Interesting question.
Yes, my faith has played an important role in my political formation. It has definitely helped tilt me decisively to the
left of the contemporary spectrum on economic issues, to focus upon one key area.
The Lord's Prayer - the "Our Father" - literally mandates debt cancellation
: "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive those indebted to us". So social issues are right there at the heart of the faith.
I am also heavily influenced by the social justice teachings of the
Torah and
Nevi'im, which are very important in Catholicism. There we find such concepts as the biblical
Jubilee, which cancelled debts that kept the poor enslaved to the rich in ancient Israel and mitigated intergenerational injustice.
From the prophet Isaiah in the 8th century BCE....
“Woe to you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land!” (Isaiah 5:8)
To Pope Francis today...
“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.”
(Pope Francis November 2013)
.....the religious scriptures and traditions I hold to be sacred have denounced social injustice and inequalities.
The church I belong to has an established "
social doctrine" which is informed by the divine revelation believed to subsist in the Tanakh, New Testament and Sacred Tradition (as witnessed by the Church Fathers and maintained in the apostolic succession).
It doesn't dictate morally binding
technical solutions to policy debates but it does provide a very comprehensive guide for what a society structured according to the values of Christ should look like, by critiquing a range of anthropological errors at the root of different ideologies and commending general pathways for change.
In the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, the Patristic writings and in the modern papal encyclicals, I find a strong body of social teaching which I think is in contradiction to some fundamental assumptions of, for example, libertarian capitalism.
As Professors Horsley and Pounds, two historical Jesus scholars, both note:
"Jesus engaged in economic conflict...[in] a Palestine burdened by intolerable taxation and debt causing the disintegration of local village economies. With regard to Galilee, Horsley points to Herod Antipas' building projects in Sepphoris and Tiberias, which he proposes drained resources from the peasant population.
Within this specific context...Jesus responded to economic exploitation by attempting to found an egalitarian village community. As opposed to the imperial system of economic exploitation, within this community there was to be a mutual economic support, cancellation of debts, redistribution of land, local resolution of economic and social conflicts, and an absence of hierarchy...
In line with the broad contours of Horsley's thesis, there is plausible evidence that Jesus' economic critique extended beyond the confines of Galilee to the high-priestly aristocracy and their retainers in Jerusalem. Much of his prophetic critique of them involved a condemnation of economic exploitation that is consistent with depictions and remembrances of the first century high priesthood" (p.119)
I thus identify with secular political movements today that advocate for the rights of the underprivileged and marginalised in society (those who are on the losing "
end" of the great capitalist rat race), that aim to resist economic exploitation of the poor, grossly unequal concentration of wealth and much else along similar lines.