Can the religious left get its groove back? Amy Sullivan discusses the challenges to progressive Christianity reasserting itself into politics in a Salon essay that is part history of the religious left — its crowning achievements in the era of civil rights, and later drift into obscurity after ceding the political stage to Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority — and part exhortation to true lefty-believers that they take a hard look at the efficiency and relevance of dividing their attention between countless different policy issues and internal reform. Some of Sullivan’s criticisms read like the conventional wisdom critique of the secular “left” as a whole: that it isn’t a whole movement as is the right, but rather a coalition of interests. The solution she hints at also seems familiar: consolidate (the forces, the issues), clarify (and simplify, and biblify) the moral message, and don’t be afraid of spin. But there are a number of fresh insights in Sullivan’s article that should inspire thought and discussion — namely, that the religious left seems absent from the political landscape not because they’re an endangered species, but because they’ve been integrated into “secular” political organizations in a way that the religious right has not.