Planting Liberally

This weekend, in anticipation of the book launch of Dispatches from the Religious Left, I am running a series on a few selected essays from the book.  Earlier today, I posted my review of PastorDan's essay on the role of the Religious Left.  This post is about an essay by Rev. Debra Haffner and Timothy Palmer: "Towards a theology of sexual justice."

Sexual justice, as defined by this essay, is quite broad:

Indeed, the full scope of sexual justice embraces anyone who is concerned with gender equality, reproductive rights and health care, and the right to privacy, not to mention education, equality of opportunity and the dignity of all persons.

These issues are far too important to far too many people to sweep under the rug in seeking the support of an ever-elusive "Religious Center", as Jim Wallis argues.  So how is the Religious Left to support sexual justice?

The essay urges Religious Leftists to support a wide array of positions under the umbrella of sexual justice, including comprehensive, age-appropriate sexuality education; full access to sexual and reproductive health services; and full inclusion of women and LGBT individuals in public life.  Additionally, the essay calls for better awareness and understanding of adolescent sexuality and sexual and gender diversity.

The key to this agenda is the development of a "theology of sexual justice".  Haffner and Palmer's organization, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, has done considerable work in framing sexual justice in a religious context.  The theology which has emerged from this work focuses on personal relationships, integrity, and justice.  The essay discusses this theology with particular regard for children and adolescents (who need help learning about sexuality and making good decisions about personal relationships); women (who deserve agency); and LGBT individuals (who have a right to full inclusion in public and religious life).

The essay explicitly rejects the narrow biblical view of these issues.  For example, in addressing abortion: "Scripture neither condemns nor prohibits abortion.  It does, however, call people to act compassionately and justly when facing difficult moral decisions.  Scriptural commitment to the most marginalized means that pregnancy, childbearing and abortion should be safe for all women."  The essay ends on a hopeful note, noting positive trends that suggest that liberal views of sexual justice are ascendant.

This kind of theological argumentation is, I think, a valuable contribution from the Religious Left.  While the Religious Right has carefully worked to close the door on theological debate of political issues, the Religious Left can blow the door off its hinges.  Certainly, this kind of debate can begin with direct biblical argumentation: the Bible does not say much about abortion, and it says almost nothing about homosexuality - and even less about how we understand it today.  But the debate is much broader, and in this sense the diversity of the Religious Left is a key strength.  For while the Bible might or might not condemn abortion, there are many people for whom the Bible, or the New Testament, is simply irrelevant, and these people have a right to make a theological argument about the issues of the day.  A healthy public theological debate about political issues can only diminish the influence of the Religious Right.

However, I think the essay stops short, in that it treats sexual injustice as merely a platform promoted by a select few leaders of the Religious Right.  In my view sexual injustice is much more; it draws on a crisis of identity and a fear of new and confusing realities among the rank-and-file.  Fear of the sexual other is interwoven throughout conservative culture, at least as far back as the days of post-World War II redbaiting, according to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland.  And it is certainly has a pernicious and sinister influence on our politics today.

But while in the political realm it is ok, and perhaps even necessary, to forthrightly reject this kind of fear, and to contrast it with open-ended inclusion, the job of a religious movement is very different.  Fear of the sexual other, and a crisis of sexual identity, is a personal and pastoral problem.  It is something which liberal religious ministry can tackle; it is a job which liberal religious leaders throughout the country are probably already doing within their own congregations.  I would also argue that it should be part of the mandate of the Religious Left, to address and mitigate this spiritual crisis outside the boundaries of liberal religious congregations and in society as a whole.  Not only would such a project be a valuable service to society as a whole, it would also redound to the benefit of the progressive movement, as it would undermine the foundation of the Religious Right.

I admit that I don't know much about how the Religious Left would go about addressing this problem outside the boundary of liberal religious congregations.  It's not an easy problem on an individual level, and I can't imagine the project gets easier on a national scale.  But I'd certainly welcome suggestions, and I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on Haffner and Palmer's thoughts about a theology of sexual justice.

