I participated in a fascinating press conference on Tuesday, organized by Faith in Public Life (FPL) to promote a campaign in which “local pastors are taking to the airwaves in five key states over the Independence Day Congressional recess, urging their Senators to support health care reform.” If you are Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, or North Carolina you may hear ads on Christian and mainstream radio featuring local pastors from each state asking their Senators to support reform.

This is great. The progressive religious folks are stepping up to argue for affordable health care for all. But I wish they would read Michael Lerner’s editorial on health care in our current Tikkun: now that’s prophetic. I was not surprised that the FPL group, including the fine activists at PICO, were holding off going for the boldest option, the one that most universal health care advocates, including Obama himself, think would be ideal: single payer. It does save the most money, and give everyone the most choice. But the consensus, led by Obama himself and shared by his party, is that “we are not ready for it yet.” OK, so the thing Obama is pushing for is the “public option” in which a government insurance scheme of some kind is offered as an alternative alongside the commercial ones. The jargon and options are all explained in the current Tikkun by Dr. Aaron Roland here. But the FPL / PICO group are not pushing explicitly for a public option either. They have decided to emphasize the goal, affordable health care for all, but not the means.

The pastors at the press conference had good statements, which most of them appeared to be reading out carefully, but I confess I longed for the ringing tones of a Martin Luther King. So after the big papers had asked their questions I asked if the group had discussed whether to adopt a prophetic tone or a reformist one. I said that the Religious Right had always gone for their biggest goals, like a complete abortion ban, and while they had not succeeded, they had shifted the center towards them, because it is the extremes that define the center. I asked if they had contemplated going all out for single payer. I didn’t have time to explain that this might help to make Obama’s “public option” look centrist and therefore more acceptable, if vocal pastors were calling loudly for single payer, and that it would be doing him a good turn.

While other questioners had been responded to by one or two of the panel, everyone seemed to want to respond to my question. The pastors all said they thought their call was indeed prophetic. I sensed a deep longing in them to be prophetic.

The call convenor, from FPL, said she thought that they did not want to be divisive like the Religious Right, and that in fact they felt everyone could get behind affordable healthcare for all.

Wow. Right there I felt the heart of our current dilemma. How to be prophetic without pissing anyone off. How to bring everyone along. This is why people voted for Obama, I think: why they preferred him to Hillary and to McCain. He promised to end the boomer culture wars, the finger pointing, the demonization of the other side that has driven so many Americans crazy in the last forty years.

Andrew Sullivan captured the mood and why Obama perfectly suited it in his prescient Atlantic piece “Goodbye to All That, Why Obama Matters,” way back in 2007. Sullivan, who was raised in England (as I was), did not explain his title and Americans may not have got the reference to Robert Graves’s book Goodbye to All That which was (at least in England) a famously furious denunciation of the generation that had caused the First World War, that epitome of senseless carnage. That emotion, of a new generation putting away the horrors of the past, is the emotion Sullivan perceived in many of his own generation and most of those younger than him, with regard to the boomers.

But there is NO WAY everyone will get on board with “affordable healthcare for all”–if “all” includes the poor, the losers, slackers, indigents, alcoholics, noncitizens, pregnant unmarried teenagers, the mentally inadequate and everyone else labeled undeserving by the hard right. There is NO WAY all Americans will agree that healthcare is a service to be made available to all instead of a profit center for a few: profit is sacred to too many of us. There is NO WAY to avoid conflict on this one. Any more than there was when FDR promoted social security, welfare, or the outrageous reform that lost him even his diehard capitalist supporters, the enlightened ones who thought he actually was saving America from socialism as he said he was: trade union collective bargaining.

There is a conflict on health care. It will continue. We can’t avoid it. But the desire to bring everyone along, to get past the bitterness of the culture wars, is a decent desire. It is shared by all spiritual people, for a start. But it has to be operationalized, as they say in business, as a better way to do conflict, not as a way to stop conflict. If you stop the conflict on health care, you abandon the 40 million uninsured, you enable the 18,000 deaths a year in this country from underinsurance, you are NOT being humane and spiritual: you are being callous and passive.So we need a growing culture that models conflict-with-love, so that people feel able and ready to step up to the necessary conflicts without feeling that they are demonizing the other side. Didn’t Gandhi do that? And MLK?

So what would it mean to be prophetic on healthcare? Go back to that editorial by Michael. Why is there this consensus that “we are not ready for it yet”? Is it because enough strong voices are not saying that we are, or is it also that those calling for single payer are doing it by emphasizing the financial issue (who pays) rather than the care issue (who benefits, and why every human being is equally worthy)? FPL and PICO and the pastors are certainly on to something, by emphasizing the latter; and the single payer activists are onto something by going boldly for the best. Now if those two strands could come together…

What Michael Lerner teaches and I am only learning slowly is that it is actually good politics to go boldly for the highest vision of social change, and to clearly state that that vision is based on a post-liberal view of human beings, a view that says our greatest needs are not for privacy, rights or individual property, but for love, recognition, mutual caring and community, as well as individual self-realization. Then, if one needs, as one always does need, to compromise to get things agreed and through the legislature, you can say “this, x, is a compromise, but our goal is still y.”If Obama did that, it would be clear what he is up to when he compromises: he could keep the goals in mind and build a consensus for those goals. But if he acts purely pragmatically, as Bill Clinton did, a wide consensus or movement is not built.

This elevation of principle is what the Right has continually done, though in a bullying way that demonizes the other side; and it has worked for them. Michael used the example yesterday of Reagan sacking all the air traffic controllers, which in itself was unpopular, but which he sold as an example of his (union-busting) principle that the free market must rule, and a majority understood what he was doing and let the experiment go ahead with their approval. Every change the Right has made has been in the name of these principles of the free market, the individual’s property rights, and so on.

So the Left and the Love-first people of all kinds have to put forward their highest policy visions and ground them in a more communitarian view of the human being, and fight like hell for them, without demonizing the other side. Isn’t that right? Are we even faintly equipped to do that? Do we have any idea of how hard it is for us to do it?