[Mb-civic] The Left Hand of God By Michael Lerner, AlterNet

Fri Feb 10 12:11:15 PST 2006

AlterNet
Excerpt: The Left Hand of God
By Michael Lerner, AlterNet
Posted on February 10, 2006, Printed on February 10, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/32037/

Editor's Note:The following is excerpted from The Left Hand of God: Taking
Our Country Back From the Religious Right, by Michael Lerner
(HarperSanFrancisco, Feb, 2006).

The unholy alliance of the political Right and Religious Right threatens to
destroy the America we love. It also threatens to generate a popular
revulsion against God and religion by identifying them with militarism,
ecological irresponsibility, fundamentalist antagonism to science and
rational thought, and insensitivity to the needs of the poor and the
powerless.

By addressing the real spiritual and moral crisis in the daily lives of most
Americans, a movement with a progressive spiritual vision would provide an
alternate solution to both the intolerant and militarist politics of the
Right and the current misguided, visionless, and often spiritually empty
politics of the Left.

People feel a near-desperate desire to reconnect to the sacred, to find some
way to unite their lives with a higher meaning and purpose and in particular
to that aspect of the sacred that is built upon the loving, kind, and
generous energy in the universe that I describe as the "Left Hand of God."

By contrast, the "Right Hand of God," sees the universe as a fundamentally
scary place filled with evil forces. In this view God is the avenger, the
big man in heaven who can be invoked to use violence to overcome those evil
forces, either right now or in some future ultimate reckoning. Seen through
the frame of the Right Hand of God, the world is filled with constant
dangers and the rational way to live is to dominate and control others
before they dominate and control us.

It is the search for meaning in a despiritualized world that leads many
people to right-wing religious communities because these groups seem to be
in touch with the sacred dimension of life. Many secularists imagine that
people drawn to the Right are there solely because of some ethical or
psychological malfunction. What they miss is that there are many very decent
Americans who get attracted to the Religious Right because it is the only
voice that they encounter that is willing to challenge the
despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is driven by
higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of supportive
community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation and
spiritual loneliness.

Many Americans have a powerful desire for loving connection, kindness,
generosity, awe and wonder, and joyous celebration of the universe. These
desires are frustrated by the way we organize our society today. A
progessive movement or a Democratic Party that speaks to these desires in a
genuine and spiritually deep way could win the popular support it needs to
create a world of peace, social justice, ecological sanity, and human
rights.

As I watch the likely Democratic Party candidates for president in 2008
scramble to position themselves as mainstream, I am all too aware that
taking this kind of spiritual politics seriously is going to require a huge
leap for many of us. Some Democrats think that they don't need these changes
to win power, and they may be right in the short run. The current implosion
of the Bush administration as it wallows in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, a failing war in Iraq, and scandal and indictments at the highest
levels of government, may be enough to provide Democrats with election
victories in 2006 and 2008 (though Republican redistricting is likely to
dampen the chance for a Democratic landslide in 2006, and electoral fraud
has increasingly characterized American national elections where so much is
at stake).

But Democrats have won elections, even the presidency, before--and yet the
movement of intellectual and political energy keeps on sliding to the Right,
and so Democrats in office often end up acting from the assumptions of the
Right in order to show that they are "realistic" and "non-ideological."

Nothing has been more dispiriting than to watch years in which Congressional
Democrats continued to vote for tens of billions of dollars to fund the war
in Iraq even after learning that the country had been lied to and
manipulated into that war. Even after conservative Democratic congressman
John Murtha called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq within six months in
November 2005, the Democrats were unable to firmly endorse that courageous
call.

Without a larger spiritual vision, the Democrats too often develop their
programs by poll data, reacting rather than leading. They may eventually
oppose a specific war, but they are afraid to oppose war. They throw money
to alleviate suffering from some particularly terrible social injustice, but
they are afraid to envision and fight for an end to all social injustice.

Let me reassure you that the spiritual vision I present is not an attempt to
recruit you to some particular religious community or spiritual trip. You do
not have to become religious to embrace a spiritual politics or to learn
from the wisdom of various spiritual practices.

I do not blame many secularists who resent the way that some in the
Religious Right seek to shove a fundamentalist and intolerant religion down
our throats. Almost every religion, like almost every political and
intellectual movement, has people of that sort, and holy texts (both
religious and secular) have voices that validate an oppressive, dominating,
fearful way of seeing. Yet in most religions (just as in many secular social
change movements and liberation ideologies) there are also voices of the
Left Hand of God, voices that embrace compassion, love, generosity of
spirit, kindness, peace, social justice, environmental sanity, and
nonviolence.

