Why we need a religious left.

It was the Christian thing to do. That's what a series of letters to members of Congress from the Reverend Pat Robertson implied. Support Republican tax cuts for wealthy families, the letters said. Support the Republican version of welfare reform, which excluded provisions for child care, health care, and welfare-to-work assistance.

Among the letters' recipients was Representative Glenn Poshard, a fourth-term conservative Democrat from a poor rural district in Illinois. Poshard is a devout Southern Baptist, and he shares some Christian Coalition positions, particularly balancing the budget in seven years and scaling back Medicare. What this former church deacon couldn't figure out, though, was how a tax cut for the wealthy, and the extra cuts in Medicare and programs for the poor it would necessitate, was the Christian thing to do. "I had to ask myself honestly as a Christian, is that appropriate?" says Poshard. "Are [the tax cuts] something that Christ would recommend? I don't think he would." So Poshard went to the House floor to speak. "With all due respect to the Christian Coalition," he asked, "where does it say in the Scriptures that the character of God is to give more to those who have and less to those who have not?. . . If there is one thing evident in the Scriptures, it is that God gives priority to the poor." He quoted Jesus Christ: "When I was thirsty you gave me drink, when I was hungry you fed me . . . When you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it to me."

Poshard's speech was not, in and of itself, notable. For centuries, leaders have drawn on a religious tradition to champion the poor and downtrodden. In America today, however, Poshard's criticism was remarkable. As Republicans claim the halo of Christianity and religious virtue, liberal religious and political leaders have been slow to respond in kind, to show how the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot condone a conservative agenda that rewards the affluent at the expense of the disadvantaged, that takes money from plowshares to forge more swords, and that demands personal responsibility from the poor while excusing the well-off from their social responsibility. Most Americans, raised as Christians or Jews, know and accept the teachings Poshard spoke about. Yet it is the conservative right that has annexed the term "Christianity" in defense of the Republican agenda. (See "What's Un-Christian About the Christian Right," p. 44.)

From the religious left there have been only murmurs. "At the moment," says Tom Fox, the editor of the National Catholic Reporter, "the religious left is . . . saying `There's no one else here. No politicians are with us' . . . There is virtually no voice in the mainstream today speaking about poverty or the marginalized." Jim Wallis, a Washington, D.C. pastor and author of The Soul of Politics, says the progressive religious community couldn't do a Christian Coalition-like voter guide even if it wanted to: "There aren't enough politicians we could support."

Many liberal politicians, meanwhile, complain that religious leaders are not providing the moral support to challenge GOP policies. "I just can't figure it out," says Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY). "I don't see a profile in courage among those who are supposed to speak for Jesus. . . . The cuts that are taking place aren't going to be restored in the next 10 or 20 years. But [liberal religious leaders] now are like deer frozen in the headlights of a car."

Religious leaders on the right, of course, have been anything but frozen. In the early seventies, a progressive Baptist minister named James Dunn wrote a book on how Christians could become more involved in politics. A few years later, he saw a picture of the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell reading his book. "We succeeded too well," Dunn, now head of the Joint Baptist Committee on Public Affairs, says. "The wrong people read the book."

Indeed, the succeeding years have seen the demise of the Moral Majority and a stronger phoenix rise from its ashes in the form of the Christian Coalition. In only six years, Robertson and his executive director Ralph Reed have built an organizational machine reminiscent of Mao Tse Tung that aims to build enough clout to swing any election in the nation. With a $24 million annual budget and four million activists, the Coalition is well on its way.

As conservatives have successfully used religion to make political inroads, liberals have become increasingly antagonistic to mixing religion and politics. The discomfort with which some liberal intellectuals treat religion stems partly from an understandable concern for the religious provisions of the First Amendment, a concern that some liberals have extended to argue that churches shouldn't speak out on political issues at all. Many liberals also associate religion with intolerance and Elmer Gantry-like evangelism. And some on the left hold the church, particularly the Catholic church, responsible for fueling the pro-life movement. The result, as Stephen Carter points out in his forthcoming book Integrity, is that everyone knows the Pope is firmly against abortion, and a good many liberals resent him for it.

