Thursday, March 02, 2006

Why Religious Americans Should Be Liberals/Progressives

I recently watched Rabbi Michael Lerner on CSPAN discuss his new book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. I thought he had a very convincing argument about why so much of middle America has been voting Republican despite it being against their economic interests.

From the Amazon summaries:

Before detailing his plan, he provides an extensive survey of American history and ideology, rife with examples of dominant and controlling attributes favored by those on the right (the "right hand of God") who believe in a frightening world replete with evil and ruled by an avenging God. This contrasts with what he considers the loving, kind and generous tendencies of those at the "left hand of God," who instead believe in a compassionate and merciful deity.

He's concluded that America is in the midst of a "real spiritual crisis," one that has been recognized and exploited -- but not solved -- by the Republican Party. For the first half of the book, Lerner diagnoses the symptoms and causes of this crisis and argues that "the search for meaning in a despiritualized world ... leads many people to right-wing religious communities" and politics. Among the thousands of people Lerner and his colleagues have interviewed, some common concerns surfaced time and again: eroding societal values, America's troubling emphasis on money and greed, unstable families, the attempt to place monetary value on everyone and everything, and spiritual isolation. Right-wing religious institutions appeal to these concerns by providing communities of comfort and instructions on how to change this status quo; right-wing politicians promise to fix the problem by imposing their own solutions. No wonder voters of modest means are attracted. But as Lerner expertly details, the proffered solutions don't eliminate the concerns so much as they trade on their political value. Concerned about unstable families? Just outlaw gay marriage. Worried about popular culture? Impeach those activist judges.


I completely agree with Lerner's analysis. I believe that caring liberals and conservatives share many of the same concerns - America's troubling emphasis on money and greed, unstable families, the attempt to place monetary value on everyone and everything, and spiritual isolation.

I agree that liberals and conservatives want to fix these problems, but that conservative politicians have been much more successful in speaking the language. However, the Republicans offer quick-fixes which generally attack a scapegoat rather than going at the heart of the matter.

Lerner believes that liberals can do better:

And it's there, he argues, that liberals have the opportunity to craft a progressive "Spiritual Covenant with America," a blueprint that composes the second half of the book. From economic to family to national security issues, Lerner outlines a politics of meaning that connects traditional liberal values to what have been inaccurately defined as conservative concerns. The Left Hand of God is ambitious, sprawling and sometimes rambling, but it serves the vital purpose of articulating a progressive religious alternative to the conservative flavor of religion that has dominated American politics and society for the past 30 years.


I haven't read his book, but I'd like to explain why I believe that liberal/progressive policies are better-suited to solving the problems. Let's take one at a time the problems Lerner outlines as being of concern to Americans.

America's troubling emphasis on money and greed

America is incredibly materialistic. We're bombarded with advertising, and corporations like Phillip Morris and McDonald's dominate the American economy, raking in money while harming Americans. Something like 70% of Americans are up to their eyeballs (technical term) in debt because they spend more than they earn to keep up with the Joneses. Predatory lenders like credit card companies encourage this behavior, creating a generation of indentured servants. Americans want big SUVs, big houses, fancy clothes, and fancy jewelry. But deep down, they're unsatisfied.

The religious right blames secularism for the focus on money. Jesus of course preached that the love of money is the root of all evil, so all those focusing on money must be un-Christian. The religious right blames Hollywood, which in fact does fetishize money, and by extension liberals.

The Republican solution is to pay lip-service to religion. Let's put the ten commandments back in schools and courtrooms, tear down the wall between church and state, etc. But these solutions if enacted would do nothing to change the problem! The Republicans support Big Business, opposing minimum wages, environmental regulations, universal health care, higher gas taxes, and progressive taxation.

However, progressive thought is about fairness and equitable sharing. Progressives support universal health care, helping the poor, caring for the elderly and disabled, and progressive taxation. We want government to keep a close watch on corporations to prevent their tendency towards monopoly and unfair treatment of workers, consumers, and the environment. We want those who earn millions of dollars to pay a higher portion back into the country that supported them as they earned their money.

