Why the new, made-for-TV religious left isn’t the movement religious leftists were waiting for.

By Jeff Sharlet

(First published in The High Plains Messenger, the politically heterodox online alt magazine from the heart of American fundamentalism.)

I received a call the other day from a CBS news producer looking for help on a segment about the new religious left, said by pundits to be in the offing. The man had done his research and understood the complexities of the subject, but still — he needed a talking head, and wondered whom I’d recommend. Would Jim Wallis do? Tony Campolo? The producer had to have someone he could put opposite the religious right. I tried to argue otherwise, but he already knew my argument, and replied easily: TV wants what it wants, and therefore he needed a mouthpiece, not a human being.

Such has been the case with a great deal of coverage of the religious left, all too often leaning hard on Wallis, the liberal evangelical author of a rather self-satisfied bestseller called God’s Politics, or Rabbi Michael Lerner, once an advisor to Hillary Clinton, or the simple fact that this or that evangelical is also an environmentalist.

And yet, the new religious left — if there is one, or if there is to be one — cannot be a person. It must be a story. That’s what movements are made of, a fact forgotten by the would-be spokesmen of the religious left as well as the media that strokes them.

Lately, a slew of books with blunt titles such as What Jesus Meant and Jesus Is Not a Republican have been trying to tell that story in greater depth. The most intriguing of the lot may be Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right From the Heart of the Gospel, edited by Rev. Peter Laarman, co-director of something humbly called the Center of Prophetic Renewal. Well, that’s ok. Humility is an overrated virtue, as the splendid glory of this past Sunday’s Gay Pride marches across the nation revealed (click and enlarge).

Splendid glory is a quality lacking in religious liberalism. The Christian Right has something close to it — stop by your local megachurch for the best Pink Floyd tribute show in America — but since the 1980s, what’s left of the religious left has been hunkering down in the bunkers of quiet reason, afraid of its own gorgeous past.

“History is a great ironist, though historians seem rarely to see the joke,” writes Marilynne Robinson in the lead essay of Getting on Message. The irony Robinson sees is that of the left’s neglected roots in the first two Great Awakenings, widespread religious revivals, of American history, conceded too often as ancestors of the present fundamentalist one.

The first Great Awakening, that of the 18th century, combined the insights of John Locke and Isaac Newton with the Bible to forge what Jonathan Edwards called “experimental religion,” a kind of science to be conducted through close study of the actual conditions of ordinary people’s lives. Historians who do get the joke realize that this religious revival — in itself, conservative — sparked the fire of the American Revolution.

The second, that of the 19th century, was built on the then-radical notion that you could provoke the presence of the Holy Ghost by organizing religious revivals rather than waiting around for them. The key word there is “organize,” the verb that makes movements happen. The second Great Awakening — also, in itself, conservative — spread the idea that organizing revival involved removing obstacles to full participation, chief among them being slavery. Abolition and the Civil War were among the results.

What kind of war will the current revival ignite? Is it “Operation Iraqi Freedom”? Or something dumber still to come? Robinson, author of last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead and a proudly orthodox Calvinist, excoriates contemporary fundamentalism for betraying the American tradition of religious revival. How? It’s a story, as it happens, that’s about you — your relationship with Jesus, your salvation, your family. By telling a lousy story. Robinson prefers a “personal holiness” that’s also political, derived from — get ready for more irony — John Calvin, the 16th century theologian usually associated with an angry proto-fundamentalism:

“‘We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love,'” Robinson quotes Calvin. “‘[H]ere there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors.'”

Calvin and Robinson aren’t talking about selflessness, a pretty but empty idea. A fundamentalist can be self-sacrificing just as easily as a more imaginative soul, but only someone who believes that his or her story is inextricably interwoven with that of the next person’s — and, for religious folk, with that of God — can turn that selflessness into power.

Power matters. The religious right knows that but doesn’t like to say it, since doing so would involve confessing how much it already possesses. The would-be religious left, as seen on TV, knows it, too, but doesn’t like to believe it, since doing so would involve admitting it doesn’t have any.

The real religious left — the one yet to be organized — will recognize the reality of power and appreciate its nuances; its applications. Another contributor to Getting on Message, Rev. Vivian Denise Nixon, an ex-con who’s now an African Methodist Episcopal pastor, quotes James Cone, author of a modern classic, A Black Theology for Liberation: “‘authentic love is not ‘help’ — not giving Christmas baskets — but working for political, social, and economic justice, which always means a redistribution of power. It is a kind of power which enables [the oppressed] to fight their own battles and thus keep their dignity.’”

Too much of what passes for the contemporary religious left speaks in terms of “help,” in no small part because that’s the only story most media will listen to. And yet, here’s another irony — “help” of the sort Cone disdains is what the Christian Right is best at. The media does Christian conservatives a disservice when it fails to notice that their movement is organized around the idea of helping people.

