BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (RNS) — Religious progressives made their displeasure with the Senate Republicans’ health care bill clear.

From the Presbyterian Church: “Draconian cuts to health care are an unacceptable threat to God’s people.” From the Church of Christ: “Drastic Medicaid cuts will only create more chaos and pain for those already facing challenges. What would Jesus do? He would champion health care for all.”

While such denouncements likely contributed to the bill’s imminent demise, religious progressives were by no means an organized force rallying in opposition to this bill. Why aren’t they more effective at engaging social policy discussions, mobilizing their base and influencing public policy?

[ad number=“1”]

Before we get to remedies, here are three factors that got religious progressives to this point:

• U.S. political culture has shifted dramatically rightward since the Reagan administration, meaning that the policy positions of religious progressives get less of a public hearing.
• Religious conservatives have mobilized so effectively for a media-oriented political culture that they have crowded out religious voices supporting other policy alternatives.
• Secular voices — sometimes simply nonreligious voices, sometimes clearly anti-religious ones — increasingly dominate progressive policy discourse.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Religion is not condemned to being a politically conservative force, and progressive politics are not condemned to “thin” moral ground without recourse to the deep ethical traditions that flow in American life. We know this from the example of faith-based community organizing (FBCO) organizations. As detailed in our comprehensive National Study of Community Organizing Organizations, the FBCO field is growing substantially as it promotes democratic engagement across a diverse base of constituents and as it influences policy decisions at all levels of government.

[ad number=“2”]

A central player in the FBCO field is the PICO National Network, formerly known as the Pacific Institute for Community Organizations. Founded in 1972 by a Jesuit priest, PICO is not aligned with any one religion and its leaders come from a range of faith communities. Nor does PICO focus on a single issue; instead, it is organizing faith-based campaigns on immigration, health care, criminal justice and many other topics around this strategy. According to its website: “PICO’s path to building a more just world involves teaching people of faith how to build and exercise their own power to address the root causes of the problems they face.”

The effectiveness and durability of faith-based community organizing underscores what we see as the two key commitments religious progressives must make if they want to be a force for good:

• Religious progressives must collaborate more effectively with other religious and secular political actors who possess complementary political skills and practices. But as with most collaborations, it will likely entail a measure of flexibility and compromise on the fine print of flashpoint issues. For example, a collaborative effort to pursue more abundant and equitable health care may require including (or removing) certain contested line items.
• Religious progressives must take a more pragmatic orientation that only a few have demonstrated up to now. Such pragmatism would entail bolstering locally rooted organizing work, while coordinating it with higher-level organizing work at the state and national level. This approach would create leverage across all of the arenas in which social policy innovation and adoption occur. We found FBCO organizations were far more likely to meet with a school board president than with a U.S. senator. Virtually every FBCO organization met with an official from city hall, while only 1 in 4 met with someone from the White House. The most astute left-of-center religious leaders recognize that issues such as mass incarceration, voting rights and racism are both intensely local and broadly national issues that need to be addressed at all levels of government.

[ad number=“3”]

Making these shifts will be not easy. Moral sermonizing won’t get much done. Conservative organizations like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition redefined the way morality figures in U.S. politics in a way that freezes out progressives. Then there is the vast power of those whose wealth and privilege lead them to oppose all progressive socio-economic policy.

But religious progressives can overcome these challenges, whether by following our suggestions or a path of their own making. If they do, a decade from now our political landscape will be less distorted by economic inequality and more vibrant with a broader representation of democratic voices.

(Brad R. Fulton is an assistant professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service)