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If you think such preachiness has no place in politics, think again. Maybe it shouldn't, but it does. As Peter Beinart wrote in The New Republic, "In the United States, where it is great causes and missionary impulses that rouse citizens to engage with the world, Bush's language captured the public imagination, and Kerry's did not." Pale "Parson" Kerry's kind of sermon was more cerebral, and therefore more complex—a harder sell in the public square today. Perhaps it's time to reconsider, in public though not on campus, the classically cool, anticlerical rationalist style Reed tends to exemplify. If Kerry had squared off against Bush in a Reed seminar, he would've won. Outside a seminar, ideas do not sell themselves by sheer intellectual superiority. You need to convey an emotional sense of a higher calling.
"I think it imperative that the secular left and religious left form new alliances," urges Lang. "Each has something of great importance to the other. The secular left can offer the religious left concrete, specific alternatives. The religious left can supply a powerful language of moral values and vision that place those alternatives within a cosmic-redemptive paradigm. We need each other."
"There is a lot of common ground," insists Wallis. "There's a growing movement among churches—and not just progressive ones—that cares about HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, global poverty, debt relief."
He freely confesses to the sins of the faithful. "Religion has indeed been used for the worst things we've done to each other in human history. Religion can be hierarchical, patriarchal, oppressive, divisive, and violent. Religion has also been a catalytic and transforming and liberating force in every major progressive movement in this country's history: the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, child labor law reforms, famously civil rights. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a member of the religious right. He also wasn't a member of the secular left because he would invoke Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jesus. But he did it with a Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other hand, and I try to do the same thing."
So does it look like smooth sailing for the new religious and/or Christian/progressive alliance? The dominant religious political groups, like Focus on the Family, scare the bejesus out of the left, even though their radicalism is not representative of the Christian majority. Some fear that finding common ground amounts to giving up ground—selling out the Enlightenment for a mess of political pottage.