Progressive and Religious

Join the Progressive & Religious Campaign on Facebook

2008-05-11T01:28:00.006-04:00

Tired of religion being used as a political weapon?

Join us on Facebook this election year to create and amplify a new voice for religion in the public square--one that goes beyond the culture wars and partisan politics and works for justice and the common good.

We are a community of people who are politically progressive and--YES--religious. All are welcome. We represent the full spectrum of religion in America: progressive Christianity, progressive Judaism, progressive Islam, socially engaged Buddhism, unitarian universalism, B'hai, and others.

We're just getting started, but our goal is to build a strong presence between now and the election, showing the strength of progressive religious voices. Come help us be the movement we've been waiting for!

Dr. Eboo Patel - New Progressive Religious Voices Podcast

2008-04-22T17:42:00.007-04:00

Dr. Eboo Patel talks about Islam, pluralism, and building the interfaith youth movement.

In this third episode of Progressive Religious Voices, Dr. Eboo Patel talks about how his Muslim faith grounds his deep commitment to pluralism and his work with youth around the world at Interfaith Youth Core.

Eboo compellingly describes what he calls the significance of the emerging “Faith Line.” The Faith Line, as Eboo describes it, does not separate people of different religions but separates religious pluralists on the one hand and religious totalitarians on the other. Eboo’s work is focused on broadening the space for religious pluralism. Drawing on his Islamic faith, he summarizes it as follows: “My hope is to articulate what I love about your tradition, and to teach you what you might love about mine, and to point to a space where we might work together to serve others. And in my mind, that’s the example of the Prophet Muhammad.”

Eboo is an important emerging progressive religious leader, and articulates eloquently the way his Muslim faith interfaces with the best of the American ideals of democracy and pluralism:

In my mind, I’m part of the story of America, I’m part of the story of India, and I’m part of the story of Islam. It was in the Holy Qur’an, which is the book that animated my ancestors, that I found the fullest description of that and that I found language that I considered home…. I love America because it gives me, the child of immigrant Muslim parents from India, the chance to participate in its progress and to carve a place in its promise. And I believe that this country was founded in large part on the idea of religious freedom and its relationship with religious pluralism…. We have managed to have a relatively thick religious pluralism in this country that has respect for identity, that nurtures community, that focuses people on the common good. What I think we need to do in America is realize that this in the early twenty-first century, in the century of the faith line, is in fact, our most precious internal resource and our most important gift to the rest of the world.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

About Eboo Patel
Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that is building the interfaith movement through service and dialogue. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together. Eboo is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the soul of a Generation.

About the Podcasts
This podcast is the third episode of Progressive Religious Voices, a bi-monthly podcast of interviews gleaned from nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders. You can subscribe to the podcast feed directly or on iTunes to get all 24 exciting interviews that we will feature throughout 2008.

You can also read more about the growing progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Beyond the Graying and Greening Religious Right: The Emergence of the Evangelical Center

2008-04-02T01:51:00.006-04:00

Note: The full text of this blog can be read in my regular "Dispatches from the Beltway" column on Religion Dispatches.

E.J. Dionne’s bold pronouncement that “the era of the Religious Right is over” has been the subject of much discussion and debate. Those who agree cite the growing support for broadening the evangelical agenda to include issues like the environment (a.k.a. “creation care”), poverty, and HIV/AIDS. They also point to the graying of the Religious Right, most prominently the deaths of Jerry Falwell and James Kennedy, and the virtual collapse of the Christian Coalition. Moreover, prominent old guard leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson have seriously damaged their credibility with many evangelicals by endorsing Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and Rudy Guiliani, a thrice-married, pro-choice New York governor, while passing over fellow-evangelical candidate Mick Huckabee. No one need ask for a more bald demonstration of prioritizing power over principle from the self-proclaimed leaders of “values voters.”

Skeptics of the decline of the Religious Right, on the other hand, cite the huge infrastructure, resources, and reach the Religious Right has built over the last few decades (to take just one example, James Dobson’s sprawling conglomerate has its own zip code in Colorado Springs and a larger monthly print circulation than the New York Times) and argue that it will not so easily wither on the vine. The most jaded on the left simply assert that the Religious Right is the truest expression of the heart of the evangelical community and is thus here to stay.

If the argument that “the era of the Religious Right is over” depended solely on what one might call the “graying and greening” argument—that the leadership is aging and out of touch and that a few issues like the environment have simply been attached to a persistent static core—I too would be skeptical. I want to argue, however, that the reason I believe Dionne is right is that a more thoroughgoing and measurable shift is happening within the evangelical community, one that represents not simply a broader agenda but also a significantly different spirit and worldview.

...

Read the rest of the article at Religion Dispatches.

Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr. - New Progressive Religious Voices Podcast

2008-03-25T16:50:00.007-04:00

I've just posted a podcast of an exceptional interview with Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr., former senior minister at The Riverside Church in New York and founder of the Healing of the Nations Foundation.

Amidst the swirl of controversy over Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright's comments and Barack Obama's disavowal of them, Easter services went forward at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago this past weekend. Rev. Dr. Forbes brought a message of healing at the evening Easter service at Trinity. According to the New York Times, Dr. Forbes preached about:

how the nation is in a "night season," a dark, destabilizing time, given the war, the economy and the vitriol over race and gender in the political primary. "It is nighttime in America," Dr. Forbes said, “and I want to bring a word of encouragement.”

Last winter, Dr. Forbes sat down with me to talk about healing the nation, a progressive view of truth, and the role of the Holy Spirit in the emerging progressive religious movement. I invite you to listen to the interview and be a part of this conversation by leaving a comment below about the interview.

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About the Podcasts
This podcast is the second episode of Progressive Religious Voices, a bi-monthly podcast of interviews gleaned from nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders. You can subscribe to the podcast feed directly or on iTunes to get all 24 exciting interviews that we will feature throughout 2008.

You can also read more about the growing progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

Review of Liberalism's Troubled Search for Equality at "First Things"

2008-03-07T21:11:00.009-05:00

This week, Wesley J. Smith posted a lengthy review of my book, Liberalism's Troubled Search for Equality: Religion and Cultural Bias in the Oregon Physician-Assisted Suicide Debates, in the conservative journal First Things. As a progressive, I don't see eye to eye with Smith on many issues (e.g., although I hate these labels, I often fall on the "pro-choice" side of many social issues like abortion). But we agree that legalized physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in the context of our current health care system--which leaves 48 million Americans without health insurance and many persons with disabilities without the care they need--puts vulnerable patients at risk. I'm grateful to Smith for the review, which reflects a careful reading of my argument.

I've included an excerpt here, with a link to the full article. Smith concludes the review by stating that "Jones’ logically argued and precisely aimed brief against assisted suicide from a liberal philosophical perspective—no call to respect the sanctity of human life here—is a distinct service to the broader debate."

