Religion

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?

I've got two, semi-connected threads in my head at the moment that I'm mulling over that have to do with how younger voters are/might influence the Republican Party. The first has to do with what we normally think of as "moral values," and how young evangelicals might reshape the debate.

Over at Revolution in Jesusland, Zack Exley points to some very interesting data from the Pew Center on Faith and American Life:

Of all the people who say moral values are very important in deciding how to vote, less than a third (30%) are referring to the candidates’ positions on issues, with by far the largest number (14%) referring to abortion. In addition, they mention gay rights (3%), that marriage is between a man and woman (3%) and gay marriage (3%). A few, but only a very few, mention homosexuality (1%), and stem cell research (1%).

The greatest majority (78%) of these voters mentions personal characteristics of the candidates including their honesty (28%), integrity (11%), ethical values (8%), and someone who does the right thing (8%), is trustworthy (7%), truthful (6%) or keeps his/her word (6%).

So there's that - a clear opening to recapture the meaning of "values" in our public debate. I don't have statistics, but I'm willing to bet that this is reframing of values would play especially well among younger evangelicals, whose support for Bush, and the Republican Party, has dropped significantly in recent years, even as Bush has been very supportive of Christian Right culture-war issues like gay marriage, stem cells, and abortion.

Instead, of supporting that agenda, what we've seen so far is young evangelicals supporting Mike Huckabee, a candidate who preaches something of an anti-poverty agenda, and wants us to be "good stewards of the earth," by 2 - 1 among young Republican voters. These young, conservative evangelicals don't seem to care about culture war issues the same war their parents/elders in the church do. Rather, they are much more interested in a different conception of faith in public life, particularly what it means in a social justice context.

The second strand is that this isn't limited in scope to young evangelicals. The 2006 American Freshman survey (pdf) revealed that there is considerable support among young conservatives for traditionally liberal positions on a number of issues:

This has tended to manifest itself in two ways, I think. First, in the support of young people for the candidacy of John McCain in New Hampshire, where 27%, a plurality of young voters chose his candidacy, and in the creation of new organizations like the Republican Youth Majority, a newish GOP youth group supporting a pro-choice, pro-environment, fiscal conservative platform.

It's important to note that prior to Huckabee's surge in December and McCain's resurgence post-Iowa, Rudy Giuliani was consistently the favorite choice among young conservative voters (pdf). Now that Huckabee has gained some traction and media attention, and is actively courting younger voters, and John McCain is perceived to be back in the race, Giuliani's support among younger voters seems to have dried up.

So here's a thought - could the Millennial Generation conservatives move the Republican Party to the center/left? Probably not anytime soon; with young voters choosing Democrats by a 2 - 1 margin, there are far too few of them to be all that influential right now. But it will be interesting to see how they shape the GOP as they grow into power.

Thoughts? I don't have this worked out yet - not by a long shot - and this is probably an oversimplification of a number of trends among conservative youth and evangelical youth. I'm interested in seeing/hearing people reinforce or tear down this idea.

Yesterday I was on a conference call with the Harvard Institute of Politics's John Della Volpe, who presented findings from the IOP's surveys and recent election research. There wasn't too much new information for those who are regular readers of Future Majority - the youth vote began trending up in 2004 thanks to new outreach programs; this resulted in Democratic victories in 2006; Millennials are optimistic and civically engaged; we are multilateralists who believe in international institutions, etc. There was, however, some data about morality, religion, and political persuasion that I find very interesting.

First, the poll found that an increasing number of American youth are spiritual (70%), however that does not translate into a desire to see candidate's profess their faith on the campaign trail.

Also interesting on this particular slide is the question about the moral direction of the U.S. This is an often abused statistic - particularly by the religious right, who use it as a club to beat pundits and journalists with the idea that more Americans are supportive of their position on abortion and stem cells. Della Volpe shed some light on these figures, pointing out that moral direction is a subjective term, and that in the cross tabs, it becomes apparent that self-identified Democrats responding to this question cite poverty, global warming, and Iraq as evidence or moral failings, while traditionally conservative respondents identify culture war issues like abortion and stem cells. So while similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans agree that the country is headed in the wrong moral direction, their views on what that means couldn't be further apart.

By far, this slide below was the most interesting piece of the presentation (click for a larger image). Take a look at the green and gray constituencies and tell me your head doesn't start to explode. Basically it identifies two new "types" of voter who comprise more than half of the Millennial electorate: the Secular Center who are less likely to vote, less supportive of moral arguments in politics less likely to support universal health care, but more supportive of gay rights; and the Religious Center who are more likely to vote, somehow split between Kerry and Bush despite the fact that African Americans and Hispanics (Democratic constituencies) are driving the growth of this sector, don't support GLBT rights, yet are greener than their secular counterparts.

I have no idea yet how to square these percentages with the actual numerical size of Millennials, and the recent swing towards Democrats by Millennials, or even with the question about partisan identification and morality mentioned above. Cognitive dissonance is setting in, and I'm getting eaten alive this week by my day job. I'll be back with more in this over the weekend once I get a chance to think and run some questions by the folks at the IOP. In the meantime, what's your take on it?

I’m at this open-source conference, which excites my radical blood, and there have been a couple things that crossed my radar lately which I want to talk about, but I haven’t had time to distill my thinking. In a post down below, Mike was talking about the likely forward movement in youth organizing, saying something along the lines of, “it’s not as sexy as Revolution!, but it’s important nonetheless.” This is true, but I miss the sexy parts.

Two posts I want to discuss soon:

• Along the lines of our Faith and Politics thread, Zack Exley reports from within the evangelical Revolution, and it’s very interesting stuff.
• In a recent post on MyDD, everyone’s favorite bomb-thrower Matt Stoller discusses turning away from the National Security State in pretty radical language.

I’d like to blog more about these themes and my own Big Revolutionary Thoughts soon. Is this of interest to others on the site?

My man Samuel Taylor has a really interesting post giving his perspective on religion and politics:

My point, simply: Jesus rapped for the ones that Johnny Cash wore the black for.

And behind the curtain: my agenda is not to convert you to Christianity. Ecgh. Disgusting. I’m trying to reconfigure some of the assumptions [people] (seem to) have about Christ and Christians. I think that’s important, partly because we will never have meaningful change in this country until we have a reevaluation of Christ, and how the secular left treats christians has a lot to do with whether or not that reevaluation is possible.

Emphasis is mine.

I think this is a really important topic. I was raised outside any spiritual tradition (my religion is “Hippy”) and so I more or less line up with “the secular left”. But I agree with everything Samuel has to say, and as the son of a preacher man he’s got some cred. I want to help us get on with this reevaluation he speaks of. I wonder what it will take.