Requiem for a Dream:
Remembering
the Religious Left

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the New River Valley, May 23, 2004, by Carter Turner, adjunct faculty in Religious Studies at Virginia Tech and Radford — as well as a member of the Congregation.

As many of you know, the quickest and most effective way to determine the significance of anything in the world today is to subject it to the empirical test of googleography – otherwise known as the Google search. A Google search on the phrase “religious left” returned 15,500 hits. The phrase “religious right,” on the other hand, returned over 450,000 hits, a ratio of roughly 30 to 1. I doubt many of you are totally surprised by these search results. While the religious right is well defined, well organized, and easily identified in their involvement in shaping American culture, the religious left appears largely nonexistent. In my search for an articulation of the tenets of the religious left, I found only one – that offered by Rush Limbaugh. Among his “14 Commandments of the Religious Left,” my personal favorite is

“Thou shalt not make any graven image out of any substance which cannot be recycled.”

The designation of the anniversaries of Roe vs. Wade and Anita Hill’s testimony as “holy days,” is a close second.

While Rush Limbaugh may have an easy time imagining the principles of the religious left, I doubt he would find the task of identifying the religious left as easy. The “Religious Right” emerged from a specific brand of evangelical Christianity – fundamentalist and Pentecostal. The phrase primarily signifies a theological orientation. But those that identify themselves as part of the religious right claim that political orientation flows from the theological. If you believe that the Bible is the literal word of God and not subject to critical interpretation, as the Religious right claims, it is self-evident that the 10 commandments should be posted in schools, that Christian prayers should be held before public events, that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that life begins at conception. Or so they say. But what exactly is the theological orientation of the religious left? And does the political flow from the theological in the same way for the left? I would like to begin by looking at the history of the religious left; how it came to be, at what point was it most influential, and what are its prospects for the future?

During the mid-19^th century, the majority of Americans belonged to the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian denominations of Christianity. These denominations were swept into the sectional conflicts that dominated the public sphere at that time. Economics, the social order, and state sovereignty were the basic issues at hand, but increasingly these issues were framed by the discussion of the morality of slavery. And within these three Protestant denominations, slavery was increasingly framed by the discussion of how to read the Bible. In the same way that the ordination of an openly gay bishop threatens to split the Episcopalian denomination today, the election of a slave-holding bishop ultimately split the Methodists, and the adoption of proclamations condemning the institution spilt the others. The issue for the leaders of these churches was slavery’s place in the Bible. Southern church leaders argued that the Bible tacitly endorses the practice. The patriarchs of the Old Testament owned slaves, they argued, and God decreed through a curse that the descendents of Ham would forever be servants to the descendants of his brothers. By tracing the lineage of Noah’s children, it was clear to southern Christians that Ham’s descendants emerged on the African continent. Most importantly to the southern divines, however, was that Jesus never condemned the practice at all. Southern Christians believed that God created the world with a particular social order in mind, that certain races of people were inferior by design, and that the social order in the south reflected God’s plan. It was blasphemous to read the Bible in any way that distorted Biblical divine law.

The north, on the whole, was much more diverse and cosmopolitan than the south. Influenced by western European theology, northern clergy by 1860 were challenging their congregants to value the spirit of the Bible over a literal interpretation. The newly formed discipline of literary criticism increasingly turned its attention to the Bible, revealing the historical and cultural particularities embedded. The books of the Bible were oral traditions passed down for generations in some cases, written, edited, combined with other writings, then finally written in something resembling their current form. To believe God oversaw this entire process and that every word bears his stamp of approval, violated standards of reason for northern Christians, causing them to increasingly reject the literalist method of acquiring biblical truth. This shift toward the implicit religious values of Christianity, promoted by both Unitarians and Universalists, was the embryonic stage of the religious left.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, northern protestant churches, no longer restrained by their southern brethren, began adopting a distinctly social Christian ethic. Underlying the humanly constructed stories of Jesus in the New Testament was a vision of the world that stood against injustice, suffering and oppression. The impetus of Jesus’ calling, for northern Christians, was for humans to strive to bring Heaven to earth, to actualize God’s world, to live as Jesus had lived. In his book Christianity and the Social Crises, Walter Rauschenbusch provided the Social Gospel Movement, as it came to be called, its most comprehensive articulation. In it he writes:

The fundamental contribution of every man is the change of his personality. We must repent on the sins of existing society, cast off the spell of the lies protecting our social wrongs, have faith in a higher social order, and realize in ourselves a new type of Christian [humanity] which seeks to overcome the evil in the present world, not from withdrawing from the world, but by revolutionizing it.

Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crises

By the turn of the century, the social gospel movement was in full swing. It was the umbrella under which other movements began such as temperance, women’s suffrage, tenement houses, and civil rights for freed slaves. It also birthed organizations such as the Salvation Army, the NAACP, and the urban league.

The social gospel movement’s influence lasted into the 1960’s. What made it so revolutionary, and also so appealing to many, was that it rejected the Puritan view that the world was inherently sinful. The movement was not utopian; denying the potential evil in humans. It was hopeful that despite the capacity of humans to do great harm, they were also capable of great good. It was this faith in human potential that lay behind the educational reforms of John Dewey, and the political reforms of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Johnson’s Great Society. It was also faith in human good that motivated Civil Rights leaders to risk, and far too often, give their lives for social change.

So what happened to the Religious Left after the 1960s? Several factors are generally sited. First, is that religious liberals have not found issues as galvanizing as civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. The religious left splintered in the 1970s into “identity politics.” Although they passionately fought for their causes; affirmative action, feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism, religious liberals were not equally passionate about these issues collectively. The splintering of political energy, combined with fading leadership as the 1960s activists grew older and quieter, opened the door for the religious right to seize the day. Drawing on the perceived moral excesses of the 1960s, and the impending apocalypse central to their theology, conservative Christians used the pulpit and airwaves to mobilize their congregants to engage social concerns. Conservative leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson successfully convinced people that Democrats were responsible for the nation’s moral decline, ensuring victory in 1980 for Ronald Reagan, a divorcee who rarely attended church, over Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian who taught Sunday school. The Christian right has become so successful in American politics in the last twenty years, they now effectively define “true” religion, and how it should shape government. In 1960, John Kennedy’s task was to convince Americans that his religion (Catholicism) would not affect the decisions he made as President. In 2000, George Bush triumphantly stated that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ, and that every decision he made reflected his faith. For many Americans today, a politician’s Christian identity is the only thing needed to pass the character test. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s fate was effectively sealed when he mistakenly placed the Old Testament’s book of Job in the New Testament. And polls show that John Kerry, who faces questions about his faith daily, has yet to convince American’s that his religion is all that important to him. The role of religion in shaping American government has never been stronger. And the religious left is stuck in traffic.

The religious left, whose greatest influence came between 1860 and 1960, emerged only after shedding the cloak of biblical literalism while retaining a Christian identity, as they boldly embraced the cause of social justice. One reason for the decline of the religious left today is that it has trouble grounding its liberal principles in religion. Many people on the political left who claim to be religious argue that no religion has a monopoly on truth. In fact, many would go so far as to say that religions are simply myths; narratives that orient our lives but do not reflect anything outside of own cultural histories. How can one who holds these positions claim to be religious? Can the left compete with the right without a distinctly religious grounding? Can UUs provide an example of a non-creedal religiosity?

This “problem” for the religious left is not new to Unitarian Universalists. The Unitarian church was devoutly Christian through the mid 19^th century, but began soon after, questioning the importance of Christ to truth. Theodore Parker, arguably the Unitarian’s most influential theologian, claimed that associating religious truth to Jesus, Muhammad, or the Buddha was akin to saying that geometry is true only because of the authority of Euclid. Euclid revealed the truth of geometry, but he did not make it true. The truths revealed by Jesus are true on their own, and not because they came from him. One of the major roadblocks in the merger of Unitarians and Universalists in 1961 was that the later did not want to give up its explicitly Christian identity. But the Unitarian faction convinced the Universalists of Parker’s argument that liberal religious truth was not the sole property of Christianity, and that making it so would limit religious exploration. The merger would have made Parker proud. He once said prophetically that theological truths change as surely through time as scientific ones. The heresy of one age is the orthodoxy of the next. Parker was “excommunicated” by the Unitarian church for making these claims, and in 1961, his views became “orthodox.” (Conkin, American Originals)

For Parker, and a half-century later, John Dewey, being religious was not the same as holding fast to a creedal religion. Dewey wrote in 1934:

It is widely supposed that a person who does not accept any religion is thereby shown to be a non-religious person. Yet it is conceivable that the present depression in religion is closely connected with the fact that religions now prevent, because of their weight of historic encumbrances, the religious quality of experience from coming to consciousness and finding expression that is appropriate to present conditions, intellectual and moral. I believe that such is the case. I believe that many persons are so repelled from what exists as a religion by its intellectual and moral implications, that they are not even aware of attitudes in themselves that if they came to fruition would be genuinely religious.

Dewey, A Common Faith

This, I argue, is the way for religious liberals to reclaim their territory. The religious quality of experience that flows from community, empathy, faith in one another, and in ourselves, has the power to bring people together in ways that secular orientations cannot. It is a religious quality because of its power to draw illogical reactions that are profoundly different from the logical. Our reactions to the prisoner abuse photos coming from Iraq reveal the mysterious connections that exist between life forms. It isn’t logical that we take the pain of others inside of us, the pain of people we’ve never met, the pain of people who may have killed Americans, but we do, and that is how we are religious. The religious quality of experience is what makes our congregation “religious” despite our lack of creeds. What is essential, in my opinion, is that the left unabashedly embrace the “religious,” this truth revealed through our interactions with the world, as the most authentic and legitimate form of religion. By drawing on this religious feeling, by staying in touch with it through worship or possibly prayer, by engaging and promoting our denomination’s rich, although non-creedal, theological heritage, we become closer and stronger. Using religious language to describe our place in the world makes a difference because it removes limits. Religious language, by definition, opens us to possibilities that cannot be imagined or comprehended. And if the left loses faith in the possible, it will surely die.

UUC Home Page