Unstable Families

Everybody knows that the divorce rate is out of control in America. Parents don't spend enough time with children, people live in all sorts of newfangled familial arrangements, etc.

Republicans do two things about this. They say, let's get people more religious and let's introduce legislation to encourage families with a mother and a father. They want to ban gay marriage, gay civil unions, gay adoption. They want to penalize unwed mothers, too, although they don't put it like that. They say we need a "culture of life," which refers only to abortion, contraception, and euthanasia, not war, lack of health care, or the death penalty.

Progressives agree that there's a problem. However, our idea is to help existing and future families stay together and provide a nurturing environment for children. We believe that the problem isn't, for example, gays wanting to marry, but that adults are too often thinking only of themselves and not their children or partners. We want to encourage all loving families, gay straight, single-parent if necessary, etc. We want to provide health care to families that can't afford it. We know that the single biggest issue dividing couples in America is money. We want to make it feasible for unwed mothers to raise their children well by providing child care when necessary and a fair, living wage for an honest day's work. We want there to be good educational systems which are absolutely necessary for children whose parents can't or won't provide good educations for them. We want to teach realistic sex ed which reduces unwanted pregnancy and disease as well as making condoms available when needed. We want parents to have access to mental health care when needed even if they can't afford it.

Spiritual Isolation

This one seems to be a slam-dunk for the religious right, right? They want to make religion more pervasive in America. They criticize the "liberal Hollywood elite" with their dodgy morals and many marriages. They criticize secular public schools. They blame "activist judges" and the ACLU for eroding the morals of America. They blame evolution.

But spiritual isolation is caused not by a lack of a specific religion, but a lack of closeness with other people, with love, and with meaning. The religious right contributes greatly to the sense of isolation by focusing on the punishing, angry side of God. They rail against homosexuality and Muslims and sinners. Progressives, on the other hand, focus on God's loving, providing side. We want corporations to treat people as human beings rather than mechanized labor. We want corporations to focus not just on the bottom line but on the effects they have on the nation and on the world. We want to fund the arts. Progressive religious groups focus on love, understanding, meaning, and the quest for peace. We believe that spiritual isolation is caused by the materialistic culture and an economy which requires both parents work long hours. We believe that class sizes in schools should be smaller, with more and better-paid teachers. We believe that we should spend less money on war and more money on helping our fellow humans. What if we spent as much on public health research as we did on Defense? Tens of millions of people could be employed helping others rather than joining the military or working in some bomb-making factory.

Conclusion

Republican rhetoric promises solutions to the "spiritual" problems facing America. Republican policies, however, do nothing of the sort. They focus on a few verses in Leviticus and take Genesis as literal history while ignoring everything God (and Jesus) taught about helping the needy, protecting the weak, and promoting peace. They fuel the greedy, debt-based culture we live in. They force people to work for corporations who show no social responsibility, who pollute our water and our air, who provide insufficient health care, who often don't pay enough for parents to get by on two full-time jobs. They underfund public schools, handicap sex-ed with idealistic "abstinence-only" nonsense, cut financial aid for poor students, fight programs which help the underprivelidged, and make our national debt skyrocket. They're quick to war and quick to draw from the underclass for its soldiers. They cut funds to NIH and politicize science.

Progressives want more for us. We want to help the needy, enable parents to be parents, educate children how they need to be educated, create meaningful jobs for corporations which are helping all people instead of just enriching the top 1%, protect the environment for our children and our children's children, etc. We believe that parents shouldn't be handicapped by the state for being gay. We believe in the promise of science to create cures and treatments for diseases.

If you're spiritually inclined, you should be voting for progressives.

16 comments:

Sadie Lou said...

The thing is, I WOULD be voting for progressives if there were not some huge stumbling blocks.
Generally, I agree with more of the progressive's positions but then on some of the bigger issues--we completely part company.
I can't see stepping in line with progressives in order to support some things and then sacrifice my objective on a couple of important stances.
If that makes sense.
What I need is a progressive candidate that doesn't compromise to fit a stereotype.

