What I mean by reclaiming faith may not mean exactly what everyone means by it, but when those of us who started this venture talked about it, we generally meant that the religious right has managed to define themselves as necessarily representing faith in general or Christianity in particular and that this needs to be addressed.

While common sense would tell us that that the religious right does not, and should not be seen as having a corner on the definition of faith, or religious truths, there have  certainly been a variety of concerted efforts by the various elements of the religious right to establish that as a popular perception and the media have all too often cooperated in this.

In reclaiming faith we are necessarily defending democratic pluralism, which as Madison and Jefferson would certainly have it, means the right to believe as you will, and to change your mind, without undue influence from the state or from powerful religious institutions. In their time, "church" was the only type of powerful religious institution that mattered, but today it is certainly not the only one.

Those who understand and support this idea, come from a wide variety of religious and non-religious traditions. But what we all face is a certain balkanization among these traditions and among single issue interest groups that benefit from democratic pluralism and such related ideas as individual conscience and separation of church and state. The balkanization is defined and enforced by parochialisms such that many can barely even speak with one another, let alone arrive at anything much in the way of a sufficiently common base of knowledge about the religious right, or a sufficiently common set of terms with which to discuss it.  

We see this, for example, in the matter of IRD and the attacks on the mainline churches. For a generation the mainline churches have not done well in contending with this. There was and is, a great deal of denial and confusion. Mainline leaders have mostly failed to speak out; little effort has been made to study and to understand the attacks from an integrated perspective (let alone respond to them effectively; and the media have generally done an exceptionally poor job of reporting the story(s). Non-religious groups have generally failed to see how the unermining of these institutions are a threat to their own freedoms, since these churches are allies in the preservation of the culture, politics and constitutional doctrines related to separation of church and state, and to a considerable degree on reprodutive rights and even gay rights. Fortunately, all this is changing, and I'd like to think that Talk to Action has played a catalytic role, although certainly not the only one.

Thus reclaiming faith also means cutting the gordion knot of our current intellectual and gridlock on these matters. While its fine that liberal christians are getting their voices and perspectives heard more often these days, that is not the main point here; we mean reclaiming more in the sense of appreciating and learning to better articulate the right of individual conscience in our history; culture; legal system, and so on explicitly in response to the religious right and its various initiatives. Part of that, means learning to respect the rights of others, and to see how all of us who support democratic pluralism are in the same boat, politically speaking.  I was impressed in reading historians Frank Lambert and Issac Kramnick about the clear alliances between free thinkers and conservative evangelicals in the run-up to the framing and ratification of the constitution. I think such alliances are needed as much now as they were then.

For our purposes then, we wish to reflect the mutual respect that must occur in all meaningful alliances, at least those in which important conversations can take place. I would like to see us learn to do that well enough that we model it effectively, although I realize it will take a lot of people being on board with that aspect to make it real, and I think we are some distance from that.

Many on the religious right would indeed, as you say, argue that they are acting on their right of individual conscience, and in many instances I would agree. They have every right to participate in public life under the same rules as everyone else. Some on the religious right,however, think that the right of individual conscience is bogus, something to be attacked, undermined, and overturned. Sorting these things out is something we do a lot of around here.

Reframing the reclaiming of faith in ways that tap into our common values and concerns in powerful ways is very much one of the tasks and goals of this site.


by Frederick Clarkson on Sun Sep 02, 2007 at 07:21:23 PM EST
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