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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- On The Left, Faith-Based Movements and Social Change [On Dec. 26, portside posted an item from the Christian Science Monitor entitled "Inequity - Is it a Sin?" The article generated a number of responses by portsiders. Below are the urls for the orginal article as well as portsiders' comments. Today we post the most recent contribution to the discussion in the hope that it will generate even more on this topic. See also today's Tidbits - portsideMod] http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1224/p14s03-lire.html http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portside/message/5258 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portside/message/5266 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portside/pending?view=1&msg=63362 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portside/message/5269 Re: Faith-based movements - Bruce Boccardy By Chris Lowe,Portland, Oregon This is a friendly response to Bruce Boccardy's reply to Katha Pollitt. When this sort of argument flares up periodically among progressives, it always puzzles me. In every social movement with which I have had any contact since my childhood in the 1960s, there have always been coalitions involving cooperation between religious, faith- or spiritually-motivated people and secular people. I am not sure exactly what Bruce Boccardy means by "embracing" people of faith. Personally I have never been part of a secular organization that either refused to work with religious groups or excluded religious individuals. Likewise when I recently gave a talk on HIV/AIDS in Africa at a local Lutheran church as part of an Advent project they do each year, no one questioned me about my faith. Yet the coalitions have also often had important activists whose religions are based on subtle and stark formal contrasts. Besides Christianity's powerful and exclusivist formal embrace of Jesus as the only path to salvation, religious progressive Christians tend to look to New Testament emphases on peace, mercy, and forgiveness. Progressive and religious Jews tend to look to emphases in their traditions on justice and on living an engaged ethical life that adapts old principles to new situations. For the Christians, the question of justice is not absent, but it has tended to be brought in partly from the coalition work itself. This may be partly from work with Jews, but more especially reflects the influence of African-American varieties of Christianity have for historical reasons drawn more heavily on the "Old Testament," not least for the role of justice in its ethics, as well as the freeing of peoples from literal bondage, not simply the metaphorical redemption from the bondage of sin. It has been the social struggles of the past 50 years or so that have brought to the fore the "peace and justice" linkage that now characterizes much mainline Christian church social thinking, as well as such liminal denominations as the divided Quaker movement and the Unitarian-Universalists, with influence also from Buddhists (mostly western converts) and from Gandhi's Hinduism. That has happened in the shadow of World War II and the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, with the rise of organized efforts and Christian-Jewish rapprochement as well as intra-Christian ecumenical efforts to limit or ameliorate sectarianism and destructive denominationalism. Now there is a whole new dimension being brought in involving Muslims, the need to protect Muslim people from discrimination and demonization, and the abysmal ignorance of most other Americans of whatever faith or secularity about Islam, particularly its internal debates and struggles that relate to progressivism and social justice issues, and questions like those vexing Christian denominations about embracing full equality for women and sexual minorities. In coalition movements and organizations containing both secular and faith-motivated activists, it has been clear enough to me that faith is a powerful motivation and a sustaining one. Often the activists who have done real heavy lifting, been in it for the long haul, or been willing to take on some of the more wearing tasks of the work have been people of faith. But I still don't understand in what way those movements have not embraced people of faith. Mostly they have been seen as godsend, as it were, by secularist comrades. In fact, just as often it can be the other way around. For example, I have worked intermittently with Jubilee 2000/Jubilee USA in debt-abolition work for poor nations in Africa and other continents. Certainly I have been welcomed at any time I have been able to participate. Yet in terms of active outreach, Jubilee seems to aim primarily at faith communities, and really Christian faith communities, despite the Hebrew origins of the "year of Jubilee" concept. This is fairly common to Christian and Jewish peace and justice activists -- they tend to look first to their own faith communities and secondly to other people of faith. This makes sense in terms of their motivational appeals, and I don't raise this as a criticism. Groups like Jubilee and Washington Office on Africa do fantastic work. But it raises the question of what sort of embrace, if any, beyond coalition work faith- motivated progressives *want* from secularists. (Christians, as members of a proselytizing religion, at some level probably want us secularists to come to share their faith and the salvation they believe it offers, but in my experience those on the left tend to limit that desire to bearing witness by their actions). This affects one of the important tasks that faces the religious left, I think -- that of combatting the religious right in the secular realm. On the one hand, this is a struggle to convince many religious people that the social and political conclusions drawn by religious conservatives are simply mistaken interpretations of their faith, or not the only reasonable ones. If there are ways secularists can help in that battle, lend moral or financial support, that would be something to talk about. Yet on the other hand, this struggle is one where secularists may often have little place -- who am I as an unbeliever to tell those I think are bad or mistaken Christians (or Muslims, or Jews) that I think so, even though I do? Concomitantly, in fighting those battles within the faiths and denominations, one sees again and again not only progressives and conservatives, but people who may agree with the progressives at an individual level but are unwilling to assert those beliefs in a manner that they think will be divisive. How should secularists respond when Christian demands for action in lived faith for peace and justice come into conflict with Christian demands for charity to fellow Christians in respecting their beliefs? Which brings us to the final point that I think Bruce Boccardy has not addressed satisfactorily. I think the coalition model has prevailed because sometimes the same individuals who are highly motivated allies on some issues (distributional justice at home and globally, war and peace) are highly motivated enemies or ambivalent neutrals on others. This is particularly obvious relating to rights to bodily autonomy in matters of sex, childbearing and abortion, sexual orientation, marriage, as well as derivative issues such as condom use in anti HIV/AIDS work, but I have also seen it work in compromise-seeking in other areas, when desire for local conflict resolution has overtaken bigger issues of justice. Presumably the inverse propositions applied to me from their perspectives. If Bruce Boccardy is following the footsteps of the late Christopher Lasch and in effect asking me and other secularists to trade or sell out support for feminism and sexual-orientation rights in order to gain support for anti-market politics, I am not willing to make that kind of "embrace." I am not sure he is asking this. But such a request would not just be one to strategically downplay abstract rhetoric. It would be a request to abandon reasoned ethical views at which I have arrived over many years, informed in part by the influence of religious ethical traditions, though absent faith in the claims of textual authoritativeness or salvific exclusiveness of those traditions, as well as in their beliefs about the nature of the universe, and the existence and character of the supernatural and supernatural beings. That is, a request for hypocrisy. Worse, it would be a request to betray people I love. None of the actual religious progressives with whom I have worked have ever made such a request of me. Nor have I asked them to abandon their faith. That seems to work pretty well. So I wonder again, what would this missing "embrace" be, that could strengthen bonds without generating conflict? Chris Lowe Portland, Oregon--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Find out what made the Top Yahoo! 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