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Liberalism’s Troubled Search for Equality

By Wesley J. Smith

Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 7:30 AM

In Liberalism’s Troubled Search for Equality, Robert P. Jones takes the measure of contemporary assisted-suicide advocacy through a distinctly liberal lens. He has impeccable credentials for this task: He is the director and senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Values in Public Life, given birth by the progressive political-advocacy group People for the American Way. In fact, it is Jones’ fervent liberalism that leads him to declare boldly that legalized assisted suicide violates the principle of “egalitarian justice.”

This is an interesting, and one might even say daring conclusion, particularly given that it conflicts with mainstream thinking of the liberal establishment. This includes the views of liberal guru and philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who has long championed assisted suicide in books, articles, and amicus court briefs.

Jones deeply admires Dworkin, yet he doesn’t hesitate to hoist the philosopher on his own petard by demonstrating that assisted suicide violates Dworkin’s oft-stated principles of egalitarianism, which Jones laments stem from “peculiar inconsistencies within his theory.” Thus, Jones writes not out of animus but devotion to the cause, hoping that, by extricating assisted suicide from other progressive agenda items, he can help his movement take “a critical step on the path toward a more egalitarian liberalism.”

You can read the rest here.

You can buy the book here:

Out-Polling the Exit Polls: Finally, a Look at Evangelical Democrats

2008-02-12T11:40:00.002-05:00

Note: Cross-posted at Religion Dispatches.

As I noted in last week's Dispatches from Inside the Beltway, the official exit polls sponsored by the media have been skewed toward the Republican party in terms of religion. . The exit polls have asked more questions about religion to Republicans in every comparable state so far, and nowhere have they asked Democrats if they were "born again or evangelical." It is time for the media to jettison this outdated script about religion and fix this bias in the exit polls.

Faith in Public Life has take the lead in identifying and publicizing this problem, and last week following the Super Tuesday primaries they fielded their own post-election poll in MO and TN--a poll that for the first time identified evangelical voters among both Republicans and Democrats. After the poll results were released yesterday, Katie Barge (Communications Director for Faith in Public Life), Rev. Jim Walls (CEO, Sojourners), and Rev. Joel Hunter (Pastor, Northland Church; former president of the Christian Coalition), and I participated in a press call with over 30 reporters to talk about how this bias distorts our understanding of both politics and religion. You can listen to the call here.

The post-election poll found the following important findings:

Senator Hillary Clinton's support from white evangelicals surpassed that of Senator Barach Obama's (MO: 54% to 37%; TN: 78% to 12%).
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the GOP has a lock on white evangelical voters, 1 in 3 evangelicals voted in the Democratic primary, something the official exit polls could not tell us. To put that into perspective, that's 160,000 overlooked evangelical voters in MO and 182,000 in TN (a number greater than, for example, all African American voters or all voters over 65 in the Democratic primaries in each state).
Importantly, the poll also found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage to include ending poverty, protecting the environment, and tackling HIV/AIDS.

These important numbers are supported by findings from other research I and others have done over the last two years. Here are three lessons the media needs to learn in order to get the religion story right this year:

1. White evangelicals are an important constituency for both parties and are no longer a lock for the GOP.

Evangelicals are an important part of the Democratic base. In both 2004 and 2006, Democratic candidates actually received slightly more votes from white Evangelicals than from Black Protestants, an important base group for Democrats. In 2004, 14% of John Kerry’s votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 13% from Black Protestants (Green 2004). In 2006, 11.3% of Democratic House Candidate votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 11% from Black Protestants (NEP Exit Poll, 2006).
Young evangelicals (under 30). Since 2005, affiliation with the GOP has dropped 15 points, from 55% to 40% (Pew 2006).

2. White Evangelicals are not monolithic, even on hot-button social issues.

The one-fifth, one-third, on-half formula: up to half of evangelicals are in play. In research I co-authored with Rachel Laser, Randy Brinson, and Joe Battaglia at Third Way, we found that evangelicals are actually 1/5 progressive, 1/3 moderate, and 1/2 conservative, a patter that held up even over hot-button social issues. These evangelical progressives and moderates make up half of evangelicals, 52 million adults.

3. There is an emerging movement among rank and file evangelicals to move beyond the narrow political issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

The American Values Survey (AVS 2006), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation, found that 8 in 10 evangelicals thought issues like poverty and affordable health care were more important in the country today that issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
The old Religious Right leaders who are clinging to the narrow agenda of abortion and same-sex marriage are increasingly out of touch and no longer calling the shots. AVS also found, for example, that a plurality (44%) of evangelicals said that James Dobson and Pat Robertson did NOT speak for them. Also, tellingly, nearly a quarter of young evangelicals (under 30) said they did not know enough about these leaders to answer the question.

The evidence has been stacking up for some time now, as Rev. Jim Wallis put it on the call yesterday, that "evangelicals are leaving the Religious Right in droves." While there have been some important media stories that have gotten this admittedly complex story right, the skewed exit polling we have now is sure to fuel biased reporting. If the major media outlets that fund the exit polls want to keep wrapping themelves in self-congratulatory slogans such as "fair and balanced" and "best political team on television," they need to let go of their old script, dig deeper, and give us the unbiased coverage of religion and politics we deserve.

Exit Polls Remain Skewed towards Republicans on Religion

2008-02-06T16:15:00.001-05:00

Note: Crossposted at StreetProphets.

Despite a drumbeat of public criticism by Faith in Public Life and others about biased exit polling on religion by the major media networks, the exit polls continue to ask more questions about religion to Republicans than Democrats.

I wrote yesterday in my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column in the debut issue of Religion Dispatches about how this bias distorts our understanding of religion among both parties.

Here's the current tally:

25 states have had both Republican and Democratic primaries
20 of these states had state-wide exit polls
All of these states asked more questions about religious affiliation to Republicans than Democrats. (Only one of these, AZ, was a Super Tuesday state).

Upshot about the major media exit poll bias:

They have asked Republicans about religion in every exit poll, but have NOT asked Democrats ANYTHING about religion in 3 states (IA, MI, NV).
They have NOT asked Democrats ANYWHERE about whether they were "evangelical or born again."

It's time for the media to update their script and give us balanced coverage of the role of religion in both parties.

The Common Good Argument Against Physician-Assisted Suicide

2008-02-06T16:00:00.000-05:00

Note: this entry cross-posted at the Common Good Blog at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

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While Catholic opposition to physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is often mentioned in the same breath as abortion and grounded in an appeal to the sacredness of human life, there is a strong but often-neglected argument against the legalization of PAS that also relies on other key principles of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly its emphasis on social justice and the common good.