Shelby and I have some very exciting news: we're about to be published! A brief chapter we wrote on new media will be published in Dispatches from the Religious Left, due out in early October. The chapter is about how liberal religious organizations can use technologies like blogs, podcasting, and social networks to reach new audiences. The book includes a lot of leaders in the world of politics and liberal religion, including Dan Schultz ("PastorDan" at Street Prophets); Rev. Debra Haffner (Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, and a leading Unitarian Universalist minister); Marshall Ganz, (community organizing guru and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School); and Robert Edgar (former head of the National Council of Churches). The editor is Frederick Clarkson, who is a long-time scholar of the religious right, and the publisher is Ig Publishing, which is an up-and-coming progressive publisher that has also published Youth to Power and Framing the Debate (both written by progressive bloggers-turned-authors.) You can find the full list of authors on Frederick's blog, http://frederickclarkson.com/. It's quite humbling to be part of such esteemed company, and we feel very lucky to be included in the list! I haven't seen the other chapters, so I'm also excited to see what the other authors have to say. If you're interested, you can buy the book right now at Powells, at http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780978843182-0. There's also going to be a very brief "book tour" of sorts, including an event at Middle Collegiate Church on Oct. 14 and another event at Harvard Divinity School. More to follow on that. If you know anyone who might be interested in this topic, I'd certainly appreciate it if you let them know about the book and send this along. We're both very, very excited about the book, and we think it'll be a great read!

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.

This Sunday marked the last day of Evolution Weekend 2008.  Held in honor of Charles Darwin's birthday, the weekend is an effort on the behalf of the Clergy Letter Project to demonstrate that religion and science are not incompatible.  Over 800 religious communities throughout the world participated, and over 500 scientists signed on as consultants to work with clergy on accurately addressing the idea of evolution in a religious context.  (The church my wife belongs to participated, although we were out of town and didn't attend.)

I think this is an important project, and I'm glad to see that it's picking up steam.  From reports in the Dallas Morning News to my very brief perusal of the project's extensive evolution sermon archive, it appears that participating clergy are using this weekend to explore the theological meaning of evolution, and more generally, the importance of science within a religious worldview.  The sermon archive includes sermons with a wide variety of theological points of view on the meaning of religion - including suggestions that evolution is proof of divine presence and creativity, not rejection of it; thoughts about the different kinds of knowledge which science and religion can illuminate; and remarks about the different ways of understanding the story of creation and the theory of evolution.

My point here isn't to explore or evaluate these various points of view, although I think some of them are intriguing.  Rather, I think this project is an example of something which we don't see very often: religious liberals providing a theological underpinning for a progressive point of view.  This is an important role for religious liberals, for a number of reasons.  First, it accurately reflects the principal factor (faith) which actually motivate some liberals.  Second, it provides an alternative to the religious conservative worldview.  Third, it may be a useful tool in motivating religious people who are not politically active to join a progressive cause.  Finally, it may help us understand the motivations of conservatives - the heartfelt beliefs and anxieties on the other side of the debate, whether the debate be centered on evolution or another topic.

Evolution Weekend isn't the only example of such an effort.  The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice offers a similar breadth of religious infrastructure for issues related to reproductive choice, as the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry does for the issue of marriage equality.  Religious liberals are steadily building a wealth of resources for explaining elements of the progressive worldview from a religious point of view.  This kind of religious infrastructure is incredibly important in competing with the Religious Right.  Instead of pandering to this crowd or attempting to imitate them while papering over substantive political differences, our leaders should be drawing on these kinds of resources, to the degree that those resources help them communicate with religious communities.  I'm glad to see the Clergy Letter Project, RCRC, RCFM, and others like them laying the groundwork for this new approach to liberal religious politics, and I hope that we see more in the future.

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?

The Christian Science Monitor today notes the beginning of the meeting of the New Baptist Covenant, convened by President Carter in Atlanta this week. The stated goal of the covenant is to bring Baptists together - the theme is "Unity in Christ" - to work on spreading the gospel and supporting social justice projects.

Politics is strictly prohibited at the meeting, although I find it a little difficult to view this meeting as purely apolitical. Any group headlined by two Presidents (Carter and Clinton) and two Senators (Graham and Grassley) is not apolitical. After all, if this meeting were purely about theological and denominational unity, it could be composed entirely without the help of these politicians who are - excepting perhaps Carter - not really leaders within their denomination.

Moreover, the topics chosen for discussion, chiefly peace and poverty, are acutely political. Even suggesting that they should be the main issues for discussion at a Baptist meeting is a political statement (although, in better times, it would not be.) There's a reason Southern Baptist Convention leaders have chosen to stay away from the meeting - they know it is an unsubtle swipe at their intensive focus on conservative orthodoxy, their focus on theological issues which align neatly with political social conservatism.

