TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Daniel Schultz
September 15, 2009

Those on the religious right and left not only diverge wildly on everything from abortion to torture, but in their composition and distribution as well.
A graph showing the opinions of progressives on raising their profile.

It should be said at the outset that the new poll released today by the Bliss Institute and Public Religion Research concerning religious activists (on both the left and the right) contains very little that will surprise anyone who has studied religion and politics in recent years.

That should not be taken to mean that there is nothing of worth in the poll results. Far from it. It confirms, for example, much that observers have had to intuit or scratch out from other data. The religious right—pardon me, conservative religious activists—is mostly evangelical (54%), with lesser contingents of Catholics and mainline Protestants. If you’re not standard-grade Christian, however, you’re probably not a part of the demographic: only 1% were Mormon, Orthodox, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and less than 1% were non-Christians.

Progressive believers were a much more diverse group, which is also not a surprise: 44% mainliners, 17% Catholics, 12% Unitarians/mixed faith, and so on down the line. Only 10% claimed to be evangelicals, a point we’ll come back to in a moment.

More not-shockers: conservative activists are focused like laser beams on abortion and homosexuality, while progressives are interested in poverty, health care, the environment, the economy in general, and ending the war in Iraq. Conservatives love them some individualistic ethics and free-market economics, progressives want to see structural reform. Cons are for torture and progs are against it (if that makes any sense). And the two sides have very different views about church-state relations, though interestingly enough, they both agree that faith should play a role in the public square in roughly equal numbers. [For an in-depth analysis of progressive attitudes on church-state issues see Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State—Ed.]

One last result that should not come as a surprise if you stop to think about it: conservatives report attending church far more frequently than their liberal counterparts. 52% of conservatives are in the pews more than once a week, compared to 25% of progressives. Once-a-week numbers are a little more balanced: 37-36. Does this mean that conservatives are more religious than progressives, or that there’s something about church that makes one a conservative? Nope: evangelical and Catholic churches typically offer more than one service a week. Mainline congregations, which tend to be smaller, are open for business only on Sundays.

Labels: Bliss Institute, Conservative, Daniel Schultz, politics, religion, religious left, religious right

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Monday, February 09, 2009

Born-Again American: A Christian-Tinged Campaign From Norman Lear, a Religious-Right Foe

February 03, 2009 06:37 PM ET | Dan Gilgoff
By Dan Gilgoff,

The music video for Born Again American, TV producer and liberal activist Norman Lear's new campaign to promote service and volunteerism, might surprise you. The video, which features a new song that's also called "Born Again American," appropriates blatantly evangelical language: "I'm a Born Again American, conceived in Liberty/My Bible and the Bill of Rights, my creed's equality." How ironic, given that Lear has been battling the religious right—the evangelical right, really—for nearly three decades. Lear founded People for the American Way shortly after the Moral Majority had opened its doors.

Has Lear jumped on the bandwagon of progressives who've "gotten religion" in recent years?

Not exactly. I found a Washington Post article describing People for the American Way's 1980 founding, and it turns out that Lear has long used religion to battle the religious right:

Two organizations, one made up entirely of mainline religious leaders and the other with them predominating, have sprung up in recent weeks to fight the evangelists of the Christian right.

One group, People for the American Way, will be launched formally today by a coalition that includes television producer Norman Lear, former senator Harold Hughes (D-Iowa), the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee and Dr. William Howard and Dr. William P. Thompson, the current and past presidents of the National Council of Churches.

Their plans call for distributing five 60-second TV spots, already produced by Lear, dealing with the Christian right. "We are trying to communicate to the American people that the Christian community understands that people must make up their own minds" about political issues, explained Thompson, who is the chief executive officer of the United Presbyterian Church.

"The church has the right to express its views," Thompson continued, "but it does not have the right to tell people how to vote."

A helpful reminder that liberals have been fighting religious conservatives with religion—and not just arguments for church/state separation—since way before the religious left's post-2004 revival.

Labels: Christianity, Dan Gilgoff, Norman Lear, People for the American Way, religious right, service, volunteering

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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Liberal Christian: 'Dominance of the religious right is finished'

David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Wednesday January 23, 2008

Please click on the link to external source for complete article, including a video clip from the Daily Show January 22, 2008.

According to a prominent liberal Evangelical, there is a major political and generational shift going on among Evangelical Christians in America.

Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners Magazine, told Jon Stewart on Tuesday's Daily Show, "Two things have happened since we last talked. I've got some good news and some great news. The good news is, the dominance of the religious right over our politics is finally finished."

As the audience cheered and applauded, Wallis continued, "Even the better news is now a new generation has come of age and they're applying their faith ... to the biggest issues that face us: the moral scandal of poverty, the degradation of the environment -- which we call God's creation -- the threat of climate change, Darfur, human rights, the exclusive use of war to fight evil."

