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When asked why the religious right is so much more powerful in American politics than the religious left, a political observer quipped that it is because the religious right consists of cows, docile and easily led, while those on the left are cats, difficult to herd under any circumstances. While that may prove be the case, on Wednesday more than 1,200 of those cats gathered on the UC campus to attend a four-day conference on spiritual activism. 

The intent of the conclave is to create a new “Network of Spiritual Progressives.” The brainchild of UC Professor Michael Nagler and Berkeley Rabbi Michael Lerner, the conference was sponsored by a variety of faith-based groups, with the cornerstone organization being Lerner’s Tikkun community. 

Wednesday night the tandem of Lerner and Reverend Jim Wallis provided the keynote addresses. Wallis, whose latest book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, a bestseller, has become the best-known voice of the religious left. Given this cachet he has joined the elite group of celebrity consultants—another of whom is UC Berkeley’s George Lakoff—periodically summoned to Washington to advise Democratic leaders. 

An evangelical preacher, Jim Wallis was a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, and is a long-time activist, best known as the founder of the Sojourner Community in Washington, DC. Wallis lambasted the religious right, arguing that the time has come for the left to take back American religion. 

Remarking that “Religion’s job is to pull out our best stuff,” Wallis decried the “seduction” of key leaders of the religious right by the Republican Party. He observed that the true function of prophetic religion is to serve “not as a wedge, but as a bridge.” He argued that “religion should be the moral center of our public life,” and that the reawakening of the religious left would assure that this would again be the case. 

Noting that the religious right’s moral “agenda” is restricted to abortion and gay marriage, Reverend Wallis observed that while poverty is mentioned 3,000 times in the Old Testament, neither poverty, protection of the environment, nor the “illegal and immoral” war in Iraq has caught the right’s attention. Remarking that conservatives have painted a picture of Jesus as “pro-rich, pro-war, and pro-American,” Jim lamented, “We need to take our religion back.” 

Wallis observed that “the biggest mistake progressives made was to cede values and faith to the religious right,” implying that many people of faith decided that liberals, and Democrats in general, didn’t care about faith, didn’t care about their spiritual crisis, and as a result began to vote Republican. Reverend Wallis argued that progressives must have faith, that it “is about changing the big things” such as ending poverty in the world. 

Quoting a young activist, who when asked where the new leaders were, was fond of remarking, “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” Jim Wallis encouraged attendees to begin a new movement. “American history has been changed by social movements and the best ones have had a spiritual foundation.” 

Although the conference audience gave Reverend Wallis a standing ovation, many participants probably wondered what they should do next. How to build a bridge between his optimism and the network of spiritual progressives advertised in the conference literature? Rabbi Michael Lerner provided many of the operational details. 

Like Wallis, Michael Lerner is a long-time activist—interestingly, also a participant in SDS—a leader in Jewish Renewal and Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun in Berkeley and San Francisco. Lerner has a Ph.D. in psychology and has worked as therapist. He used this experience to provide a psychosocial analysis of American culture. Agreeing that faith-based social movements can transform American society, Lerner argued that their unique role was to “transform the energy from fear to hope.” He sees America as locked in a spiritual crisis where the average citizen is fearful, because we have been taught to treat each other as commodities in an increasingly materialistic culture. 

Lerner believes that the religious right sees this spiritual crisis and has proceeded with a faulty analysis that scapegoats groups such as Jews, blacks, feminists and gays. The left doesn’t understand that there is a spiritual crisis and therefore has lost contact with the average American—who would rather go with a faulty solution than no recognition of their alienation. 

Lerner’s solution is for spiritual progressives to unite in an awareness of the crisis and to then generate an analysis and compelling vision. He proposed the Network of Spiritual Progressives as the vehicle to accomplish this. Rather than stick to the conservative paradigm of “selfishness and materialism” the network would posit an alternative of “love and generosity.” Michael Lerner sees this analysis being worked out through a series of conferences; his target is to provide a progressive “platform” before the 2008 elections. 

The 1,200 “cats” packed into Pauley ballroom were obviously moved by the words of Wallis and Lerner. The question is whether they will line up to form a movement.