Despite its recent prominence, the religious right is only about thirty years old, while the religious left has a genealogy that stretches back more than two centuries. In every generation people of faith have brought their bodies and spirits to the causes of human freedom, racial and gender equality, economic solidarity, and global peace. Catholics and Calvinists, theological liberals and evangelicals, adherents of indigenous spiritualities and immigrants of every faith have worked to extend the radical vision of the American Revolution to all peoples.

More here, from “The Religious Left: an Old Tradition for a New Day” in the Unitarian Universalist magazine. Saying the Religious Left only stretches back “more than two centuries” is a little thin, when one thinks of Cromwell’s Ironsides who cut off the king’s head, or the Anabaptists of the 16th century, or the medieval Cathars and Hussites and so on. And that’s just the Christians.  The article ends with a survey of the religious left today, seeing four wings of it:

1. grassroots activists like the 185 Catholic Worker houses, and the new monastics, typically nonviolent
2. the social advocacy arms of the mainline denominations (only Christian and UU ones are mentioned, though)
3. those who identify with theologies of liberation and consider the first group too nonviolent, the second group too liberal
4. the “spiritual but not religious” for whom social activism is inherently spiritual.

Tikkun isn’t mentioned and I am not clear where they think we would fall. I’ve been working on our deadline for the next issue all day and will keep cranking all tomorrow and on to Tuesday end of day, and don’t have a brain cell left for making that judgment call, or for saying something analytically wise and interesting. Giving the link to this article is enough.

Though I have to add that we published a kick-ass article on the relevance of the social gospel today, by Gary Dorrien, that goes much deeper than this UU World survey is able to do. Dorrien blows me away with his ability to sum up major historical religious responses to the world in a single sentence, and here he strings together a virtuoso string of them:

The novelty of the Social Gospel was not that it possessed a social ethic or got involved in politics, though it certainly did both. The difference was its focus on structural transformations for social justice. Early Christianity had a regenerative social ethic, but the early church was a marginalized eschatological community. The medieval church had a social ethic of the common good, but it was an ethic of authority and social control. The Reformed tradition had a covenantal social ethic with transformational potential, but it was turned into an apologetic for commercial society. The Anabaptist churches had a radical-conservative social ethic of (usually pacifist) dissent, but the Anabaptists were ascetic or apocalyptic or both. Evangelical pietism had a postmillennial social ethic that fought against slavery and alcohol, but it fixated on personal conversion.

Only with the rise of Christian Socialism and the Social Gospel did Christian communities seek to restructure society in the direction of freedom and equality. Society became the subject of redemption; social justice became intrinsic to salvation. If there was such a thing as social structure, redemption had to be reconceptualized to take account of it; salvation had to be personal and social to be saving.

Now that’s writing, and the only way to get it before we put it on the web January 1 is to buy the magazine, or go find it in your local library, and if they don’t carry it, ask them nicely if they will please do so. It’s in bookstores but you can also buy a single copy online here, or subscribe here (but your first issue won’t be the current one). And here’s the table of contents of all the amazing writing you will have if you get it.