A Powerful Religious Left is Emerging, But Theyll Fail Without Secular Support

[NeoGreen]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/06/11/a-powerful-religious-left-is-emerging-but-theyll-fail-without-secular-support/

A Powerful Religious Left is Emerging, But They’ll Fail Without Secular Support
June 11, 2017 by Hemant Mehta

In a front page story appearing in today’s New York Times, Laurie Goodstein writes about the Religious Left and their emergence in liberal circles. After ceding a lot of ground to conservative Christians over the past few decades, and seeing the way their faith has been used to hurt people who are already oppressed, they’re finally fighting back. Sure, they’ve been working for these causes the entire time, but in the age of Donald Trump, their message is finally resonating beyond their typical bubbles.

(snip)

I did want to bring up one passage that bothered me. Rev. Jim Wallis, a longtime Religious Left leader, said this about how Democrats have failed in their outreach to his tribe.

“The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, the evangelical social justice advocate who founded the Sojourners community and magazine in 1971.

“Most progressive religious leaders I talk to, almost all of them, feel dissed by the left,” he said. “The left is really controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists.”

What. The. Hell.

If the left is “controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists,” it’s news to me since the Democratic Party is full of people who parade their faith. If Democrats are allergic to religion, they must get a full-blown viral outbreak when it comes to atheism.


(snip)


Furthermore, that phrase “secular fundamentalists” is just plain offensive, as if atheists are demanding that the government force people not to believe in God. There’s a difference between calling for religious neutrality from Washington and changing the Pledge of Allegiance so it says we’re “one nation, under no God.”

A “secular fundamentalist” is really just someone who challenges religious beliefs and promotion of God by the government. That’s it. A religious fundamentalist, on the other hand, has very different intentions.

[trotsky]

1. There's a feeling on the religious left that they're responsible for every bit of social progress.

Never mind it was the religious status quo being fought against.

Never mind that secular and atheistic progressives have been in the mix every time.

Nope, it's atheists and humanists who need to STFU lest we scare away religious people. If their commitment to a progressive cause can be dampened by atheists expressing negative opinions about religion, I kind of have to question how strong that commitment was in the first place.

[NeoGreen]

2. Related to a point I've made before...

...we're not advocating for the general adoption of anti-religious sentiment:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/123051823



We're advocating for the re-adoption/return of the neutral position/argument, as it is our collective Constitutional heritage.

The religious left would benefit from this and should recognize and embrace our role in calling out the Constitutional absurdity of the religious right.

[trotsky]

3. Agreed - the answer to a right-wing theocracy is not a left-wing one.

Let's base our politics on reason and data, not on what we think a god wants us to do.