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Religious Left Unsure of Their Message

Erin Roach
Baptist Press 5-24-2006

They know they want to counter the messages of conservative Christians, but they just can’t seem to discover an idea around which to build their bid to retake the White House and the congressional majority.

More than 1,000 members of the religious left, including Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo, gathered at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington May 17 for a “Spiritual Activism Conference.” Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan also made an appearance.

New York Times reporter Neela Banerjee noted that “if the gathering is any indication, the biggest barrier for liberals may be their regard for pluralism: for letting people say what they want, how they want to, and for trying to include everyone’s priorities, rather than choosing two or three issues that could inspire a movement.”

“We didn’t get on the same page with everyone, and it is about getting on the same page,” Campolo, a well-known American Baptist speaker and a professor of sociology at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, told The Times after the conference. “The thing about the left is that they want everybody to feel good.”

Campolo told participants during a seminar at the conference that many lawmakers are religious and familiarity with the Bible is the key to gaining their attention.

“You have no right to be a spiritual leader if you haven’t read Scripture,” he said. “People in Congress respect the Book, even if they don’t know what it says. If we don’t recognize this, we don’t know squat.”

The Times reported that a young man with long hair and a tunic questioned Campolo’s statement during the seminar.

“I thought this was a spiritual progressives’ conference,” the man said. “I don’t want to play the game of ‘the Bible says this or that,’ or that we get validation from something other than ourselves. We should be speaking from our hearts.”

The religious left’s struggle to define themselves is part of the larger Democratic Party’s quest to do the same. They’re scrapping to “shake an image of indifference to religion,” as The Times said, before the next elections roll around.

Liberals’ difficulty in reaching people of faith, in particular evangelicals, might be seen in part in their misunderstanding of the demographic, seen in part in the selection of All Souls Unitarian Church as the venue for the gathering. Unitarian beliefs generally include:

-- God is not a personal deity and the term God refers to the living processes of nature and conscience at work in mankind.

-- The Bible is a collection of myths, legends and philosophical writings.

-- Jesus was no more or less divine than any man.

-- People essentially are good and can save themselves.

JEWISH GROUP PROTESTS EPISCOPAL CHURCH AWARD -- The Simon Wiesenthal Center, one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations, is calling on the Episcopal Peace Fellowship to reconsider a decision to give their highest honor to a Palestinian Anglican priest who has denied Israel’s right to exist.

The fellowship, which renounces war and other forms of violence, selected Canon Naim Ateek, director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, to receive the 2006 John Nevin Sayre Award at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church this summer in Ohio.

“Canon Naim Ateek’s voice is heard around the world as a strong voice of faith and nonviolence,” an April 28 EPF news release said. “His message of nonviolence states, ‘as a Christian, I know that the way of Christ is the way of nonviolence, and therefore, I condemn all forms of violence and terrorism whether coming from the government [of Israel] or from militant [Palestinian] groups.’”

But Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, and Yitzchok Adlerstein, the center’s director of interfaith affairs, contend Ateek has taken positions in the Mideast conflict that have “repeatedly diminished, not enhanced, the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East.”

The two said Ateek has used the Sabeel Center to lead a global campaign to replace Israel and the territories of the Palestinian Authority with a single state, according to a May 15 news release. Furthermore, Ateek has justified the Second Infitada, during which suicide bombing has been used against Israelis, as a legitimate weapon, Cooper and Adlerstein said, and he has compared Israelis to “Christ-killers,” with their Palestinian victims as Jesus.

“... [H]onoring Ateek rewards and emboldens the forces of extremism in the Middle East and is a supreme slap in the face of the Jewish people,” Cooper and Adlerstein wrote in a letter to Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. “... We urge you to reconsider this unfortunate move, so our two faith-based communities here in the United States can continue to work together towards the goals of peace and reconciliation.”

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