What they don't know, Carter notes, or what they choose to ignore, is his opposition to the death penalty or his repudiation of consumerism or his commitment to helping the poor. Pope John Paul II's message on his recent visit seemed downright radical in America's political climate. "Is present-day America becoming less sensitive, less caring toward the poor, the weak, the stranger, and the needy?" he demanded. "It must not!" Similarly, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops recently spoke out harshly against Republican policies--partly because they fear cuts in programs for the poor will encourage abortion, but also, as one Cardinal said, because "the weakest members of society should not bear the greatest burdens" in the effort to balance the budget.

So when secular minds raised on rigid political dichotomies dismiss the Catholic church because of its position on abortion, they throw away the chance to build a coalition on many issues where they have much in common. Abortion is perhaps the religious right's most powerful mobilizing issue; yet the people it attracts aren't the pro-Gingrich caricatures liberals imagine. Stephen Carter notes surveys showing that Christian evangilicals and Roman Catholics are more likely to support liberal economic policies than their supposedly more liberal mainstream or Protestant counterparts and that pro-life advocates are more likely than pro-choice advocates to strongly support government assistance for the unemployed.

That liberals and the Pope have more in common on socioeconomic isssues than you might think isn't just coincidence. Many of liberalism's core values--whether help for the downtrodden or support for peace--derive from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Liberals who disdain religion are inadvertently acting like embarrassed adolescents who shun their own parents. For whether or not you believe Jesus was resurrected, he still offers a model for a life of radical social justice. Whether you believe God or men wrote the Bible, it too speaks to how we live.

But the left, or what remains of it, seems to have forgotten how powerful a force religion is. "It's moral support," says Rangel. "Just putting on a collar and coming down here makes a difference. It means a lot when a rabbi thanks you at a synagogue, or a bishop thanks a congressman for supporting a program for the poor." Religious leaders have the right to criticize or support the government, and political leaders who use their faith as a guide to their actions have a right to speak out about those values. They also have an obligation.

God on their Side

The proof of the power is in the history: Dating back at least back to the Quaker abolitionists in the 1830s, American liberals have a much longer--and until the early seventies a much stronger--tradition of bringing religion's moral suasion to politics and public policy.

During the Depression, for example, Dorothy Day used the Catholic church's social teachings, the "preferential option for the poor," to speak out on behalf of the poor, workers, and the unemployed through her Catholic Worker newspaper, which inspired a movement of the same name. But it was in the 1960s, with the civil rights movement, that religion's power to transform American society was most obvious. From Catholic bishops who excommunicated segregationists to the rise of civil rights leaders from the black, primarily Baptist churches, the movement was always as much spiritual as it was political.

By rendering faith into action and religious fervor into a passion for social justice, Martin Luther King, Jr. convinced Southern blacks that God (and at least some churches) were on their side, which gave them the strength to protest peaceably. "With this faith," he said in his "I Have a Dream" speech, "we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day."

King also used a biblically based, moral appeal to reach whites; he invoked the inclusive image of "God's children" and explained to white church leaders in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" that, "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God."

Religious values partially undergirded the anti-war movement as well. Protestant theologians were outspoken in their criticism of the war, and many of the anti-war movement's leaders, such as the Protestant chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr. and the Jesuit Berrigan brothers--came out of the churches. Again, the ethos--that the war was morally wrong, even if it could be strategically justified-penetrated secular society.

Many of the major liberal economic programs are, in one sense, the use of government as an instrument to fulfill God's will as established in the Old and New Testaments--to lift up the poor, to use an affluent country's resources to help those in need, to shore up the weakest links in the chain that creates a community. That was the spirit of the New Deal; Eleanor Roosevelt once called her husband a "very simple Christian." For Lyndon Johnson, as for John and Robert Kennedy, the War on Poverty and the Great Society weren't just practical exercises in governing; they were about fulfilling the obligations incumbent on religious faith.

The merging of Robert Kennedy's faith and his politics took him to the ghetto, amidst the rural poor, and as far afield as South Africa, where he said that the heart of Western freedom and democracy "is the belief that the individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state exist for his benefit." Robert Kennedy touched the religious conscience, but he also appealed to secular liberals who were drawn to his moral conviction and spiritual vision--a conviction and vision rooted in his faith.

In the eighties, the religious left had a brief resurgence as Protestant and, Catholic churches passionately opposed U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and the El Salvadoran government. The churches mobilized thousands of members who weren't traditionally liberal or politicized. Opposing communism, they argued, could never justify killing innocent people or funding terrorism. Churches raised millions of dollars and provided sanctuary to refugees, and religious activists testified and protested on Capitol Hill. Many members of Congress attributed their opposition to funding the Contras to the influence of the religious community.