Stewart questioned whether a religious left might not wind up being just as rigid as the religious right, but on the other side. Wallis replied that he wasn't expecting that to happen, because people in this country "don't want to go left or right, they want to go deeper, they want to go to a moral center."

"Politics in America is broken," Wallis said, explaining why he anticipates a new social movement, rather than a new political movement. "Social movements often rise up to change politics when it fails. And the best social movements often have spiritual foundations."

"Why does it always have to be tied in to faith?" Stewart asked, pointing out that at the same time as the 19th century abolitionists were appealing to religion, so were the supporters of slavery. "Isn't there a way to have a right and wrong?"

"Religion has no monopoly on morality," Wallis agreed, acknowledging that all the great social movements have had a significant component of people of faith, but never exclusively. "And there's a whole new denomination now," he added, "called the spiritual but not religious, that's growing all over the country."

"The two great hungers in the world today are the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social justice, and the connection between the two is the one the new generation is just waiting for," Wallis concluded.

He cautioned, however, that "when people of faith get to the public square, they shouldn't say, 'My religious view is this.' They should speak in moral language that is inclusive of everybody. ... I care about not someone's religion, but what their moral compass is."

Labels: Daily Show, David Edwards, faith, Jim Wallis, morality, Muriel Kane, politics, religious right, spirituality

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Monday, June 11, 2007

In US, faith is never far from politics

By Ed StoddardCHARLOTTE, N.C., (Reuters) -

Three former presidents honour mega-preacher Billy Graham at the dedication of his library. Days later the three top Democratic contenders for the White House openly talk about faith in a televised forum. Church and state may be separate entities in the United States. But faith and politics have become inseparable.

"This is basically a very religious nation, people have very intense feelings here about religion," said Carroll Doherty, associate director at the Pew Research Center. "It is unlikely that a nonreligious person would be elected president," he said. This distinguishes the United States from most of the developed world.

Although figures are disputed, polls say that more than 40 percent of Americans attend religious services at least once a week, more than double the rates in western Europe, where the sacred and the secular seldom collide in the political sphere. "The strict separation of church and state in the U.S. actually fosters a broader role for religion in public life," said Matthew Wilson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"It means religious institutions have long felt very free to publicly criticize the government and public norms," he said, pointing to the historic role of churches in the anti-slavery and civil rights movements. The growth of the "Religious Right" -- a social conservative movement aligned with the Republican Party -- over the past three decades has also brought faith forcefully into the political realm.

It is part of a broader backlash to a perceived "permissiveness" in popular culture that has helped politicize U.S. religion. How that translates into politics was highlighted in a survey by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, which found that being an atheist was a bigger negative for candidates running for president than smoking, being gay or being Muslim.

A revealing 63 percent of those surveyed said they would be "less likely" to support a presidential candidate who did not believe in God.Never holding elected office before ranked second on the negative scales among the several traits that people were questioned about. Being gay, Muslim or a past drug user were next in line.

The most positive qualities were previous military service and being a Christian, with 48 percent and 39 percent of respondents respectively saying such traits would make them more likely to support a presidential candidate.

The religious left and right

The same survey found a "wide partisan" gap with 61 percent of Republicans saying they would more likely support a Christian candidate compared with 32 percent of Democrats. But the Democratic number -- a third -- is hardly small.

This helps explain why the leading Democrats for their party's 2008 presidential nomination did their best on Monday to come across as pious on a televised forum about faith. Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and former senator John Edwards were all trying to woo the "Religious Left" - faith-based organizations that see moral or Biblical imperatives to help the poor and care for the environment.

"Faith -- I mean, not only my faith, but prayer's played a huge role in my life. It does every single day; it's what gives me strength to keep going," Edwards said. Clinton said her faith had pulled her through the fallout surrounding her husband's infidelity while he was president. Obama evoked Biblical passages to care for the needy.This was an invasion of territory normally held by the Republican Party.

Some on the Religious Left see this as a mistake. "I think the Christian left is the counter-balance to the Religious Right but we're making the same mistakes," said Jan G. Linn, a pastor and author of the book "Big Christianity: What's Right With The Religious Left.""The Democrats are going to use us just as the Republicans have used the Religious Right," he told Reuters by telephone from his Minnesota base.

Mistake or not, Democrats clearly see a Christian base which they hope to energize -- just as the Republicans have appealed to their evangelical base through strident opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Faith has never been far below the surface of political power in America -- a fact driven home last week when ex-presidents George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton all appeared on a podium with the aging Billy Graham.

At a dedication to a library honouring America's most famous evangelist, the former presidents all spoke warmly about Graham's impact on their spiritual lives. Graham offered spiritual guidance to many American presidents but his distinctly apolitical approach also evokes another era, when faith and politics did not publicly mix to the extent they do today.

Labels: Billy Graham, Christianity, Democrat, faith, politics, religion, religious left, religious right, Republican