BOOK REVIEW: 'Progressive & Religious' Profiles America's Liberal Diversity of Faith

By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic

Robert P. Jones has discovered a group that many thought had disappeared: Believing Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists who believe in America's traditional tolerance of other religions and who also support "progressive" -- the current name for "liberal" -- causes.

Based on his own research and in-depth interviews with nearly 100 Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, his intriguing book, "Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders Are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life" (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD., 280 Pages, notes, sources, index, $24.95) shows that -- in the U.S., at least -- there is a countervailing force to the much profiled religious right.

Progressives who are believers are caught between the rock of religious belief dominated by fundamentalists of all faiths and the hard place of fellow progressives who believe that all religion is a relic of a superstitious past, something that should be sloughed off so progressives can get on with the real task of eliminating war, hatred, poverty and other social ills.

The latter group, which Jones calls neoatheists, includes such best-selling authors as Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great") -- for my 2007 review click here: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/070710-kinchen-columnsbookreview.html -- and Sam Harris ("The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason," "Letter to a Christian Nation"). For my 2006 review of Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation" click here: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/061008-kinchen-review.html.

As one who trends toward the views of Hitchens and Harris, I was startled to find an echo of something I had written about a few years ago after one of my many visits to Chicago: The remarkable tolerance of diverse religious beliefs in one Chicago neighborhood, Albany Park, on the Windy City's north side. I called it the "Chicago Solution."

Interviewing a progressive Muslim in Chicago, Dr. Eboo Patel, Jones notes that unlike in other countries such as India (clashes between Christians and Hindus or Hindus and Muslims) or Iraq (Sunni vs. Shia, Muslims vs Christians, Kurds vs. Arab), different sects in the U.S. at least aren't killing each other:

Here's what Patel says (Page 155):

"Now, think about the American achievement....We are the most religiously diverse nation in human history and the most religiously devout society in the West in a moment of global religious conflict. Sunnis and Shias don't kill each other here, and liberal Protestants and evangelical conservative Protestants don't kill each other in Boise, and Orthodox Jews and Reform Jews don't throw rocks at each other on Devon Avenue in Chicago."

Just before I wrote this review, I read about violent clashes between India's dominant Hindus and the tiny minority of Christians in India's Orissa state:

The New York Times reported (Oct. 13, 2008) that:

"India, the world’s most populous democracy and officially a secular nation, is today haunted by a stark assault on one of its fundamental freedoms. Here in eastern Orissa State, riven by six weeks of religious clashes, Christian families ... say they are being forced to abandon their faith in exchange for their safety. The clash of faiths has cut a wide swath of panic and destruction through these once quiet hamlets fed by paddy fields and jackfruit trees. Here in Kandhamal, the district that has seen the greatest violence, more than 30 people have been killed, 3,000 homes burned and over 130 churches destroyed, including the tin-roofed Baptist prayer hall where the Digals [a family profiled in the story] worshiped. Today it is a heap of rubble on an empty field, where cows blithely graze."

Earlier I had read about attacks on Christians by Muslims in Mosul, in Iraq's north. And the list goes on and on....

People interviewed by Jones -- among them David Saperstein, Michael Lerner, Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Eboo Patel, Kecia Ali, Surya Das, Robert Thurman and E.J. Dionne -- reinforce the author's point of view that virtually every major progressive political involvement in American history (for instance: the struggle for Civil Rights in the South, the fight against child labor) has had progressive religious voices leading the way.

Jones says that "To judge all of religion by the behavior of the far Christian right...is to mistake the part for the whole. As I hope this book makes clear, these voices do not represent all Christians, much less all religious people."

"Progressive & Religious" is a thought-provoking, very readable book that shows that it is possible to be both religious and progressive -- at least in America and other multicultural countries like Canada and Australia.

posted by Robert P. Jones, Ph.D.   @  1:42 PM (permalink)

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