The 10th anniversary of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, which made Oregon the only state to legalize physician-assisted suicide (PAS), came and went largely without controversy last fall. But embedded in this issue are important lessons about the interrelationship between protecting life and social justice. In an election year, when complex issues are too often reduced to sound bytes, making these connections is an important moral exercise that helps us re-envision how a commitment to the common good might change our politics.

Many think of debates about PAS as just another round of the “pro-life”/“pro-choice” abortion debates. But choices about PAS, if they are to have moral significance, must be un-coerced, free choices. And meaningful choices must be available not just to the privileged few but to everyone. A common good lens highlights the stark inequalities in our society that too often constrain, threaten, or even prohibit meaningful free choices for many vulnerable citizens on this issue.

It is no secret that the health care system in America needs repair if not complete overhaul. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2006 the proportion of Americans without health insurance rose to 15.8 percent, or 47 million people, and a recent report by Families USA found that almost 90 million Americans under age 65 were uninsured for some or all of the 2006-2007 two-year period. Not surprisingly, minority groups bear a disproportionate brunt of this problem – 21 percent of African Americans and 34% percent of Hispanics are uninsured.

In a context of such health care inequalities, legalizing PAS puts the working poor who lack insurance at risk of reaching for PAS under financial duress. Choosing between spending $40-$150 for a lethal prescription versus tens of thousands of dollars for long-term care is hardly an unfettered choice between equal alternatives. In this situation, the coercive power of scarcity pushes the poor toward draconian calculations that those of us with private health insurance do not have to make. A commitment to the common good calls us to see that any policy that hands the poor tough choices that the rest of us can avoid erodes our sense of solidarity, of belonging to one human family.

The poor, minorities, and the disabled clearly see the problem of coercion. For example, a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that while the general public is evenly divided, 78 percent of minorities with incomes under $50,000 oppose PAS. Ellie Jenny, a person with disabilities and an activist with the group Not Dead Yet, put it this way: “Choice is OK when you have options, but when you live in poverty with rationed care, you don’t have options.” The American Medical Association and other leading national medical associations also oppose PAS because of concerns about vulnerable populations and undiagnosed depression.

Despite these testimonies, many still think of PAS through the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” frames. But if we expand the frame to include the common good, we will find that there is common ground that protects life and meaningful choice for all. At a minimum, both groups can agree that concerns for the poor and vulnerable demand that universal health care (or at least universal palliative care) ought to be in place before PAS could be legalized. This would not ultimately solve the debate, but if we could see this complexity and make progress here, it would bode well for so many other issues where the old binary divides fail us.

You can read more of this social justice perspective on PAS in my recent book, Liberalism's Troubled Search for Equality: Religion and Cultural Bias in the Oregon Physician-Assisted Suicide Debates (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

Note to the Media: Time for a New Evangelical Script

2008-02-06T15:46:00.001-05:00

Note: This originally posted 2/5/08 on Religion Dispatches, a new daily online magazine dedicated to the analysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlighting a diversity of progressive voices. I will be writing a regular column, "Dispatches from the Beltway," there in 2008.
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Old plotlines die hard, especially when they have the seductive clarity of binary divides: right vs. left, Republican vs. Democrat, us vs. them. Nowhere is this tendency truer than in stories about religion. We have witnessed a real sea-change in the relationship between religion and progressive politics since 2004, and some of these shifts have been noted in major news stories, such as the growing coverage of the complexity of the white evangelical community. But too often, the mainstream media is still trying to force the current complexities and realignments into an outdated script.

In my former life as a software designer, we lived by the mantra, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Media storylines about religion and national elections, and thereby public perceptions, are driven by two major factors: exit polls (controlled by the major media outlets) and the selection of sources for stories by reporters. There is mounting evidence that much of the mainstream media is operating with a perversion of this mantra, a kind of “garbage in, gospel out” approach that begins and ends with its own self-verifying, dated stereotypes about religion in American public life.

The heart of the old script was the mythology of the so-called “moral values voters”--voters who were highly religious, Republican, and supposedly cared about prohibiting same-sex marriage and abortion above all else. We now know that despite the hype, the single exit poll question upon which those conclusions were based in 2004 was deeply flawed.

In a New York Times Op-ed four days after the 2004 election, Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News and a dissenting member of the team that drafted the questionnaire, cautioned that the inclusion on the exit poll of “this hot-button catch phrase…created a deep distortion--one that threatens to misinform the political discourse for years to come.” A series of subsequent polls, such as the American Values Survey (AVS), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life in 2006, showed how distorting these assumptions were. AVS found that Americans in fact think mostly about “the honesty and integrity of the candidate” when voting their values. Even among white evangelicals, the group that was supposedly synonymous with “moral values voters,” only 1 in 5 (19 percent) thought primarily about the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage when voting their values.

Since 2004, much of the mainstream media has unfortunately continued to reinforce the assumptions that religion is only relevant to conservatives and Republicans. A recent study by Media Matters for America, "Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media," documented the continued bias in linking conservative politics and religion. The study found that while media coverage of religion has increased significantly since 2004, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories nearly three times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

Despite these well-known problems, in the exit polling in the 2008 primaries so far, the major media news outlets have once again pulled out their dog-eared script on religion and politics as they constructed the exit polls. In the Iowa and Michigan, Democrats weren’t asked about religion at all. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, more questions were asked of Republican voters on faith than Democratic voters. And nowhere have Democrats been asked if they were evangelical or born again, despite the fact that in 2006 white evangelicals made up 11.3 percent of the Democratic house vote nationwide, casting slightly more votes for Democratic candidates for example than black Protestants.

Even noting the source of objections to this practice is a testimony to the new religious landscape. Leah Daughtry, Chief of Staff of the Democratic National Committee (and herself an ordained Pentecostal minister) recently lamented in a Washington Post Op-ed that the biased exit polls drove media stories that

“often fail to acknowledge that people of faith are and can be Democrats.”

Similarly, a group of prominent evangelical leaders also objected to this prejudicial polling, declaring that these surveys

“pigeonholed evangelicals, reinforcing the false stereotype that we are beholden to one political party.”

As these leaders attest, this skewed coverage is damaging both to politics and to religion and diminishes our understanding of American public life. Hopefully the media will update their script with more equitable exit polling and balanced sources heading into Super Tuesday and through the home stretch of the election cycle.

New Progressive Religious Voices Podcast

2007-12-13T13:54:00.000-05:00

Featured Interview: Rabbi Sharon Brous

Welcome to Progressive Religious Voices, a podcast featuring progressive religious leaders who are moving beyond the culture wars and transforming American public life.

In this podcast, I talk with Rabbi Sharon Brous, founder of the vibrant IKAR Congregation in Los Angeles.

