DOING THE LORD'S WORK

...And sex—meaning the confluence of feminism and the various "lifestyle," "family values," or, in the more neutral formulation, "cultural" issues—is unavoidably part of the political agenda...

...The column did note the existence of consensus on gay human-rights issues in the political arena, and promised to be more vocal in expressing those convictions...

...only later, and often haltingly, do they proceed toward social analysis...

...And a growing number, like author-activist Arthur Was-kow, are also reaching back to renew a living personal and communal connection to the religious sources of the Jewish progressive tradition...

...With considerable eloquence, McAllister expressed her conviction that the actions which led her to prison were of a piece with her opposition to abortion...

...However, many of the religious leftists who hold such reservations regard them as matters of private religious conviction and support gay-rights initiatives in the public realm...

...They are also more likely to take on such a deeply unpopular but undeniably crucial moral issue as the death penalty...

...It was begun almost three years ago as "a liberal/progressive alternative to Commentary and the voices of Jewish conservatism" and, according to Editor Michael Lerner, now has a circulation as large as Commentary's...

...But there is something approaching an identifiable and relatively consistent stance for the religious Left...

...The core perspective of religious activists tends to be politically radical but theologically moderate...

...They can also, at worst, sound like a more concentrated version of good old-fashioned liberal guilt, albeit accompanied by more genuine, and often substantial, repentance...

...He is now a monthly columnist and contributing editor for that magazine and a freelance writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...On Central America, the impact of the religious Left is even more profound...

...That shared faith can create natural bridges between mostly white "peace-and-justice" activists and their minority co-religionists...

...Those values should include the importance of private covenant relationships as the building blocks and glue of the larger public community, and recognition of the raising of children as a valued vocation for men and women and as a matter of communal and social responsibility...

...In the early 1980s, many religious activists were new to political organizing and action...

...Feminism, per se, is rarely disputed among religious leftists...

...Where secular-religious conflict has occurred, it has often been simply a matter of people coming together from different worlds with little knowledge of the others' milieu...

...They part company with the view that homosexuality is a valid expression of human sexuality on a par with the traditional religious ideal of heterosexual marriage...

...They generally do it with bold and well-timed acts of moral witness intended to jar the larger society to attention...

...The results of activism by the religious Left are most clearly visible in regard to two critical issues, homelessness and Central America...

...But such quibbles aside, in the last decade the strongest and fastest growing current on the American Left—or whatever it is America has instead of a Left—has clearly been among those who ground their politics on the teaching and practice of Judaeo-Christian faith...

...If anything, discomfort with patriotic sentiment is higher there than elsewhere on the Left...

...That's not to say that sexism is not present on the religious Left, only that it is not uniquely so...

...Religious leftists, or leftists of religious inspiration, can be found scattered across, or leaping about, the entire spectrum of dissident opinion and action...

...The religious Left, like the broader peace movement, is primarily a white, middle-class phenomenon...

...Some came to activism through church-based activities where the use of specifically Christian symbols and language was a given, so they had difficulty subordinating those deeply felt impulses within broader coalitions...

...They have enDanny Duncan Collum was, from 1980 to 1988, an associate editor of Sojourners...

...Even the most savvy and media-wise of religious activists often see their actions as those of a "prophetic minority" rather than a potential American majority...

...Most of what I've described so far as the religious Left is, in fact, an ecumenical Christian Left...

...As the Reagan climate of militant conservatism seeped into other institutions—the media, the academy, the unions, the Democratic Party—the churches and religious communities often found themselves at the moral epicenter of opposition...

...My friend said he had no answer, at least none which fit his interlocutor's categories...

...Others fear the consequences for women of a legal ban on abortion in the current political and cultural climate, and prefer the long-range path of discouraging abortion by building up the social and economic infrastructure of alternatives...

...Finally, the questioner said, "Oh, but you're religious, right...

...We've just witnessed a Presidential election in which the Democratic nominee was seriously damaged by his unwillingness or inability to cope convincingly with the complex of cultural issues which Catholic author Joe Holland has neatly identified as the trinity of "Flag, Family, and Faith...

...This wouldn't be the case if such discussions resulted in capitulation to patriarchal and intolerant traditions...

...Such visions are inevitably rooted in the best of a people's cultural traditions, and in America those traditions are in large part religious—from John Winthrop's "city on a hill" to Martin Luther King's dream...

...A few years ago, while discussing the difficulties facing the Administration's Nicaragua policy, Buchanan gave first place to "the effective lobbying of the churches...

...The religious left is of little help on the "flag" part of the equation...

...In New York late in December, Tikkun assembled a virtual Who's Who of American Jewish writers, artists, and thinkers for a major national conference aimed at reconstituting their progressive tradition...

