What Would Falwell Do?

[Ian David]

What would Falwell do?
After years of near-invisibility, religious progressives want to regain their vanished political clout. But with conservatives claiming a monopoly on godliness, it's going to be a struggle of biblical proportions.

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By Amy Sullivan

March 10, 2005 | The Bush administration is going to hell. That, at least, could be the take-away message from a Tuesday press conference religious leaders from five major Protestant denominations held at the National Press Club. Clad in clerical collars, and invoking the Gospel story of Lazarus, a poor man ignored at the gate of a rich man's estate who went to heaven while the rich man was sent to hell, the leaders called on Congress to oppose what they called an "immoral budget" and staked a claim for moral values that don't have anything to do with abortion or gay marriage. "The 2006 budget that President Bush has sent to Capitol Hill is unjust," they charged. "It has much for the rich man and little for Lazarus." But while the press conference focused on calling attention to the need for truly compassionate policies that protect the most vulnerable in society, it had another mission as well: to assert the relevance of the religious left.

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Everyone knows about the religious right, a movement of conservative, mostly Christian, religious communities that has become increasingly involved in American politics over the last three decades. The idea that there could be a countervailing religious force, whether defined as religious progressives or simply everyone not part of the religious right, has long since been dismissed from public consciousness. Indeed, the religious left had almost forgotten about itself -- the community hadn't come together to protest a federal budget, one of the religious leaders told me, "since the early Reagan years."

And yet there was a time -- not so very long ago -- when the religious left was a powerful institution in American society and politics, when the term "religious" was not immediately assumed to connote "conservative." Moral giants with names like Reinhold Niebuhr and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr. led intellectual and social justice movements. It's nearly impossible to page through American history without coming across political causes that were driven either partly or entirely by progressive people of faith -- abolition, women's suffrage, labor reforms of the progressive era, civil rights, and any number of antiwar movements. Just a few decades ago, venerable organizations like the National Council of Churches (NCC) made pronouncements that carried not only moral weight but political influence as well. In short, the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Ralph Reed have not always dominated American politics; indeed, in the span of American history, the last three decades are an anomaly.

Today, the religious right and the Republican Party are clasped in a mutually beneficial relationship while the religious left and the Democratic Party are barely on speaking terms. Last year was the best in recent memory for cooperation between the two camps, and yet there is no question that relations are still dangerously strained. While the Kerry campaign hired several individuals to coordinate religious outreach -- the first time a Democratic presidential campaign has branched beyond outreach to black churches -- they were not held in high regard; the campaign's director of community outreach often mockingly referred to her religious colleagues as "the Romper Room," and the communications team simply refused to return press calls on religious issues.

More:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/10/religious_left/index.html

[Tux]

1. Jim Wallis

May actually be able to get the religious left and Dems together and maybe get moderates with them. Let's include Buddhists, UUists, Jews, Muslims, etc so they won't be left out of the "Christian nation".