Planting Liberally

Zack Exley has a short piece up about the phenomenon of evangelical Christian house meetings - informal extra-church prayer meetings that create a kind of secondary structure in religious communities.

Exley is interested in the nature of praying and other activities at these meetings, which I suppose is interesting.  But what I find intriguing is the striking similarity between this kind of activity and the political awareness-spreading/fundraising house parties made famous by progressive trailblazers like Howard Dean and MoveOn.  At the time, these meetings were hailed as a new kind of community, perhaps capable of replacing some of the social capital which Robert Putnam claims we've lost over the past generation.

It's clear there are important differences between Christian house meetings and progressive ones.  The former have a long-term goal of fellowship and religious activism, whereas the latter are usually organized around a fundraising or volunteer recruitment goal.  The former are not centrally organized - sometimes not even supervised by religious leadership - while the latter are usually initiated by a central organizing committee, e.g. the Dean campaign or MoveOn's online house party tools.  The former, at least in the case Exley points to, are regularly-occurring meetings that build community among a relatively stable group of people, while the latter are sporadic meetings that feature a loose group of strangers.

Still, I wonder why it's not possible for progressives to imitate these house meetings - particulalry, why it's not possible for religious progressives to imitate them.  This reminds me to some degree of some of the more interesting organizational proposals in Michael Lerner's Left Hand of G-d.  In that book, Lerner suggests building neighborhood groups of spiritual progressives across the country, who gather to discuss current events, pray together, etc.

I'm not sure if anyone in the religious progressive movement, aside from Lerner, is thinking about this kind of thing seriously, or how to foment this kind of activity, but I'd certainly welcome hearing more about it.

There's been a lot of interesting news in the world of labor and in religion and politics lately. In case you're paying no attention at all to the Super Bowl tonight, some of this might prove interesting:

• The New York Times reports that the writers' strike may be nearing its end. The writers conceded their desire to represent animation and reality TV workers, but appear to have won concessions on royalties for content distributed on the Internet. The agreement now goes to the guild's governing boards, and then to the writers themselves.
• Last week was the celebration of the New Baptist Covenant, a group convened by Pres. Carter and composed of about 30 different Baptist denominations. The meeting's theme was unity, especially along racial and ethnic lines, and it appears that the meeting did indeed include a diverse cross-section of Baptists. While the group is expressly apolitical, it focuses on themes of social justice and peace, a notable divergence from the Southern Baptist Convention's focus on a conservative orthodoxy revolving mostly around sexuality. The SBC did not formally participate in the meeting, although individual SBC members were free to attend.
• Pastor Dan notes that the SBC is losing membership and is having trouble attracting younger folks, putting to rest the notion that only liberal denominations have those kinds of problems. Membership appears to be slipping away towards Pentecostal churches and non-denominational churches. (Full disclosure: my wife is a once-a-week front pager at Street Prophets.)
• Via Zack Exley, the Barna Group this week reported the results of a poll which show that born again voters no longer favor Republicans. This is a group which voted for Bush over Gore by a 57-42 margin, and for Bush over Kerry by a 62-38 margin. They now favor a generic Democrat over a generic Republican by a 40-29 margin. On the other hand, evangelical voters would vote for a generic Republican over a generic Democrat by a 45-11 margin, with 40% undecided. Evangelicals remain extremely conservative, with 72% self-identifying as conservative, 24% identifying as moderate, and 2% identifying as liberal.

Well, it's mostly religion news, but I thought the writers' strike news was pretty interesting too. So, is there anything interesting on TV tonight?

Over at Street Prophets, Pastor Dan today posts an interesting idea: monitor evangelical sermon podcasts for Huckabee endorsements. While Pastor Dan suggests only monitoring the likely suspects, I think it'd be far more efficient to use audio or textual search to find sermons that mention "Huckabee" or one of the other candidates, and just listen to those. Presumably, some good netroots crowdsourcing can be brought to bear on this project. While I think this would be a really interesting project to pull off, I'm not entirely sure it would be effective in separating Huckabee from the evangelical network. After all, pastoral endorsements are hardly the only way the message gets out about a candidate within a church network. Moreover, most pastors are not dumb enough to flagrantly violate the rules governing tax-exempt status, and many are too concerned with evangelism to participate in politics besides. In fact, you could make a case that the churches most likely to be savvy enough to podcast and otherwise put their sermons online are the least likely to violate anti-trust rules. Anyway, it's a creative idea, and I think it deserves some credit. Three cheers!