Carter is leading a deliberate effort to "re-brand" Baptism as a religion focused on social justice as well as evangelism, and that means that he doesn't want it to be a religion focused on evangelism and social conservatism. Fine, I applaud that. But what will the New Baptist Covenant need to do, in pragmatic terms, to actually wrest control of the Baptist identity out of the SBC's hands? Meetings, as prominent SBC leader Albert Mohler notes, are not enough.

My reading of intra-Baptist denominational politics is extremely fuzzy, so I don't have a particularly good answer to offer. But my guess is that, despite reform efforts within the SBC, the conservative "resurgence" within the convention is not getting much weaker anytime soon, and that the upper echelons of the SBC leadership won't be joining the New Baptists in the near future. Instead, the New Baptist Covenant will have to offer a clear alternative to the grassroots of the SBC, at both an individual and a congregational level. They will probably want to offer some kind of formal affiliation program to individual SBC congregations. SBC congregations do, after all, have a high degree of autonomy. If the New Baptist Covenant were willing to provide a certification program under which any Baptist congregation were free to apply for, let's say, a "Unity in Christ" certificate, individual SBC congregations should be free to do so without interference from the larger convention.

The result would be a patchwork of Baptist denominations and congregations, all theoretically united in a common theological vision of evangelism and social justice, who might be able to speak and organize in a cohesive voice, thereby undermining the conservative orthodoxy of the SBC. Moreover, such a program would give aspiring Baptist preachers who are interested in social justice an idea of where to seek their calling. It would also allow socially-minded Baptists an opportunity to find a home congregation which matches their own theological vision. At the end of the day, it would give the social justice voices within the SBC something to rally around.

In light of the extreme unpopularity of the war in Iraq, and the newfound popularity of social justice work in evangelical circles of late, this should not be an extremely difficult sell. It will take a bit of legwork and, I think, some aggressive marketing, but it is eminently feasible. Indeed, such a program might actually be a lifeline for many congregations, SBC and non-SBC alike. After all, as Bill Leonard points out in the Monitor article, nondenominational churches (which overlap a good deal with, but are not strictly the same as, the well-known megachurches) are offering Baptist congregations pretty stiff competition. A new focus on social justice work might be a way to build cohesion among Baptists, or to attract new congregants from nondenominational churches.

It'll be interesting to see what Carter and the New Baptists come up with. The challenge to the conservative orthodoxy of SBC leadership must come both from within and without.

Update: You can follow news from the covenant meeting at Baptist reform blog Mainstream Baptist, or the more conservative SBC Outpost. So far, from early reports, there have been nice speeches and references to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of racial unity, but no action plans. (h/t Melissa Rogers)

Update 2: With a tip of the hat to Melissa Rogers again, don't hold your breath for the New Baptist Covenant to aggressively compete with the SBC. From the Dalls Morning News: 

At a Friday news conference, Mr. Carter said he and other organizers of the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant will be meeting in the next few weeks to consider how best to follow up.

No new organization is foreseen. But Jimmy Allen, coordinator of the event, said another mass meeting is likely "in two or three years," and meanwhile, ways will be explored to help foster collaborations by the groups that came together this time.

We'll find out more in a couple of months, I guess.

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!

Kudos to Chris Lehmann on a fascinating and fair-handed review of a recent study on evangelical elites. I don't have a whole heck of a lot to say about it just yet, but the one aspect which strikes me as most fascinating is the disconnect between evangelical elites and the rank-and-file. The conservatizing influence of evangelical Christianity, after all, is largely felt in the way that evangelicals vote and participate in politics. Twenty-five years ago, evangelicals were not-entirely-reliable Democrats; fifty years ago, they were split between being apolitical, and being reliable Democrats; now, they appear to be reliable Republicans, but might be swinging back to the left. Is this shift due to top-down control by evangelical elites, or is it the result of grassroots evangelical conservative self-identification? If it's the former, then the disconnect noted in this study is potentially a useful opening which Democrats can exploit to help destabilize the Republican coalition. Full disclosure: I've done a small bit of technical development work for the New York Observer in the recent past.