As a forthcoming book by statistician Arthur Brooks, Who Cares, demonstrates, religious conservatives give more to charity than liberals do by any measure. Not just in sheer numbers, but as a percentage of individual income. And not just to their churches, but to charities that really do provide food, medicine, and education for the poor. The one victory the tepid religious left of the moment can claim is the media misconception that religious liberals are more charitable, that they care more about the poor. They’re not, and they don’t. Rather, some of them — those not busy playing to the press — care differently.

That’s made most plain in the closing essay of Getting on Message, “Putting Our Money Where God’s Mouth Is.” It’s by Garret Keizer, a former Episcopal priest who’s also the author of an essay in Mother Jones last year that drew the starkest line yet between the “help” offered by religious conservatives and liberals and the solidarity that he says must be the standard of any left worthy of the label, religious or otherwise.

“I have begun to lose patience with ‘compassion,’” writes Keizer, “be it the conservative version that sees poverty as a moral disease to be cured with a benevolent dose of 19th-century rectitude, or the liberal version that views poverty as an exotic culture to be scrutinized through the kindly lens of tolerance. Poverty is not a culture to be understood; it is a condition to be eradicated.”

In his more recent examination of “help” vs. “solidarity” in Getting on Message, Keizer proposes a list of policy initiatives to make that happen. They’e not particularly original — national health care, equal education funding, etc. — but that’s significant in itself. Another common mistake made by a media in search of the new religious left is its insistence on finding the color purple — that is, some ostensibly innovative blend of “red” and “blue” values, “fresh” ideas. Again, much of what passes for the religious left complies, declaring, like Michael Lerner of Tikkun, that by mixing more religion into the public sphere we’ll alchemize a whole new liberalism.

And yet, we never managed to achieve the old liberalism. “Putting Our Money Where God’s Mouth Is” means, simply, redistribution of wealth. It means recognizing the reality of class. The “spiritual warfare” of the religious left is what the religious right considers class warfare. And the right is right — solidarity among the religious left will provoke a fight. Solidarity does’t mean asking for help from the powers that be, it means organizing to become a new kind of power.

Of course, “solidarity” itself can become just such a sanctimonious distraction. “The persons with whom I feel myself in deepest solidarity,” writes Keizer, “are persons deeply suspicious of words like solidarity — of mass culture, mass production, and mass movements of all kinds.” Even solidarity grows poisonous when it’s infected by piety, since piety provokes the hierarchy implicit in holier-than-thou.

The religious right knows this, which is why it tries to hide its most pious feelings. Not through transforming the power it’s achieved into something truly egalitarian, but through surface maneuvers intended to show that some of the most powerful preachers in the world are just ordinary Joes: Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, boasts to reporters of his goofy bumper sticker (“Vote for Pedro”); Rick Warren, author of the mega-selling ode to submissiveness The Purpose-Driven Life (recently adopted by the government of Rwanda, the first officially “Purpose-Driven Nation”), assures his fans that he’s free of ambition by draping himself in Hawaiian shirts.

The would-be religious left — not the one that includes real writers such as Marilynne Robinson, Garret Keizer, and James Cone, but the one we see more and more of on TV and in the newspapers, as “balance” for what is apparently, in the mind of the media, the gravitas of Jerry Falwell — is learning this trick as well, cheering for its champions as they do battle in CNN’s studios, forgetting singer Gil Scott-Heron’s first truth of modern revolution: the one that we want, the one that we need, the one built not on piety of any kind but the sort of solidarity that’s sweaty and sequined, flabby and fabulous, won’t be televised.

*****

I’m a writer, so I’m biased — I like to think that at least a piece of the revolution will be written. Two other new chapters worth looking at are Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, and Randall Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament.

Goldberg’s account of recent fundamentalist power grabs is pithy, tough, and not much concerned with what fundamentalists think they’re up to, which is fine — this is a book for activists who want to fight back right now, and as such a welcome reprieve from the common ground questing of more banal writers who try to persuade us, and themselves, that Americans ultimately all share a common vision. Michelle Goldberg doesn’t share a damn thing with James Dobson, and God bless her for that.

Balmer’s book is more historically rooted — he’s a scholar of American religion at Columbia University — and more emotionally complicated, since Balmer is an evangelical himself and spent many years linked to the loyal opposition within the Christian Right. “I write,” he opens, “as a jilted lover.” As such his vision is not always 20/20 — he is, perhaps, too insistent that the former object of his affections used to be just, kind, and lovely — but his now-barely-restrained anger is beautiful to behold.

Jeff Sharlet teaches journalism and religious studies at New York University. He is the co-author of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible.