Over the past few weeks, there has been a quiet but significant battle raging between religious progressives and and a coalition of evangelicals and centrists over who represents the real religious progressive voice in American politics. I don't want to delve too far into it, but I thought I'd do a brief blow-by-blow summary for anyone who's interested.
- On Jan. 15, Third Way and Faith in Public Life released "Come Let Us Reason Together", a policy platform signed by a variety of religious leaders, purporting to be a "compromise" between religious progressives and evangelicals. The substance of the compromise was much of what we've seen before: reducing abortions and ending job discrimination against gays, and little else.
- That document drew a number of stinging critiques from religious progressives, including one by Rev. Osagyefou Sekou which called the document nothing more than "the continued blessing of the religious right’s cultural politics", and another by Rev. Deb Haffner, who said that the document's billing was false advertising, citing the under-representation of progressive viewpoints among the document's authors.
- Robert Jones, one of the principal authors of the document, responded in kind, claiming that the authors of Dispatches from the Religious Left were being shrill and uncivil.
- This week, Pastor Dan and Fred Clarkson teamed up to respond to Jones. Pastor Dan's essay defends ideological differences for their own sake, arguing that sometimes debate and political wrangling reflect honest disagreements over values and economic priorities. Clarkson's essay defends the Dispatches contributors and points out that real progress can't be accomplished by a group of people bloviating about platforms anyway; organizing is the key to real progressive change.