...Tikkun's religious stance is a matter of "a general approach to the world" that recognizes the importance of people's "legitimate psychological, spiritual, and ethical needs," Lerner says, and he criticizes the Left for its attachment to "an analysis which sees the world entirely in terms of economic needs and political rights...

...There the tension was heightened by the Catholic Worker's precedent, established by founder Dorothy Day, of strict allegiance to church teachings on questions of personal faith and morals...

...What leftists, religious and secular, need to reach for these days is a nonsectarian moral vision upon which to reconstruct American life...

...This perspective often appears under the label of pro-life feminism...

...A certain amount of tension may be inevitable when two of the taboos of polite conversation, religion and politics, are breeched simultaneously...

...My friend confessed to his Christianity, and his co-worker informed him, "Well then, that's what you have instead of politics...

...And some secular activists have had bad experiences with churches or church people...

...In the spring of 1985, Sojourners magazine published a lengthy book excerpt on human sexuality by the popular Protestant author and theologian Richard Foster...

...Catholic bishops, the lobbying of other denominations, persistent direct action and civil disobedience at the grass roots (much of it initiated by religiously based organizations), and the powerful witness of the Sanctuary Movement, which attained widespread, mainstream recognition and respect during the Reagan years...

...There are religious-based pro-choice organizations, and in the absence of any specific condemnation of abortion in scripture, most prominent feminist Christian theologians make the case for it on the grounds that it enhances women's ability to shape their own destiny...

...Most religious activists can legitimately claim to be within one of the historic Judaeo-Christian traditions, if sometimes tenuously and contentiously so...

...What's needed is not a reversion to Nineteenth Century values or worse, but an effort to generate mutual respect among people who may currently hold radically polarized views...

...Such passionate appeals to social conscience cut through the fog of abstractions surrounding life-or-death issues like world hunger or the contra war...

...He is a member of an Orthodox congregation, but he identifies some of Tikkun's contributors as "militantly atheist...

...Since the political instincts of religious activists are rooted in ancient traditions, they tend to display more cultural conservatism than is to be found in the Left at large...

...The controversy ended with Scherer's resignation...

...In most such situations, people have learned about each other with the passage of time, and often they have gained some respect for the other's perspective...

...Prophetic minorities don't make social change through the gradual, step-by-step organizing of neglected constituencies...

...they have either reconsidered or moved on to more secular pastures...

...In the 1980s, something similar began happening in the United States...

...It admitted that the magazine had no consensus within its own ranks on the moral and theological questions surrounding homosexuality, and it vowed public silence on those questions, pending further clarification of thought...

...Increasingly, Jewish leftists are setting out to reclaim Jewish politics and tradition from a media-generated neo-conservative hegemony...

...In such countries as Poland and Chile, during times of political and cultural clampdown, dissident voices and movements find their only shelter in the churches...

...But they still inhabit separate worlds...

...As religious and secular radicals have increasingly found themselves joined in coalitions, conflicts have sometimes arisen over questions of style, tactics, rhetoric, and—less frequently—political substance...

...Their old habit of considering religious belief as an automatically reactionary phenomenon is not completely behind us, either...

...Many of those, myself included, whose political commitments are somehow inspired by religious faith might quibble with that "instead of...

...Within such an atmosphere of respect, we could perhaps begin to grope for a common ground of affirmative values, at least as the basis for debate...

...Abortion and gay rights are sources of division and debate within the religious Left itself...

...For Christian activists, this allegiance is in direct obedience to Jesus' injunction that whatever is done for, or to, the "least of these"—the hungry, homeless, and imprisoned—is done for, or to, Christ himself...

...When you add the third taboo, sex, relations can become even more difficult...

...Eventually, the editors of Sojourners published a one-page column noting the concern of readers and briefly describing the intramural discussions the article had prompted...

...In many cities, efforts that began with simple acts of compassion led eventually to campaigns for "right-to-shelter" initiatives, antidisplacement laws, and a renewed government commitment to affordable housing...

...DOING the Lord's WORK BY DANNY DUNCAN COLLUM Several years ago, a friend who worked at one of the more prominent progressive lobbies on Capitol Hill told me that a co-worker had asked him, in a friendly fashion, to describe his politics...

...Homelessness has come to the fore in the consciousness of Americans mostly because of the witness, service, action, and hell-raising of religious people...

...But on the issues which touch people's feelings about personal moral values and the primacy of the traditional family, the discussions among religious activists, painful as they may sometimes be, could ultimately be good for the whole progressive movement...

...These days, it is often heard in the statements and programs drafted by the national offices of the mainline Protestant churches, and from a substantial number of the Roman Catholic bishops...