[Click here for Podcast Transcript - PDF]

About Rabbi Sharon Brous
Rabbi Sharon Brous is founder of the IKAR congregation in Los Angeles, a vibrant and innovative new spiritual community in Los Angeles. While completing her rabbinical training at Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Brous also completed a Master's Degree in Religion and Human Rights at Columbia University. For the last three years (2005-2007), IKAR has been included in "Slingshot, A Resource Guide to Jewish Innovation," an annual compilation of the 50 most inspiring and innovative organizations, projects, and programs in the North American Jewish community today. From 2004-2006, Rabbi Brous was included the Jewish Forward’s “Forward 50,” a list of most influential voices embody “the spirit of Jewish action as it is emerging in America.” Since 2005, she has been a member of the Synagogue 3000 Leadership Network, a select national group of rabbis, cantors, and artists working to transform and revitalize American Jewish spiritual communities.

To hear more....
To hear more interviews with progressive religious leaders, you can visit our website at www.progressiveandreligious.org/interviews.html. You can listen online, or subscribe to this podcast (Check back soon--subscriptions available beginning January 2008) to hear the entire series of these hopeful interviews that we will feature throughout 2008. You can also read more about the growing progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life, which will be available summer 2008 from Rowman & Littlefield Publishers and in bookstores nationwide.

'Tis the Season: New Progressive Religion Amazon Store Open

2007-11-20T12:04:00.000-05:00

As we move into the gift-giving season, I thought I'd let you all know of a collection of books and resources on progressive religion that I've set up as part of this effort to promote progressive religious voices. You can get to the Progressive & Religious Store by clicking on the "Store" link on any page on the website. If you want to link to it directly from outside, you can link to:
http://www.progressiveandreligious.org/store.html.

Proceeds from purchases originating there (including all items bought after clicking on the Amazon logo) will go to support this project promoting progressive religious voices in 2008.

The Store has resources in the following main categories:

Religion and Progressive Politics
Progressive Christianity
Progressive Judaism
Progressive Islam
Progressive Buddhism
Classics
Music
Children's Resources

I also would appreciate assistance in two ways:

I'd love any help any of you may be willing to give promoting/linking to the store by blogging about it or linking to it from your website.
I'd also like your help in recommending books and other resources I may not know about in the categories I have: progressive Judaism, progressive Christianity, progressive Islam, progressive Buddhism, and children's resources. I'd especially like recommendations in the progressive religious music and children's resources areas.
If you have your own resource such as this, I'd love to know about it and link to it.

Drop me an email with recommendations and I'll see what I can do to get them added.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Progressive Argument Against Legalizing Physician-assisted Suicide

2007-10-17T17:46:00.001-04:00

Question & Answer
Robert P. Jones, Ph.D.
Note: This interview cross-posted on The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

You say in your book that both liberals and progressives incorrectly view physician-assisted suicide as another “choice” issue, like abortion. Why isn’t this issue about someone’s right to decide his or her fate at the end of life?

My argument is really a social-justice-oriented argument against the legalization of assisted suicide in our current health care context. And those last words are really important: in our current health care context. I think one important piece may be the number of uninsured Americans that we have in the country. The recent numbers that came out from the U.S. Census Bureau saw the number of Americans without health insurance rise to 15.8 percent – or 47 million people in our country. What that means – and what I argue – is that legalizing assisted suicide in the context where we have this kind of inequity in our health care system actually puts those who are uninsured at risk for reaching for assisted suicide for a financial necessity or out of some duress.

So to put it starkly, if you’re faced with the choice at the end of life where one option is between $50 and $150 for a lethal prescription of medication to end your life versus tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for long-term care, that’s a pretty draconian choice to put in front of people.

You can see this situation coming out if you look at the demographics of people who are for and against assisted suicide. The country is fairly evenly divided if you look at Pew polling on this issue. But I argue that if you start looking underneath the numbers and you look at the poor or at minorities, a different picture emerges. According to my own analysis of the Pew data, you have 61 percent of whites with incomes over $100,000 supporting physician-assisted suicide, but you have 78 percent of minorities with incomes under $50,000 opposing assisted suicide. That picture, I think, ought to tell us something – specifically, that those more vulnerable populations who are less likely to have health insurance and large financial resources are also less likely to support physician-assisted suicide. We shouldn’t move too quickly past those numbers.

A group that has been very prominent in these debates is the disability-rights movement. In August 2007 there was an article in the Los Angeles Times that cited opposition to assisted suicide coming from an unusual place – the disability-rights movement, which is concerned about people with disabilities being very vulnerable in our current health care context. That movement is really worried that financial incentives may push doctors to make certain decisions or push patients to make certain decisions that I think we couldn’t call a free and non-coerced choice.

So what you are saying, in essence, is that lack of universal health care increases the risk that legalizing physician-assisted suicide will ultimately lead to abuses?

I think that’s right. You mentioned earlier this analogy with abortion, that there’s a kind of pro-life/pro-choice thing. I think one of the mistakes that has been made around the assisted suicide debate is to too easily try to fit that framework over this issue and say that if you’re pro-life, you should be against physician-assisted suicide, and if you’re pro-choice, you should be for it.

But I think that obscures the real financial issues here, and what I’ve been arguing is that a more appropriate analogy might be the capital punishment debate. That argument goes like this: Regardless of whether or not – in the abstract – we could justify capital punishment for certain heinous crimes, in the current context of our society, which is shot through with racism and shot through with financial problems of representation in the courts, we can’t justly implement it.

And what I’m arguing is that a very similar kind of argument ought to be made by progressives on the issue of assisted suicide – that regardless of whether we can make an argument that physician-assisted suicide in certain cases is a social good or is morally justifiable, in our current health care context we can’t justly implement it in a way that doesn’t lead to increased risk to the disadvantaged and the vulnerable in society.

Let’s assume that in the next few years the United States moves from its current health care system to a European-style universal care model and everyone has access to health care. That takes out of play your big concern. At that point, should people still have qualms about physician-assisted suicide? Are there still issues that need to be explored, or are we now ready to move on to that?

My argument is that [universal health care] ought to be the floor that is in place before we really have this debate. And at that point I think the argument is moving to a different space. I’m arguing that at least the justice claims of the poor, vulnerable and disabled ought to be met before we open up this debate, and I think it’s a debate we ought to have. We ought to have it in the legislatures and in public, and it’s one that I think is a healthy debate for the country.

One of the most interesting comments I found was by Dr. Rob Jonquiere, head of the Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia Society. He is a very strong advocate for these rights at the end of life in the context of the Netherlands, but when asked about what the U.S. ought to do, he basically said no. He said that in the U.S., where so many people are uninsured, you could not defend such a law. And this is from someone who is a staunch advocate for the right to assisted suicide and euthanasia at the end of life. And I think that really does set the floor below which we shouldn’t go in the U.S.

In your book you take liberals and progressives to task for ignoring the role that religion can play in this discussion. Why do you think the left has excluded religious considerations on an issue like doctor-assisted suicide?