Jewish Atheist said...

What issues, Sadie Lou?

Sadie Lou said...

Well, I don't want to turn your comments into a free-for-all debate about certain issues but I guess progressives usually lean the opposite way on abortion and war than me.

asher said...

I hate when people refer to Lerner as a rabbi. He received his ordination from some match book cover rabbinical school and has never had a congregation. Lerner is the editor in chief of Tikkun Magazine which was financed by his wife's family. (I doubt that it's still being published but if you find an issue you can get a good laugh out of it).
Lerner was very influential in the policies of Hillary Clinton where they both were delving into something called "the politics of meaning". This as opposed to meaningless politics or the politics of non-meaning (I made this point in a letter to the editor in The New York Times Sunday Magazine when Lerner was focused some time ago).
Sorry JA, the man talks and says nothing. It's all rhetoric and lacks anything resembling a concerete set of ideas. Politics of meaning, my ass.

dbackdad said...

I believe there are several things that caused the degradation of the family and of society:

1. The exodus from the cities to the 'burbs left everybody behind 6 foot fences and shopping in faceless, nameless big-box stores. People don't care who they live by or who gets their money when they shop.

2. The Reagan revolution created a society of me-me-me. If I have more things, I will be happier.

3. A larger and larger disparity between the rich and the poor fueled by a government deep in the pockets of special interests. The inventors of trickle-down economics and tax reform ought to be shot. And anyone who honestly believes that they make society better are morons. For the first time in the history of civilization, a government has actually CUT taxes during wartime. Those armchair neocons are sure sacrificing a lot for the cause ... horseshit.

Every family has to have two wage earners just to get by. That means less time spent together by married couples and by parents and children. That is why the family breaks down ... money. We have a responsibility to make sure that people do not have to have both parents working or one parent working two jobs. We have a responsibility to make sure every child gets a quality FREE education. We have a responsibility for EVERYONE to have free quality healthcare.

I own my own business and I would gladly pay more in taxes, give up my car, my house in the 'burbs,etc. to have a better society.

JDHURF said...

Asher,
I’m not so sure about what you’re saying and I am not all that knowledgeable on Lerner but I must say as a secular humanist that the Tikkun magazine has some very relevant and meaningful articles within it. Sometimes I find myself at the bookstore looking at various magazines, Free Inquiry, The Humanist, New Republic, etc. and I will see the Tikkun with an interesting cover story and I will read through it and never have I read anything that lacked a concrete ideal and I have never read meaningless rhetoric. I must ask you, what makes you say this about the magazine? Oh, and yes it is still published. I don’t read it very often or very thoroughly but when I have read it I don’t remember it being as you would have it described.


jewishatheist,
Good post, it seems odd to me that the term liberal has gained the negative aspect that it now has, in part, gotten from the religious right movement. I actually read a transcript of a speech where Nixon was speaking on the positive aspects of liberalism, it seems only a while ago there was not such a blatant opposition to liberal progressivism.
It seems astoundingly odd that anyone can be against progress. Life is replete with change and those that do not progress begin to regress, you simply cannot get a strangle hold on the world, society or politics and keep it the way that it has been or even go beyond that, as the conservatives do, and attempt to take things back to the way they were in the “good ‘ol days.” It also seems that the conservatives wish to take our society and our politics back to a time that was ideal that, in reality, never existed.
One must remember that those that will not grow and progress are doomed to entropy and regression and I am surely not fighting for the contrary.


dbackdad,
Well said, I completely agree with you.

JDHURF said...

Whoops, in my last post I meant to say - One must remember that those that will not grow and progress are doomed to entropy and regression and I am surely fighting for the contrary. The "not" in that sentence should not be there.

Random said...

JA,

Not your best effort, I'm afraid:-( Was it really only a few posts ago ("Religion vs. Dogma Part II") that you were saying that religious groups should ideally keep out of secular politics? Are you now saying it's actually fine for them to get involved, but only if they do so in support of causes you agree with? A tad hypocritical surely?

