My copy of Dispatches from the Religious Left arrived today and, since the book launch is next week, I thought I'd crack it open and review some of the essays this weekend. The book is divided in three parts: "Envisioning a more politically dynamic Religious Left", "Memos on hot button issues", and "Getting from here to there". So my plan is to review one essay from each chapter over the next few days.
First up is "Religious Left: Changing the Script", by Daniel Schultz, better known to many blog readers as Pastor Dan of Street Prophets.
PastorDan's essay is characteristically blunt and honest. It opens with a none-too-subtle reproach to Religious Leftists: "What the Religious Left is doing is not working!".
The prognosis is that, for a variety of reasons, the Religious Left is not an effective political movement in the way that the Religious Left is. This ineffectiveness stems from a tendency to get mired in small-bore issues and miss the forest for the trees; an eagerness for spiritual development coupled with ambivalence about politics; and the storied theological diversity of a movement which includes some number of Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, and Muslims - and many others.
The prescription, according to PastorDan, is to develop and articulate a progressive political theology for the Religious Left. By way of contrast, he refers to Walter Brueggemann's identification of the dominant political theology in a 2005 Christian Century article - "the script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life."
PastorDan echoes Brueggemann's argument that the Religious Left must offer a "counterscript" to this dominant ideology. He doesn't so much spell out what that progressive political theology is, but suggests, in a somewhat roundab
out fashion, a way to get there. The key idea is that the Religious Left should be "questioning assumptions, imagining new possibilities, keeping an eye on the human bottom line of public policy." This process suggests an honest examination of conflicted feelings on issues ranging from sexual diversity to social welfare programs, and to use that examination to probe long-held assumptions more deeply. For example, PastorDan suggests that conflicted feelings about safety in the age of terrorism could lead to an examination of the assumptions embedded in our national security state, and from there to a productive re-imagination of the transformation of that apparatus.
This process is not the stuff of winning electoral politics, exactly, and PastorDan is quick to admit that he is not calling for the development of a robust political machine which can answer the Religious Right, dollar-for-dollar and demagogue-for-demagogue. Indeed, he argues that while the role of the Religious Right has always been to provide clear answers, that of the Religious Left should be to ask questions, to be "astronauts of inner space".
This chapter is rather difficult, both because it's a bit on the abstract side, and because its prescription is challenging. Asking difficult questions, suited though it may be to the Religious Left, is a good way to mint new enemies, and is not a good way to notch up victories. Those who are hoping for a powerful, organized political religious movement that can provide the same kind of volunteer firepower to the Democrats that the Religious Right provides to the Republicans won't get a lot of sympathy from PastorDan. That doesn't mean he's wrong, but it's likely to give a lot of people (myself included) some pause.
To be sure, I don't think we want a Religious Left that is in every way similar to the Religious Right. To begin with, the last thing we need in this country is a second copy of the Religious Right; more to the point, it just won't work. Religious progressives, by an large, will not participate in a movement that works in lockstep with a political party.
At the same time, it seems to me that asking questions is just limiting the Religious Left a bit too much. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the chapter, but it seems to me that PastorDan assumes a dichotomy between asking questions and providing answers, and based on that assumption, imagines that the Religious Left must be a constant long-term thorn in the side of the political system, rather than an agent of potential short-term victories. I think it's a false dichotomy, although I admit that I'm not entirely sure what the mechanics of asking questions while providing answers looks like. To return to the earlier example, it certainly would have been a tall order, in the post-9/11 days, to simultaneously ask difficult questions about our national security apparatus and to illuminate a hopeful path into a safer and more sane world. That's still pretty difficult, seven years after the fact.
In any case, I'm curious to hear what you think - is PastorDan's diagnosis correct? Is asking questions a sufficient role for the Religious Left, or is it too narrow? And if it is too narrow, what's the proper role for the Religious Left?
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