Religious views got dismissed in the debate in a couple of ways that I find really unfortunate. The first one was by using language like, “You’re imposing your religious beliefs on me on this issue.” If you listen to the talking points of many of the supporters of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act and physician-assisted suicide, this is a tool that they reach for very quickly, this idea that any religious voice in the public debate is somehow imposing a view on someone else.

And that word “impose” carries a kind of sinister connotation, that there’s something unconstitutional going on or there’s something that we ought not to be doing. Famously, there was a commercial spot that ran in Oregon during these debates that painted a kind of sinister view of religious dogma. And at the end of the spot, it came up and it said, paid for by the “Don’t Let Them Shove Their Religion Down Your Throats Committee.” It was actually there on the media spot. And that tells you something about what levers the supporters thought they could pull in the debate that made it seem that any sort of entry into the public realm by religion was somehow inappropriate. So I think that’s one way that religion was dismissed in the debate.

The other thing that I think happened is that there were religious voices in Oregon raising the kinds of concerns that I’m raising here about the disadvantaged, about the poor, about the disabled – and they were dismissed, not only because of religion but also for a second reason. Those arguments about the disadvantaged were dismissed because they were interpreted to be mere covers for the real agenda, which was a pro-life agenda.

And I think that’s a real mistake, too. I understand why that leap in logic was made, but I think it’s important to take these arguments at face value, especially when you think about the fact that in the state of Oregon there’s a huge Catholic health care system that offers lots of social services and has their fingers on the pulse on a lot of disadvantaged Oregonians. And to not take seriously those kinds of objections from people who work every day down in the trenches with these problems of poverty and lack of access to health care does the whole debate a real disservice, I think.

Is there any evidence in Oregon that the sorts of problems that you’ve raised have actually occurred?

On their face, the official reports out of Oregon so far don’t seem to indicate that these sorts of problems have occurred. But there are some issues with the reporting that I think are worth mentioning. The law requires doctors to report, and there are penalties in the law for any doctors who don’t report. So there are some safeguards there, but it’s important to say where they are and where they aren’t. For example, all the reports are filled out by physicians – by the attending physicians that are supervising the patient that has requested assisted suicide. So they’re not reported by the patient. They’re not reported by the families. So the basic demographic information – the objective measures of the patient’s age, gender, race, medical diagnosis – I think is probably reliable.

But there are some indications that the more subjective perceptions of physicians – about whether the patient had concerns about finances, pain, depression, being a burden to the family – are less reliable, and these are critical. Of course, these are all problems when you have the physician reporting his or her perception of a patient’s condition. In fact, one of the few studies we have to shed some light on this problem shows significant discrepancies between what the family members reported as their perception of the patient’s needs in terms of caregiving burdens, pain and financial worries [and what the doctor reported].

Let’s briefly take a look at this from a different angle. Social conservatives often make the argument that physician-assisted suicide devalues life by creating certain classes of people whose lives are possibly no longer worth living. Is there any truth to this argument, and is there any danger that physician-assisted suicide, even if we have universal health care, could ultimately lead to involuntary euthanasia of the severely handicapped or the infirm elderly?

I, like many progressives, am worried about slippery-slope arguments that go too far. At the same time, I don’t want to completely dismiss the idea that there can be slippage that happens. Once you take one step, it’s easier to take another. I do think that there’s something there.

My worry – and I think you’ll hear this from a lot of the disability-rights organizations – is that there is the sense that given how hard it is to get health care, given the day-to-day kinds of constraints people with disabilities have to live with, that there is this feeling that society really doesn’t value their lives as much as they do able-bodied people. I heard that over and over again from disability-rights activists. And that’s a real worry.

Were you surprised by the recent defeat of the physician-assisted suicide bill in California?

I haven’t followed that case that closely. But I mentioned the Los Angeles Times article that was a sort of post-mortem on the bill there, and one of the things that they said was that one of the pieces that really did get some traction was the argument by disability-rights groups. And what’s important about them is that they’re not typical like pro-life groups. They’re not a religious group. They don’t fall prey to the easy dismissal that sometimes the Oregon Right to Life or the Catholic Church in Oregon fell prey to. And in fact, they’re civil liberties defenders, defenders of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other things. And I think for that group to stand up and say, “Hold on a minute, there’s something else going on that people aren’t seeing” – I think it matters to people.

If you look at the national bodies of the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the American Psychiatric Association, all of them filed amicus briefs in these cases against the legalization of assisted suicide and were worried about its impacts on vulnerable populations. In the American Psychiatric Association’s case, undiagnosed depression was a big worry there. So these groups said, look, we think that palliative care really can address most of these issues and some of the reasons why people reach for assisted suicide is to get problems solved that could be reached by better palliative care or better psychiatric care.

Given the different types of opposition against this practice, do you think it is likely that for at least the time being Oregon will remain unique as the only state that allows assisted suicide, or do you think that there’s a decent chance that some other state will enact a similar law?

It’s hard to prognosticate on these things. New York was one of the earlier states to really think about this pretty seriously, in the mid-1980s. The state even had a task force thinking about it. And in the end, New York ended up saying that regardless of whether we can think about this as a good practice, it’s beside the point as long as we have vulnerable patients who might be disproportionately affected. In fact, they way they put it was that the risks of legalizing assisted suicide for vulnerable individuals “in a health care system and society that cannot effectively protect against the impact of inadequate resources and ingrained social disadvantage, are likely to be extraordinary.” There’s been a concentration of states considering the practice in the upper Northwest, and what those states have in common is that they have ballot initiatives. Where the successes have been, they’ve sort of bypassed the legislatures and gone through the balloting initiative process where you really can run mass media campaigns. I think if we do see it moving forward, my guess is it’s going to be another state with ballot initiatives.

This transcript has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar.

Come Let Us Reason Together: A Response to Pastor Dan from Third Way

2007-10-12T15:19:00.000-04:00

Note: This response cross-posted at StreetProphets here.

From:
Rachel Laser, Director of the Third Way Culture Project
Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., Religion Scholar and Third Way Consultant

First, we’d like to thank Pastor Dan for responding at length to our paper, "Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values between Evangelicals and Progressives" yesterday. We are ourselves baffled, however, with his assertion that "there’s little new here" and that at bottom this careful research and concrete policy recommendations amount to "a less-than-inspiring solution to a phony problem." These hasty conclusions are unfortunately based on a misunderstanding of the expressed purpose of the paper and a misreading of both the data and the real political landscape.

1. Perhaps the most pervasive misunderstanding in PD’s response is that he has imposed a partisan frame on an explicitly non-partisan paper. See his conclusion:

“Come to think of it, why any of this? I really can't see any point to this study other than to provide an intellectual foundation for people who've already decided that the future of the Democratic party lies in attracting "persuadable evangelicals".... but what we need to know is why that would be preferable to concentrating on winning many more non-evangelicals who are solidly and consistently in agreement with the party's core positions. This study doesn't answer that question.”

