IT has been said, correctly in my opinion, that between Politics and Theology there lies a very thin and barely discernible line. The gradual decline of the Left has been completely masked by the recent mass mobilisation of its contemporary adherents. Regardless whether one happens to agree with the ideological precepts of the Old Left or not, the serious predicament of its current flagbearers is based on an opportunistic preference for quantity over quality; for recruitment before any real attempt to seed modern society with anti-capitalist principles. Indeed, notwithstanding the fact that a large number of Leftists are actually state capitalists, rather than genuine socialists in the Morrisonian or Owenite mould, their ineffectuality may be compared to the plight of Western Christianity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Rather than retain the upwards trajectory of linear progressivism that was once the very hallmark of both Christianity and Leftism – paradisiacal in the case of the former, and revolutionary for the latter – each has become irrevocably sidetracked. For liberal Christians, this has meant tumbling headlong into the tepid waters of ecumenicalism and syncretism; for the Left, a disastrous preoccupation with identity politics and, thus, a departure from working class origins and a rapid descent into the oft-brutal and vociferous realms of the inquisitorial.

This, of course, is what happens when one loses sight of what lies ahead, becomes distracted by what is happening on either side and then drifts away from the transcendent verticality of one’s original belief-system. The inevitable result, therefore, is to wander aimlessly into a meaningless horizontal void of postmodern sentiment. None of it is motivated by a real desire to overthrow oppression or save souls, mark you, but a desperate need to be all-inclusive and politically correct. The reshaped fidelity they have come to expect from others, has been eroded within themselves.