Common Ground: Building A Spiritual Left

June 2005

Building A Spiritual Left

Rabbi Michael Lerner says progressive social change groups must incorporate a deeper spiritual understanding into their work

By Bob Condor

When Rabbi Michael Lerner talks about the need in this country—check that, make that the desperate need—to create a “spiritual left,” he wants to remind Americans that God doesn’t belong to the right. When he thinks of what would make possible the creation of a new openness to spiritual consciousness in liberal circles, his thoughts turn to the women’s movement of three decades ago—because they made huge changes that no one thought were possible when first imagined.

Showing that there can be a “left hand of God,” a progressive spirituality, is a monumental task. Especially considering the organized strength of the religious right, the U.S. senators in pivotal positions who see themselves doing God’s will, the Bill Moyers manifesto that the current administration doesn’t fret much about environmental protection because Armageddon nears, and the number of voters who crossed over for George W. Bush in the 2004 election as he represented at least some sort of spiritual values even though his economic policies were not in their interests.

“The mountain is not as big as that faced by the women’s movement trying to dismantle patriarchy,” says Lerner, who is editor of the bimonthly magazine Tikkun. “Those of us who want to build a politics based on love, generosity and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation hope to emulate the accomplishments of feminism.”

Besides, Lerner asks gently but compassionately, “What’s the alternative? Let the religious right get more and more powerful by being the only -political force that can speak to Americans’ hunger for a meaning to life that transcends money and power?”

Lerner has been championing the idea of a spiritual left in earnest and visibly since the 2004 election went sour for progressives, though his work at Tikkun has no doubt laid the groundwork over the last 20-some years. It is well documented by the New York Times and Washington Post that Lerner was a trusted adviser to the Clinton White House.

Yet Lerner is savvy enough to understand that politicians do not represent the early building blocks of a spiritual left movement. “I realize it is an empty strategy to whisper in the ear of the powerful,” he says. “The women’s movement had the ears of Senators in the 1970s but success didn’t come until huge numbers of women responded with their own actions in the 1980s.”

Lerner’s reminded of a story about Franklin D. Roosevelt, who listened intently to union leaders lobbying for workers’ rights to organize in the 1930s. After the group finished, FDR simply said, “OK, you’ve convinced me. Now go out there and force me to do it.”

In that spirit, Lerner’s Tikkun organization and Dragonfly Media, the parent company of Evergreen Monthly, have partnered to present a Spiritual Activism Conference July 20-July 23 in Berkeley, Calif. A second conference is slated for next February 10-13 in Washington, D.C. Attending the conference will be the first step in building an interfaith network of spiritual progressives. Lerner emphasizes that you don’t have to believe in God or “a higher power”; secular people who are what Lerner calls “spiritually sensitive” and wanting to make Democrats and the progressive social change movement more inclusive and receptive to religious and spiritual people are also welcome. He’s intent on changing politics with an eye toward the 2008 presidential election as a first major benchmark.

Evergreen Monthly caught up with Lerner recently at his Berkeley-based office. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

EM: The July conference sounds energizing for anyone who shudders thinking about the recent filibuster issue in the U.S. Senate and the God-owning of certain U.S. senators. What are you goals for the conference?

Rabbi Michael Lerner: There are three major points. Number one is to create a network of spiritual progressives. We have to challenge the misuse of God and religion by the religious right and stop identifying them as the basis for war policies and eliminating programs for the poor.

The second goal is creating a spiritual left. In the past there has frequently been a knee-jerk antagonism from some Democrats and progressives toward anything spiritual or religious—as though everyone who believes in God or who develops a spiritual practice is either flak or reactionary. We need to challenge the automatic assumption that God equals the right wing of politics.

The third goal is to change the current line of thinking that being efficient, rational and productive means you maximize money and power. We have to maximize love and caring and rediscover our capacity to respond to the universe with awe and wonder. These elements are central to what should be a new bottom line—and let that be the criterion of whether an institution is efficient or productive.

