"connecting religion with a progressive agenda"

Politicized religion has played a transformative, progressive role in the history of the United States. The American Revolution was prepared by the first 'Great Awakening' in the United States, in which populist preachers crisscrossed the country, bringing Christians of different nations, classes, colonies, and even races into concert, based not on reading well but on an ecstatic, visceral, common faith. The struggle for the abolition of slavery was made possible by the religiously inspired daring of Unitarians, who not only agitated against slavery but sometimes risked their lives to escort African Americans to freedom. The Civil Rights movement grew out of devout black Baptist churches in which the Hebrews' flight from Pharaoh was a prophetic tale.

Can the Democrats re-take America's religious heartland? That hinges on connecting religion with a progressive agenda. And that will require a transformation of American Christianity, a reaching out to those religious men and women who understand justice, tolerance, and anti-colonialism as central to Jesus' public mission. American Christians have a history, one that is not over. If they did not feel reviled and dismissed as obscurantist no-nothings, they might respond to a spiritual politics from the progressive side. They know their Bibles.

The elements for a reversal are there. Bush has put together a coalition of religious conservatives and the monied elite. Yet, if one looks at the texts that animate American Christians, one sees a deep distrust, and indeed, hostility to international capitalism. The Left Behind series is the single most popular book series in America, probably in American history. It details the Rapture, the moment that Christ brings up the saved to Heaven, leaving behind those who are likely damned. It celebrates love, true love, the kind of love between a man and a woman, they argue, that can only be had through religious faith. But it also warns of the powers of international finance, of monies out of control, powers that provide the wordly vehicle for the anti-Christ. That second moment contains a rich populist vein that, while vulnerable to anti-Semitism, is also a potential source to critique a country whose sovereignty is being compromised by the international economic forces to which the Republicans would deliver us. The South Dakotan populism that defeated the Jaguar-driving Daschle distrusts big money.

And finally there is the issue of family values. We can tie their agenda to ours. There is, after all, accumulating evidence that abortion has been rising under President Bush because low wages and the absence of affordable health care make it too economically painful to bring a baby to term.

....read it all: When Jesus Votes by Roger Friedland, Tikkun, Jan/Feb 2005 issue