Progressive Politics and God

What does come to mind when someone mentions "American religion" nowadays? Aren't Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, or antiabortion or antigay picketers probably the first images? Or is it perhaps Bill Clinton, lachrymose at a Washington prayer breakfast last year, earnestly "repenting" his affair with Monica?

More recently what about the House Republicans voting that schools post the Ten Commandments as the answer to gun violence? Or the discomforting sudden embrace of religion by this year's crop of presidential candidates and their minions? It's not a list designed to warm most progressive hearts. Nor should it.

Yet it's far from all we need to know or care about American religion. Contrary to what many may think, not only is religion alive and well in America, but it's growing in scope and influence today-and a good deal of what it says and does is progressive.

Of course, religion has always been present in America's life. John Winthrop's "City on the Hill" provides a starting point, and Tocqueville reports on its centrality to civic life and politics 200 years later. Even Marx saw we were different. "America," he wrote, "is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure us. . . . We find that [American] religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality."

No one who reflects even for a moment on abolition, suffrage, temperance, various utopian and reform movements, or the Progressive Era-or more recently, on civil rights, the Vietnam era, and the 1980s battles over Central America or nuclear weapons-can miss the vital role of religious leaders, religious visions, or religious communities in any of these transformative struggles. But what about today?

Here's what surprises a lot of my liberal friends: in Los Angeles, you'll find that progressive religious tradition alive in CLUE, a broad-based coalition of ministers, priests, and rabbis, that was at the heart of the city's successful Living Wage campaign last year. In Boston, it's in the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a new ecumenical social justice organization working on local job creation and school reforms. At its founding meeting, nearly 5,000 people heard religious leaders from Cardinal Law to inner-city black Pentecostal ministers and suburban Unitarians and Episcopalians preaching a new era of faith-led urban renewal.

In Washington, a liberal evangelical group called Sojourners regularly challenges its conservative brethren on issues from their stances on women and race to economic inequality and support for organized labor. Sojourners, to the surprise of skeptics, is drawing increasing attention and influence among America's largest bloc of white Christians, many of whom seem to be increasingly uncomfortable with the "Christian right" legacy of the 1980s and early 1990s. A few blocks away, coordinators for the religious alliance Jubilee 2000 are pressing Congress to abolish the foreign debts of the world's poorest countries, drawing on the Old Testament example of "the Jubilee Year" when debtors were to be forgiven their debts, and slaves set free.

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