This political Right achieved power by forging an alliance with a Religious
Right that is willing to provide a sanctimonious religious veneer to the
selfishness and materialism of the political Right in exchange for the
political power it needs to impose parts of its religious agenda on America.
Capitalizing on a very real and deep spiritual crisis engendered by living
in a society that teaches "looking out for number one" as its highest value,
the Religious Right has managed to mobilize tens of millions of people to
vote for candidates who end up supporting the very economic arrangements and
political ideas responsible for creating the spiritual crisis in the first
place.

With this alliance now propelling them into control of Congress, the
presidency, and the judiciary, they have launched a cultural crusade against
liberals, secularists, activist judges, homosexuals, feminists, and anyone
who still believes in peace and social justice. The country received its
strongest alert to the nature of the assault on the American tradition of
religious tolerance when, in the spring of 2005, the Right began to talk
openly about impeaching from the judiciary "activist judges" who were
imposing "secular values" on the country, then managed to torpedo Bush's
nominee to the Supreme Court (Harriet Miers) and encouraged him to appoint
Samuel Alito, a sophisticated conservative ideologue.

Although I do not share the goals of many leaders of the Religious
Right--and in fact believe that they pose a huge danger to American
society--I must admit some appreciation for their willingness to state their
objectives clearly and honestly, a refreshing change from the diet of mush
that often emerges from the Democratic Party. Paul Weyrich, one of the
Right's most serious strategists, said it clearly in 1980: "We are talking
about Christianizing America. We are talking about simply spreading the
gospel in a political context." I was invited that same year to debate
Weyrich at the Moral Majority's annual Family Forum and found him a powerful
advocate for a frightening worldview that I hoped would remain marginal in
America. But twenty-five years later, having followed the advice of Jerry
Falwell, who famously said, "Get them saved, get them baptized, and get them
registered," the Christian Right is now carrying out its agenda.

It is perfectly legitimate to be alarmed at the growing power of those on
the Right and the way they use it, to challenge their ideas forcefully, and
to warn of the dangers should they succeed in their stated intentions. I
will certainly do everything I can to prevent them from popularizing the
notion that people have to be religious or believe in God to be moral and to
challenge their particular understanding of what God wants of us.

What I will not do, and what I urge my friends in liberal and progressive
movements not to do, is attribute evil motives to those on the Religious
Right or to view them as cynical manipulators solely interested in power and
self-aggrandizement. The Religious Right certainly has its share of power
mongers and hypocrites. But the vast majority of those involved are people
who are driven by principles and who want what is best for the world. We can
strongly disagree with those principles, as I do, and we can argue, as I
will, that they lead in a very dangerous direction, one that would actually
increase the pain and suffering of humanity. But I do not doubt the
sincerity or basic goodness of most of those who are involved.

So where are the Democrats, the liberals, and the progressive forces that
have traditionally been able to provide a counterweight to corporate
selfishness and have fought for separation of church and state?

For much of the past thirty years the Democrats have been more interested in
showing how similar they are to the Right than how different. Faced with
both a corporate takeover of the media that increasingly portrays liberal
and progressive ideas as some form of extremism or "class warfare" and with
a Religious Right that has managed to put secular people on the defensive,
the Democratic Party and much of the liberal and progressive world (which
for convenience I'll call the Left)* has contented itself with mild reforms.
It tinkers with narrow policy goals instead of promoting an alternative
vision and alternative values to those of the Right. Fearful of political
isolation, Democrats listen to the wisdom preached by the media and by a
bevy of corporate-friendly professional consultants who tell them to be
"realistic" by accepting the contours of politics as defined by the Right.
And the more they do so, the less anyone else sees these Democrats as a
viable alternative. Democratic voters lose their enthusiasm. They go to the
polls grudgingly, not because they believe that the Democrats have any
solutions but rather to stave off the even worse consequences of Republican
dominance. Many do not even bother voting, and millions of others look for
vision elsewhere--and find it in the Religious Right.

Others take the approach of the "let's-move-further-to-the-left" section of
the Left, insisting that the old formulas of the really radical Left, mixed
with a repackaging of identity politics and presented as economic populism,
would provide the magic formula, if only those Democrats would listen! But
meanwhile, they can't explain why their candidates, running in Democratic
primaries or as Greens, rarely manage to get significant support from
American voters. But the "let's-get-closer-to-the-middle-of-the-road" mavens
of Democratic leadership face that same challenge, since they've also tried
the "let's-be-softer-and-gentler-born-again Republicans" strategy, and it
too has failed.

We need to look deeper.

Liberals and progressives sometimes like to make fun of the Right by
pointing out that it is precisely in the Red states of the Republican
majority where abortions are most prevalent, where divorce is most rampant,
where the power of corporate selfishness is most unrestrained by laws, where
the malls have done most to uproot small businesses, and where materialism
on the whole seems to be having its greatest field day. The same is true for
many of the enclaves of Red-state consciousness in Blue states, such as the
gated communities and mostly white valleys of Southern California or the
suburban areas of many other Blue states. But that, of course, is just the
point. It is precisely because people in the Red states are suffering most
from the epidemic of uncontrolled me-firstism that so many residents of
those states are so desperate to find a counterforce. They are the most
susceptible to the appeals of a Religious Right that has become a champion
for family values, tradition, the stability that is offered by authoritarian
and patriarchal norms, and the real comfort that spiritual life offers
through connection to something higher than money.

The point is that there is a real spiritual crisis in American society, and
the Religious Right has managed to position itself as the articulator of the
pain that crisis causes and as the caring force that will provide a
spiritual solution. And then it takes the credibility that it has won in
this way and associates itself with a political Right that is actually
championing the very institutions and social arrangements that caused this
problem in the first place. And with the power that each of these has gained
by their alliance, they have become ever more arrogant in trying to impose
their worldview on everyone else in society. Their alliance threatens to
destroy the fragile balance between secular and religious people and to move
the United States toward the very kind of theocracy that people originally
came to this country to escape.

So, how could this happen?

It has happened because the political Left doesn't really have a clue about
the spiritual crisis in American society and is thus unable to address it in
any persuasive way. Witnessing the country give electoral victories to the
Right, those on the Left are totally confused about why it's happening. They
earnestly study poll data and then reposition themselves in ways that will
not put them too far beyond where they imagine popular opinion is moving. It
never occurs to them to be the shapers of this social energy instead of
merely the responders. For much of the past twenty-five years, since the
early days of the Reagan administration, the Democrats have explained their
electoral losses by claiming that the country is just in a "conservative
period," as though the political climate had fallen mysteriously from heaven
and had nothing to do with the way liberals failed to develop mass support
for a progressive worldview when they held political power. In this book I
will provide you with an explanation of why we got into a conservative
period and how that can be changed.

After the 2004 elections many Democrats read the exit-poll data and realized
that some voters were motivated by "values." Since then the Democrats have
been frantically looking for a magic bullet to win back the "values voters."
But mostly their discussion has been about hype, not about substance.

If we, the American people, are going to win back our country from the
Religious Right, we are going to have to reshape the Democratic Party and
the Greens, or create some other party, to come to grips with the depth of
alienation from liberal politics among the many people who continue to vote,
unenthusiastically, for the Democrats as the only way to stop the Right.

A reshaped Democratic Party, or a new party, must minimally:

    * Understand, acknowledge, and respond to the spiritual crisis in
American society--and provide a progressive spiritual vision that is more
attractive than the one currently offered by the Right.
    * Recognize that people hunger for a world that has meaning and love;
for a sense of aliveness, energy, and authenticity; for a life embedded in a
community in which they are valued
    * Reject the tendency to regard people who are not part of the liberal
culture as stupid, demented, or evil.
    * Fight for ideals that are not yet popular and be willing to stand for
those ideals even if that means temporarily losing some elections.
    * Unite secular people in a movement with "spiritual but not religious"
people and join both of those groups with progressive religious people.
    * Reject and combat the religion phobia that dominates important sectors
of liberal and progressive culture.

Only a political party that can incorporate these goals at the center of its
agenda can hope to win a majority, which would allow it to implement the
other peace, justice, and ecological goals of the liberal and progressive
agenda. For many Americans, meaning needs are the most pressing issues in
their lives. This hunger for meaning, mutual recognition, and a spiritual
foundation for their lives--for a sense of aliveness to counter the
emotional and spiritual deadness that people experience in work and on
television--is just as significant as the hunger for material well-being.
Hence these are not issues that can be addressed "later," after all the
peace and justice and ecological issues have been solved. These needs lie at
the center of many Americans' lives, and unless we address them powerfully
and convincingly, the Democrats and the Left will continue to lose power.