US News: A New Faith and Politics Fight: Religious
Progressives Vs. the Religious Left |
Site last published: 01/06/10
US News: A New Faith and Politics Fight: Religious Progressives Vs. the Religious Left
US News
March 31, 2009
Dan Gilgoff
Hardly a week goes by these days without a group of religious progressives in Washington rolling out some major new policy or political initiative. Right before President Obama's official announcement of the nomination of Kathleen Sebelius for secretary of health and human services, a left-leaning organization called Catholics United launched a campaign to rally faith-based support for her, including a website called Catholics for Sebelius. Facing attacks from Christian right groups over her pro-choice stance, Catholics United argues that Sebelius reduced Kansas's abortion rate as governor and that she is personally antiabortion, though she backs abortion rights.
Last month, progressive evangelical leader Jim Wallis partnered with former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson to issue bipartisan recommendations for reducing domestic poverty. Some of them, like expanding the child tax credit and funding re-entry programs for ex-offenders, showed up in the White House's 2010 budget.
And earlier this year, a recently launched progressive organization called Faith in Public Life helped facilitate a dialogue between high-profile evangelicals and secular liberals to find common ground on hot-button issues like abortion. The project culminated in the release of "Come Let Us Reason Together," a purported road map for ending the culture wars, and a meeting with White House aides.
It's hard to remember a time in the past three decades when there was so much faith-based activity on the political left. Groups like Catholics United and Faith in Public Life didn't even exist before the 2004 election, when Democrats got walloped by so-called values voters.
But as left-of-center religious voices have crescendoed into a full-blown movement, there has been a break in the ranks. Some grass-roots religious liberals are charging that supposedly progressive religious groups like Faith in Public Life and Catholics United have gone centrist, turning their backs on true progressive values. These proud religious leftists say that Washington's purportedly progressive faithful are more concerned with wooing religious conservatives into the Democratic Party. As opposed to battling the religious right, religious leftists say, Washington's new breed of religious progressives want to co-opt the religious right's base. "A lot of people in the mushy middle want to call themselves progressive," says Dan Schultz, who runs the popular religious-left blog Street Prophets and frequently criticizes more moderate liberal voices, including Faith in Public Life and Jim Wallis. "If all you want to do is talk to conservatives and incorporate conservative ideas, are you really a progressive?"
Indeed, at a moment when the number of alternative faith-based voices to the religious right has exploded, the debate on the left between liberal and more centrist religious voices is raising questions about exactly what it means to be a religious progressive. Those in the more centrist beltway crowd, which prefers the "religious progressive" label, say it means providing an alternative faith voice to the religious right. They want to expand the religion-in-politics agenda to include protecting the environment and ending coercive interrogation techniques, issues that enjoy some bipartisan support. But the religious left prefers direct combat with the religious right, standing firm for liberal values—even on divisive issues like abortion and gay rights. More centrist groups like Faith in Public Life and Catholics United have worked to defuse culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, which have usually wound up benefiting the Republican Party politically. While they stick up for Democrats whose faith comes under attack from the religious right—like Sebelius—centrist-leaning religious progressives also want to tweak the party's stances on wedge issues. The "Come Let Us Reason Together" coalition, for instance, proposes reducing abortions through increased access to contraception for low-income women and promoting comprehensive sex education.
Schultz and his fellow religious leftists, meanwhile, want to articulate moral or faith-based rationales for liberal positions "If we're talking about a basic human right [to abortion]," says Schultz, a Wisconsin-based United Church of Christ minister, "why should we discourage people from exercising that right?"
The same goes for gay rights. "There's no question that Jesus consorted with outlaws, sinners, and prostitutes," says Peter Laarman, who leads the Los Angeles-based religious-left group Progressive Christians Uniting and is another critic of Washington's burgeoning religious-progressive set. "For Christians to say, 'I only validate traditionally normal sexual behavior,' that's lazy theology."
After the 2004 election, religious leftists and more centrist progressives were united, pushing back on the religious right's claim that it spoke for values voters. But the Democrats' return to power, and their new enthusiasm for religion's role in politics, have exposed fractures over how to define the left's faith-based agenda. "Grass-roots people started out saying we like these people," says Schultz, referring to religious progressives. "Then I had qualms, then dissatisfaction. And then I said, 'This is just not working.' "
While religious progressives have spent a lot of time in dialogue with evangelical leaders, religious leftists argue that winning over evangelicals is a losing battle. They note that white evangelicals backed John McCain over Obama 73 to 26 percent last year, only a slight change from 2004, despite Obama's aggressive evangelical outreach. Religious leftists say it makes more sense to work with liberal religious traditions, like mainline Protestants.