The campaign for a just Central American policy was important and successful, but it begs a question: Why didn't the churches fire up the same passion about issues confronting Americans at home? Why weren't they sitting in congressional offices protesting conditions in Appalachia and South Central Los Angeles? "[Domestic policy doesn't hold the glamour of Central America," says Sister Maureen Fieldler of the Quixote Center, a Catholic social action organization in Maryland. "You can't go on a delegation to the inner city." In the same way, the religious left often championed the cause of, say, people with AIDS while ignoring the larger cause of universal health care. The religious left, much like the left at large, sometimes went for radical chic over radical change.

By the time a campaign for universal health care did take hold--during the debate over the Clinton plan in 1993 and 1994--the religious left had long since receded as a major presence on domestic policy issues. After Roe v. Wade in 1973, many liberals, led by the feminist movement, turned against the church because of its position on abortion. For the religious right, Roe v. Wade sparked political mobilization and fired its ascendency. Later in the decade, Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, not only disappointed many liberals but embarrassed them with talk of spiritual "malaise" and of praying for God's guidance when making big decisions. His presidency hastened liberals' flight from religion.

Unfortunately the religious left began to fade just when the economy began to slide; over the years, as the poor got poorer, the religious left proved impotent. While the health-care crisis worsened, for example, religious leaders were first quiet and when they finally acted, ineffective. The religious community lobbied heavily on behalf of universal access to health care; they were precisely the kind of fire-in-their-bellies allies liberals needed. But health-care reform failed dramatically--partly because the other, side mobilized. greater resources and grassroots opposition (with Christian Coalition help), partly because many religious leaders didn't speak out, and partly because political leaders didn't call on those who did. The coalition splintered over churches' vociferous opposition to any plan that would fund abortion and secular liberals equally adamant attachment to one that would.

Of late, left-leaning religious leaders and devout politicians have spoken too rarely, and too softly, on draconian policies and unsettling economic trends, on violence in the inner city, on the relation between personal responsibility and structural change. Louis Farrakhan motivated hundreds of thousands of black men to march on Washington--what better proof of the need to link spirituality with politics?--but the churches to which those men belong have done little to mobilize protest against GOP policies that could further erode their already weakened communities. "They're basking in a 30-year-old story of Martin Luther King and the black church," says Reverend Eugene Rivers, who heads the Ten Point Coalition in Boston, which aims to inspire local black churches to greater involvement in their communities. Why, in an era when their voices are so crucial, has the religious left become so quiet?

"People should be out in the streets," says Pastor John Steinbruck of Luther Place Church in Washington, D.C. But he's not--for good reason. Upstairs he has three dorms of homeless women and recovering drug addicts. In his basement a group of volunteers supervise activities for the mentally ill. A complex of low-income housing--constructed entirely from money raised by Steinbruck and the church--is being built across the street. "I am consumed with binding up wounds, caring for people," Steinbruck says with frustration. "How much time do I have left [for political activism]? How much energy?"

That's one explanation for the religious left's absence from politics--many of its members are too busy doing social service work to put time into grassroots campaigns. Another is that just as evangelicals during the fifties and sixties saw politics as something dirty, some in mainline religious congregations now fear that political involvement will devolve into a grasp for power, a scramble for money, and thus contradict their most fundamental religious values.

Many religious communities and religious leaders also are unsure whether their role is to provide comfort and celebration for life as it is, or to challenge their followers to change the status quo. That's why liberation theology, a populist interpretation of Scripture that inspired Catholic clergy throughout Latin America and other developing regions to challenge oppressive regimes, was necessary in the first place. Ministers or rabbis who speak out on behalf of the poor risk alienating middle class congregations unless they can provide enough moral fervor to inspire a change of heart. "Most church people are not persuaded or educated as to the social implications of the gospel, because most preachers don't preach it," says Collins Kilburn, the North Carolina director of the National Council of Churches. "I'm 61, and I've been working all my life to make the social gospel more relevant," he says. "I have not been successful."

Other members of mainstream congregations are suspicious that ministers who preach the social gospel are smuggling secular liberal ideology into the church. Those ministers need to show that they are speaking straight from the Old and New Testaments, that liberalism took its cues from those ancient texts and beliefs.

