{"id":70,"date":"2010-09-15T06:30:41","date_gmt":"2010-09-15T06:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-new-progressive-religious-script.html"},"modified":"2010-09-15T06:30:41","modified_gmt":"2010-09-15T06:30:41","slug":"the-new-progressive-religious-script","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-new-progressive-religious-script.html","title":{"rendered":"The New Progressive Religious Script"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For some years now, religious progressives (I know one when I see one) have been looking for a way to make themselves felt in society as a proper counterweight to the religious right. They may not have the numbers, but surely there ought to be a way to get the troops cranked up and marching to the beat of a spiritual drummer of their own.<\/p>\n<p>Among the would-be drummers have been Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner, moderate evangelical and liberal Jew, who have with modest success promoted their respective lines with the magazines <i>Sojourners <\/i>and <i>Tikkun<\/i>. On the book front, another candidate is United Church of Christ Pastor Daniel Schultz, who made his name (&#8220;Pastordan&#8221;) as the principal blogger at the Daily Kos religion site, Streetprophets. (These days, he&#8217;s to be found over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.religiondispatches.org\/dispatches\/danielschultz\/\">Religion Dispatches<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Pastordan&#8217;s new book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Changing-Script-Authentically-Progressive-Political\/dp\/1935439146\"><i>Changing the Script<\/i><\/a>, advances a &#8220;progressive political theology for the 21st century&#8221; by focusing on abortion, economic justice, and militarism as avenues for liberal religious folks to march down. He&#8217;s got good arguments, but arguments alone, I&#8217;m afraid, do not a religious movement make. Judging by the history of anti-slavery, woman suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, you need a cause that is at once morally incontestable and, in fact, contested. Its message must be simple and capable of creating a broad and diverse coalition. And it must be plausibly related to the religious sensibility of its time. <\/p>\n<p>One of these has finally come along: Call it anti-Islamophobia. It stands for the religious liberty that Americans recognize as central to their national identity. Its opponents are real and (increasingly) vocal, but are easily confronted and have difficulty holding their ground (cf. Koran, burning of). Its message is simple and bespeaks the powerful contemporary spirit of inclusion; and the makings of the necessary coalition have long since been in place. The only question is whether the fight can last long enough for a real movement to form. We&#8217;ll see after November.&nbsp; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For some years now, religious progressives (I know one when I see one) have been looking for a way to make themselves felt in society as a proper counterweight to the religious right. They may not have the numbers, but surely there ought to be a way to get the troops cranked up and marching&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The New Progressive Religious Script - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-new-progressive-religious-script.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The New Progressive Religious Script - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For some years now, religious progressives (I know one when I see one) have been looking for a way to make themselves felt in society as a proper counterweight to the religious right. They may not have the numbers, but surely there ought to be a way to get the troops cranked up and marching&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-new-progressive-religious-script.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-09-15T06:30:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The New Progressive Religious Script - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/the-new-progressive-religious-script.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The New Progressive Religious Script - Religion &amp; Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"For some years now, religious progressives (I know one when I see one) have been looking for a way to make themselves felt in society as a proper counterweight to the religious right. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}