Reuters reports that a Religious Left is emerging in the U.S. In it they state:
Since President Donald Trump's election, monthly lectures on social justice at the 600-seat Gothic chapel of New York's Union Theological Seminary have been filled to capacity with crowds three times what they usually draw.
In January, the 181-year-old Upper Manhattan graduate school, whose architecture evokes London's Westminster Abbey, turned away about 1,000 people from a lecture on mass incarceration. In the nine years that Reverend Serene Jones has served as its president, she has never seen such crowds.
"The election of Trump has been a clarion call to progressives in the Protestant and Catholic churches in America to move out of a place of primarily professing progressive policies to really taking action," she said.
Although not as powerful as the religious right, which has been credited with helping elect Republican presidents and boasts well-known leaders such as Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson, the "religious left" is now slowly coming together as a force in U.S. politics.
Its an good and hopeful story. But let’s be clear:
The Christian Right is not just a bunch of politically active conservative Christians. They are one of the most significant and dynamic social and political movements in American history. As such, there are good reasons why they played such a major role in the 2016 elections and continue to play a big role in the Trump administration.
While it is true that a lot of religiously inspired progressive activists and clergy are becoming much more active -- activism alone does not a movement make
But fortunately, there's a book for that.
A few years ago, I edited a book of essays that was intended, as I told journalist Bill Berkowitz at the time, not as a manifesto, a platform or blueprint, but more like the “application of jumper cables to start a necessary conversation.“ That conversation has continued over the years, and as Reuters suggests, has recently intensified. While many things have changed for the nascent Religious Left, many things have also stayed the same. As Reuters reported:
A key test will be how well it will be able to translate its mobilization into votes in the 2018 midterm congressional elections.
"It's one of the dirty little secrets of American politics that there has been a religious left all along and it just hasn't done a good job of organizing," said J. Patrick Hornbeck II, chairman of the theology department at Fordham University, a Jesuit school in New York.
I said at the time:
The ancient rabbi, Hillel, writing for the ages asked, “if not now, when?“ and Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, wrote about the “fierce urgency of now.“ These two great leaders each sought to teach us about our roles in the face of the great moral issues of our time. That said, religious progressives seem to be politically stalled, distracted, and lacking a coherent strategy and effective tactics. Therefore, it is safe for government officials to ignore them, and we can see the results on just about everything that really matters.
Both the secular and religious left have generally failed to learn any lessons from the tremendous successes of the Religious Right over the past few decades. And what lessons have been taken are too often the wrong ones. Several Dispatches contributors are exceptionally well informed about the Religious Right, and discuss what lessons can be drawn from the experience of this formidable movement—and rightly caution us about others. One of the themes that emerges in the book is that the religious left needs to reestablish a significant capacity for “organizing“ in the broad, social, political and electoral sense. It has been a key to successes in the past but seems to have been abandoned in favor of think tanks and public relations strategies.
As Marshall Ganz, formerly one of the top organizers with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Union writes in the opening essay:
“To find the courage, commitment, and hopefulness to face the challenges of our times, why would we turn to marketing mavens, management gurus, and niche strategists when our real sources of strength are in learning who we are, where we come from, and where we are going?”
For those who really want to increase their capacity to prevent and to stop wars; to dramatically reduce poverty in its many dimensions; to generally achieve a far more just society and world than currently seems possible—it is time for a conversation about what is and is not working and to consider what might be done differently and to go out and get it done.
Read more in Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. The newish copies are nice, but you can also get used copies dirt cheap.