So far, the escalating battle between the two camps has played out mostly in the blogosphere. "[S]ome things aren't amenable to compromise because there is no middle ground,'" Schultz blogged in a Street Prophets critique of Come Let Us Reason Together. "Either abortion is murder or it's not, and so on."
That and other criticism provoked a response from Robert P. Jones, a member of the "Come Let Us Reason Together" coalition and a key player among Washington's more centrist religious progressives. Writing on a new website called Religion Dispatches, Jones derided the religious left for dividing "the world into an ever-shrinking cadre of ideologically pure, litmus-tested allies and the remainder, a world of enemies to be defeated."
To Jones and his allies, the religious left is repeating the mistakes of the religious right, whose ideological purity has succeeded in mobilizing the GOP base but has led to few policy victories. For instance, abortion is still legal nearly 40 years after the antiabortion movement got off the ground. "The lesson from the religious right is the danger of not getting anything done," says Jones.
Which helps explain why Washington's religious progressives are increasingly embracing the centrist label. Faith in Public Life started as a Democrat-allied group operating out of the liberal Center for American Progress. "But we realized that people don't want to escalate the culture war," says Executive Director Jennifer Butler. "They want to dismantle it."
Even as groups like Faith in Public Life work to position themselves as centrist, though, much of their work clearly benefits Democrats. Working to introduce an anti-religious-right group in Ohio after the 2004 election, Faith in Public Life helped close the GOP advantage among religious voters there. Obama and Hillary Clinton attended a candidate forum that Faith in Public Life sponsored last spring, but McCain declined.
Indeed, their support from Democratic donors partly explains why religious progressives are ahead of the religious left in terms of organizing and infrastructure. But religious-left leaders have published a book called Dispatches From the Religious Left and say they've begun to organize beyond the blogosphere. Whether they can reclaim the term "religious progressive" has yet to be seen. Given that some proud religious progressives are now embracing the centrist label, though, they may have an easier fight on their hands.
March 31, 2009
Dan Gilgoff
Hardly a week goes by these days without a group of religious progressives in Washington rolling out some major new policy or political initiative. Right before President Obama's official announcement of the nomination of Kathleen Sebelius for secretary of health and human services, a left-leaning organization called Catholics United launched a campaign to rally faith-based support for her, including a website called Catholics for Sebelius. Facing attacks from Christian right groups over her pro-choice stance, Catholics United argues that Sebelius reduced Kansas's abortion rate as governor and that she is personally antiabortion, though she backs abortion rights.
Last month, progressive evangelical leader Jim Wallis partnered with former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson to issue bipartisan recommendations for reducing domestic poverty. Some of them, like expanding the child tax credit and funding re-entry programs for ex-offenders, showed up in the White House's 2010 budget.
And earlier this year, a recently launched progressive organization called Faith in Public Life helped facilitate a dialogue between high-profile evangelicals and secular liberals to find common ground on hot-button issues like abortion. The project culminated in the release of "Come Let Us Reason Together," a purported road map for ending the culture wars, and a meeting with White House aides.
It's hard to remember a time in the past three decades when there was so much faith-based activity on the political left. Groups like Catholics United and Faith in Public Life didn't even exist before the 2004 election, when Democrats got walloped by so-called values voters.
But as left-of-center religious voices have crescendoed into a full-blown movement, there has been a break in the ranks. Some grass-roots religious liberals are charging that supposedly progressive religious groups like Faith in Public Life and Catholics United have gone centrist, turning their backs on true progressive values. These proud religious leftists say that Washington's purportedly progressive faithful are more concerned with wooing religious conservatives into the Democratic Party. As opposed to battling the religious right, religious leftists say, Washington's new breed of religious progressives want to co-opt the religious right's base. "A lot of people in the mushy middle want to call themselves progressive," says Dan Schultz, who runs the popular religious-left blog Street Prophets and frequently criticizes more moderate liberal voices, including Faith in Public Life and Jim Wallis. "If all you want to do is talk to conservatives and incorporate conservative ideas, are you really a progressive?"
