[Dialogue] The Left Hand of God

[KroegerD@aol.com]

A recent review of this book I had ealier mentioned.
 
 
The politics of faith 
The Left Hand of  God Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right 
Michael Lerner  HarperSanFrancisco: 408 pp., $24.95 
By Ed Bacon 
The Rev. Ed Bacon is rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.  

February 19, 2006 

RABBI Michael  Lerner's "The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From 
the Religious  Right" is his latest contribution to a long list of inspiring 
and practical  writings. Here, Lerner contends that "the America we love" is 
threatened with  destruction. His critique stems from the moral values, spiritual 
practices and  political actions of the ancient speak-truth-to-power 
prophetic tradition.  

Lerner's career of balancing social and political action  with religious 
practice began in the Jewish Theological Seminary, where his  professor Abraham 
Joshua Heschel held that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in  his preaching and 
his politics, was in effect the 20th century incarnation of  the Hebrew 
prophets. In this book, Lerner — rabbi of San Francisco's progressive  Beyt Tikkun 
synagogue and editor of Tikkun, a journal striving to "mend, repair,  and 
transform the world" — updates this tradition for the beginning of the 21st  
century. 

Lerner believes America is in the grip of a spiritual  crisis. 

On the one hand, there is what scholar Walter Brueggemann  calls "the 
imperial consciousness." This right-wing mind-set worships its own  power — an act of 
idolatry, according to Lerner. Its adherents ignore the groans  of the poor, 
the oppressed and the marginalized, conducting business as usual as  though no 
one were hurting and there were no groans.  

On the  other, an impotent liberal cohort lacks the moral courage and 
political savvy to  resist a culture of imperial domination in both church and state. 
The  compromises made by the left because of political expediency result in a 
 political lassitude, which amounts to complicity with the forces of empire.  

But Lerner is chiefly concerned with the millions of people who  are not 
conservative ideologues but who have in recent elections voted that way  because 
they yearn for the "purpose-driven life of meaning" promised by the  
communities of the religious right. There they find a sense of belonging, of  dignity, 
of outrage at meaningless marketplace thinking — and (in Lerner's  indictment 
of his own liberal tribe) a respectful absence of condescension. The  irony 
that begs for explanation is the phenomenon of this group voting against  its own 
enlightened self-interest.  

Lerner's reflections are  informed by his interviews with "middle-income 
working people," conducted over  28 years for the Institute for Labor and Mental 
Health, which he co-founded in  1977. "The psychotherapists, union activists, 
and social theorists who were  working at the institute," he writes, "had one 
question we particularly wanted  to answer: why is it that people whose 
economic interests would lead them to  identify with the Left often actually end up 
voting for the Right?" What he and  his colleagues discovered was "that many 
people need what anthropologist  Clifford Geertz once termed a 'politics of 
meaning' and what I now call a  spiritual politics — a spiritual framework that 
can lend meaning to their lives  [and] allow them to serve something beyond 
personal goals and economic  self-interest. If they don't find this sense of 
purpose on the Left, they will  look for it on the Right." With consistent passion, 
Lerner insists on respect  for this group of people. The left sabotages its 
efforts every time it views  them as somehow less intelligent and evolved than, 
say, the liberal elite.  

For Lerner, the key is something he calls "meaning needs." The  left has to 
recognize "that people hunger for a world that has meaning and love;  for a 
sense of aliveness, energy, and authenticity; for a life embedded in a  community 
in which they are valued for who they most deeply are, with all their  warts 
and limitations, and feel genuinely seen and recognized; for a sense of  
contributing to the good; and for a life that is about something more than just  
money and accumulating material goods." The right, he maintains, has supplied  
all this in a variety of ways. The left is clueless, unaware that such needs  
even exist.  

At the core of Lerner's argument is his  description of two competing 
theologies.  

The theology of the  "right hand of God" gives conservative ideologues their 
religious credibility.  This theology "sees the universe as a fundamentally 
scary place filled with evil  forces…. God is the avenger, the big man in heaven 
who can be invoked to use  violence to overcome those evil forces, either 
right now or in some future  ultimate reckoning….[T]he world is filled with 
constant dangers and the rational  way to live is to dominate and control others 
before they dominate and control  us."  

The "left hand of God" theology sees God as "the  loving, kind, and generous 
energy in the universe" and "encourages us to be like  this loving God." 

Lerner readily admits that the right-hand  theology exists in the scriptures 
of the world's major religions, but he objects  to its use by the religious 
right to promote a kind of imperial dominion, à la  Pat Robertson's 1986 stated 
goal "to rule the world for God." The scriptural  passages often used to 
justify a dominionist position — in both Judaism and  Christianity, Lerner points 
out — were originally written to empower the  oppressed with assurances that 
God would hear their cries and come in power to  liberate them and establish a 
reign of justice and peace. Thus, he argues, the  hard-core religious right has 
perverted religion: They distort scriptural texts  and ancient theologies 
written for the powerless and use them to theologically  undergird the powerful. 
Lerner sees this core as a relatively small part of  American society. The 
much larger populace that votes with the religious right  does so in support of 
what it sees as "a community that gives priority to  spiritual aliveness and is 
affirming and loving. That is the experience they are  looking for, and for 
that they are willing to hear God's voice in the way the  Religious Right hears 
it." 

Lerner's solution is to call for the  redemption of religion in the thinking 
of the secular left, along with the  establishment of a politics that refuses 
to allow the values of the commonwealth  to be trumped by the powers 
protecting private wealth. He advocates the  development of a "spiritual left" as a 
coherent alternative to religious  triumphalism. Were we to adopt this 
"spiritual-political alternative" and bring  together three groups he has identified on 
the left — the secular, the  "spiritual but not religious" and the 
"progressive religious" — then America  could be rescued.  

Like Rabbi Lerner, I am a clergyman in a  faith community rooted in the 
prophetic tradition. I share his concerns about  the health of the United States 
and of the world, as measured by our care for  one another in a context of 
peace. I share his hope that there is abundant  spiritual energy available to 
individuals for effective social action over the  long haul. That energy is 
accessed when people are meaningfully rooted in  communities where their dignity 
(along with that of every other human being)  finds warm affirmation and where 
prayer leading to vigorous social action is the  norm. These communities can, as 
Lerner insists, be empowering oases of hope in  the midst of the politics of 
fear in which we now live.  

Rabbi Heschel taught that in every moment something sacred  is at stake. His 
student, Rabbi Lerner, has written a book that sends a clear  call to everyone 
who cares about the future of America to take part in the  transformation of 
our history into something of beauty, meaning and justice — a  work that, 
whether we think of it that way or not, is intrinsically sacred.  


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times  
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