I Am Not Left. I Am Not Right. I Follow the Crucified One. by Jeff Callaway

I Am Not Left. I Am Not Right. I Follow the Crucified One.

(A Catholic Independent Manifesto for a Tribalized Age)

by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

I. The Noise

They are screaming again.

Left and Right, Red and Blue, elephant and donkey — bellowing at each other across the burning ruins of what was once called civil society, each side absolutely certain that the other is the devil himself, each side recruiting, demanding, threatening, flagging, labeling, canceling, and consuming. The television is a weapon. Social media is a war zone. The town square has become a colosseum, and the crowd is drunk on the blood of its neighbors.

And right in the middle of all of it — right in the very center of this catastrophic, deafening, soul-destroying American political circus — stands the Cross.

Not a Republican cross. Not a Democrat cross. Not a progressive cross or a conservative cross. Not a red-state cross or a blue-state cross. Just the Cross. The old rugged one. The one outside Jerusalem on a hill called Skull. The one soaked in the blood of a man who was executed by both the religious establishment and the political state, betrayed by his own inner circle, abandoned by nearly everyone who claimed to love him, and raised from the dead three days later because neither the power of Rome nor the wrath of the Sanhedrin nor the silence of the grave could hold the Son of the Living God.

That is my North Star.

Not the Republican Party. Not the Democratic Party. Not any party, ideology, political movement, think tank, talk radio host, cable news network, social media algorithm, or duly elected representative of any tribe on this wounded and weary earth.

I am a Roman Catholic. And that changes everything.

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II. The Confession

Let me be plain with you, the way plain people talk to each other in South Texas diners over black coffee, without performance, without spin.

I am not Left. I am not Right. I have no party. I have no team jersey. I have no bumper sticker loyalty, no sacred political cow that I refuse to slaughter when truth demands it. I have been called a liberal by conservatives and a conservative by liberals, and I take both accusations as a kind of twisted compliment. It tells me I am standing somewhere approximating the right place.

My politics are Jesus Christ and the Roman Catholic Church.

That is not a slogan. It is a confession of faith. It is the most politically dangerous and socially inconvenient thing a person can say in modern America, because it means I am beholden to a Truth that sits in judgment over every party platform ever written, over every campaign promise ever made, over every ideology ever packaged and sold to a frightened electorate.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches clearly, without hesitation, that human life finds its unity in the adoration of the one God, and that idolatry — the worship of anything that is not God — is a perversion of the soul. It names power among the false gods. It names the state. It names money. It names every creature that men bow before in the place of the Creator (CCC 2113).

And here is the hard truth that neither party wants you to hear: political tribalism is idolatry. When you love your party more than you love truth — when you defend your side even when your side is wrong — when you excuse the cruelty of your own team while magnifying the cruelty of the other — when the elephant or the donkey becomes the lens through which you interpret scripture, reality, and the human person — you have built yourself a golden calf and danced around it. You have transferred, in the words of the Catechism, your indestructible notion of God onto something that is not God. And no matter how many flag pins you wear on your lapel, no matter how many Bible verses you quote in your campaign ads, no matter how many times you say "God Bless America" — you have become an idolater.

I refuse that altar.

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III. The Tradition

The Church has known this for a long time. She has seen empires rise and fall. She has watched ideologies consume millions in the name of progress, in the name of order, in the name of the fatherland, in the name of the revolution. She has seen what happens when men hand their consciences over to systems.

The Catholic social tradition — that magnificent, overlooked, deeply inconvenient body of teaching that runs from Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum to the present day — is explicitly and deliberately neither Left nor Right. As the Catholic Church's own documents make clear, this teaching cannot be called liberal or conservative in the contemporary political meaning of those terms. It stands above those limiting categories.

Pope Leo XIII, in 1891, saw the grinding poverty produced by unchecked industrial capitalism and named it an injustice. He also saw the violent class warfare of atheistic socialism and named that an injustice too. He stood between the wolves on both sides and said: the human person is more than either of you has imagined. He has dignity. Not because the state granted it. Not because the market earned it. But because he was made in the image and likeness of God.

That is where the Church planted her flag. And she has never moved it.

Pope Pius XI, writing between the two World Wars, looked at the rising twin demons of fascism on the Right and communism on the Left and condemned both with equal force. His language was not diplomatic. He called the international imperialism of money what it was. He called atheistic collectivism what it was. He saw that both extremes — the worship of the individual and the worship of the collective — were roads that led to the same destination: the destruction of the human person.

Pope John Paul II — a man who had stood face to face with Nazi occupation as a young seminarian and then spent decades under Soviet communism — said the same from personal, bone-deep experience. He wrote that Catholic social doctrine is not a surrogate for capitalism. He also condemned socialism. He condemned the spiritual void that atheism produces. He had seen both systems devour people he loved. And when he stepped onto the balcony in St. Peter's Square on October 22, 1978, and told the world to be not afraid — he was not speaking to one political tribe. He was speaking to all of humanity, crushed under the weight of systems that had stolen the meaning of life from them and left them staring into the dark.

