This is a well written article that REALLY speaks to me. I thought
you might like to read it as well... at least, as food for thought.
~MP
P.S. Pass it on as you deem appropriate.
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Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Democrats Need a Spiritual Left
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-01.htm
For years the Democrats have been telling themselves "it's the
economy, stupid." Yet consistently for dozens of years millions of
middle income Americans have voted against their own economic
interests to support Republicans who have tapped a deeper set of
needs.
Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems
to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know
that "looking out for number one" has become the common sense of our
society, but they want a life that is about something more --- a
framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend
the grasping and narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will
admit that they have material needs, and that they worry about
adequate health care, stability in employment, and enough money to
give their kids a college education. But even more deeply they want
their lives to have meaning --- and they respond to candidates who
seem to care about values and some sense of transcendent purpose.
Many of these voters have found a "politics of meaning" in the
political Right. In the Right wing churches and synagogues these
voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to
their "meaning needs." Most of these churches and synagogues
demonstrate a high level of caring for their members, even if the
flip side is a willingness to demean those on the outside. Yet what
members experience directly is a level of mutual caring that they
rarely find in the rest of the society. And a sense of community
that is offered them nowhere else, a community that has as its
central theme that life has value because it is connected to some
higher meaning than one's success in the marketplace.
It's easy to see how this hunger gets manipulated in ways that
liberals find offensive and contradictory. The frantic attempts to
preserve family by denying gays the right to get married, the talk
about being conservatives while meanwhile supporting Bush policies
that accelerate the destruction of the environment and do nothing to
encourage respect for God's creation or an ethos of awe and wonder
to replace the ethos of turning nature into a commodity, the intense
focus on preserving the powerless fetus and a culture of life
without a concomitant commitment to medical research (stem cell
research/HIV-AIDS), gun control and healthcare reform., the claim to
care about others and then deny them a living wage and an
ecologically sustainable environment --- all this is rightly
perceived by liberals as a level of inconsistency that makes them
dismiss as hypocrites the voters who have been moving to the Right.
Yet liberals, trapped in a long-standing disdain for religion and
tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underlie the move to the
Right, have been unable to engage these voters in a serious
dialogue. Rightly angry at the way that some religious communities
have been mired in authoritarianism, racism, sexism and homophobia,
the liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to
religion that it has both marginalized those many people on the Left
who actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused
to acknowledge that many who move to the Right have legitimate
complaints about the ethos of selfishness in American life.
Imagine if John Kerry had been able to counter George Bush by
insisting that a serious religious person would never turn his back
on the suffering of the poor, that the bible's injunction to love
one's neighbor required us to provide health care for all, and that
the New Testament's command to "turn the other cheek" should give us
a predisposition against responding to violence with violence.
Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk about the strength that
comes from love and generosity and applied that to foreign policy
and homeland security.
Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk of a New Bottom Line, so
that American institutions get judged efficient, rational and
productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and
power, but also to the extent that they maximize people's capacities
to be loving and caring, ethically and ecologically sensitive, and
capable of responding to the universe with awe and wonder.
Imagine a Democratic Party that could call for schools to teach
gratitude, generosity, caring for others, and celebration of the
wonders that daily surround us! Such a Democratic Party, continuing
to embrace its agenda for economic fairness and multi-cultural
inclusiveness, would have won in 2004 and can win in the future.
(Please don't tell me that this is happening outside the Democratic
Party in the Greens or in other leftie groups --- because except for
a few tiny exceptions it is not! I remember how hard I tried to get
Ralph Nader to think and talk in these terms in 2000, and how little
response I got substantively from the Green Party when I suggested
reformulating their excessively politically correct policy
orientation in ways that would speak to this spiritual
consciousness. The hostility of the Left to spirituality is so deep,
in fact, that when they hear us in Tikkun talking this way they
often can't even hear what we are saying ---- so they systematically
mis-hear it and say that we are calling for the Left to take up the
politics of the Right, which is exactly the opposite of our point ---
speaking to spiritual needs actually leads to a more radical
critique of the dynamics of corporate capitalism and corporate
globalization, not to a mimicking of right-wing policies).
If the Democrats were to foster a religions/spiritual Left, they
would no longer pick candidates who support preemptive wars or who
appease corporate power. They would reject the cynical realism that
led them to pretend to be born-again militarists, a deception that
fooled no one and only revealed their contempt for the intelligence
of most Americans. Instead of assuming that most Americans are
either stupid or reactionary, a religious Left would understand that
many Americans who are on the Right actually share the same concern
for a world based on love and generosity that underlies Left
politics, even though lefties often hide their value attachments.
Yet to move in this direction, many Democrats would have to give up
their attachment to a core belief: that those who voted for Bush are
fundamentally stupid or evil. Its time they got over that elitist
self-righteousness and developed strategies that could affirm their
common humanity with those who voted for the Right. Teaching
themselves to see the good in the rest of the American public would
be a critical first step in liberals and progressives learning how
to teach the rest of American society how to see that same goodness
in the rest of the people on this planet. It is this spiritual
lesson --- that our own well-being depends on the well-being of
everyone else on the planet and on the well-being of the earth --- a
lesson rooted deeply in the spiritual wisdom of virtually every
religion on the planet, that could be the center of a revived
Democratic Party.
Yet to take that seriously, the Democrats are going to have to get
over the false and demeaning perception that the Americans who voted
for Bush could never be moved to care about the well being of anyone
but themselves. That transformation in the Democrats would make them
into serious contenders.
The last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked
their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by
Martin Luther King. We cannot wait for the reappearance of that kind
of charasmatic leader to begin the process of rebuilding a
spiritual/religious Left.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is national co-chair (with Cornel West and
Susannah Heschel) of The Tikkun Community, an interfaith
organization that seeks to build on the political vision articulated
above and more fully explained in their Core Vision which you can
read at www.Tikkun.org; editor of TIKKUN, a bimonthly Jewish
Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, author of "Spirit
Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul", and rabbi of
Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco.