Progressives organize

Christian Century, April 18, 2001

INVOKING THE SPIRIT and words of Martin Luther King Jr., Christian and Jewish clergy attempting to embolden prophetic voices from the "progressive" perspective have launched a new coalition with a founding conference in the nation's capital.

Although the Progressive Religious Partnership has Unitarian and secular participants, and lay leaders as well as clergy, the thrust of the April 4-6 conference in Washington was mostly clergy-led and focused on encouraging ministers, priests and rabbis on the left to address moral and social issues as strongly as clergy on the right have done in recent decades.

Said retired Episcopal rector George Regas of the California-based Regas Institute, which co-hosted the conference with the People for the American Way Foundation: "There has been no shortage of God talk and God talkers in the public square, but there has been little suggestion of compassion or justice in all their talk."

The meeting, which registered nearly 300 participants, began on the 33rd anniversary of King's assassination. One of the Baptist minister's former colleagues, Charles G. Adams, delivered a thundering speech from the pulpit of Washington's 163-year-old Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

"There's a whole lot of dangerous, bad, sick religion in the world. Bad religion makes you hate folks; good religion loves everybody," said Adams, pastor of Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit, who began working with King in 1957. "Let us go forward together. Let us turn the world upside down and turn it right-side-up in the name of justice."

One of the main topics of discussion was President Bush's proposed budget and $1.6 trillion tax cut, which several speakers said would come at the expense of programs for children and the underprivileged. "I hope everyone can accept the principle that the tax cuts and budget debates are faith and community issues," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "We need your moral authority to win this debate," Henderson told the audience.

Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, noted wryly that Bush "chose to take the trademarked mission statement" of the Children's Defense Fund. "So we are going to define for him what it means to `Leave No Child Behind.'" Edelman noted that she moved to Washington 33 years ago--just before King's death--to oversee his Poor People's campaign, when 11 million children were living in poverty. She said now 12 million do. "The rich folk are just going to have to wait on another tax cut, until we have no more children hungry and homeless and learning in crumbling schools," she said.

Other speakers warned about the temptations of the new "charitable choice" program as proposed by the White House. Congressman Robert C. Scott (D., Va.) said religious leaders shouldn't sacrifice their autonomy for cash, but instead remain independent watchdogs and maintain church-state separation.

Between the speeches and plenary discussions, conference participants broke into workshops on AIDS, the 2000 presidential election, missile defense, sweatshops and welfare, school vouchers, capital punishment, ecology, reproductive rights and same-sex unions, among other topics.

"We are not spraying bullets all over the place," said Steven Jacobs, rabbi of Kol Tikvah, a Reform temple in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills. Jacobs is one of six members of the organizing committee for the Progressive Religious Partnership. "Sexual justice is part of the thread that runs through all of these issues, and all are part of the progressive agenda for America."

The fledgling organization, two years in the making, "is clergy-oriented, but it's not a hierarchy," said Jacobs. Many of the names are familiar ones in social-activist circles: Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, Carton Veazy of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Timothy McDonald of the African American Ministers Leadership Conference, President John Buehrens of the Unitarian Universalist Association and President Joe Hough of Union Theological Seminary were on hand at the conference, as well as Catholic Sisters Joan Chittister and Maureen Fiedler and Rabbis David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center and Arthur Waskow of Shalom Center.

Leaders of the partnership want to create a grass-roots organization, with regional chapters. "There are so many pastors and rabbis who want to deliver a prophetic message and come up with progressive programs, but it is lonely out there," Jacobs said. The postconferenee challenge is to deliver support for clergy who risk alienation in their congregations, said the rabbi, who conceded that not everyone in his 600-family synagogue is happy with his social stances and his appearances with Jesse Jackson.

The Progressive Religious Partnership has created a Web site (www.religiousprogressives.org) to disseminate information and aid with organizing. Organizers plan to draw on the services of politically active young adults, and the "old lions" of the civil rights movement such as James Lawson of Los Angeles, a veteran of the civil rights protests in the South.