Taking Back the Faith (Page 2)

Wallis, Lerner and other religious progressives are up against a long-entrenched and formidable foe, especially on radio and TV. The Republican activist Paul Weyrich told a group of neocon advisers Bush had brought to the White House that they had no excuse for failing to get their message out. "There are 1,500 conservative radio talk-show hosts. You have Fox News. You have the Internet, where all the successful sites are conservative. The ability to reach people with our point of view is like nothing we have ever seen before."

Wallis realizes that even if he gets a toehold in radio and television, it's only a start. "You can't just be on the air and in the media, so we've been having extensive conversations at our magazine Sojourners and at our Call to Renewal movement about organizational strategies. We've had lots of other organizations and groups come by who'd like to make alliances and partnerships, so we're talking about a pastors' network, a congregational network."

I ask Wallis if he has any plans for trying to do the kind of grassroots political work the religious right has done so successfully in getting people elected to school boards and local offices. "I've met lots of local elected officials," he says, "who have a progressive faith perspective--state senators and representatives, mayors, school board commissioners. They've urged us to have a gathering for state and local officials. We'd have hundreds for such a conference. I've got former students from Harvard running for office around this agenda, running for city councils already, and some of them are going to be running for state offices. The right does it in an overtly partisan way, almost like a power bloc within the Republican Party. I see us doing more like a civil rights movement kind of thing, rather than what the Christian Coalition did. We want to build a movement around issues like poverty and hold politicians accountable, more than just joining the political party and trying to gain power within the party."

* * *

"We realize this time it's an all-hands-on-deck situation."
   --Dave Robinson, director of Pax Christi, the Roman Catholic progressive movement for peace and justice

The jacket of Robert Edgar's suit is off, and his shirt is crisp and white, his tie straight, his glasses clear. Before becoming general secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC), Edgar was a six-term member of the House of Representatives, the first Democrat in more than 120 years to be elected from the heavily Republican Seventh District of Pennsylvania. He also served as a minister to Methodist congregations and as a college chaplain before coming to New York in 2000 to run the NCC from his office in "the God Box," a building on Upper Broadway that serves as headquarters for the NCC and a number of Protestant denominations.

"We've been Sleeping Beauty," he says, "but the actions of the Bush Administration to force us into war in Iraq was the kiss that woke us up." One result of the wake-up, Edgar says, is the website started by the NCC, called FaithfulAmerica.org. "Is that in response to the religious right?" I ask. Edgar sighs:

Almost everything we do is in response to the religious right. They have done an excellent job over the last forty years in silencing moderate to progressive voices. We're trying to be silent no more, we're trying to stand up when they're telling us to sit down, and we're trying to speak out when they tell us to be silent. Here we're using some new energy and techniques to go after those who are trying to take us down the wrong road.
 We watched how MoveOn.org and Working Assets and other advocacy groups have formed, and about a year ago we said, Can't we invent that same kind of technology for the faith communities? In May of last year we had 2,000 e-mail addresses, and now there are over 125,000 who we talk to about once every ten days.
 Churches that stand for something grow. Not just conservative churches but liberal churches that take the Gospel seriously are increasing in membership. But many of our pastors haven't figured that out yet.

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