Excerpts - Spiritual Politics

The Spiritual Political Party by Joseph Amoroso, Philadelphia Spirituality Examiner, August 6, 2010 -
There is a growing movement in New Thought Spirituality for a political party which would represent the peaceful and all encompassing views of modern spirituality. Now, more than ever the spiritual community has become a powerful political force as social networks have bridged the gaps between all the spiritual theologies of the world, forming a worldwide spiritual connection of millions of like minded individuals...
If this spiritual party would organize itself, you would see some of the most incredible foreign and domestic policy in modern history...A sentiment that is not exclusive to the spiritual community as this movement is sweeping the world across all party lines.
Basing their ideology on Universal principles, spirituality sights vast similarities of thought and not the semantically differences of theologies...
The thing that is stopping this movement is not public opinion, it is organization. As new age leaders in general are more about passively teaching rather than becoming influential leaders...Although, Imagination is abundant, the organization is still yet to be formed and the muscle of the spiritual communities numbers have yet to be harnessed. ...Only time will tell how many more will stand up and organize themselves and be counted as a part of this emerging political powerhouse. full text

A Primer on Activism from Unitarian Universalists by Kim Bobo, Religion Dispatches, August 5, 2010 Want to know how to run a successful protest? Arizona is ground zero for the struggle over immigration, and when the Arizona legislature passed SB 1070 and the law was scheduled to go into effect on July 29, groups in Arizona began organizing and inviting allies from around the nation to join them...Although most faith bodies and

denominations have very strong statements on immigration reform, those same denominations did not activate people. With one glaring exception—the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).
Of the several hundred religious leaders who showed up, only the Unitarian Universalist Association seriously committed staff, money and organizing talent to the struggle.
Standing on the side of love Let’s look at what the UUA did...Supporting human rights for all people, including immigrants, is a core Unitarian Universalist value. The UU engagement in Arizona made a significant impact. Following are seven lessons this experience offers for the faith community on effectively engaging and mobilizing people around the immigration crisis (or other social justice issues).
1) Engage leadership.
2) Link to principles and history.
3) Assign staff and resources for planning.
4) Coordinate with local coalitions.
5) Be visual.
6) Use social media.
7) Ask for personal engagement and sacrifice.   full text

Many Faiths, One Truth by Tenzin Gyaatso, the Dalai Lama, New York Times, May 24, 2010 – When I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.
Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence…Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.
Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.
An early eye-opener for me was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions.
A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism…The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.
Take Judaism, for instance…I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”…I’ve come to see the centrality of selfless compassion in Hinduism too…Compassion is equally important in Islam — and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant faith…An imam in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran.
Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.
Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole. full text

The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger by Chris Hedges, first posted on TruthDig Posted on June 8, 2010 on Alternet.org. ...Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism...
There are wild contradictions within this belief system. Personal independence is celebrated alongside an abject subservience to leaders who claim to speak for God...It speaks of love and promotes fear of damnation and hate. There is a terrifying cognitive dissonance in every word they utter...Those gathered into the arms of this Christian fascist movement are desperately struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment....They have a right to their rage and alienation. But they are also being used and manipulated by forces that seek to dismantle what is left of our democracy and abolish the pluralism that was once the hallmark of our society. full text

Did Christianity Cause the Crash? by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic, December 2009
America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.
...Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers...
“Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!”...
America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity...
Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.
In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. ...the prosperity gospel, which is most prevalent in the Sun Belt—where many of the country’s foreclosure hot spots also lie...
Many of the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer’s son turned Pentecostal preacher. ...In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a “seed” offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.
But since that time [1980's], the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors...Kirbyjon Caldwell...Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation’s most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country’s largest church by far.
...Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas...50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity...Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”...believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.
Osteen is often derided as Christianity Lite, but he is more like Positivity Extreme...advice is exactly like the message of The Secret, or any number of American self-help blockbusters that edge toward magical thinking, except that the religious context adds another dimension...
Theologically, the prosperity gospel has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors...More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse...
Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor...Nationally, the prosperity gospel has spread exponentially among African American and Latino congregations. This is also the other distinct pattern of foreclosures...banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans...branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers.
...Oral Roberts’s seed-faith concept is the source of much suspicion about prosperity churches; pastors, including Garay, ask their parishioners to give 10 percent of their income to the church...He spoke in very specific terms during church services, promising that a $100 offering would yield a $10,000 return: “This is not my promise. It is God’s promise, and he will make it happen!” he would say.
While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence...He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. “They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it’s God’s will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else.”
...Garay describes the recession as God’s judgment—for abortion, taking prayer out of school, bikinis on television...adherents of every stripe exhibited the same sort of magical thinking about finances, as did millions of nonbelievers... full text

God and His Demons - Taking on the Religious Right by Gregory Elich , Counterpunch.org, March 24, 2010
Michael Parenti has written a compelling work, whose themes are so relevant for our time: the essentiality of rational thought, the struggle to maintain a secular and tolerant society, and the abuse of religion for reactionary political and obscurant objectives... Too often today, religion is placed at the service of reactionary political goals. "Backed by moneyed interests, the right-wing Christianist media propagate free-market corporatism, militarism, and super-patriotism." And their influence is powerful...Fundamentalist Christian leaders make no secret of their desire to transform the American political system into a theocracy. Already, alarming inroads have been made...The goal, Parenti writes, "is to take over the U.S. government and replace civil law with biblical law."...
Parenti does see some glimmers of hope, with the continued adherence to the ideal of a secular and tolerant society by a meaningful portion of the American public. Our aim, Parenti concludes, should be to "roll back the theocratic aggrandizement while strengthening our right to entertain our beliefs and disbeliefs openly and with impunity. Only secular strength and organized democratic activism on our part will counter the sectarian intolerance and state-assisted tyranny of reactionary theocrats. full text

Idealism, Conscience And The Spiritual Left by William Horden, Huffington Post, March 1, 2010 ...Spiritual Left did not, of course, originate with the 60s....it dates back at least to 1838, when Emerson and other Transcendentalists began their quest for a path "away from the old 'religions of authority' into a new 'religion of the spirit.'"...sought a first-hand experience of the divine grounded in nature and community rather than institutionalized dogma. Rooted deep in the grain of American culture, the Spirtual Left has long acted as the progressive conscience of the nation, championing as it did from its very beginning unpopular causes like abolition and women's rights...
Amorphous and anti-authoritarian, the Spiritual Left is perhaps best defined as a borderless association of leaders. Free thinkers and independent seekers of spirituality beyond dogma, its members engage in--and disengage from--political activism as a matter of personal conviction, not ordained groupthink...The Political Left will need to return to the moral high ground of progressive American thought and give voice to the American conscience of compassion if it is to recapture the imagination and heart of its spiritual counterpart. It has to want to change the world for the better, not just get elected...full text

The Pluralism Problem by Brendan Sweetman, PBS, ONE NATION: RELIGION & POLITICS, January 28, 2010
Listening to President Obama’s State of the Union address, one underlying theme made a big impression: the problem of pluralism and how to deal with competing worldviews, ideologies, values, and political beliefs in the same country.
It is clear that the president is struggling with this question. Since he came into office he has been frustrated and perhaps baffled by the difficulty he and many leaders experience in actually trying to govern when they obtain political power in a democracy...he made a strong appeal to our “shared values” and the fact that both sides of the political aisle simply have to work together. He rightfully spent most of his time on the economy, and he is aware that our economic worries tend to overshadow our ideological differences, for a time at least, and they can bring us together as we try to find a way out of the mess that was created largely by human greed...he is also aware, although he made no mention of it, that a common purpose does not mean agreement on a common solution...
The problem of pluralism, unfortunately, leads to very nasty partisan politics...that it has always been like this in terms of political infighting, partisan attacks, and political corruption, though we are now more ideologically split than we have ever been before...
underlying much of the president’s remarks was a powerful theme: that we are all human beings, and that we have many shared values on the important things in life like morality, education, and the common good. Our economic and security concerns make us see from time to time that many of our disagreements are petty, and, as the president rightfully said, we all have a responsibility to strive to make progress as a country...
Every now and again an extraordinary individual comes along and helps us concentrate on our shared values, rise above our differences, and move forward together to solve our difficult problems. President Obama carried great promise into office, but his star has faded a little in his first year. It remains to be seen whether he can overcome the problem of pluralism, where so many have failed, to lead us forward as a nation. full text

Society as the Subject of Redemption: The Relevance of the Social Gospel by Gary Dorrien, Tikkun magazine, November/December 2009
The idea that biblical religion has a regenerative social mission is as old as the biblical message of letting justice flow like a river, pouring yourself out for the poor and vulnerable, and attending to what Jesus called the "weightier matters of the law," justice and mercy. A century ago, the Social Gospel movement put it in a novel way, calling Christians to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice... Society became the subject of redemption...
The leading figures of the Social Gospel were Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch. For them, the Social Gospel was political without apology, with a progressive ideology, and vibrantly evangelical, in a theologically liberal fashion. ...
Rauschenbusch said it in the movement's greatest work, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), ...great social truth can be won only when an oppressed class "makes that truth its own and fights for it."...
the Social Gospel, for all its faults, had a greater progressive religious legacy than any other North American movement. Christian realism inspired no hymns and built no lasting institutions. It was not even a movement, but rather, a reaction to the Social Gospel centered on one person, Reinhold Niebuhr. The Social Gospel, by contrast, was a half-century movement and an enduring perspective that paved the way for modern ecumenism, social Christianity, the Civil Rights Movement, and the field of social ethics...the Social Gospel was a response to the first historic wave of economic globalization...
the National Council of Churches, representing thirty-three denominations, has a new Social Creed that...calls for "full civil, political, and economic rights for women and men of all races...It stresses the necessity of adopting simpler lifestyles; living within our means; protecting the earth's environment; and investing in renewable energy. It supports equitable global trade that protects local economies, and advocates a foreign policy based on international law and multilateral diplomacy...it calls for cooperation and dialogue among world religions...
the crisis of social justice organizing within religious communities today is acute...it is also a time of bold faith and hope. Unlike the social gospelers, we have no illusions of being carried along by a tide of cultural progress. For us, history must be about struggle, not progress; or at least, as Frederick Douglass put it, "without struggle, there is no progress." full text

The American Creed, a spiritual and patriotic primer by Forrest Church -
"Like all experiments, The Declaration of Independence started with a precept, a “given” – in this case a set of truths so rockribbed and essential that they were deemed to be “self-evident.” Truth cast in language that, in turn, spells out the truth for succeeding generations deserves to be called a creed…
As understood by Lincoln, King and many others, America is a union of faith and freedom, in which faith elevates freedom and freedom tempers faith. The American Creed doesn’t impose parochial faith upon its citizens but protects freedom, including freedom of religion, by invoking a more universal authority. Though employing the language of faith, it transcends religious particulars, uniting all citizens in a single covenant. It treats believer and atheist alike, offering each the same protections, securing freedom of and from religion. Equally important, it protects freedom from itself, tempering excesses of individual license by postulating a higher moral code. In America, faith and freedom wed to form a union greater than either alone is capable of sustaining…
If ours is not an explicitly Christian nation, it is nonetheless built on a religious foundation. By law, church and state are separate in America, to the signal advantage of both. But by tradition, religion and politics are interdependent, especially at times of crisis…
No American faithful to the founders’ vision can view social outcomes as independent of moral consequence…conscience is the handmaiden of American freedom. Conscience also touches the heart of what it means to be human…In religion Americans are willing to accept absolutes for themselves…however we have proved unwilling (at least for long) to impose our absolutes on others…It is precisely the vacuum created when we forget the nation’s creed that invites occupation by the new fundamentalists. full text

Obama And the Rise of Secular Spirituality by Deepak Chopra and Dave Stewart, Belief.net, January 18, 2009 - "It's rare enough for an incoming President to inspire such a flood of hope and optimism, or so much relief that our long imprisonment in the political doldrums should be ending. But Barack Obama has done more than that. He has become a symbol of the rise of secular spirituality in this country, a liberated set of values that exists largely outside organized religion...Where organized religion has opted to stand by the right wing, millions of Americans who consider themselves spiritual have longed for peace, unity, nonviolence, and freedom that isn't imposed by the force of arms. We think Obama stands for the same values...Nothing less than spiritual renewal is needed across the board, and there is no one of equal stature to lead it." full text

First Ever Polls Comparing Conservative and Progressive Religious Activists
Show Divergent Identities and Strategies, Common Commitment to Political Involvement - The 2009 Religious Activist Surveys were conducted by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in partnership with Public Religion Research. These first ever comparative surveys of conservative and progressive religious activists find them to be faithful, engaged, and divergent.
Key findings:
Religion. Conservative and progressive religious activists are deeply religious, but have strikingly different religious profiles.
In terms of religious affiliation, conservative activists are almost exclusively Christian, whereas progressive activists are more diverse...In terms of beliefs, conservative and progressive religious activists have strikingly different beliefs about scripture. Nearly half of conservatives (48%) view scripture as the literal word of God, a view held by only 3% of progressives.
...Issue priorities. Conservative and progressive religious activists have strikingly different issue priorities. A majority of conservative religious activists gave priority to abortion and same-sex marriage, while progressive religious activists gave priority to a number if issues, including economic justice, the environment, and peace...

Issue positions. Conservative and progressive religious activists have sharply different views on cultural, foreign policy, and economic issues. Abortion...Gay and Lesbian Issues...Health Care...Environment...Torture...Iraq War...
Role of Government and Taxes. Sixty-eight percent of progressive religious activists believe government should increase spending and provide more services; 89% say tax cuts should be directed toward lower income people.  By even larger margins, conservative religious activists believe that government should provide fewer services and cut spending (86%).  Sixty-one percent back tax cuts targeted at upper-income individuals...
Religion in public life...Nearly all conservative activists believe America was founded as a Christian nation, a view shared by only 37% progressive activists...
In terms of future public engagement, both conservative and progressive activists strongly emphasized the importance of being publicly visible and politically active. Conservative activists were more likely to emphasize the importance of prayer, whereas progressive activists were more likely to emphasize the importance of civility, pluralism, and social justice. full text

The religious left - An old tradition for a new day by Daniel McKanan , Unitarian Universalist World, Winter 2009 - For the past three decades, many political commentators have assumed that the United States was divided between the “religious right” and the “secular left.” ...Unitarian Universalists often felt left out of this picture—and so did Roman Catholics who cared about poverty and evangelicals who worried about global warming. In many ways, the picture reflected the worldview of a newly assertive political movement, the religious right, which assumed that anyone who questioned biblical literalism was a hopeless secularist...Clearly, the relationship between religion and politics is not what it once seemed.
From a longer historical perspective, things are getting back to normal. Despite its recent prominence, the religious right is only about thirty years old, while the religious left has a genealogy that stretches back more than two centuries...
All the traditions of the religious left came together in the work of Martin Luther King Jr. ...as well as of the social gospel tradition...As the United States’ foremost social prophet, King echoed the witness of the Hebrew prophets, celebrated the democratic ideals of the United States, and insisted on a radical confrontation with the “evil triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism.
With King’s assassination, the religious left succumbed to the schismatic fragmentation ...
These divisions could not destroy the religious and spiritual left. Arguably, it is as strong at the grassroots as ever, though it has had few public policy successes in the past generation. Today, it can be understood as four overlapping clusters. First, grassroots activists who continue the work of the radical wings of the civil rights and antiwar movements...A second cluster is centered around the denominational bureaucracies of the mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches...which continue the social gospel tradition of working for “progressive” legislation, relying more on lobbying and letter-writing than on the direct action favored by the first cluster...The biggest but least organized cluster includes “spiritual but not religious” people and many others for whom social activism is inherently spiritual...As the era of the religious right comes to a close, these four clusters have a remarkable opportunity to forge real solutions to climate change, economic inequality, and the persistent injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Just as people of diverse faiths joined together in the antislavery, social gospel, and civil rights movements, so today we have the power to change the world. But we will do it only if we blend an awareness of our history with a creative openness to the possibilities of the present. full text

