The religious left is struggling. Can the cause of economic justice help
it rise again?
Michelle Boorstein ("The Washington Post," April 24, 2014)
The religious left was never as powerful and cohesive as the religious
right. But a new report based on many interviews with religious progressive
leaders finds that the Obama era may have further weakened Democrats’ interest
in the non-secular.
The report released Thursday by the Brookings Institution argues that
religious progressives could be heading for a renaissance if they can focus on
what some see as the civil rights issue of our time: economic justice.
The report, by the institute’s Governance Studies Program, is based on
polling and interviews with many of the top players of Washington’s religious
left. This includes John Carr, formerly of the U.S. Bishops Conference,
evangelical writer Jim Wallis and Rabbi David Saperstein of the Reform Jewish
movement.
It starkly lays out the challenges facing religious activists and voters
who work for causes such as immigration reform and limiting budget cuts for
the poor.
Their movement played a massive role in everything from the New Deal to
ending slavery. Can it again be as impactful?
The report, co-written by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., finds
that today’s religious progressives — like their predecessors — have not
played a central role in organizing for Democrats the way religious
conservatives do and did for the GOP. The success of Obama and the Democrats
in
2008, it argues, “led not to a redoubling of interest on the progressive side
religion, but quite the opposite. . . . Engagement with religion atrophied.
” Many saw 2012 as widening the gap between secular and religious
progressives because Obama and other Democrats had gained so much traction by
pushing on socially liberal issues such as abortion and contraception — areas
on
which there is not unanimity among religious progressives.
The report lays out the key challenges for religious progressives:
● The numbers. Even as the religious conservative movement is failing to
attract younger people, 56 percent of Republicans call themselves religious
conservatives, while only 28 percent of Democrats call themselves religious
progressives.
● Religious progressives are not homogenous and thus not as cohesive. Their
views on abortion and gay marriage can vary, and their congregations are
more politically diverse and thus harder to rally.
● Religious progressives are sometimes viewed suspiciously by their secular
allies, in part because of skepticism about religion, but “[d]ifferences
on social issues are almost always at the root of this secular mistrust,”
the report says.
● Democrats are ambivalent about the role of religion in politics.
● Religious people are divided on whether the poor are helped more through
the work of churches and other private charities or through government
programs.
● The decline of the unions, a key partner for religious progressives.
● Growing divisions within the Catholic Church, the country’s largest
source of money for grass-roots, faith-based organizing, over priorities and
whether the church can work with liberal groups on something such as food
stamps if they disagree on something such as gay marriage.
But amid the long list of problems, the report sees perhaps a bright future
for the religious left.
One reason is demographics. A far bigger share of younger Americans call
themselves religious progressives (34 percent of those ages 18 to 33) than
religious conservatives (16 percent of the same group).
Another is a comparison to the Civil Rights movement, which the report says
“interwove religious and civic themes” such as struggle, organizing and
movement-building and was so successful because it was so ecumenical. We may
be at such a moment, the report argues.
“[T]here’s a strong case that the current moment looks far more like the
era leading up to civil rights activism than to the period that ushered in
the religious right. Just as the civil rights movement spoke to a widespread
desire in the nation to perfect the post-war social contract to include
African-Americans, so do new social movements on behalf of greater equality
and mobility speak to a broadly felt need for a new social contract. . . .
Economic justice may prove to be the fertile ground of this era.”
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