[Dialogue] Tikkun's Lerner Counters Relig. Right Attack

[jim rippey]

Colleagues:  Below is a Religious Right critique of the Religious Left that was in the New York Times OpEd Jan. 2.  Below that is an answer that Tikkun's Rabbi Lerner emailed today.  Both are long and I haven't digested them fully.  But I thought it would be interesting if others had comments.  

Jim Rippey in foggy Bellevue, NE.

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Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P., By JOSEPH LOCONTE, NY, Times OpEd, 1/2/06

Washington

NANCY PELOSI, the Democratic leader in the House, sounded like an Old Testament prophet recently when she denounced the Republican budget for its "injustice and immorality" and urged her colleagues to cast their no votes "as an act of worship" during this religious season.

This, apparently, is what the Democrats had in mind when they vowed after President Bush's re-election to reclaim religious voters for their party. In the House, they set up a Democratic Faith Working Group. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, created a Web site called Word to the Faithful. And Democratic officials began holding conferences with religious progressives. All of this was with the intention of learning how to link faith with public policy. An event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July even offered a seminar titled "I Don't Believe in God, but I Know America Needs a Spiritual Left."

A look at the tactics and theology of the religious left, however, suggests that this is exactly what American politics does not need. If Democrats give religious progressives a stronger voice, they'll only replicate the misdeeds of the religious right.

For starters, we'll see more attempts to draw a direct line from the Bible to a political agenda. The Rev. Jim Wallis, a popular adviser to leading Democrats and an organizer of the Berkeley meeting, routinely engages in this kind of Bible-thumping. In his book "God's Politics," Mr. Wallis insists that his faith-based platform transcends partisan categories.

"We affirm God's vision of a good society offered to us by the prophet Isaiah," he writes. Yet Isaiah, an agent of divine judgment living in a theocratic state, conveniently affirms every spending scheme of the Democratic Party. This is no different than the fundamentalist impulse to cite the book of Leviticus to justify laws against homosexuality.

When Christians - liberal or conservative - invoke a biblical theocracy as a handy guide to contemporary politics, they threaten our democratic discourse. Numerous "policy papers" from liberal churches and activist groups employ the same approach: they're awash in scriptural references to justice, poverty and peace, stacked alongside claims about global warming, debt relief and the United Nations Security Council.

Christians are right to argue that the Bible is a priceless source of moral and spiritual insight. But they're wrong to treat it as a substitute for a coherent political philosophy.

There is another worrisome trait shared by religious liberals and many conservatives: the tendency to moralize in the most extreme terms. William Sloane Coffin of the Clergy Leadership Network was typical in his denunciation of the Bush tax cuts: "I think he should remember that it was the devil who tempted Jesus with unparalleled wealth and power."

This trend is at its worst in the misplaced outrage in the war against Islamic terrorism. It's true that in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, some Christian conservatives shamed themselves by blaming the horror on feminists and gays, who allegedly incited God's wrath. But such nonsense is echoed by liberals like the theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University.

"The price that Americans are going to have to pay for the kind of arrogance that we are operating out of right now is going to be terrible indeed," he said of the United States' response to the Qaeda attacks. "People will exact some very strong judgments against America - and I think we will well deserve it." Professor Hauerwas joins a chorus of left-wing clerics and religious scholars who compare the United States to Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany.

Democrats who want religious values to play a greater role in their party might take a cue from the human-rights agenda of religious conservatives. Evangelicals begin with the Bible's account of the God-given dignity of every person. And they've joined hands with liberal and secular groups to defend the rights of the vulnerable and oppressed, be it through prison programs for offenders and their families, laws against the trafficking of women and children, or an American-brokered peace plan for Sudan. In each case believers have applied their religious ideals with a strong dose of realism and generosity.

A completely secular public square is neither possible nor desirable; democracy needs the moral ballast of religion. But a partisan campaign to enlist the sacred is equally wrongheaded. When people of faith join political debates, they must welcome those democratic virtues that promote the common good: prudence, reason, compromise - and a realization that politics can't usher in the kingdom of heaven.