There's too much in there really for me to analyse right away, but there was one paragraph that leapt out at me -

"We want to fund the arts."

Unless I misjudge where you're coming from on this, you really don't - you want to force other people to fund the arts by allocating a share of their hard earned tax dollar for the purpose. I have to say this sounds like the classic definition of a "progressive" as somebody who's in favour of spending other people's money and expects to be praised for his generosity in so doing. If you were really in favour of funding the arts you'd do what conservatives do, and give your own money - that way you may even get your name on the marquee...

"Progressive religious groups focus on love, understanding, meaning, and the quest for peace. "

You realise this is an almost exact fit for the Roman Catholic Church, don't you? Is that really your idea of a progressive religious organisation, or is "progressive" now being defined so widely as to lose all meaning?

"What if we spent as much on public health research as we did on Defense?"

To achieve this happy situation you'd have to either massively increase defence spending or massively cut health spending - the USA currently spends something like 4x as much as a share of GDP on health as it does on defence.

"Tens of millions of people could be employed helping others rather than joining the military or working in some bomb-making factory."

Ask the USN personnel who spent much of last winter helping hundreds of thousands of victims of the Asian tsunami whether "helping others" was something you do "rather than" joining the military. This is a false dichotomy, and one I suspect many men and women in uniform would find more than a little offensive.

Jewish Atheist said...

Random:

Not your best effort, I'm afraid:-( Was it really only a few posts ago ("Religion vs. Dogma Part II") that you were saying that religious groups should ideally keep out of secular politics? Are you now saying it's actually fine for them to get involved, but only if they do so in support of causes you agree with? A tad hypocritical surely?

You're right, of course. I wish religion would stay out of politics. But progressives are getting killed by letting the religious right be the only religious side that's talking. Personally, I have been uncomfortable in some liberal Jewish temples I've visited due to their very outspoken political stances. But they can't let the religious right have the monopoly on saying who God would vote for.

Unless I misjudge where you're coming from on this, you really don't - you want to force other people to fund the arts by allocating a share of their hard earned tax dollar for the purpose.

I want to spend OUR money on the arts. And, since I believe in progressive taxation, those funds would come disproportionately from those who have more than enough to spare. I think that people who make a lot of money by living in our country and using our resources have to pay back into the system that feeds them.

If you were really in favour of funding the arts you'd do what conservatives do, and give your own money

Yeah, I hear this a lot, but it doesn't really hold. Conservatives talk a big game, but when it comes down to it, they don't donate enough money. That's why we need taxes to pay for things like the arts as well as programs for the poor and sick.

You realise this is an almost exact fit for the Roman Catholic Church, don't you? Is that really your idea of a progressive religious organisation, or is "progressive" now being defined so widely as to lose all meaning?

It's not black and white. Certainly, American Catholics are progressive on issues like war and helping the poor. Traditionally, Catholics have voted Democratic, although many have shifted due to abortion and the fact that conservative whites have stopped discriminating against them.

"What if we spent as much on public health research as we did on Defense?"

To achieve this happy situation you'd have to either massively increase defence spending or massively cut health spending - the USA currently spends something like 4x as much as a share of GDP on health as it does on defence.


I guess it depends on what you want to call "public health research." According to the chart here, we spend about 17% of the budget on Defense and only 11% on "Health." I assume you're including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc., but those don't go towards health research as far as I know. And even that's misleading. Bush has shifted a lot of the "Health" money to study a couple of microbes that pose a "bioterrorism" threat and reduced federal support for research on other microbes that are arguably a greater danger to the public. (Scientists wrote an open letter about the problem in Science Magazine. Subscription required.)

"The diversion of research funds from projects of high public-health importance to projects of high biodefense but low public-health importance represents a misdirection of NIH priorities and a crisis for NIH-supported microbiological research," the letter said.

