Left Behind

The hottest topic in American politics today is religion, or perhaps more accurately, the role that religion should play in government and political discourse. Congress is deadlocked over President Bush’s nominees to judicial posts, with critics of his appointments claiming that these judges will attempt to impose their religious beliefs on American law and the larger public. Faith-based initiatives have come under increasing scrutiny from academics and the public alike as debates have erupted over the morality, effectiveness, and scope of so-called charitable choice programs. The movement for gay marriage has inspired a counter-movement of sorts in the opposition, whose visible leadership at least has been drawn from the religious right. And all this is to say nothing of the Terry Schiavo circus that dominated the media earlier this year. Supposedly in defense of the right to life, the conservative dominated government, with the assistance of such high-profile religious “leaders” like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, mobilized on behalf of a woman who had been in a vegetative state for 15 years—neglecting, of course, less pressing business concerning the millions of non-vegetative Americans who are mired in poverty.

The last example notwithstanding, this piece is not an all out assault on the religious right. I think that there is value in having religiously-informed ideas and religious institutions as active participants in American politics. The biggest problem with the explosion of religion into American politics is that it has been extraordinarily one-sided. The religious right has come to hold a near-hegemony in the public mind when it comes to religion. Just the mention of faith conjures up images of fiery, conservative Southern Baptist preachers like Richard Land and right-wing politicians like Tom DeLay. In 2005, the Left has no captivating, visible, and intellectually substantive religious leadership, and it is suffering immensely because of it.

The simple fact of the matter is that America is a country where the vast majority of people is religious. Whether this means that they actively participate in a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple or if they have an individual, meaningful relationship with a higher power is immaterial. The point is that many Americans have a faith they are devoted to and derive their values from. The result is that when many Americans talk about their vision of what America should be and what American politics should accomplish, these ideas are largely influenced by religion and conceived of in religious vocabulary. If the Left is incapable of conversing in the language of religion and presenting values consistent with social justice as religiously-informed values, it will consistently alienate Americans who primarily understand the world in those ways.

The predictable liberal response is that religious folks should keep their faith to themselves and learn how to talk about their values in a way that does not “impose” their personal religious beliefs on others. In principle, this could presumably be seen as a benign compromise between both sides—but in practice, this has come to manifest itself in a painfully obvious tone of condescension towards religion and religious institutions. While liberals have an almost reflexive negative response to what they perceive to be unfair assaults on their morality by religious people, they often attempt to impose their own secular morality on religious people and implicitly chastise them for their “irrationality” or “narrow-mindedness.”

This dynamic sets up an internal dilemma in the Left amongst people who would otherwise be more sympathetic to a liberal agenda. In attempting to draw a sharp distinction between politics and faith, even in political debate, the Left essentially hinders the participation of most of the American public in progressive philosophical and political conversation and presents a false dichotomy that posits conservatism as congruent with faith and progressivism as antithetical. What a sad fate for the progressive political and theological tradition that has not been the most prolific, but has been at times quite powerful, most recently in the short Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and 1960s.

What the Left should launch is a national initiative, where progressive organizations, left-wing intellectuals, and political leaders and parties at all levels enter into a sustained effort to engage religious institutions and leaders with similar political views and develop them where they do not exist. More effort needs to be made to catapult fresh, charismatic, religious faces with engaging and challenging ideas to the forefront of this side of the political spectrum. This will ease the paralyzing discomfort the average moderate American feels when presented with the television-skewed political debate over most politics being conducted by a person who is openly religious and devoted to their faith and what often comes across as a condescending intellectual or policy wonk that is disconnected from the way most Americans think about the world.

The Left has allowed itself to be boxed into a debate it cannot possibly win during a time where the political landscape necessitates victory. Bush’s new approval ratings show that most Americans know that this country is headed in the wrong direction and that the new Republican leadership has overstepped its boundaries. Politically, the conservative establishment is very vulnerable. They will not, however, be defeated if liberal inaction continues to force Americans to choose between having their faith respected by their political leaders and having a society that reflects the needs of the many, not the greed of a few.

Brandon M. Terry ’05 is a government and African and African American studies concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.