c. 1996 Religion News Service

(WASHINGTON) Determined not to relinquish the moral high ground to the Christian Coalition, a who’s-who of leftist intellectuals, community activists and religious leaders are gathering this weekend to foment a Religious Left.

“The Summit on Ethics and Meaning” in Washington, D.C., is a rally for activists appalled by the political muscle of the Religious Right and longing for a reinvigorated, authentic moral voice on the left.

The liberals convening this three-day summit on Sunday also admit that sometimes, in an effort to keep church and state separate, they have drained their own vision of moral content.

They want God back.

Or, as one summit leader, James A. Wallis, said, “A growing number of American Christians are feeling a fresh commitment to apply spiritual values to vexing questions in our public life, and, where necessary, to offer an alternative to the Christian Right. We want other voices to be heard.”

Some of these voices are Jewish. Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, (from the Hebrew word “to heal”), is a key summit organizer. He argues that Americans are burned-out on “looking out for number one,” and are searching for meaning in themselves and their government.

“If you are sickened by the triumph of selfishness-not only in American politics, but the way people treat each other in daily life-we have a strategy to stop the Right,” Lerner said. “And we are challenging the ethos of selfishness and materialism in American life that is too often ignored by the left.”

To mount this challenge, summit planners lined up Harvard University professors Harvey Cox, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, the author of “Race Matters.” Sister Joan Chittister, a Catholic human rights advocate and Mordechai Liebling, a Reconstructionist Jewish leader, will participate.

They are among panelists who will try to answer: “God does not belong to the Religious Right-so why are right-wingers winning in the religious world?”

John L. Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO, and Dennis Rivera, president of Hospital Workers Local 1199, will talk about the workplace. Economist Paul Hawken will address the environment. And representing the halcyon days of the liberal 1960s will be singer Pete Seeger, California State Sen. Tom Hayden and Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame.

The ’60s are a flash point for the Christian Right, who trace America’s perceived moral decline to the excesses of that decade. At the Christian Coalition convention in Washington last September, speaker after speaker drew standing ovations by decrying the ’60s.

This dynamic fascinates Professor John C. Green, an expert on evangelical voters and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio.

“The first to take part in modern religious ideological politics were leftist Protestants in the 1950s and ’60s,” Green said. “They represented a new breed who fought for civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam. They were followed by liberal Roman Catholics who were galvanized by Vatican II.

“The religious conservatives tended to be apolitical during this time. In a sense, the Christian Coalition and the current move to the Religious Right was almost a delayed reaction to the successes of the Religious Left.”

The reaction has been formidable. Exit polls now find one in three American voters identify as an evangelical Christian, Green said.

At the core, the Religious Left and Right operate under contrasting notions of God, Green said. For conservative Mormons, Catholics, Jews and evangelicals, God is the all-powerful, all-knowing governor of human lives.

Liberals in those and other faiths embrace a less authoritarian deity. “The liberals’ God is less concerned with rules and more concerned with justice and compassion,” Green said.

The challenge for the Religious Right, Green said, is that its members have a hard time forming coalitions. Conservative Catholics and Jews may vote the same way, but they are very aware that they pray quite distinctly. Their closely held beliefs make them leery of each others’ organizations, Green said.

For liberals, the coalitions are easier to build, Green said, but the articulation of concrete conviction is tougher.

One pitfall the leftist summit must avoid, Green said, is simply defining itself in opposition to the Religious Right.

Michael L. Russell, a spokesman for the Christian Coalition, suspects Sojourners Magazine editor Wallis has created a cottage industry out of criticizing the Christian Right. Russell said he has yet to see any groundswell of popular support for summit organizers or their cause.

“When we introduced our Contract with the American Family in May last year, it wasn’t to oppose anybody,” Russell said. “It was to move the country forward. We certainly welcome Mr. Wallis and the others’ ideas. But attacking us is not a productive, or quite frankly, smart strategy.”

This weekend, the leftists are drawing up their own “Progressive, Ethical Covenant with American Families.” At the same time, many religious liberals say they are overdue on taking moral stock of themselves.

High on this agenda is the left’s long-standing support of abortion, said the Rev. David S. Toolan, a Jesuit priest and editor of the liberal Catholic publication America.

He got unexpected support from feminist author Naomi Wolf. She wrote a controversial New Republic article last winter that described abortion as “an evil” that should provoke the moral qualms of “passionate feminists.”

Wolf, who is leading a summit panel entitled, “Abortion: Whose rights? Whose meaning?,” believes thousands of devout Americans have been driven into the Republican camp by the Democratic Party’s refusal to debate the moral ramifications of its pro-choice plank.

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There is much evidence that American voters take their convictions seriously. Nine out of 10 say they believe in God-a piety unmatched in the rest of the industrialized world. And pointedly religious critics helped overthrow slavery here in the 19th century and passed the laws reining in raw capitalism in the early 20th century.

Organizers hope the summit is taken seriously, too. Their efforts should not be dismissed as “either New Agey or flaky, or else nothing more than a self-interested power grab by some intellectuals,” warned organizer Mark Levine, associate director of the newly formed Foundation for Ethics and Meaning.

Instead, he plans to begin a critique of the national economy that “measures productivity or efficiency in terms of maximizing our ability to sustain loving relationships and to embody ethical and spiritual sensitivity. By that criteria,” Levine said, “America is very inefficient and its economy remarkably unproductive.”

How sustainable such critiques are in the marketplace of ideas will be the acid test, said Samuel H. Kelman, a Shaker Heights, Ohio, participant. He became interested in the summit through his membership in the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, and his life’s work in child welfare organizations.

“Even the name of this conference is relevant,” Kelman said. “We literally lack meaning in our lives in this society. It’s very important to reconstruct it.”

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