Ironic Provincialism by Paul Rasor,  Paul Rasor, Director, Center for the Study of Religious Freedom and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Virginia Wesleyan College, June 24, 2009, Salt Lake City, UT - ...Our commitment to religious freedom, our openness to new ideas, our insistence that religion should live in the present and not in the past, our healthy theological pluralism – all of these, the very things that make us liberal, mean that our collective religious identity will inevitably be difficult to pin down at any particular moment in our history. Dean Lewis Fisher captured this reality nearly a century ago as he anticipated the question of where Universalists stand. “The only true answer,” he famously said, “is that we do not stand at all; we move.”
Our peripatetic progressivism means that we are often ahead of the cultural curve in responding to the realities of the world around us. Yet there are times when the opposite is true, when the realities are so daunting that we freeze up...
The context of our challenge is familiar but worth saying. Our society is right now, in our generation, undergoing the most radical demographic shift in its history...These changes are forcing us to reexamine everything we thought we knew about ourselves, both as a society and as a religious movement....we have much to offer, much to say that our world needs to hear.

...It is widely accepted among scholars that religious liberalism’s central defining characteristic is its posture of intentional engagement with modern culture. Liberal theology starts with the premise that religion should be oriented toward the present, taking fully into account modern knowledge and experience. ...Another feature of our faith tradition that should make us ideally situated to respond to the new cultural context is our inherent theological pluralism. This pluralism is a product of our commitment to free religious inquiry and our openness to insight from many sources, including other religious traditions.... full text

UF study recasts political ‘God gap’ theory with details of a religious left,  University of Florida News - Christians who value communal forms of worship over doctrine have emerged as a politically liberal alternative to the religious right...The research has broad political implications in that it contradicts the so-called “God gap” theory that white religious Christians are conservative and more likely to vote Republican...
“We are able to uncover considerable evidence of a religious left among Christians, and the big news is that it matters electorally,” Wald said. “Having a strong communitarian view of faith is associated with voting for Democratic candidates. Because of favorable political circumstances, we’re in an age where we’re likely to see a flowering of the religious left......discover the power of religion to change society...
“We sensed there was a style of religious attachment that is less individualistic and more focused on the social and communal aspects of people’s lives,” Wald said. “This orientation is much more based on who one’s friends and family are and how involved one is with the life of the religious community.” full text

Real moral values - Articulating a liberal religious moral vision by Rev. William G. Sinkford, Unitarian Universalist World, March/April 2005 -
...As religious people, we should welcome the renewed focus on morality...We need to expand the focus from rigid rules to encompass more complicated realities...The moral values of our liberal religion call us to work toward the beloved community. They encourage us to love our neighbors as ourselves, always widening the circle of who we mean by "neighbor."

...the moral obligation to care for people where they are and as they are, living the reality of their complicated lives, understanding that we are all in this together...That's what the most fundamental moral value—the individual worth and dignity of every person—requires.
...Our liberal religious sense and our lived experience need to be part of the national conversation...if we offer our moral vision clearly, it will resonate with many who, in enduring our nation's polarized shouting match, have yet to hear their own values voiced. Perhaps this can prevent the phrase "moral values" from being again wielded by the few to divide the many...Perhaps it will help this country to heal. It is a conversation worth having, and I urge all of us to participate. full text

