Rebuilding the Religious Left

Through a series of email exchanges, we discussed the current state of the religious right, the growing influence and media presence of Pastor Rick Warren, efforts by the Obama campaign to court evangelicals, and how an authentic religious left might be able to win back a place at the table.

While he is a skilled showman, he is unable to sustain moderation in style or in substance even before a national television audience. His real self leaks out. At the Civic Forum, Warren highlighted the top two litmus tests of the religious right—abortion and same sex marriage, and described abortion as a "holocaust." Following this he called on his audience not to "demonize" people with whom they may disagree—having just compared people who have a different view on abortion to the Nazis. In my view, Warren is an emerging leader of the Religious Right in transition, not of evangelical moderation.

Being different than Falwell and others of that generation does not necessarily a moderate make. Warren acknowledges climate change, for example, but is a fierce proponent of "free" markets and is so ideologically rigid that it is difficult to imagine him getting behind the kinds of solutions that could address what needs to be done. Similarly, he is fiercely antigay and supports African political and religious leaders who advocate criminalization of homosexuality. It is difficult to imagine that the HIV/AIDS work for which he receives such plaudits can ever be successful as gay people are driven underground in an atmosphere of persecution and fear.

As for how he fits in the wider constellation of religious leaders, as a disciple of the late guru of modern corporate management Peter Drucker, Warren is more about building a religio-corporate empire than former leaders of the religious right. Drucker was the theorist of the mega-church, applying business principles to the creation of religious empires. Meanwhile, Warren's books read more like self-help books than dire warnings of Satanic or Muslim hordes. Warren claims both McCain and Obama as "friends" and both immediately agreed to participate in Warren's event.

I think the Obama campaign is more about depolarizing the debate and reducing the demonization of the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate. Changing the tone of politics is good, but I think this is also about marginalizing the role and voice of religious progressives who in past decades played decisive roles in stopping the war in Vietnam, pushing for African American and women's rights, and much more. The Beltway Insiders would prefer not to have a resurgent religious left complicating things by making conservative evangelicals uncomfortable and, perhaps more importantly, compelling significant changes in the way the politics and public policy industry does business.

I think a faux religious left is being manufactured as an official counterweight to the religious right as a sop to the actual stirrings among religious progressives.

Viguerie, Schlafly, and others were predicting a time of regrouping; McCain represented more of the same. Focus on the Family's James Dobson had said more than once that he could never vote for him. Pro-choice moderates like former Gov. Tom Ridge (R-PA) or former Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman (I-CT) were considered unacceptable choices for vice-president and I have no doubt that had McCain selected one of them, many on the religious right would have chosen to sit out the race or focus on down-ticket races where they could have a larger impact.

Max Blumenthal reported that at a pre-GOP convention meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secret right-wing leadership and networking group, Tom Minnery, a close aide to Dobson, gave the thumbs up to Palin in advance of the announcement. That this group was consulted before anyone even knew that Palin was a possibility speaks volumes about the nature of the deal. After the announcement, Dobson called her an "outstanding choice," and Viguerie called Palin "perfect." Viguerie went on to say that conservative evangelicals would be energized in a way not seen since Ronald Reagan. I would say that the religious right made its demand and its demand was satisfied.

If Palin survives the scrutiny of her more extreme views on abortion, the teaching of creationism, resistance to LGTB rights, and stem cell research—it will represent the mainstreaming rather than the rejection of the most openly far religious right views.

Additionally, mainline Protestant churches and Catholic bishops who had led the way in much of the social progress of the era were under tremendous pressure to back off. A more conservative Vatican silenced liberation theologians and promoted conservative bishops as progressive theologians retired.

The rightist financiers of the conservative movement, such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, bankrolled dissident factions in the mainline churches and established the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) that has served as headquarters for networking and encouraging conservative factions as well as waging its own campaign of disruption and division against mainline churches. These highly organized campaigns have resulted in the departure of congregations and wider schisms, particularly in the Episcopal Church.

What went largely unnoticed was that while the strategic funders of the right were building both secular and religious right organizations and institutions, they were also underwriting efforts to degrade the opposition. (To this day, many have a hard time accepting this unfortunate fact.) This, combined with some natural attrition in membership due largely to changes in demographics, left churches in a perpetual budget crunch. The National Council of Churches (a communion of about 35 denominations) at one point came perilously close to shutting down. Even so, the many millions of progressive Catholics, Protestants, and Jews were still out there, but under-organized. The more dynamic and politically oriented organizations of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (such as Clergy and Laity Concerned) withered and were not replaced or were institutionalized to the point of political irrelevance.

Finally, the religious left, unlike the religious right has never figured out how to relate to electoral politics. The key to the religious right success was organizations like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and the 35 state-level political affiliates of Focus on the Family (among others), which mastered the mechanics of electoral politics and had worked out highly developed ideas of what it means to be a Christian and a citizen and how these identities relate. On the religious left, a culture of protest politics and a sense of helplessness came to dominate. To this day, there is no organization of the religious left anywhere in the U.S. that engages in year round electoral power building the way that religious right organizations have done.

While I wanted a reasonably diverse mix of religion and race and such for the book, it also needed a mix of approaches; activists, academics, journalists, theologians, clergy, and laity. Most books in this field seem to be dominated by academics. I wanted to widen and deepen the conversation to make it more exciting and engaged than what most academics offer. It needed essays that would acknowledge that there is no religious left that is even remotely comparable to the religious right, at least in terms of power and influence. I wanted to know what contributors thought about that and what should be done about it.

If there were going to be a more politically dynamic religious left, what would it be like and how would we get there and what mistakes should we avoid? How could a movement be created that is greater than the sum of its parts? I did not want a manifesto, a platform, or a blueprint—I wanted some exceptional political thinking that would help to open up a wide ranging conversation about the state and direction of the religious left.