Is Praying Liberally Just for the Boomers?

by Seth Pearce, Living Liberally

This week Living Liberally launched Praying Liberally, our new network of local liberal meetups of progressives from a wide range of faiths to talk politics, say a collective prayer for "the least of these" in our world, and build community to organize around our common causes.

Since Monday, when Praying Liberally launched over at Street Prophets and got some mention on Daily Kos and Hullabaloo, we've gotten several requests to start new chapters, many from Boomers, some who've said they felt too 'old' for the Drinking Liberally crowd, which is fine. Different Liberallies appeal different people. But we still haven't gotten any requests from millennials.

This leads us to ask: is Praying Liberally just for the Boomers? Will the religious left die out?

It doesn't have to.

With interest in religion and spirituality rising on college campuses, and the fact that the millennial generation is one of the most liberal ever, the community potential is there.

Plus, The fact is there are many progressive religious youth orgs, such as Mitzvah Corps, that get young people engaged in social justice and other progressive causes.

But unlike conservative religious youth groups, progressive ones don't usually self-identify in ways that would explicitly denote them as progressive organizations. Also, these groups haven't formed solid coalitions with the progressive movement, and in that they fail to act as a legitimate gateway for youth into the progressive movement. Introducing youth involved with religious programs into the greater movement was one of the Religious Right's key skills as they grew their power in the last decades of the 20th century.

The progressive movement needs to build connections with these progressive religious youth groups through more liberal faith communities such as the United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist and Episcopalian churches, and the Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish movements. As well as the younger, more liberal generation of church-goers at traditionally conservative churches.

This relationship between "Church" and Progressive Movement could provide us with great new leaders, who like Barack Obama, would come to the progressive movement through their faith community. It could also infuse these religious organizations with new energy, connecting young people to faith in new ways and expanding the opportunities offered to them by their religious community as they see their church, synagogue, mosque or temple becoming more connected with their everyday lives.

But for now, while we try to convince the progressive movement to get involved with this kind of outreach, are there any millennials out there who want to start a Praying Liberally chapter?

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Outreach to Non-believers

I would actually like to see some outreach done to the secular/humanist/atheist/non-religious community by progressives.

There's this myth that we're all just automatically progressives (& vote Democratic, for instance), especially official, dues-paying Secular Humanists like myself ... But, actually, many are being brought over to "The Right" - not so much the Republican Party, but Libertarians are making huge in-roads with secular people.

& lately, since Obama has tacked towards the center, & especially with him reaching out to evangelical voters, he's beginning to annoy us who cherish Mr. Jefferson's "Wall of Separation" ... I would like to see Obama, at least, reassure us "Atheists for Obama" that he will stand up for our values too.

"Vote Republican? I'm not rich enough, & I don't hate all that many people ..."

Agnostic but hopefule

I'm an avowed agnostic, so I won't be starting up any chapters, but this is a really important development and I wish you all the best of luck.

Back when I was working at Music for America, one of hte biggest criticisms we received was the lack of a place or young progressives of faith to be heard in our community. That was partially my fault - my own beliefs kept me from writing about that in any way other than through knee-jerk attacks against christian conservatives.

But there are millions of young, progressive leaning people of faith. And many evangelicals are abandoning Bush the the Republican Party as they shift their work towards social justice issues like poverty and climate change. I hope y'all can be a vital link to bring them into a big-tent progressive coalition.