‘Spiritual Crisis’ Driving Rush to Conservatism, Rabbi Says
By Alexandra Alter, The Miami Herald
Mar. 4–What draws people to Pat Robertson, the diplomatically-challenged televangelist who advocated killing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and called Ariel Sharon’s stroke divine retribution, and other ultra-conservative religious leaders?
Author and rabbi Michael Lerner argues they’re driven by a “spiritual crisis” and hunger for meaning that liberal churches and politicians have failed to provide.
In his new book, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (Harper SanFrancisco, 2006), Lerner sets out to explain how some religious leaders convinced working-class people to vote against what he sees as their own economic self-interest by supporting conservative Republicans. For Lerner, the culture war isn’t about abortion or homosexuality, it’s driven by a culture that prizes possessions, power and status over family, community, and compassion for the needy.
Lerner, who edits Tikkun magazine — a bi-monthly spiritual and political journal — draws on hundreds of interviews conducted through focus groups with union workers. He describes a nation paralyzed by a spiritual crisis, where working-class citizens who’ve been alienated by a culture of materialism turn to fundamentalist religious leaders and support politicians who espouse “faith-based” platforms.
Lerner spoke recently with The Miami Herald:
Q: How did you research this book?
A: “We started with groups that were formed primarily out of a labor movement, people who were referred to us from unions. . . . We started this process just trying to talk about stress in the workplace and stress in family life. As we sat and listened to people, we were astounded to find that these people who worked for unions were turning to the right.”
Q: How did that discovery lead you to look for religious motives?
A: “We didn’t know that people were moving to the right for any kind of spiritual reasons. It took thousands of people in the groups before the evidence was incontrovertible — it was a spiritual crisis, their hunger for a framework of meaning that would transcend the materialism and competitiveness of the marketplace.”
Q: Did you interview any leaders of the religious right?
A: “I did not interview people in the religious right. It is not a book primarily about them. It is about the people who are attracted to them.”
Q: You advocate forming a political movement based on the ideas outlined in this book. Would you ever consider running for a political office? Has anyone asked you to run?
A: “Yes, they have, and I’ve said no. I said I’ll run for U.S. Senate or president if you raise the $100 million. I’m not going to go out and cater to people who have the money. There’s no way to form a new political party until we try to change the old parties.”
Q: How do you define the religious right?
A: “I define the religious right as those people who are willing to give support politically to those who believe that the best good for the society as a whole will be fulfilled if the government is downsized.”
Q: But don’t leaders on the religious right talk more about abortion and homosexuality than economics?
A: ‘Personally, I don’t agree with abortion. That doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal. Those issues to me don’t define the religious right. What defines the religious right is, ‘How are you going to take care of the poor?’ “
Q: Are there any issues that you agree with the right on?
A: “There’s a section of the right that is now coming around to a progressive position on the environment. . . . There’s the turning of science into a religion. We need moral guidelines for how we use science. The right has been more on the advance of that.”
Q: Does your categorization of religious conservatives as judgmental and legalistic and progressives as forgiving and compassionate discount some of the positive actions of evangelicals, including their pressuring the Bush administration to address the conflict in Darfur?
A: “I’m the editor of Tikkun magazine and we’ve been yelling and screaming about Darfur long before them. So I don’t give them credit for Darfur.”
Q: The progressive evangelical Jim Wallis has cautioned religious progressives from exclusively aligning themselves with the Democrats, arguing that to do so would be to make the same mistakes as the right by reducing religious values to the agenda of a single party. Might there be a danger in aligning the spiritual left with the Democratic and Green parties?
A: “What we’re in favor of is creating a spiritual caucus in the Democratic Party, in the Greens, in the Republican Party and the Conservative Party. We want a new bottom line in America: . . . The right hand of God and the left hand of God don’t map onto the right and left politically.”
Q: Are you in favor of dialogue between religious leaders across political lines? Have you sought out any on the right to try to build bi-partisan religious coalitions?
A: “That is what Jim [Wallis] does. Jim has convinced me that the best way to do that is not to associate it with some of the other elements of a network of spiritual progressives.”
Q: Jim Wallis has said the Democrats ceded religious values to the right because they were afraid talking about religion would offend their liberal base. You bring a similar charge against liberals. Are you suggesting Democrats take up a language of faith?
A: “It’s not enough that Democrats are quoting scripture. That response is a manipulative one. We need a change in the left. . . . We are not only for religious people. The Network for Spiritual Progressives, it’s also for people who are spiritual but not religious.”
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Miami Herald
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