Likewise, PD criticizes our paper for not taking up a host of issues. He states:
“Meanwhile, the issues that Americans do care about these days - the war, health care, immigration - go unaddressed.”

But both of these criticisms misunderstand the purpose of our paper, which we clearly lay out in the very first paragraph:

“This paper presents a framework for bridging the cultural divide that has existed between many progressives and Evangelicals. Over the last few years, progressives and Evangelicals have engaged in new discussions to find common ground on issues like caring for the poor, eliminating HIV/AIDS in Africa, and more recently, protecting the environment. These groundbreaking dialogues are significant achievements, but they have succeeded largely by agreeing to sidestep so-called “cultural issues.” As a result, many who consider themselves both Evangelical and progressive have held these identities in considerable tension, and those who identify as one or the other still envision themselves on opposite sides of a cultural gulf.

Now, it’s fine if Pastor Dan wishes that our paper laid out an agenda for the Democratic Party or addressed a broader set of issues, but this was explicitly not our purpose. It's a real mistake to criticize the paper on those grounds. Our purpose was to find common ground between Evangelicals and progressives on some of the toughest, most divisive issues of our day—something we’ve achieved (not perfectly but certainly substantively) after numerous, painstaking conversations with progressive and evangelical leaders over the course of this year.

2. Second, and more troubling, is PD’s misreading of the data and the real political landscape, both of which cause him to miss what’s “new” and significant in this paper.

PD asserts that “the data in the back of the study undermines the authors' own points” and cites a chart that shows partisanship by religious subgroups (traditionalist, centrists, modernists). He then goes on to argue that this chart does not show that significant numbers of Evangelicals “are more in play than conventional wisdom suggests.”

But that data is not the relevant data for that argument, and it is not the data we use throughout the paper. PD fails to understand that those categories are, as the title suggests, “religious subgroups” (based entirely on religious belief and practice measures developed by political scientist John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Politics) and not political subgroups. We included that data from Green’s analysis in the appendix for reference because he is one of the most respected and cited experts on religion and politics. (Green, by the way, described our analysis as “excellent” in an article in the Christian Science Monitor article published today).

Throughout the paper, our arguments rest on the more appropriate measure of political subgroups (based on political measures such as the Pew social conservatism index), which lead to the new and significant insight about the diversity of Evangelicals that we call the one-fifth, one-third, one-half formula:

• One-fifth of Evangelicals (representing 5% of the general population) are progressive;
• One-third of Evangelicals (representing 8% of the general population) are moderates who share some progressive values; and
• One-half of Evangelicals (representing 13% of the general population) are conservatives who may be partners on particular issues.

Moreover, we note that this pattern persists even on the more challenging terrain of cultural issues. That half of Evangelicals representing 13% of the population (that, by the way, is more than 25 million adult Americans) are social progressives or moderates and open to forming policy alliances is no small insight.

Finally, PD misreads the real political landscape. He notes:

Nobody that I'm aware of believes that churches should be forced to change their theology or sacraments to accommodate gays and lesbians. Nobody thinks that abortion should be encouraged willy-nilly, or that there should be no reasonable limits on the scientific uses of embryos and cloned material. Nobody, umm, even thinks about porno on the internet or fatherhood, much less disagrees with the very mild policy suggestions listed here.

PD’s declarations that “nobody that I’m aware of believes that...” and “nobody thinks that...” remind us of the old joke:

The inmates at the penitentiary know each other so well that they’ve numbered their jokes. Instead of telling the whole joke, one of them will occasionally say, "#37" and the others will laugh. A new inmate decides to give it a try and says, "#54!" But no one laughs. He asks the fellow next to him, "What did I do wrong?" The guy shakes his head and says, "Some people can tell 'em and some people can't."

The point here is that we hardly have to listen to people we know well—we all know what progressives really believe and that many of the stereotypes are false. But when we venture outside our own walls—as we at Third Way have over the past year talking with numerous Evangelical leaders—we find that many of these fears exist (e.g., we included our statement on religion because so many Evangelicals we spoke to indicated a real distrust at that point), our short-hand falls flat, and our positions need to be carefully and explicitly articulated. Both groups also come to understand, if we are honest, that while many stereotypes are based on sheer misperceptions, some are based on real missteps that have given extra life to those misperceptions. The policies we outline here, far from addressing a “phony problem” that only existed in the “mid-90s” (PD, do you really believe America is not divided over these issues?), represent real progress not only in advancing civility in public life but in the concrete policy areas we address.

Come Let Us Reason Together: Calling for an End to the Culture Wars

2007-10-09T22:53:00.000-04:00

Today, I am standing as a co-author with Third Way at a national press conference to release a paper, "Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values between Evangelicals and Progressives." The Third Way paper--the result of nearly a year of research and coalition building--includes original analysis of the most recent public opinion research on Evangelicals and a corresponding set of recommendations on how progressives and Evangelicals can develop lasting and deeper coalitions. The paper also outlines new, common ground approaches to issues such as reducing the need for abortion, affirming the human dignity of gay and lesbian people, working for responsible progress in the treatment of human embryos, and respecting the role of religion in the public square.

E.J. Dionne wrote a strong column today about our paper, "A Treaty in the Culture Wars: Requiem for the Religious Right?", where he calls this effort an "important sign that religious conservatives are facing the disintegration of their movement."

The following are a summary of my remarks delivered at the press conference:

I stand here today keenly aware of my own multiple identities. First, I stand today with Third Way as a progressive. Like Rachel, prior to co-authoring this paper, I worked with a number of progressive organizations, most prominently serving as the founding director and senior fellow of the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation. I have published a book and several articles exploring future directions for liberalism, and I am currently completing a book on the growing progressive religious movement in America.

But I also grew up as an Evangelical in Mississippi, earned a degree from a Southern Baptist college and then a Master of Divinity degree from a Southern Baptist seminary in Texas where I trained for the ministry before pursuing a Ph.D. in religion.

Both of these identities have informed a growing conviction that I share with many others who know these two communities: that we are ready to end the culture wars. Long and bitter conflicts around cultural issues have not only stifled progress toward common goals, but have damaged our sense that a shared national life is even possible. We are here today to insist that it is possible and to chart a course forward together.

As we begin to chart that course, I want to draw your attention to one of the most important insights from our research about the diversity of Evangelicals as a group. During our research, we found a consistent pattern across a number of broad measures that we dubbed the one-fifth, one-third, one-half formula:

One-fifth of Evangelicals [representing 5% of the general population] are progressive;
One-third of Evangelicals [representing 8% of the general population] are moderates who share some progressive values; and
One-half of Evangelicals [representing 13% of the general population] are conservatives who may be partners on particular issues.