"Five people died in the anthrax attacks, but thousands and millions die from malaria and cholera and all kinds of other infectious diseases every year, including many in this country," said Bonnie L. Bassler, a Princeton microbiologist who signed the letter. "There are microbes much worse than anthrax, and in the long run America is going to suffer from these decisions."


(via DailyKos.

"Tens of millions of people could be employed helping others rather than joining the military or working in some bomb-making factory."

Ask the USN personnel who spent much of last winter helping hundreds of thousands of victims of the Asian tsunami whether "helping others" was something you do "rather than" joining the military. This is a false dichotomy, and one I suspect many men and women in uniform would find more than a little offensive.


I apologize if I created a false dichotomy. Obviously, the military does a lot of helping people. However, they also do a lot of killing and dying, too often for stupid causes.

Sadie Lou said...

Every family has to have two wage earners just to get by. That means less time spent together by married couples and by parents and children. That is why the family breaks down ... money. We have a responsibility to make sure that people do not have to have both parents working or one parent working two jobs.

dback--
Don't you think that American families are so consumed with having it all that they are forced to work two jobs to support that lifestyle?
I know a guy that is an eye doc and his wife is a pharmasist, combined they make a healthy salary. They make WAY more than Dan and I and yet, I stay home with the children and her kids are in daycare.
However, they drive two brand new cars and live in a big house and take elaborate vacations every year.
It's the American drive for material possesion that is killing the family because that's an example of almost all of my friends that put their kids in daycare.

Juggling Mother said...

Sadie Lou - I can't speak for the US, but here in the UK double income has become essential...

Average wage = £24k pa (2005)
tax works out at roughly 25% s0 take home pay of £17k pa or £1,500 per month

Average house price (rent is more expensive for most people) is £200,000. A £200k mortgage over 25-30 years works out about £1200 per month

Water, Electricity, Gas, Sewerage, average out at £100 per month, and food for an average family hits £400 per month (if you shop on a budget & don;t buy branded goods)

Aggie earns average wage, so assuming I never buy any clothes, have my hair done, or use a phone, run a car (I guess Aggie has to walk the 30 miles to work each day), take a holiday or go out, we'll just about scrape by each month!

As an aside, I did once see the statistics for the number of divorces caused by financial worries. I can't remember the exact bfigure, but it was well up in the 80 or 90% mark

Although I'm not a beliver in "traditional" family make-up. If you look through historical evidence, it virtually never existed!

Random said...

"I want to spend OUR money on the arts."

*You* want to spend *our* money? My first draft of this post included a lengthy rant at this point to the effect of by just what right you claim not only the right to spend my money without my permission but the right to claim this was a virtuous act, but courtesy made me cut it back. I think we may have to write this one off to fundamentally incompatible worldviews.

"I think that people who make a lot of money by living in our country and using our resources have to pay back into the system that feeds them."

They already do. The richest 1% of Americans earn 16.77% of national income - but contribute 34.27% of income tax (an average tax rate of 24.31%, compared with 11.9% for the population as a whole - figures from http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html). I've no idea what ratio you personally regard as just or fair, but if progressives think they can continually squeeze this group in order to prove how caring and civilised they are, then I would venture to remind them of the fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs (or more prosaically recommend a good article on the Laffer Curve).

"Yeah, I hear this a lot, but it doesn't really hold. Conservatives talk a big game, but when it comes down to it, they don't donate enough money."

They don't? According to the National Endowment for the Arts (http://www.arts.gov/pub/how.pdf), of every 10 dollars given to the arts in the USA, 9 come from private donations. I'm not sure where you get the idea from that the private sector is inadequate and it's the state that needs to do the heavy lifting - the actual figures indicate the opposite is more the case. In any case I would venture to suggest that if the arts cannot make themselves sufficiently attractive or relevant to the public to enable them to pay their own way in the world, then there is no great reason why they should be able to call on the taxpayer to fund the gap. After all, Hollywood manages to get by without public funds...