America's founding faiths - Competing visions of divine order and sacred liberty divided America's founders and its religious communities by Rev. Forrest Church, Unitarian Universalist World Winter 2007
...From the outset of our experiment in government, in fact, the founders fought tooth and nail in a contest over American values...
American politicians may not have been “religious men”—not one of the nation’s early presidents was an orthodox Christian, for example...When political parties emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, their constituencies mustered for battle across the same spiritual divide. Pitting order versus liberty, England versus France, the established church versus champions of church-state separation, and America’s original Puritan versus its new Enlightenment inheritance, the first great culture war in American political history—waged from George Washington’s inauguration in 1789 to the outset of James Monroe’s presidency in 1817—was joined.
...Thomas Jefferson is best remembered for seven words, the unalienable rights he enumerated as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. He grounded these rights in an Enlightenment metaphysic, guaranteeing them as a universal bequest from nature and nature’s God. To Jefferson, they were interdependent ideals...The result was a civil ethic, in which the individual conscience received unprecedented priority. The transcendent point of reference was no longer the monarch but the people themselves, whose rights he endowed with sovereign, even divine, authority.
...To friends, he referred to himself variously as a “Theist,” “Deist,” “Unitarian,” “Rational Christian,” and “Epicurean...
...Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury, Connecticut, Baptists remains the single most influential presidential document in the history of American church-state relations. Its central passage encapsulates a lifetime of thought and effort dedicated to liberating the individual from government interference in matters of religion: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, . . . that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” The wall he built has proved both time-worthy and abidingly controversial; it endures as a delineating symbol for American church-state separation...
...Religion and politics would continue to mix, sometimes combustively, in the country at large, but for decades to come no president would have to suffer anything close to the religious calumnies that spiritual partisans had lavished on Adams, Jefferson, and Madison during the height of American’s first great culture war. full text

Pence urges conservatives to utilize 'our moment' to gain political power by Dan Balz and Philip Rucker, The Washington Post, February 19, 2010

Asserting that "this is our moment," Indiana Rep. Mike Pence issued a call-to-arms at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning, urging grass-roots activists to turn Democrats out of power in November and deliver the country from "the bondage of big government."

Pence repeatedly brought audience members to their feet with a stirring articulation of conservative principles. Noting his party's failures to adhere to those values when they last held power in Washington, he said to cheers and applause, "We don't just need a Republican majority, we need a conservative majority on Capitol Hill."

His speech came on the heels of one by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty -- like Pence, a Republican mentioned as a presidential candidate in 2012. Pawlenty urged the conference to deliver a strong message to President Obama that "we will fight back."

"We're planting the flag on constitutional ground, and if you try to take our freedoms, we will fight back,"...

In dealing with China, Pence said the United States should have "one hand extended in diplomacy and trade, and the other hand resting comfortably on the holster of the arsenal of democracy."...

"The implication is, we're kind of bumpkins," Pawlenty said. "Well, history is on our side. The Constitution is on our side. We're on the side of freedom. We're on the side of individual responsibility. We're on the side of free markets. We're on the side of rule of law. We're on the side of limited government...we fight."...

The governor spoke about the key principles of limited government, individual responsibility and a sanctity of life. "God is in charge," he declared. "If it's good enough for the Founding Fathers, then it should be good enough for each and every one of us."

Pawlenty took several sharp digs at Obama..."I think we should take a page out of her [Tiger Wood's wife] playbook and take a nine-iron and smash the window out of the big government in this country."

That drew a derisive response from the Democratic National Committee, as spokesman Brad Woodhouse said Pawlenty had taken "a nine-iron to his own credibility."