Joseph Loconte, a research fellow in religion at the Heritage Foundation and a commentator for National Public Radio, is the editor of "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Hard Core Right-Wing Heritage Fndt. Attacks the Religious/Spiritual Left
by Rabbi Michael Lerner

When Joseph Loconte, a "fellow in religion" at the hard-core right-wing Heritage Foundation, attacked the Religious Left on the op-ed page of the New York Times Januargy 2nd, 2006 (reprinted above), he was heralding a first step in what will have to be a major ongoing assault by the Right.
In my forthcoming book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, Feb, 2006) I show that a major source of the political Right's success in the past several decades has been based on its ability to corner the market on spiritual and religious issues. The Religious Right correctly understood that there is a deep spiritual crisis in the lives of many Americans, and insisting that that crisis was not merely a personal problem for most people but was rooted in a defective social reality of selfishness and materialism. Just as the women's movement helped reduce self-blame and increased a sense of self-worth among many women by helping them understand that an important aspect of their personal suffering was rooted in societal oppression, so the Religious Right won the loyalty of millions by similarly relieving self-blame and insisting that the selfishness that infuses itself in destructive ways into our friendships and familial life is socially caused.
Unfortunately, the Religious Right has frequently identified the source of that selfishness and materialism as caused by the demeaned others of the society (feminists, homosexuals, African-Americans, immigrants, Jews, and more recently, secular people and activist judges). Ironic, because in fact the research in my book demonstrates that it is in the capitalist marketplace and the world of work that it generates where most people learn that "the bottom line" is money and power and that "looking out for number one" is the only common sense way to live, and that any serious attempt to change our economic life to make it morally based would be "unrealistic" and "utopian." When people bring home into personal life the "realism" that they've learned all day in the world of work, they end up reproducing the materialism and selfishness that the Right correctly decries.
The Left could have revealed these dynamics and used them to show that if we want to end the spiritual crisis in American society we need to challenge the very economic and political institutions that the Right consistently champions. After all, it is the Right that insists that the best good for all will be achieved when corporations and individuals are freed from all community constraints so that they can pursue their own economic self-interest without the restrictions placed by the society (for example, environmental safeguards and minimum wages and safety conditions for their workers). 
But the Left has been so tone-deaf to the spiritual crisis in our society that it has been unable to effectively challenge the Right. Many people on the Left are refugees from the sexism, racism, homophobia or hierarchical and restrictive thinking that they encountered in some religious communities, so when they hear talk about a "spiritual" crisis they think that these are just code words for the oppressive ideas that they rejected long ago. It is not uncommon for religious people to feel that their spiritual preferences are greeted with contempt by some sectors of the liberal and progressive culture. 
This picture will not be repaired by Nancy Pelosi or other well-meaning Democrats quoting scriptures or adopting religious language. But it could change dramatically as a new religious and spiritual left emerges with a fundamental critique that goes way beyond liberal politics and demands a whole new "bottom line": institutions, corporations, social practices should be judged efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological behavior, and enhance our capacities to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred and respond to the universe with awe and wonder. 
This kind of New Bottom Line will have a far greater impact on reducing selfishness and materialism than anything that the Right has been willing to back. Which is why the Heritage Foundation needs to distort our message. 
Understanding that many people who seek God today have been driven from the churches and synagogues by the prevalence of ungodly demeaning of others, the Network of Spiritual Progressives (which is sponsoring a series of Spiritual Activism conferences around the U.S.) is building a new progressive movement that is not only for people in traditional religious communities but is also welcoming to the many "spiritual but not religious" people who also recognize the need for a spiritual transformation in the U.S. The concern of the new Religious Left is more focused on uniting those who take seriously the biblically derived injunctions for social justice, peace, non-violence, ecological sanity and human rights, and who recognize the importance of love, gratitude, caring for others, individual and social responsibility, repentance, forgiveness of others, open-heartedness and radical amazement and celebration of the miraculous in the universe, than on dividing people along theological fault lines.
There's nothing inherently sectarian about this kind of agenda. A New Bottom Line consciousness needs to be fought for in every political party, not just the Greens and the Democrats. But for those in the hardcore Right, the Network of Spiritual Progressives poses a deep dilemma: are they really more committed to corporate power or to a world in which the preferential option for the poor, the social justice concerns of the prophets, the "turning of the other cheek" called for by Jesus, and the beating of swords into ploughshares that the Bible promised are given our whole-hearted commitment. It is precisely because the newly emerging Religious/Spiritual Left poses this question that it has the potential of changing the fundamental dynamics of American politics.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun and author of the forthcoming The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, Feb, 2006). WWW.TIKKUN.org

