I was raised in a religious milieu in which it was thought that ‘personal change’ was the primary way to create a world without war, hunger, and class conflict. “You will never cure war in the world,” I was taught, “until you cure war in the home.” Leaders who had unresolved issues of ego, arrogance, resentment, desire for praise and so on in their personal lives, who could not get on with their own families and colleagues, could not create peace or unselfish social reform.

So we had no idea what to do with leaders like Martin Luther King, who was a sexual philanderer, or the Kennedy brothers. From today’s New York Times:

Born to one of the wealthiest American families, Mr. Kennedy spoke for the downtrodden in his public life while living the heedless private life of a playboy and a rake for many of his years.

Our heroes in history were men like the slave ship captain John Newton and the upper class playboy and politician William Wilberforce, both of whom underwent deep experiences of personal change, which propelled them into leading the struggle to abolish slavery. After his conversion, Wilberforce became a model puritan as well as a great (though patrician) practitioner of political reform. (After fighting for over three decades in the British Parliament for abolition he lived to see it, and so was more fortunate than Ted Kennedy, who described universal health care as “the cause of my life.”)

In our movement we preferred the terms “change” or “lifechanging” to “conversion” because we wanted to distance ourselves from fundamentalists and evangelicals who stressed correct belief instead of moral change. After all, love is more important than belief. But not “that kind of love”–extramarital, premarital, or homosexual. Our movement included Catholics and Protestants and religious people with nonchristian beliefs, but no one who disagreed with our sexual puritanism. (I didn’t kiss anyone until I was 23, after I left the movement.)

Despite our adoption of nonsectarian language (which you will be familiar with from AA, one of our spin-offs) we arose from and were part of a long Christian tradition that includes the Pietists and the holiness sects. In my doctoral thesis about them I preferred to use the word “experientialists,” as in “Christian experientialists.” We focused heavily on sexuality, but religious experientialism, including ours then, is much broader than that. Our priorities were the personal change necessary to enable teamwork within the movement and conflict resolution in the wider world.

It all sounds quaint and the puritanism old-fashioned or nasty, but there are strong modern parallels among progressives. Anyone who quotes Gandhi’s injunction that we must be the peace we want to see in the world, and who works on their relationships with friends and opponents to that end, is an experientialist. Any feminist who has ever pointed out to a male leftwing politico that his utopian words are completely undermined by the way he treats women at home or in their political organization is an experientialist. Anyone who works on their own racism, conscious or unconscious, or their heterosexism, or their internalized oppression, understanding that a cognitive appreciation that these things exist is not enough on its own to enable one’s own self to transform, is an experientialist.

It is unfortunately true that even spritual progressive leaders may treat their employees or movement members neglectfully or abusively, and primarily as instruments for the cause, while preaching a world based on treating people as sacred. If you lose sleep over that, you are an experientialist. You want the walk to match the talk.

It is not by fine words and grand utopian visions that we will change the world, many of us feel, for those are ten a penny. How many left wing utopian visions have we seen in the last century or so that dissolved in infighting? When successful they issued in anything from murderous dictatorship at worst to less-than-loving government welfare bureaucracies in the democracies at second-best.

Utopian visions and fine words do not deal with the central issue, which is how we actually treat each other: how we learn to see each other as inherently worthy of respect and love, and how we actually practice that in every realm of life, day by day, minute by minute, transforming our institutions and culture in the process.

So it’s not wrong to work hard on personal change and personal spiritual growth: these will surely contribute to a better world.

But spiritual progressives can get so dedicated to making the walk match the talk that we start sounding as judgmental and self righteous as oldtime Pietists and the religious right. It can become more important to us to make our immediate relationships work–or for our political activists and leaders to make their personal relationships work–than to develop our analytical skills and bold visions and throw ourselves into the messy world of politics despite our personal inadequacies. From the NY Times on Ted Kennedy:

Dismissed early in his career as a lightweight and an unworthy successor to his revered brothers, he grew in stature over time by sheer longevity and by hewing to liberal principles while often crossing the partisan aisle to enact legislation. A man of unbridled appetites at times, he nevertheless brought a discipline to his public work that resulted in an impressive catalog of legislative achievement across a broad landscape of social policy.

Mr. Kennedy left his mark on legislation concerning civil rights, health care, education, voting rights and labor.

How many people were better feminists, better people in their personal lives, less patrician and more in touch with the working class, less gluttonous or with lower carbon footprints, than Ted Kennedy, but didn’t stick to crafting actual political change with a thousandth of his dedication and good effect? There are different kinds of talks to be walked. He walked his talk of public service and political responsibility within the confines of Congress, and all of our lives are better as a result.

Photo credit: Flickr/Brian Finifter