{"id":9904,"date":"2020-10-22T12:27:59","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T12:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.incirliseviye.com\/?p=9904"},"modified":"2020-10-22T12:27:59","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T12:27:59","slug":"u-s-religious-progressivism-way-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/?p=9904","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Religious Progressivism \u201cWay of the Future\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The future of religion in U.S. politics lies not with conservatives but rather with religious progressives, social scientists here are suggesting, with a faith-based movement potentially able to provide momentum to a new movement for social justice.<\/p>\n

According to a new report from the Brookings Institute, a think tank here, the current religious social justice movement can be compared to the period of civil rights activism in the mid-20th century.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere really is an opening now for a religious movement for social justice that is similar in many ways to the civil rights movement. We see it around issues of minimum wage, budget cuts, and immigration,\u201d E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report, told IPS.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn social justice issues, religion has long been a progressive force, and Pope Francis is challenging people\u2019s assumptions that religion is an automatically conservative force \u2026 After years of paying lots of attention to religious conservatives, religion by no means lives on the right.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United States has a strong history of religious groups in social justice movements, including in pushing for the abolition of slavery and the institutionalization of civil rights, as well as the social welfare programs put in place a half-century ago. Yet today, religion and progressivism are often seen as being at odds.<\/p>\n

According to the report, for instance, just 47 percent of white Evangelicals in the United States think government needs to do more to reduce the gap between rich and poor. On the contrary, 85 percent of Democrats hold this belief.<\/p>\n

This schism underscores two trends that have defined the U.S. religious landscape over the past two decades: a decline in those who regularly attend religious services, and a rise in the conservative \u201creligious right\u201d.<\/p>\n

According to the report, these trends are interrelated, as \u201cmany young Americans were not turned off by faith itself but by the rightward trend they perceive among leaders. To young adults \u2026 \u2018religion\u2019 means \u2018Republican,\u2019 \u2018intolerant,\u2019 and \u2018homophobic.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet despite these trends of growing secularization, Dionne said, \u201ca religious voice will remain essential to movements on behalf of the poor and the marginalized and also on behalf of the middle-class Americans who are under increasing pressure at a time of inequality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further, demographics indicate that this religious voice will not be from the conservative wing, Dionne suggests. During the last presidential election here, in 2012, the ages of the religious coalitions that voted for President Barack Obama versus his Republican rival, Mitt Romney were starkly different.<\/p>\n

Of those who considered themselves actively religious, Romney voters were primarily elderly, while Obama\u2019s supporters skewed far younger. \u201cWhat\u2019s clear,\u201d the report suggests, \u201cis that the religious right is not the way of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The Brookings researchers acknowledge steep challenges facing any incipient religious movement in the U.S. for social justice.<\/p>\n

A primary challenge is congregational decline. In 1958, about 49 percent of Americans attended church services weekly, while today that number is down to about 18 percent.<\/p>\n

This decline naturally decreases the coalition size and donor base available for grassroots work. In addition, this has often been accompanied by a decreased respect for religious groups, exacerbating divides between those who consider themselves religious versus secular.<\/p>\n

Tensions also exist when religious groups try to engage in political issues without using morally ambiguous political methods. For example, many religious progressive leaders want to abstain from the \u201cquid pro quo\u201d nature of political deal-making.<\/p>\n

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Ideological divides within religious communities can threaten the work of social justice advocates, especially opposition from single-issue groups.<\/p>\n

For example, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), which supports a spectrum of faith-based grassroots organizations, provided over nine million dollars in grants to over 214 groups last year. However, after Catholic anti-abortion groups pushed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to strictly regulate donations from Catholic coalitions, some CCHD grants were cut \u2013 even if the projects had only tangential connections to abortion or same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n

Still, many groups have overcome such challenges.<\/p>\n

Prominent examples in this regard include Circle of Protection, an alliance of Christian leaders who have banded together to try to protect pro-poor government programs from budget cuts. Likewise, Nuns on the Bus, a group of Catholic nuns who travel the country lobbying for social justice reforms, played a role in the 2012 elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the reasons religious voices are so important now is that, especially with the weakening of the labor movement, the churches are the only mass organization representing many, many poor people,\u201d said Dionne.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome research we did showed that, for example, in neighborhood community development, the pastors are the only people who could get the attention of the banks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report notes that these religious progressive groups are very active and often successful, but lack the fanfare that can receive broad public attention.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Another U.S. group, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), has focused on trying to influence corporate decision-making, both domestically and internationally, from an interfaith perspective for nearly a half-century.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrankly, those who are ideologically or politically divided can learn something from ICCR,\u201d Laura Berry, the group\u2019s executive director, told IPS. \u201cThere are some areas where the right and the left agree, after all, and finding those places to build coalitions are wonderful opportunities to reverse trends in inequality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berry highlighted ICCR\u2019s work following last year\u2019s collapse of Rana Plaza, the Bangladeshi garment factory that killed more than 1100 people. Since then, ICCR has led a coalition representing over 4.1 trillion dollars in managed assets, pushing over 160 companies to have their overseas factories inspected, to hire and train labor inspectors, and to adopt improved worker safety standards.<\/p>\n

According to Berry, ICCR\u2019s own experience elucidates several of the trends indicated by the Brookings report.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve become increasingly driven by a broader coalition that includes increasingly secular progressive voices,\u201d she says. \u201cFirst we were only religious. But now we include more secular members, like labor unions and asset managers.\u201d<\/p>\n

ICCR is also facing many of the challenges outlined in the Brookings report, Berry says, particularly over ideological divides. Yet she notes that important areas of overlap and opportunity continue to arise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are positive signs of improved coalition-building in human rights, like human trafficking, among Evangelicals and progressive Christians,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to let the ideological divide in the broad Christian community prevent us from talking about inequality \u2026 And we\u2019re starting to see some leaders like Pope Francis who are saying things out loud, and people are asking, \u2018Is that progressive? Is that conservative?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a9 2014 Inter Press Service<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The future of religion in U.S. politics lies not with conservatives but rather with religious progressives, social scientists here are suggesting, with a faith-based movement potentially able to provide momentum to a new movement for social justice. According to a new report from the Brookings Institute, a think tank here, the current religious social justice … <\/p>\n

Read more “U.S. Religious Progressivism \u201cWay of the Future\u201d”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onhee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}