Wise words on how to build a powerful religious left:
Religious progressives must now learn the lesson evangelicals learned long ago: the key to organizing people of faith is not through celebrity clergy but through congregations. Congregations are where the rubber hits the road. This is where the faithful meet, greet, eat and mobilize. E-mail lists are great and an important tool, but congregations are the long established historical and spiritual bases of operation. Congregations are the very definition of grassroots. The right knows this and the left does not. ...
One problem for religious progressives today is a lack of trained organizers in their midst. The religious right has been training organizers for years. Religious progressives, with some heroic exceptions, have not. Progressives need to enlist the help of professional organizers from the likes of the labor movement and community organizations to fill in the gaps and train a new generation of activists. Otherwise there will be lots of message, lots of talk, lots of spin, but it will not filter down to the congregations with sufficient force to mobilize significant numbers.
I would add that mainline Protestants are too often conflict-averse, fearful of losing members to political controversy or otherwise upsetting the apple cart. While evangelicals are busy making sure everyone has a Christian Coalition voter guide, the rest of us are forming task forces to gather input on whether at some point we might issue a vague statement about faith and politics. In addition to being politically useless and reflective of organizational ostrich-headedness, that's also bad theology: "Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers" (Matthew 21:12).
Posted by Michael at January 8, 2005 04:20 AM | TrackBack