Finally, there's the attitude of secular liberals, who sometimes seem to have assimilated Marx's contention that "religion is the opiate of the masses." "Religion," says Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the lieutenant government of Maryland and, like her father, Robert Kennedy, a devout Roman Catholic, "provides a moral sense of right and wrong, but liberals feel uncomfortable with that. . . . They try to be value-neutral."

Consider Hillary Clinton's 1993 speech on the "politics of meaning," in which she proclaimed, "We need a new ethos of responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves."

A crowd of 14,000 Texans gave her a standing ovation; the pundits gave her hell. Sure, some of her speech was corny, but most of the criticism sprang from a mocking mistrust of a liberal who dared to speak about spiritual matters. The irony, as the magazine Christian Century noted, was that "for the protectors of secularism, she sounded too spiritual," while "for the large public, which does relate to religious language, she sounded too secular." Hillary Clinton was raised a Methodist, and much of her political outlook has origins in her denomination's commitment to improving the lives of the less fortunate. Since that speech and the torrent of criticism that followed, she has played down the role her faith plays in driving her politics.

Her husband has had more success--among the best speeches of his presidency was the impassioned address he gave in 1993 to 5,000 black pastors in Memphis, where he talked about a "great crisis of the spirit . . . we have to reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul, and the truth of human nature." President Clinton has faith, but he has called on it too rarely--especially this year--to make a moral case for his policies.

Getting Religion

Secular liberals need to understand: Americans have spiritual as well as material needs. In opting for moral relativism, liberals have alienated those who believe in morality. As the Democrats are finding, a platform framed in technocratic, utilitarian terms--repair the inner cities to reduce crime, reduce welfare to cut taxes, support affirmative action to retain the black vote--does not resonate in the American conscience.

The left at least is trying to mount a challenge to the Christian Coalition. A Progressive Evangelical Network was established recently to show that not all evangelicals are with the rightwing. (Since the early 1970s, in fact, there has been a small band of evangelicals working for traditionally liberal causes. In May, more than 100 Christian leaders issued the "Cry for Renewal," a powerful statement challenging the values of the religious right and its claim to speak for all people of faith. An Interfaith Alliance of Christian and Jewish leaders has begun to distribute "mainstream" voter guides. These campaigns are important, but inadequate. They oppose the religious right, but are not for anything.

For liberals, religion offers values as well as spirituality. In a society where we often judge each other on material success--adulating the best ballplayers, the richest entrepreneur, the best-looking model--the Bible provides a wholly different set of criteria: whether you live, as the Jesuits put it, as a "man or woman for others." For believers, the idea that God will judge them, not on who they are but how they act, is a powerful incentive to live differently. Even for nonbelievers, it continuously needles us to strive to be better than we are.

How we treat the least among us--the least important, the least appealing, the least wanted--is the most important test in the Judeo-Christian tradition. On his path to sainthood, God demanded that Saint Francis of Assisi embrace and kiss a leper, whom Francis considered the lowest of all humans. From St. Francis, God exacted compassion harshly: "Half of his putrescent nose had fallen away," Nikos Kazantzakis writes in God's Pauper, an imaginative retelling of St. Francis's life. "His hands were without fingers--just stumps; and his lips were an oozing wound. Throwing himself upon the leper, Francis embraced him, then lowered his head and kissed him upon the lips." How many among us would similarly embrace an AIDS patient or a homeless woman who hasn't bathed in weeks? The story of St. Francis moves us, perhaps, just a little closer.

In an age of unchallenged capitalism, an awakened religious left's greatest duty may be to provide an alternative set of economic values. In the 1980s, for example, when the Catholic church did speak out on economic issues, it offered one of the most profound challenges to conservative economic doctrine and its celebration of profit and wealth. In the week after Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops released the first draft of their pastoral letter on the economy. It was a chastening statement, a moving, beautifully written guide Catholics "trying to live their faith in the market place." The bishops wrote to provide guidance for members of their own church: "No one may claim the name Christian and be comfortable in the face of hunger, hopelessness, insecurity, and the injustice found in this country and around the world." But the bishops also wrote to help shape the public debate on the economy. Every economic decision and institution, they insisted, "must be judged in light of whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person."

The challenge for religion in the United States is not to provide a knee-jerk defense for government or liberal policies that haven't worked. Indeed, it can help wean us from looking to government and look more toward ourselves. Since leaving the presidency, Jimmy Carter has brokered peace, founded a center to work for democracy, and lent his name and hands to Habitat for Humanity. His example of a private citizen acting on his faith's call to action may be a more lasting legacy than his presidency.