Last week, Faith in Public Life and Third Way released a study, Come, Let us Reason Together (PDF). The study has been the subject of a fairly intense back-and-forth debate with pastordan at Street Prophets, mostly about the partisan implications of the study, and what we (as progressives, or as Democrats, take your pick) should do about it. One of the most interesting findings of the report are that evangelicals can be decomposed, politically, into three groups: progressive (about one-fifth of evangelicals), moderate (one-third), and conservative/traditionalist (one-half). Despite these ideological monikers, the group is every bit as conservative in voting behaviors as we've otherwise heard: 88% of conservative evangelicals, 64% of centrists, and 48% of progressive evangelicals voted for Bush. By contrast, 43% of self-described moderates, and 14% of self-described liberals, voted for Bush in 2004, according to CNN's 2004 exit polls. It's not their voting habits, but their positions on cultural and economic issues which make some evangelicals "progressive" and "moderate", according to Third Way. Now, this may or may not be a political opportunity for Democrats. The 2006 exit poll results, in which 74% of evangelicals voted for Congressional Republicans (compared to 78% support for Bush in 2004) certainly don't suggest as much: in a Democratic wave election, evangelicals are still heavily pro-Republican. But the evangelical world is changing slowly, and it's at least theoretically possible that there may be some long-term potential in this group. The cause of that slow change interests me much more than the effects of the change, revealed in voting patterns and poll responses. Why are evangelicals suddenly beginning to speak out against the war, for the environment, and for the poor? What is going on, in the Sunday sermons and the small group ministries of evangelical churches, which is producing this shift? There are a couple of different ways to understand this shift, and they parallel the way I understand the political power of the evangelical movement generally. One model supposes that the religious movement is largely apolitical internally, and that its interaction with the political world is driven through a number of religio-political leaders who drive the political efforts of the movement at a number of levels. These leaders include, most notoriously, folks like James Dobson at the highest level, some political pastors at a more localized level, and a mostly unnoticed group of politicized lay leaders within the churches, who are active both in church and political life. Some of the accounts in Applebee's America certainly seem to suggest that this model is correct, although those accounts are purely anecdotal. Another model supposes that the theological underpinnings of the evangelical world are changing, and that those theological changes are producing parallel political changes. This model would predict that more and more evangelical pastors are focusing on the social justice aspects of the Gospels, for example, or that evangelical churchgoers are more and more curious about those portions of the Bibles (regardless of the messages coming from the pulpit.) Some aspects of the political shift in the evangelical world seem consistent with this model - particularly the recent popularity of "creation care", an evangelical theology of environmental responsibility. It appears that creation care is itself a response to heightened environmental awareness in the general public, but the concept nevertheless seems to be theological first, and political only in after-effects. The difference between these two models is profound, and affects the actions of Democratic candidates going forward in very different ways. If the evangelical movement is mostly apolitical internally, and its political efforts are affected by key players who have a foot in the political world, then Democrats can only hope to make major headway in winning evangelical votes by winning support from those key players, or at least neutralizing their impact within the evangelical world. On the other hand, if the political changes are the by-product of underlying theological change, then winning evangelical votes may be as simple as not insulting evangelicals directly, and doing some broad-based outreach around issues of mutual consent, like global warming and economic justice. But beyond vote-getting, the progressive movement should be concerned with these two very different models for another reason: social change. As both a political and a cultural movement, we should be concerned not just with winning elections, but also with changing our larger cultural environment. Our movement is strongest, and, we believe, our country is strongest, when more and more people subscribe to a "we're all in this together" worldview, to borrow Paul Waldman's formulation. If the first model is correct, and we are gaining a few evangelical supporters here and there because of rifts within the political leadership of the evangelical movement, then the long-term prospects for progressive social change are weak - or, at any rate, progressive social change isn't served by the evangelical movement at all. If the second model is correct, then there is some hope for long-term progressive social change through the evangelical movement. I wish there was a bit more data on this kind of thing, but there just isn't. Most of the data we have about the political nature of the evangelical movement addresses things like voting behavior and issue positions, not the causes of that change. That's somewhat understandable, because voting behavior and issue positions are concrete quantities which can easily be measured in a variety of ways. Shifts in theology and the relative influence of various individuals within a movement are much harder to measure. Regardless, I think the progressive movement needs to start paying a lot more attention to the underlying causes of evangelical political attitudes; it is crucial to long-term social change.