Planting Liberally

Dispatches from the Religious Left will be released in about a week, on Oct. 1, 2008.  The book contains a wide variety of thoughtful essays on what the Religious Left is and how it should move forward, including a brief chapter on new media that my wife and I co-write.  If you happen to be in New York on Oct. 7, please drop in for the book launch:

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
7:00pm - 10:00pm
Middle Collegiate Church
50 East 7th St., New York, NY
RSVP: http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?ei d=25908349317

This will certainly be a fascinating event, with featured speakers including Chris Hedges (author of "I Don't Believe in Atheists", and "American Fascists"); Rev. Debra Haffner (Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing); and Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou (Associate Minister for Missions, Social Justice and Community Action at Middle Collegiate Church).  Frederick Clarkson, the book's editor and one of the main contributors at Talk2Action, will also be appearing.  The event will be moderated by the Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Senior Minister at Middle Collegiate Church, and will feature the church's gospel choir.

I won't be speaking, although you will get to see me in a suit, which, apparently, is still something of a shock to my college friends.  And I imagine there'll be a pretty lively Q&A.

It's quite exciting to be able to attend this event; I view this book as an answer, of sorts, to Michael Lerner's call for a movement of spiritual progressives in The Left Hand of G-d, with plenty of specifics.  I hope to see plenty of MyDD readers there!

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.

A little while ago, I discovered the MyChurch application on Facebook.  The application lets you place a badge displaying the name and logo of your denomination on your profile, helps you find others in your denomination, and allows you to identify the name of your church.  Soon, the application will allow churches to post sermons, events, and pictures to a Facebook page.

What's particularly interesting to me is hidden within the application's discussion boards (see the "Adding your local church to the list" discussion): all churches listed by the application must be Christian, and must subscribe to the Nicene Creed.  The Nicene Creed is considered, by some, to be a "correct" expression of Christian faith; it tends to be adopted by the more conservative churches.  (This is a vastly oversimplified statement - for example, some conservative evangelical churches do not adopt it, because they view it as getting in the way of outreach.)

Clearly, the MyChurch folks are using their Facebook application to promote this particular version of Christianity.  That's a rather unusual use of Facebook applications.  Most Facebook applications - indeed, most web applications, period - are noncredal, even if they come from organizations who are hoping to promote some cause or another.  The most obvious exception to the rule, that I can think of, is ActBlue and its various imitations on the right.

So it's interesting to see that MyChurch has had very limited adoption among Facebook users, with only 7,000 active users.  Is that because a) most Facebook users don't care to wear their religion as a badge, and/or don't identify as members of a denomination, even if they do belong to one? b) Facebook users are sufficiently turned off by the credal aspects of MyChurch? c) Facebook users are sufficiently religiously diverse that they're simply excluded from MyChurch through its credal restrictions? or d) for whatever reason, many Facebook users have simply never heard of MyChurch?  I suspect that a) and d) are the two most powerful reasons, but I'd be very interested to see which one matters more, since they're very different reasons.

I'd also be curious to see whether anyone is thinking of developing a similar application for non-Christians and/or non-Nicene Creed Christians, to reach out to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, non-credal Christians, pagans, atheists, spiritual-but-not-religious-ists, agnositics, and many others.  It's not entirely clear to me whether members of minority religions would care to display their religious affiliation as a badge on Facebook.  But with the Millenial generation being significantly more religiously diverse than previous generations, it seems to me that this kind of application has the potential for broad adoption on Facebook.

Such an application could also be a useful tool for friend-to-friend religious outreach on Facebook.  I discussed this idea with my wife; as a lay leader in her Unitarian Universalist church, she thinks about religious outreach for liberal religion quite a lot.  Her view is that this kind of application would lower the barrier, somewhat, in helping Facebook users provide acquaintances with basic information about their church, and to invite them to attend services, on a one-on-one basis.  She argues, and I'd agree, that it would be next to useless if it were used to cast a wide net (since that kind of religious outreach is pretty ineffective.)  Moreover, such an application might offer liberal congregations a new avenue to connect with members, and an efficient mechanism for collecting membership pledges.  Clearly, this could be an interesting business model for a liberal entrepreneur.

Part of the reason I'm kicking these ideas around is pure self-interest: my company will be launching a new division dedicated to developing websites for liberal congregations in about a month.  So these issues are very much intertwined with my business.

But I also think that the online outreach for liberal religious organizations is extremely important, and mostly behind the times.  As far as I can tell, the most concerted online outreach effort among liberal religions is the Still Speaking initiative by the United Church of Christ; there's not much else like it among other liberal religious organizations.  That is a real shame, because the Millenial generation is emphatically more religiously diverse than older generations.  Around 10% of the generation dubs itself "spiritual but not religious", potentially giving liberal religious organizations an important opportunity to reach out to a large number of spiritual seekers.  (It should be noted, of course, that not all people who call themselves spiritual not not religious are seekers; some of them may be mad as hell at organized religion, but still interested in spirituality in a less structured way.)

Why does any of this matter to progressives?  I think I'll get a lot of push-back in the comments for this, but I believe that religious outreach within liberal religions is extremely important to the health of the progressive movement.  Our movement rests on a foundation of a progressive worldview, which, in Paul Waldman's formulation, boils down to "we're all in this together."  If fewer and fewer people subscribe to that worldview, the progressive movement, for all its cleverness in canvassing and blogging, will slowly recede and lose power.  So it's important to keep that foundation strong.  Now, there are a number of cultural institutions which keep this worldview alive - unions, colleges and universities, and liberal religious congregations.  It's no accident that the conservative movement has systematically attacked each of these institutions, with some of the most insidious and vicious attacks being lobbed against liberal religious congregations (Google "Institute on Religion and Democracy" if you're curious.)  One of the goals of the conservative movement is to attack the foundation of our movement, and to weaken it from within.

Contra-wise, the best way to ensure the long-term health and growth of the progressive movement is to spread the "we're all in this together" worldview as far as possible.  That means strengthening the labor movement, and it also means strengthening the liberal religious movement.  Online outreach is really a very small part of the overall effort; but considering the demographics of the Millenial generation, I think it's a very important part.