These patterns suggest that while Evangelicals are more conservative than the general population, half of Evangelicals (representing 13% of the population, approximately 52 million adult citizens) have views that are in sync with or open to progressive ideas. The upshot is that Evangelicals are more diverse than conventional wisdom would suggest, and this one-fifth, one-third, one-half pattern persists even on the more challenging terrain of cultural issues.

This, I believe, is cause for great hope, as is the very presence here today of so many people, Evangelical and progressive, who are committed to doing the hard work of reasoning together.

Creating a Better Evangelical Map for a Better Politics

2007-08-02T15:28:00.000-04:00

Note: This originally posted on Faith and Public Life's Blog as part of a dialogue with Randy Brinson and Pastor Bill Devlin of Redeem the Vote; Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary and Center for American Progress; Rev. Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary; and Rev. Rich Killmer of National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

One thread running through this exchange is the need to understand the size (one in four Americans) and the complexity of Evangelicals as a group. Shaun Casey and Randy Brinson are right to point out that one significant upshot of the new coalitions being built is that they expose once and for all the fallacy that Evangelicals are a monolithic group. This complexity is especially true as one moves down the chain from the most vocal political (and increasingly partisan) activists like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, to umbrella groups like the National Association of Evangelicals (remembering to note that the largest Evangelical denomination, Southern Baptists, are not members of the NAE), to non-denominational relief groups, denominations, and finally to individuals. In Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want, Christian Smith summed up his research among rank and file Evangelicals by noting, “When it comes to politics, the millions of ordinary evangelicals look not like a disciplined, charging army, but something more like a divided and hesitant extended family.”

To give just two telling examples, The American Values Survey that I directed last fall at the Center for American Values found that:
• Like the general public, when thinking about voting their values, more Evangelicals (44%) think about the honesty, integrity and responsibility of the individual candidate than any other single issue. Only 1 out of 5 (19%) Evangelicals thought primarily about same-sex marriage or abortions when voting their values.
• Fully 44% of Evangelicals say that Evangelical leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson do NOT speak for them.

Because of the complexity and decentralization that Shaun cites, a clear map doesn’t really exist right now; there is a state of ferment among Evangelicals that has opened up possibilities for new thinking and new ideas. But the partial maps we put together along the way matter. On this point, I am grateful to Susan Thistlethwaite for putting on the table the “enormous concerns” that she and others feel about these new coalitions, both because these concerns are operative in various ways in progressive circles and should be addressed directly and because they are prudent for politics in the real world—something people in faith circles sometimes neglect, as Susan notes, to their later regret.

But I want to quibble with Susan’s map and note the connection between the landscape of the map and the magnitude of the worries. Susan names six groups that make up the landscape: four groups (gospel of prosperity megachurches, creationists, theocrats, and religious right activists) are clearly difficult partners for political progressives; one group (“intent on saving souls”) is either problematic in terms of the challenge it represents to the progressive value of pluralism, or simply an irrelevant sectarian group disengaged with politics; and the final group is “left-wing” Evangelicals who are already allies in significant ways. Although Susan notes that there are others along this continuum, naming only these groups with no place for the large group of Evangelical moderates makes progressive coalitions seem either like fool’s errands or fait accompli.

Creating accurate maps that reflect a mix of realism, humility, and generosity is a key part of the work progressives need to do in this time. To link this back to my earlier post, there is a fine line between prudence and defensiveness, and more accurate maps can help us avoid the latter.

(Note: there are at least two major projects underway that will address this mapping problem: David Gushee’s forthcoming book in January 2008, A Public Witness of the Evangelical Center: The Future of Faith in American Politics, and a forthcoming paper in September that I’ve been working on with Rachel Laser at the Third Way Culture Project and Randy Brinson at Redeem the Vote).

Evangelicals and Progressives: Finding the Faith to Build a Meaningful Politics

2007-07-31T15:06:00.000-04:00

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1, RSV).

More and more people across the country are realizing that the recent levels of polarization of politics and politicization of religion has been bad for both, and that the continuation of the conversations between Evangelicals and progressives might be a key step in recalling a more prophetic religion and a more meaningful politics.

As someone who grew up Southern Baptist and whose commitments to progressive politics were formed in the crucible of the Deep South, I have had a somewhat unique vantage point as I’ve worked at this intersection both as a scholar studying the role of religion in public debates, and as a consultant on specific projects, such as a current effort to bring together progressives and Evangelicals on cultural issues with The Third Way and Redeem the Vote.

I want to focus here on one of the deepest obstacle to progress: a sense of defensiveness, particularly the ideological malady that thinks that giving an inch is opening the floodgates to disaster. For example, in Evangelicals circles, it is well-known that James Dobson and the Christian Coalition have both strongly resisted efforts to broaden the evangelical agenda to issues like poverty and global warming, claiming these are not core issues. In progressive circles, I personally encountered a similar defensiveness after giving a presentation of public opinion data that showed the promise of common ground between progressives and Evangelicals. The first comment came from an agitated prominent progressive blogger, who, on the bases of his own biases alone, proceeded to tell us not only that any outreach strategy was a waste of time but went on to seriously propose that a more prudent strategy would be to find ways to simply suppress the Evangelical vote.

The great twentieth century theological H. Richard Niebuhr identified a sense of defensiveness at the heart of what can go wrong not only with religious groups but all human groups and called for a movement from an ethics of defensiveness (which he noted resulted ultimately in an ethics of death) to an ethics of faithfulness and responsibility. The key to this move was to articulate (“to confess” in religious terms) our own positions as honestly as possible while embracing our human finitude, which requires the modest notion that we might be wrong. That simple acknowledgment gives life to a humility that opens up space for new conversations and breaks down old orthodoxies.

It is worth noting that at least three significant things can happen as we move from defensiveness to faithfulness, a process Niebuhr thought had to be ongoing:
1. Space opens up for creativity on issues that seemed completely intractable. For example, as I noted on my blog last week, Democrats in the House recently made a quiet but significant step toward healing one of America's deepest divides by passing the "Reducing the Need for Abortions Initiative" as part of the 2008 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for 2008.
2. Opponents are humanized and become more complex. For example, in a recent meeting, a prominent Catholic leader told a largely surprised group of progressives that he had hosted visitors in his home to pro-life protests and anti-war protests on back to back weekends and that in his theological framework, these were perfectly consistent things to do.
3. The possibility of mutual critique emerges as the excesses of one ideology become more visible viewed in the light of the other. For example, progressives begin to think more about the importance of changed hearts and Evangelicals more about transformed institutions.

Although these are modest steps, they are significant. Thankfully, we are beginning to see a new day and the emergence of a meaningful national politics that requires less fear and more faith—both in our fellow citizens and in our own abilities to hold our principles while listening to others and looking for the common good.