Religious values can, however, play a fundamental role in determining what government provides, and what it expects. Probably the strongest challenge to President Clinton to veto the welfare bill--which, at press time, it seemed he would--came from Marian Wright Edelman in a stinging Washington Post op-ed addressed to the President. She appealed to Clinton's "moral leadership," referring to God's mandate "to protect the poor and the weak and the young." "Do you think," she asked, "the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Micah and Amos--or Jesus Christ--would support such policies?"

When Congress first spoke of dismantling the federal guarantee of health care for the poor, imagine what would have happened if Christian and Jewish leaders had come together to remind one of the most religious nations in the industrialized world of Deuteronomy: "For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land," or Luke's message that "When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind." imagine that they preached these messages to their congregations. Even though your own health care might be covered, they could have said, faith means offering compassion as well as receiving comfort--it means action as well as be lief. If the religious community stopped aid to the Contras in the eighties, it could have stopped the GOP from sacrificing health care for the poor to pay for a tax cut and a few more B-2s.

The power of religion, as anyone who has heard King's speeches can testify, is that it touches not reason, but emotion--which is exactly why liberalism, with its Enlightenment roots, is so skeptical of it. Emotion has power--real, raw power--to change hearts and minds in a way that facts do not. Which is exactly why liberals should use it, not fear it. That's what Bill Clinton does when he taps into something higher than the Democratic Leadership Council; it's what Jesse Jackson, political maneuverings and missteps aside, does time and again.

There may be no single leader in the church able to claim King's mantle, no Bobby Kennedy in politics today, but there are individuals who can provide models for what the religious left should do. Take Dr. J. Philip Wogaman, the minister at Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. "For this church to ignore the issues would be a dereliction of duty," Wogaman says, particularly because the members of his congregation include policymakers like Bill and Hillary Clinton.

During the health-care debate, for example, Wogaman preached for universal access. In the Gospel of John, Wogaman pointed out, Jesus stood before 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and some fish: "Jesus didn't say some of you will be fed," Wogaman said. "Jesus said all of you will be fed." To a debate framed by politics and profits, Wogaman brought a third consideration: right and wrong. "Grave moral issues can be present even though the language can be very technical," he said, noting fast-food chains' complaint that the obligation to provide employee health care would raise the price of pizzas and burgers. That suggested, he said, that his Big Mac was being subsidized by the health insecurity of the worker he bought it from--that it is more important that burgers be a few cents cheaper than it is for the young mother who works there to see a doctor. He invoked the words of Psalm 13: "Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers, who eat up my people as they eat bread?"

A religious left is not just vital--it's possible. There are millions of people of faith wanting their better halves appealed to, willing to act, waiting for a vehicle to do so. There are thousands of people acting already. Some small religious lobbying groups--catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, and more--have been working feverishly to protect federal programs for the disadvantaged. This year, for the first time, the theologically Conservative Jewish community lobbied against legislation that would hurt immigrants and the poor, and rabbis were asked to speak out about the disadvantaged during holiday services. "Our tradition has an ethical dimension," says Rabbi Charles Feinberg, who heads the Rabbinical Assembly's Social Action Committee. "They're not just rituals so the Jewish people can survive for the sake of surviving; it's so that we can survive for a higher purpose."

Beyond the Beltway, some black churches are continuing the struggle for social change. In Detroit, for example, at the Baptist Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, throughout his 26-year tenure as pastor, Dr. Charles Adams has exhorted his congregation to scrutinize elected officials and call them to task, to write legislators letters invoking the prophets. The church registers voters, and Dr. Adams makes sure his 8,000 congregants, welfare recipients or college professors, vote: "We preach that you cannot live in this society and not exercise your democratic responsibility."

Then there is Representative Glenn Poshard, exercising not only his democratic but also his religious responsibility. He says many of his colleagues, particularly Southern Democrats, thank him privately for speaking out, but they are scared to do so themselves because the religious right has so much power in their districts. With their silence, that power only grows.

"This is not a question of fighting the Christian Coalition," Poshard says. "It's one Christian taking issue with another on what our faith means. . . . I came out of the same background as the people running the Christian Coalition. . . . When something like a report card goes out so that Christian people--even in my own church--call and say, `We don't understand why you can't be more Christian in the way you vote,' it hurts me. I have to explain what the budget means, and tell them, `You think it was un-Christian of me to vote that way. I think it was the most Christian thing to do'."