...This trend has been confirmed by no less an authority than Patrick Buchanan, the former director of communications for the Reagan White House...

...They tend to know more about the lives of Central American peasants than about the shrinking income and growing burdens of the two-job family in suburban North America...

...Because of this moral and theological inclination, religious activists tend to be drawn to situations remote from the experience of most Americans...

...Lerner sees Tikkun as a broad umbrella for liberal and progressive Jewish thought, "emanating from a religious perspective but not restricted to that...

...It is no overstatement to say that the United States has been kept out of overt, aggressive warfare in the region by the strong opposition of the U.S...

...However, the religious Left breaks with the bulk of organized feminism on the question of abortion...

...If these issues are controversial among religious people, they are also a persistent problem for progressive politics in America at large...

...But in the past eight years the issue has been taken up by tens of thousands of churches, synagogues, and religious communities across America...

...Was he a Marxist, neo-Marxist, anti-imperialist, democratic socialist, or what...

...But in the 1980s we have also seen a remarkable revival of specifically Jewish activism, an inevitably different but equally important part of the relationship between religious tradition and progressive politics...

...The political views of today's religious activists tend to rise from moral and scriptural imperatives...

...Few Biblical literalists are to be found among them, but there are also few of those who, in the 1960s, proclaimed the death of God...

...The most obvious sign of a reinvigo-rated and self-consciously Jewish Left is the remarkable success of Tikkun, a magazine published in Oakland, California, which bills itself as "a bimonthly Jewish critique of politics, culture, and society...

...A year later, the New York Catholic Worker, in many ways the historic mother church of the religious Left, was fraught with similar divisions over homosexuality...

...It can be seen in phenomena ranging from the growth of fundamentalist religion among working people to the popularity of New Age notions and nostrums among baby boomers of the "new class...

...The mainstream of the religious Left has largely adopted feminist issues and analysis as a contemporary extension of the Spirit embodied in the Exodus and in the radical egalitari-anism of the early church...

...Many pro-life religious leftists support the anti-abortion legislation that comes before Congress each year...

...Some at the Worker, including the paper's then-editor Peggy Scherer, believed that gay rights was an issue on which the church needed to be pushed...

...In 1984, when Catholics for Choice published its initial New York Times advertisement calling for the recognition of diverse views on abortion among Catholics, Liz McAllister of Jonah House, then serving a long prison term for an anti-nuclear action, wrote a lengthy reply that was published in National Catholic Reporter...

...It echoes through the pages of such publications as Sojourners, The National Catholic Reporter, The Other Side, the various Catholic Worker papers, and scores of regional and denominational caucus newsletters...

...Religious activists tend to be more interested in the homeless than in displaced industrial workers...

...Religious activists often emphasize the obvious disparities and subtler causal links between the relative comfort of most Americans and the suffering of domestic minorities and the poor in the Third World...

...Those values should also include the importance of diversity, as a good in and of itself, in the ways people live out their lives in private community...

...Moral witness in this context means frequent recourse to Gandhian nonviolent tactics-fasts, prayer vigils, and, above all, civil disobedience...

...It's also in line with the Biblically rooted insight of liberation theologians that the God of Jewish and Christian scripture is uniquely partial to the cause of the poor and oppressed...

...There is ample evidence today of that reaching toward transcendent purpose...

...The result was a torrential outpouring of negative mail and considerable controversy within the magazine and its organization...

...The admittedly limited success of the religious Left in this decade offers some hope that the thirst for transcendence can also be one of the engines for progressive social change...

...The black churches are the heart and soul of black politics, and Hispanic movements are often deeply rooted in Catholicism...

...In one section of that article, the author expressed the view that homosexual practice could not be fully accepted by the Christian churches...

...The exchange that followed in National Catholic Reporter's letters and op-ed columns was an instructive primer in the conflicting impulses abortion raises, even within the church most clearly identified with its prohibition...

...And in most American cities today, agitation for affordable housing leads to a head-on collision with some of the most rampant forces of late American capitalism—real-estate speculators and developers...

...ergized the Left in this country to an extent that it has not been energized since Vietnam...

...As a result, the religious Left's agenda usually responds to the most morally outrageous or emotionally rending of social wrongs, rather than to the calculation of "winnable" issues...

...The first to prominently take up the cause of the homeless were religious communities allied with the Catholic Worker tradition, especially Washington's Community for Creative Nonviolence...

...It's also called, in a phrase originating with Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, the "seam-less-garment-of-life" approach, the metaphor being intended to indicate a consistent pro-life stance that opposes abortion, the death penalty, war, hunger, and economic exploitation...

...The question of homosexuality is similarly troublesome for some religious leftists...

...The prophetic minority allies itself with those who are most starkly victimized, suffering, or oppressed...