Our time has been increasingly polarized in American politics. It seems that everyone is expected to take a side on every issue, whether tweeting on recent news or injecting our views into conversations when an appropriate topic comes up. This is how people usually debate ideas now: always within the framework of their own political views while tearing down the views they don’t agree with. No longer are we allowed to view the world through our religious conviction. Even this area can be co opted and subsequently shaped by politics! No longer can we deal with difficult things we read about in the news (or the people we meet in our own daily lives) through a lens of compassion for the suffering of others and a remediation of that suffering as best we can. Now we must also have a political explanation as to why the wrong occurred and a political solution as to what might be done about it.
Charles Dickens, too, was writing in a time of extreme political division, in which each person viewed the troubles of society—the suffering of the poor in particular—through a political lens. G.K. Chesterton, in his preface to Dickens’ Oliver Twist, paints the picture of a society where individuals obsessed over how society was to be changed according to their own ideals—a lot like our own moment in time, which also is deeply divided over politics. Dickens was continually taking aim at injustices, but injustices on all sides of the political divisions that existed in his day. In Oliver Twist, he took aim at workhouses, but to call that a political stance (even though it was a stand against a recent political measure) would be reductive:
This is where Dickens’s social revolt is of more value than mere politics. His revolt is not a revolt of...the Liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now his revolt would not be the revolt of the...Anarchist against the Socialist. His revolt was simply and solely the eternal revolt; it was the revolt of the weak against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the face of a man when he looked down on another man. And that look on the face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to fight between here and the fires of Hell. That which pedants of that time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of Dickens was really simply the detached sanity of Dickens (G.K. Chesterton).
Instead of dismantling the system, he was taking aim at those whose roles within the system made them feel invulnerable, superior, and therefore unsympathetic or even cruel to those they served. The mechanism that Dickens sees for the way out is individual compassion. As Chesterton observes, Dickens gives Oliver—not a hopeless demeanor—but a hopeful one, a hope that the world will be kind. When the overseer treats him cruelly, we all feel Oliver’s disappointment, and we long to be able to alleviate it. Dickens hoped that each of his readers would be spurred to enter the world in compassion to those with less privilege than him. That is both simple and biblical!
Although Dickens did not paint the world in the colors of the Gospel explicitly, his imagination was greatly influenced by the Christian picture of the world: a world deeply broken by sin but still with the beauty of goodness in it. Although he did not reckon explicitly with the story of Jesus in his works, it still seems that Dickens had a clear sense of the right and wrong that God embedded in Creation—”being understood from what has been made.” And God has always been a supporter of the weak over the strong:
As 1 Corinthians 1:27-29 says:
But God chose those whom the world considers foolish to shame those who think they are wise, and God chose the puny and powerless to shame the high and mighty. He chose the lowly, the laughable in the world’s eyes—nobodies—so that he would shame the somebodies. For he chose what is regarded as insignificant in order to supersede what is regarded as prominent, so that there would be no place for prideful boasting in God’s presence. For it is not from man that we draw our life but from God as we are being joined to Jesus, the Anointed One (The Passion Translation).
Jesus’ first followers were nobodies, but rather than treat them as peons, He welcomed them as friends. Some of them were morally corrupt when He first called them, and He gave up His life for the love of them. Dickens’ blunt sense of the wrongness of the oppression of some men over others was clearly and lovingly modeled after Jesus. Although He could have placed Himself at the head of all men and started His earthly reign in wise power over other humans, instead He even let Himself take on the stain of association with the lowly, weak, and sinful in order to draw them to His heart and save them.
That beautiful, pure love in the face of sin, the love that led someone to give up His life in place of all humankind, is at the heart of the Gospel; and for us today, it has power to free us from self-centeredness, self-importance, and give us compassion and humility in our dealings with others, whether they are movie stars too obsessed with their wealth and fourteen swimming pools, or they have lost their way in different ways, while only having a backpack and a sandwich. Now, because of the compassion God puts in our heart, we can set about changing the lives of those around us by sharing that message but also entering into places of sorrow and injustice and speaking words of love and hope in a spirit of brotherhood with all men. We can take on the role of serving those with no hope, and do so as Christ Himself did. We can embrace and not look away.
So, the next time we feel the urge to interpret the world’s brokenness through our default political position, let’s pray that God’s Spirit will open the door of our mouths and the hearts of whomever we’re in conversation with! Let’s display God’s glory by praising Him as we talk, but most of all, let’s tell others how glad we are that we know God, and how much God loves them and offers them the specific hope of a heart restored. Maybe that will shift the conversation from political anger to Christian hope.