EM: Those are ambitious goals.

Lerner: Changing liberal and progressive politics to make it more spiritually centered is more than just “reframing” the old policies with new slogans—liberals and progressives need a fundamental rethinking of the foundations of their politics—and that will take more than one or two years. In the 2004 election too many spiritually hungry people were either, one, not voting or two, voting for the right because the right talks about spiritual crisis in this country.

EM: You say the Democrats and progressives have “knee-jerk antagonism” toward anything spiritual, at least in politics. How did that happen?

Lerner: Many people who become liberals or progressives had experiences of repressive religion while growing up. I don’t blame them for opposing the homophobia, racism, and patriarchal views and practices that dominate many right-wing religious communities. Unfortunately, many liberals seem unable to distinguish between those repressive uses of religion and the more liberatory elements in some religious and spiritual communities. They ignore liberation theology, they forget that the left was most influential in this country when it was led by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s very much church-based civil rights movement. As a result, they’re not inclusionary enough toward many spiritually oriented progressive people.

EM: Is there resistance to the spiritual left from progressives?

Lerner: There is a depressive certainty among too many liberals and progressives that their highest values will just turn people off, so that all they can do is talk about what they are against (the war, the Bush assault on the judiciary) but not what they are for. That’s why this new network of spiritual progressives is putting the development of a positive vision at the forefront of our agenda. I’ll be presenting part of that in a Spiritual Covenant with America that will be part of my book “The Left Hand of God.” I’m hoping that we can convince the Democrats to make that Spiritual Covenant the center of their electoral strategy in 2006 and 2008.

EM: Depressive certainty is a good description.

Lerner: The interpretation is that President Bush triumphed because the American people are so stupid. Or that America’s either evil or stupid. That labeling is one reason people think the left is elitist; they can’t stand the contempt that leftists show for those who don’t vote their way. Americans may not always understand the details of a policy debate, but they sure can feel when a political movement has contempt for them, and that’s what they often feel from Democrats and progressives. That was evident in the 2004 elections.

EM: So what should spiritual progressives actually do?

Lerner: We are challenging the religious right—and organizing people to stand outside courthouses once a week to demonstrate in favor of an independent judiciary. In the current political climate, spiritual progressives have to stand up for the rights of secular people not to be religious. And to stop blaming secular people for the decline of spiritual values in this society—a decline that is actually caused by the dynamics of global capital, not by gays and not by feminists and not by secular people.

EM: You have written that people are taking their work home with them in terms of how we evaluate the loved ones in our life similar to how a company evaluates a product or income stream. That a person must be productive or efficient, that relationships are akin to a market exchange whether we are conscious of it or not. That’s deeper and more disturbing than simply bringing the stress of a job home to our families and friends.

Lerner: It’s true. We are not conscious of it. We are spending all day [in our work lives] learning to treat people as objects, and that corrodes all of our relationships, even outside work. It won’t help to introduce prayer or meditation at work; what we need is a brand new bottom line that shapes what corporations are all about.

EM: Does spiritual activism and forming a spiritual left change that?

Lerner: I want to stop the blame in politics and in our lives. I don’t blame corporate leaders for acting to advance their corporations—they often have no choice. That’s why we need a whole different social reality, so that corporations can only retain their corporate charters if they can prove every ten years to a jury of ordinary citizens that their corporation has demonstrated a satisfactory history of social responsibility.

Social change movements of the past haven’t included inner change. We need to include both the inner change and the social change. The temptation is to say, “I will address my emotional and spiritual self first, then…” But there never will be a “then.” We need a political movement that encourages us to develop an inner life even as it simultaneously engages in changing the other world. That’s one of the many tasks of developing a network of spiritual progressives.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun and national Chair of The Tikkun Community, the organization that’s launching the Network of Progressive Spiritual Activism. His new book, “The Left Hand of God,” will be published by HarperSanFrancisco in January 2006. For info on the conferences, go to www.tikkun.org.

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