"I guess it depends on what you want to call "public health research." According to the chart here, we spend about 17% of the budget on Defense and only 11% on "Health." I assume you're including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc., but those don't go towards health research as far as I know."

No, you're talking about the federal budget, I was talking about GDP - the latter includes money spent by private corporations and individuals on such things as insurance and private sector R&D (drug companies don't get government grants for the majority of their research).

Jewish Atheist said...

They already do. The richest 1% of Americans earn 16.77% of national income - but contribute 34.27% of income tax (an average tax rate of 24.31%, compared with 11.9% for the population as a whole - figures from http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html). I've no idea what ratio you personally regard as just or fair, but if progressives think they can continually squeeze this group in order to prove how caring and civilised they are, then I would venture to remind them of the fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs (or more prosaically recommend a good article on the Laffer Curve).

There are two separate arguments here. One of fairness and one of pragmatism. For the first one, I would argue that the richest 1% can and should pay more than 24.31% of their income in taxes since they can afford so much more and since they've been given so much. I know you'll say that they did it on their own, yada yada yada, but more often than not, the rich get rich using common resources (highways, the stock market, etc.), making much more money from employers than they pay them, and shunting costs to the public in the form of pollution, harming people's health, etc. Perhaps if the system worked so that people were paid more fairly according to the worth of their work, taxes wouldn't have to be progressive to be fair. As for the pragmatic argument, nobody's talking about removing all incentives to making money. Nobody in the top 1% is taxed enough to be hurt by it. None of them are going with medicine or healthy food or adequate health care. Meanwhile, on the other end of the income spectrum, people are working two or three jobs and still not able to get good health care. I'd rather a millionaire have to go without a 15th Bentley than 1000 poor people have to go without health care.

They don't? According to the National Endowment for the Arts (http://www.arts.gov/pub/how.pdf), of every 10 dollars given to the arts in the USA, 9 come from private donations. I'm not sure where you get the idea from that the private sector is inadequate and it's the state that needs to do the heavy lifting - the actual figures indicate the opposite is more the case.

Perhaps you're right about the arts, but nobody's stepping up and donating enough to make up for the woeful lack of health care for America's poor. If the poor were being taken care of by generous conservatives, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

No, you're talking about the federal budget, I was talking about GDP - the latter includes money spent by private corporations and individuals on such things as insurance and private sector R&D (drug companies don't get government grants for the majority of their research).

Ah. Well I was referring originally to how much the government spends in each area.

Anonymous said...

Thank Nature you didn't say anything about the nonreligious ;) I think everybody should be more libertarian; recognizing that all people are equal and basically sovereign unto themselves. Of course, that isn't to say I'm advocating anarchy, but a much smaller governemnt is definitely desirable to me.

-Benjamin (aka Hrafnkel)

Jewish Atheist said...

Benjamin,

The reason I'm not a libertarian is that I believe capitalism unchecked leads to monopolies who will use their power to screw everyone else. If we don't force businesses to treat their employees fairly, to refrain from destroying the environment, etc., we'll just get a bunch of Enrons only a thousand times worse.

asher said...

Random,

Can't you understand that no matter how many correct statistics you throw at JA he's going to stick with his first comment?

"Yes, it's true that blah blah blah but but I still feel it's wrong". This is why Air(head) American, the radio station that ws supposed to combat the conversative talk shows is failing. They have no point to make yet except to say "we want more health care, jobs, education, racial equality, and free abortion" and can't come up with a single way to create these things. In a Utopian society it's all going to equal out..much like Marx said. Of course Marx never had a job or said how all this is to be done. And the followers of Marx were sure they were carrying out his orders...just look at the success of Stalin, Mao and Castro.

You still can't explain why Rockerfeller, Canegie and Ford gave so much of their own money to charitable causes when they couldn't take it off their taxes since none existed back then.

"I feel it's supposed to be this way" it not a real substitute for "Show me the logic".

Kind of like evolution...I know it can't be reproduced, that there is no way to replicate it, that there is no objective evidence to prove it but....hey...it's science.
"I'm the Mommy; that's why"