Indeed, at a moment when the number of alternative faith-based voices to the religious right has exploded, the debate on the left between liberal and more centrist religious voices is raising questions about exactly what it means to be a religious progressive. Those in the more centrist beltway crowd, which prefers the "religious progressive" label, say it means providing an alternative faith voice to the religious right. They want to expand the religion-in-politics agenda to include protecting the environment and ending coercive interrogation techniques, issues that enjoy some bipartisan support. But the religious left prefers direct combat with the religious right, standing firm for liberal values—even on divisive issues like abortion and gay rights. More centrist groups like Faith in Public Life and Catholics United have worked to defuse culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, which have usually wound up benefiting the Republican Party politically. While they stick up for Democrats whose faith comes under attack from the religious right—like Sebelius—centrist-leaning religious progressives also want to tweak the party's stances on wedge issues. The "Come Let Us Reason Together" coalition, for instance, proposes reducing abortions through increased access to contraception for low-income women and promoting comprehensive sex education.
Schultz and his fellow religious leftists, meanwhile, want to articulate moral or faith-based rationales for liberal positions "If we're talking about a basic human right [to abortion]," says Schultz, a Wisconsin-based United Church of Christ minister, "why should we discourage people from exercising that right?"
The same goes for gay rights. "There's no question that Jesus consorted with outlaws, sinners, and prostitutes," says Peter Laarman, who leads the Los Angeles-based religious-left group Progressive Christians Uniting and is another critic of Washington's burgeoning religious-progressive set. "For Christians to say, 'I only validate traditionally normal sexual behavior,' that's lazy theology."
After the 2004 election, religious leftists and more centrist progressives were united, pushing back on the religious right's claim that it spoke for values voters. But the Democrats' return to power, and their new enthusiasm for religion's role in politics, have exposed fractures over how to define the left's faith-based agenda. "Grass-roots people started out saying we like these people," says Schultz, referring to religious progressives. "Then I had qualms, then dissatisfaction. And then I said, 'This is just not working.' "
While religious progressives have spent a lot of time in dialogue with evangelical leaders, religious leftists argue that winning over evangelicals is a losing battle. They note that white evangelicals backed John McCain over Obama 73 to 26 percent last year, only a slight change from 2004, despite Obama's aggressive evangelical outreach. Religious leftists say it makes more sense to work with liberal religious traditions, like mainline Protestants.
So far, the escalating battle between the two camps has played out mostly in the blogosphere. "[S]ome things aren't amenable to compromise because there is no middle ground,'" Schultz blogged in a Street Prophets critique of Come Let Us Reason Together. "Either abortion is murder or it's not, and so on."
That and other criticism provoked a response from Robert P. Jones, a member of the "Come Let Us Reason Together" coalition and a key player among Washington's more centrist religious progressives. Writing on a new website called Religion Dispatches, Jones derided the religious left for dividing "the world into an ever-shrinking cadre of ideologically pure, litmus-tested allies and the remainder, a world of enemies to be defeated."
To Jones and his allies, the religious left is repeating the mistakes of the religious right, whose ideological purity has succeeded in mobilizing the GOP base but has led to few policy victories. For instance, abortion is still legal nearly 40 years after the antiabortion movement got off the ground. "The lesson from the religious right is the danger of not getting anything done," says Jones.
Which helps explain why Washington's religious progressives are increasingly embracing the centrist label. Faith in Public Life started as a Democrat-allied group operating out of the liberal Center for American Progress. "But we realized that people don't want to escalate the culture war," says Executive Director Jennifer Butler. "They want to dismantle it."
Even as groups like Faith in Public Life work to position themselves as centrist, though, much of their work clearly benefits Democrats. Working to introduce an anti-religious-right group in Ohio after the 2004 election, Faith in Public Life helped close the GOP advantage among religious voters there. Obama and Hillary Clinton attended a candidate forum that Faith in Public Life sponsored last spring, but McCain declined.
Indeed, their support from Democratic donors partly explains why religious progressives are ahead of the religious left in terms of organizing and infrastructure. But religious-left leaders have published a book called Dispatches From the Religious Left and say they've begun to organize beyond the blogosphere. Whether they can reclaim the term "religious progressive" has yet to be seen. Given that some proud religious progressives are now embracing the centrist label, though, they may have an easier fight on their hands.