c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)-Torie Osborn, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Janet Winter, a member of the Bruderhof sect, a theologically conservative communal Christian group, lead lives that appear galaxies apart.

Yet there they both were, Osborn in jeans and Winter wearing an ankle-length skirt and head scarf, agreeing on the need for a new political ethos based on love and respect-and above all, an openness to the religious dimension of public-policy decisions.”I believe in one man, one woman for life,”said Winter, who lives in a 400-member Bruderhof community in Rifton, N.Y.”But I don’t go around bashing or condemning those who don’t. We need to look beyond our differences to find common ground if we are to build a society based on love.” Osborn and Winter were among more than 1,500 people who met for three days in Washington this week to forge a”progressive”religious organization they hope will ultimately counter the political influence of the Religious Right. The organizing premise of the Summit on Ethics and Meaning, as the gathering was called, was that religious conservatives have gained as much political clout as they have only because liberals have allowed them to monopolize the public debate over values and morality.”This nation is in ethical and spiritual crisis,”said Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun and the meeting’s prime organizer.”The failure of liberalism has been its emphasis on economic justice alone and its failure to comprehend that people have a deep need for spiritual and psychological meaning that goes way beyond the marketplace.”Human beings need meaning, and meaning is the one thing the marketplace cannot provide. If they can only find an articulation of meaning in reactionary communities, then that’s where they will go.” The summit was long on talk about the need to overcome”selfishness, materialism and cynicism”and how to combine individual spiritual development with community social activism. But it was short on how to effect concrete political change and how to convince Americans concerned about a breakdown in society that liberal religious beliefs have a greater claim on the truth than do conservative religious viewpoints.

For some in attendance, the lack of a concrete platform was frustrating.”Give me answers,”said Kathleen Staniszewski, the second-term Democratic mayor of Lackawanna, N.Y., a blue-collar suburb of Buffalo.”I hear the cries of my constituency who are desperate for a sense of community, a sense of faith in the political system. They can’t wait.” The gathering did issue a”Progressive, Ethical Covenant with American Families.”Lerner also scheduled follow-up meetings around the nation as a prelude to creating an organizational structure to get the summit’s message before the public.

Lerner likened the summit to the early days of the feminist or civil rights movements.”We’re building a social movement. That requires patience,”he said.

The covenant-issued as a direct response to the Christian Coalition’s”Contract With the American Family”-calls for rewarding”caring behavior in the economy, rather than selfishness and materialism”and challenging”violence, selfishness, materialism and manipulative sexuality in children’s television.” It also urges the teaching in schools of”empathy, individual responsibility, discipline and respect for the experience of others”; generally strengthening families, including non-traditional ones; and”creating a society safe for love and intimacy.” The Christian Coalition, the leading political group on the Religious Right, came in for frequent criticism during the meeting, which ended Tuesday (April 16). Jim Wallis, the editor of the liberal evangelical magazine Sojourners, said the coalition, organized by evangelist Pat Robertson, had”distorted”the biblical message by equating Christianity with American-style capitalism to the exclusion of immigrants, racial and religious minorities, gays and others.

In response, Christian Coalition spokesman Mike Russell dismissed the summit as a”media event.””If you’re putting out a message of pluralism, why spend so much time demonizing the Christian Coalition? It’s a mixed signal. I think what we’re seeing here is bitterness over our success,”he said.

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The summit was by no means the first effort by the Religious Left to organize in response to the Christian Coalition and other power-brokers on the Religious Right.

The Christian and Jewish Interfaith Alliance, founded in 1994, and the evangelical Christian Call to Renewal, organized earlier this year, both seek to blunt the Religious Right’s influence.

What set the summit apart was the broad spectrum of liberal support it garnered-much of it from groups and individuals who do not speak in overtly religious terms or are viewed as outside the religious mainstream.

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The list of summit speakers ranged from AFL-CIO President John L. Sweeney and Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.) to Harvard University divinity professors Cornell West and Harvey Cox. Others included Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president-elect of Reform Judaism’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations; evangelist Tony Campolo; and Rebecca Parker, president of the Starr King School for the Ministry at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.

Also on hand were best-selling New Age-oriented writers Marianne Williamson, author of”ILLUMINATA: A Return to Prayer”; and Dr. Larry Dosey, author of”Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine”; as well as Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream; and Vietnam-era activist Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers.

The meeting’s sponsors were equally eclectic. They included the American Muslim Council, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and the Association for Religion and the Intellectual Life. Others were Co-Op America, which attempts to sensitize business leaders to environmental concerns; TV producer Norman Lear’s People For the American Way; and the Society for Values in Higher Education.

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Some of those in attendance have in the past tended to distrust organized religion.

Osborn, the former gay and lesbian task force official, for example, spoke of the homosexual community’s”fears”of religion, noting the condemnation homosexuals have encountered in many traditional faith groups. But”the collective near-death experience”of AIDS, she said, has released”a surge of spiritual energy”within the gay and lesbian community.

Noting the range of opinions at the summit, the Rev. George Regas, rector emeritus of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif., said”everybody here is connected with the world of the spirit, if not the world of organized religion.” What unites them, he added,”is a great distress that the Religious Right has taken hold of the agenda on morality and has been allowed to do so and a belief that if we don’t get organized-and quick-we’re going to lose the game by default.”

MJP END RIFKIN