The courage of that moment was not political courage. It was the courage of the Cross. The courage that comes from knowing that no earthly power — no Caesar, no commissar, no chairman, no president, no political party — has the final word over the human soul. Christ knows what is in man. He alone knows it. That is why the doors must be opened wide for him, and for nothing else.

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IV. The Indictment

Now let me say what needs to be said, because silence is its own kind of cowardice, and I did not come here to be polite. I came here to be honest.

To the American Right: You do not own Christ. You do not own the flag and the faith simultaneously without examination. You cannot wave the Cross with one hand and cut food assistance for hungry children with the other. You cannot claim to be pro-life only in the womb while ignoring the life that staggers through poverty, through addiction, through a broken criminal justice system, through war, through despair. The Catechism teaches that those who are oppressed by poverty are the object of a preferential love on the part of the Church (CCC 2448). Saint John Chrysostom, a Doctor of the Church, said that not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them. That is not a talking point from the radical Left. That is a Doctor of the Church. That is Sacred Tradition.

You cannot dress your nationalism up in baptismal water and call it Christianity. The Church is not a decoration for your political platform. She is the Body of Christ, and she will survive you.

To the American Left: You do not own justice. You cannot build a civilization of love on a foundation that denies the sacred nature of life in the womb. There is no consistent ethic of care that carves out exceptions for the most vulnerable among us. The Church's Catechism teaches that every human life, from the moment of conception until death, is sacred because the human person has been willed for its own sake in the image and likeness of the living and holy God (CCC 2319). That is not a negotiating position. That is bedrock. You cannot lecture the world about human dignity while participating in the dismemberment of the unborn. The logic collapses. The foundation is sand.

And you cannot redefine the institutions of marriage and family that the Church has always recognized as the first vital cell of every social grouping and call it progress. The Natural Moral Law is not a religious imposition. It is written in the nature of reality itself, and no legislature, no court, no social consensus, no amount of cultural pressure can erase what God has inscribed in the structure of existence.

Both sides use the language of justice and dignity. Both sides betray it. Both sides have made gods of their own making. Both sides have invited the faithful to kneel before those gods. And I will not kneel.

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V. The Wound

Here is what they have done to us — both parties, both media machines, both tribal armies that have turned the American political landscape into a theater of contempt.

They have taught us to hate our neighbors.

They have taught us that the person on the other side of the aisle is not a human being made in the image of God — not someone with fears, with grief, with children, with hope — but an enemy. A threat. Something to be defeated, humiliated, silenced, canceled. They have made politics into a zero-sum war where every transaction must produce a loser, and the greatest virtue is the annihilation of the other side.

And the Church has watched this happen, and wept, and called us back to something older and truer and more demanding than any party platform has ever required.

The Letter to the Galatians names what political tribalism produces among us: enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, factions (Galatians 5:19-21). These are listed as works of the flesh. Works of the flesh. Not the works of a healthy political culture. Not the signs of a thriving democracy. Works of the flesh. And Paul warns, without apology, that those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.

The political tribalism of our age is a spiritual sickness. It fractures the unity of the human family. It trains us to see our identity in our party affiliation rather than in our baptism. It gives us an enemy to define ourselves against rather than a Lord to define ourselves for.

When the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus with a political question — render unto Caesar — he did not join their team. He held up a coin and named the limit of Caesar's claim on the human soul. He rendered to Caesar what was Caesar's and to God what was God's (Matthew 22:21). And what belongs to God? Everything. The human person in his entirety. His conscience, his dignity, his freedom, his eternal destination. Caesar gets the coin. God gets the man.

That has been the fundamental Catholic position on politics for two thousand years. The Church works within political systems. She does not consecrate them. She evangelizes nations. She does not baptize their ideologies. She serves the common good. She does not serve any party's good.

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VI. The Manifesto

So here is where I stand. Here is my manifesto, written not in party platform language but in the harder and more ancient language of faith.

I believe that every human being — every single one, without exception, from the first cell in the womb to the last breath in the nursing home — carries within them the irreducible image and likeness of God. That dignity cannot be earned and cannot be taken away. No poverty strips it. No crime destroys it. No immigration status nullifies it. No political usefulness is required to maintain it. It simply is, because God willed it, and God does not un-will his own image.

I believe that the unborn child is a human being. I believe that the refugee at the border is a human being. I believe that the man on death row is a human being. I believe that the homeless veteran sleeping under the overpass is a human being. I believe that the elderly widow dying alone in a care facility is a human being. I believe that the immigrant worker in the field, the child in the failing school, the prisoner in the overcrowded cell, the addict on the street corner, the factory worker whose job was shipped overseas, the farmer losing his land to corporate consolidation — every single one of them is a human being, made by God, redeemed by Christ, loved by the Holy Spirit, and therefore owed justice, dignity, and care.