From the Culture Wars to the Common Good on Abortion

2007-07-25T14:46:00.000-04:00

Note: This posted originally on FaithfulDemocrats.com.

Last week, Democrats in the House made a quiet but significant step toward healing one of America's deepest divides by passing the "Reducing the Need for Abortions Initiative" as part of the 2008 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for 2008.

The $647 million abortion reduction package includes many of the provisions in the Reducing the Need for Abortions and Supporting Parents Act (H.R. 1074), legislation developed by Third Way, a progressive think tank, in partnership with pro-life Democrat Tim Ryan (OH - 17) and pro-choice Democrat Rosa L. DeLauro (CT - 3).

The bill's novel approach seeks to reduce the need for abortions by increasing resources both for prevention of unintended pregnancies (such as contraception, sex education, and after school programs) and for services to meet the needs of young women in difficult circumstances who may be deciding whether they are in a position to raise a child (such as child care and health care assistance, adoption awareness). This approach stakes out a new, more nuanced position for the Democratic Party that takes seriously the moral complexity that many Americans feel on this issue. As Rachel Laser, Director of the Third Way Culture Project, noted in a recent dispatch about the legislation, "The Democrats remain and will always be the party of abortion rights, but they are looking more and more like they are also the party of reducing the need for abortion."

The significance of progress on this front should not be underestimated. The issue of abortion has been the quintessential "wedge issue." As it has been marshaled in endless political races over the last few decades, abortion has evolved into a kind of proper noun that conjures an entire worldview. For both Republicans and Democrats, it has become a symbol that inspires, a badge that identifies friend or foe, a litmus test for inclusion, a banner under which to march. One only needs to look at local races, where candidates for school board or county clerk often include their stance on abortion in campaign materials, survey bumper stickers in an average parking lot, or listen in on first dates when the conversation turns to politics to see its symbolic power. "So, are you pro-life or pro-choice?" The question demands a binary answer even as most of us struggle internally with all the qualifiers we really feel.

Despite the binary nature of the issue as a symbol, when asked the right questions, Americans demonstrate this complexity. According to the recent 2006 Pew Religion and Public Life Survey, a majority (55%) of the country can be called "abortion grays," who think that abortion should neither be legal nor illegal all the time. Most importantly, two-thirds (66%) of Americans (and even 61% of white Evangelicals) believe that the country should find some "middle ground" on abortion laws (Pew, August 3, 2006).

The complexities of the issue are felt especially when binary positions are put into conversation with the language of faith. To put this in the context of Christianity, on the one hand, Christians are certainly commanded to value and protect life, but not in an unqualified way or at all costs -- note for example the cases of rape, incest, or saving the life of the mother, where even a majority (51%) of white Evangelicals believe abortion is allowable (Pew, August 3, 2006). On the other hand, Christians are commanded to respect the human capacity and responsibility for making free choices, to be compassionate, and to support social conditions that allow choices to truly be free. And as far back as Augustine in the 4^th century, Christians have understand this world as an imperfect place where difficult, even tragic choices are sometimes made and where the coercive power of law has its limits.

The problem with issues that become symbols is that they spawn entire industries that, rather than looking for solutions that work for the common good, have a vested interest in perpetuating polarization. Although the Republican Party and the far religious right have marketed abortion, religion, and the GOP as a seamless garment, it is striking that with a Republican president and Congress, this administration has done virtually nothing that would actually reduce the number of abortions in America. For serious people of faith who care about abortion as a problem to address rather than a symbol to wield merely for partisan gain, this new Democratic effort to find common ground on the shared value of reducing abortions without imperiling a woman's health or putting anyone in prison should be welcomed as real progress and as a hopeful beginning to a new, more civil era in our shared public life.

"Liberal Media?" Not When it Comes to Religion

2007-07-05T12:52:00.000-04:00

This post originally written for Third Way Culture Project and can be seen here.

When I hear complaints about the “liberal media”, the additional adjective “secular” is usually a part of the phrase or not far behind. For example, last summer at the so-called “Values Voter Summit” in Washington, DC, speaker after speaker referred to how the “secular liberal media” has neglected religion and distorted coverage of religion and conservative values. A new study by Media Matters, however, documents two key findings that debunk this tired mantra: 1) since 2004, coverage of religion by the media has increased significantly; and 2) this coverage has actually been biased in favor of conservative religious leaders by a factor of nearly 3 to 1.

The new Media Matters for America report – Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media – demonstrates that the clear conservative bias in coverage of religion since 2004:

Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

On television news – the three major television networks, the three major cable news channels, and PBS – conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.

In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.

(You can check out the highlights of the Media Matters press conference here.)

What are progressives to make of this? One response would be to concede the religious ground to the conservatives and simply lament the increased coverage of religion, which seems to bring in its wake increased coverage of conservative viewpoints. But one of the most exciting things happening in progressive politics today is that political progressives are remembering (even if the media are still coming around) that “religious” and “conservative”, “Christian” and “Republican” are not synonyms. Progressives are awakening from their short-term amnesia to remember that the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the abolitionist movement—in fact virtually all major progressive political movements in American history—have had influential progressive religious voices helping to lead the charge.

Progressives are also realizing that the American religious landscape is much more diverse than the skewed media coverage leads the public to believe. Just a glimpse of some findings from the American Values Survey conducted in 2006 by the Center for American Values in Public Life illuminates our real religious diversity:

The vast majority (9 in 10) Americans consider themselves religious, and most (50%) Americans are Religious Centrists.

Religious Traditionalists—the voices overrepresented by the media—only represent 18% of Americans.

Progressive Religious Modernists weigh in at 15% of the population, nearly matching the size of Traditionalists that too many assume are the whole of religion.

Even among conservative religious groups such as white Evangelicals, only 44% said that conservative religious leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson represented their views.

Despite the insistence by conservative religious leaders that religious Americans cared mostly about hot-button cultural issues, AVS found that more than 8 in 10 Americans agree that too many religious leaders use religion to talk about abortion and gay rights and don’t talk enough about more important things like loving your neighbor and caring for the poor.

So, progressives need not lament the increased coverage of religion—an important and influential part of American life—but the Media Matters study demonstrates that we need to demand better, balanced coverage that fairly portrays the voices that are both religious and progressive. Fortunately, there progressive religious leaders have been organizing and working to educate the media through efforts like Red Letter Christians, Faith and Public Life’s Voicing Faith Media Bureau, and Catholic Alliance for the Common Good’s Voices for the Common Good Speaker’s Bureau.

Progressives should encourage a more informed media that will not only paint a more accurate portrait of religion in America but it will also give the American public a more accurate understanding of what religious Americans care about—a broader religious agenda that goes beyond conservative values and hot-button issues to include progressive values and other moral issues like the budget, poverty, the war, and health care.