P.S. A few of the many distortions in Joesph Loconte's piece in the NY Times:
1. Jim Wallis was not an organizer of the Berkeley conference to which he refers, but was one of the speakers at it (and had parts of it that he supported and parts he did not). His Call for Renewal organization, like the Network of Spiritual Progressives, is one part of the emerging new Religious/Spiritual Left.
2. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid do not identify with the Religious/Spiritual Left, though they may have their own personal religious beliefs. When the Democratic Party adopts religious language or attempts to reframe its same old programs in religious garb, it is not acting as the Religious Left but as the opportunistic middle seeking any tools it can appropriate for its own self-interest. We in the Religious Left are not a branch of the Democrats or any other political party. 
3. It is ludicrous to deny that the Bible has a political agenda. What exactly do you call a document that demands that people stop work one day out of seven, and one year out of seven, leave part of their crops for the poor, forgive all debts once every seven years, and redistribute land back to the original roughly equal distribution once every fifty years. That Scriptures can sometimes be illegitimately appropriated to justify some aspects of a political program does not prove that there are no specific political implications of the holy writings. La Conte is correct that the Bible does not justify every specific spending program by the Democrats, but it doesn't follow from that that the Bible does not mandate some spending programs on the poor. 
4. The fact that we had one of our fifty workshops specifically addressed to "spiritual but not religious" people is singled out by Loconte in the article below as a way of signaling that we are not really religious at all. This is simply false. We are a movement of people some of whom fit into traditional religious communities, some of whom are struggling to change those communities to make them more spiritually alive, and some of whom are not part of those communities but nevertheless recognize that the empiricist/materialist account of the universe is inadequate and misses a fundamental dimension of reality. That is further explored in The Left Hand of God. Loconte would prefer to ridicule by innuendo than engage with the openness and breadth of the new Religious/Spiritual Left. 
5. Many on the religious Left oppose the war in Iraq and many of the other policies of the U.S. government. But we do not spend our energies comparing the US to Nazi Germany, and we are proudly patriotic in affirming the many good aspects of American society even as we draw from religious sources to critique aspects that are immoral and deserve to be changed. 

We hope that you'll join with us in building this new Religious/Spiritual Left either by coming to the next Spiritual Activism conference (May 17-20 in Washington D.C. with speakers that include: Sister Joan Chittister (a Benedictine nun who is past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the author of many books including Becoming Fully Human: The Greatest Glory of God, Çalled to Question: A Spiritual Memoir, and The Wisdom of the Benedictine Elders ), co-chair of the Tikkun Community Cornel West (professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of Race Matters), Rev. Tony Campolo (Evangelical minister and member of the board of The Call to Renewal), William Sinkford (national president of the Unitarian Universalists Association), Bishop Joseph Gumbleton of Detroit, Arun Gandhi (grandson of the Mahatma), Christopher Hedges (former NY Times reporter and author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning), Charlene Spretnak (author of Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Reemergence in the Modern Church and of The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature and Place in a Hypermodern World), Bob Edgar (General Secretary of the National Council of Churches), Harvey Cox (professor of Theology at Harvard University School of Divinity and author of When Jesus Came to Harvard and of Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century). Rev. Joan Brown Campbell (former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ and now director of Religion at the Chautauqua Institute), Rev. Ama Zenya and Rev. Paul Sherry (United Church of Christ), Rev. James Winkler (chair, Board of Church and Society, United Methodists of America), Rabbi Brian Walt (executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights), Rabbi Stephen Jacobs of Kol Tikvah synagogue, Rabbi Debora Kohn, Rabbi Arthur Waskow (the Shalom Center, Cindy Sheehan (anti-war activist), and Rabbi Michael Lerner (co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and editor of Tikkun Magazine--www.tikkun.org). 


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