No party gives me all of that. No ideology holds it all together with integrity. Only the Church. Only Christ. Only the Cross.

I believe in subsidiarity — that decisions should be made at the most local level possible, closest to the human person affected. I believe in solidarity — that we are genuinely responsible for one another, that there is no such thing as a self-made man in the eyes of God, that we are members of one body, and when one member suffers, all suffer. Pope Benedict XVI made clear that subsidiarity without solidarity becomes cold social privatism, and solidarity without subsidiarity becomes paternalistic and demeaning. Both principles are required. Both are rooted in the Gospel. Neither belongs to a party.

I believe that truth is objective and knowable. I believe that the Natural Moral Law is written in creation itself, not invented by religion and therefore dismissible by the secular state. I believe that a society which loses its grip on objective truth — which tells itself that each individual constructs his own reality, his own identity, his own moral universe — is a society that has chosen disintegration.

I believe that the family is the first and foundational unit of society, and that its destruction by poverty, by ideology, by fatherlessness, by economic pressure, by cultural contempt — is a civilizational wound that no government program alone can heal and that no social revolution can cure by redefining the institution itself.

I believe that war is sometimes necessary and always tragic. I believe that the death penalty is almost never necessary. I believe that the goods of the earth belong, in their universal destination, to all people, and that extreme inequality of wealth is a moral problem, not merely an economic one. I believe that the environment is a common home entrusted to human stewardship, and that its reckless destruction is an offense against the Creator and against the generations that come after us.

None of this fits in a party platform. All of it fits within the two-thousand-year tradition of the Catholic Church.

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VII. The Cost

Let me be honest with you about what this costs.

It costs you the comfort of the tribe. When you refuse to pick a side in the war, both sides will regard you with suspicion. You will be called a fool, a coward, a traitor. Your former allies on the Right will call you a liberal. Your former allies on the Left will call you a bigot. You will be too complicated for a meme. You will be too demanding for a sound bite. You will not be welcome at the rallies of either army.

Good. The Cross was never a popular place to stand.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who died in a Nazi prison, wrote that the church stands or falls by whether it proclaims Christ crucified — including his judgment upon every earthly power. He understood that a church captured by a political movement — a church that blessed the swastika in exchange for state protection — was no longer a church but a chaplaincy for power. We have our own version of that danger. And it runs in both directions.

The early Christians were described by both the Roman establishment and the Jewish authorities as troublemakers. They refused to burn incense to Caesar. They refused to compromise the lordship of Christ for the comfort of social acceptance. Many of them died for it. They died not because they were political revolutionaries but because they were political irreducibles — because there was something at the center of their lives that no empire could reach, that no threat could erase, that no offer of safety or comfort could purchase.

That something was Christ crucified and risen.

And it is still the only answer to the madness of our age. Not a party. Not a movement. Not a personality cult dressed up in patriotic or progressive clothing. Not a flag — not even the beautiful, complicated, deeply imperfect flag of the nation I was born in. The answer is the Cross. The answer is the one who hung on it. The one who died on it. The one who rose from behind its shadow.

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VIII. The Call

I am writing this for the Catholics who have been told they must choose a side.

You do not have to choose a side. You are already on a side. You are on the side of the Crucified One, and that side is not a political party, and it is not comfortable, and it is not popular, and it does not promise you victory in the next election cycle.

But it promises you something that no party ever has: the truth about who you are, the dignity that no government can grant or revoke, the community of the Body of Christ that spans two thousand years and every nation under heaven, the sacraments that feed your soul when the world would starve it, the mercy of God that reaches into every pit of failure and calls you by name, and — finally, ultimately, unshakeably — the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting.

Form your conscience from the Catechism and the Scriptures, not from your cable news subscription. Vote, when you must, for the option that honors the most human dignity in the most consistent way — understanding that no candidate will ever give you everything, that you are not looking for a messiah in a suit, that political engagement is a duty but political idolatry is a sin. Engage public life with the strength of love, as the Church asks us to, and hold fast to the recognition that the true measure of any civilization is how it treats its most vulnerable members.

Speak truth to power — but understand that power wears many jerseys.

Condemn injustice — but condemn it wherever it lives, not only in the camp of your political enemies.

Love your neighbor — especially the one whose yard sign makes your blood boil.

And in the deafening, weaponized, tribalized noise of this American political moment — in the endless shouting and the algorithmic outrage and the manufactured contempt — find the silence at the foot of the Cross, and stand there.

I am not Left. I am not Right.

I follow the Crucified One.

And I am not afraid.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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