"The American people don't need more empty sound bites and red meat one-liners for the extreme right wing. They need serious leaders with serious solutions to the problems we face -- and Pawlenty proved today that the only thing he is serious about is pandering to the radical right wing," Woodhouse said in a statement. full text

How Christian Were the Founders? by Russell Shorto, New York Times, February 14, 2010 - ... members of what is the most influential state board of education in the country, and one of the most politically conservative, submitted their own proposed changes to the new social-studies curriculum guidelines, whose adoption was the subject of all the attention — guidelines that will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years...proposed amendment after amendment on social issues to the document...in what would have to be described as a single-handed display of archconservative political strong-arming.
McLeroy moved that Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, be included because she “and her followers promoted eugenics,” that language be inserted about Ronald Reagan’s “leadership in restoring national confidence” following Jimmy Carter’s presidency...The injection of partisan politics into education...This is how history is made — or rather, how the hue and cry of the present and near past gets lodged into the long-term cultural memory...Public education has always been a battleground between cultural forces; one reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money...Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State...The cultural roots of the Texas showdown may be said to date to the late 1980s, when, in the wake of his failed presidential effort, the Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition partly on the logic that conservative Christians should focus their energies at the grass-roots level...and Texas was a beachhead. Since the election of two Christian conservatives in 2006, there are now seven on the Texas state board who are quite open about the fact that they vote in concert to advance a Christian agenda...
they hold that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts. This belief provides what they consider not only a theological but also, ultimately, a judicial grounding to their positions on social questions.
The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society... “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”... full text

Obama Says Faith Shouldn't Be Used to Divide, President Barack Obama at National Prayer Breakfast, February 5, 2009  "As St. Augustine once said, "Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you." So let us pray together on this February morning, but let us also work together in all the days and months ahead. For it is only through common struggle and common effort, as brothers and sisters, that we fulfill our highest purpose as beloved children of God." full text 

Prayer Warriors and Palin Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America by Bill Berkowitz - Interview with Rachel Tabachnick,  a nationally recognized researcher and writer on the religious right and its "end-times" narratives, Published by AlterNet, March 1, 2010 - ...[New Apostolic Reformation, the largest religious movement you've never heard of]
a religious network of elites drawn from the ranks of business and government throughout the world...encompasses the humble and the elite alike, supporting a network of "prayer warriors" in all 50 states, within the ranks of the U.S. military, and at the far reaches of the globe -- all guided by an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media...
Movement operatives are well-connected enough to have testified before Congress and to have received millions of dollars in government abstinence-only sex-education grants, ...The movement has emerged from the largest single block of Protestant Christianity on the globe -- sometimes called charismatic, neo-charismatic or neo-Pentecostal...At the top of the New Apostolic Reformation authority structure is Presiding Apostle C. Peter Wagner...graduate school mentor of Rick Warren...partnered with Ted Haggard, then pastor of the New Life Christian Church in Colorado Springs, to build the initial nerve center of the movement in that town....
Rachel Tabachnick:...every person -- from the individual congregants to the top leaders -- would have someone to whom they are accountable...hundred apostles across the U.S. and about 40 nations, international training centers and prayer warrior communication networks in all 50 states and worldwide...This is not just a church movement. [Those called] market apostles work in business, finance, communications, media...this campaign encouraging Christians to take dominion over seven spheres of government and society...
Wagner teachers that there will soon be a "great transfer of wealth" from the ungodly to the godly ...believes rapid growth of the movement will allow Christians to take dominion inside a democratic framework...
Spiritual warfare is not a new concept...the New Apostolics have co-opted the term.
...instead of winning souls one by one, entire geographic areas and "people groups" could be targeted, therefore speeding up the process...After expelling the demons, the evangelized population can take "dominion" over local government and culture. Then the community supposedly experiences a foretaste of "God's Kingdom on earth." These mini-utopias are advertised as having reduced poverty, corruption, disease, and even healing the environment. This is the ultimate faith-based initiative: remove the demons and society will be healed...organizations worldwide are attempting to replicate these prototypes in their local communities...
Another political area in which New Apostolics are deeply entrenched is John Hagee's Christians United for Israel. Hagee is still teaching that the Rapture may happen any moment, but many of his directors and leadership are New Apostolics who teach that they must take "dominion" over the earth, including Israel, before Jesus can return. ...The Transformations movies show access to many political figures from Fiji to South America to Africa. Uganda is a prime example ...
this movement's threat to separation of church and state is greater than some of the more overtly theocratic movements of the religious right...Unsuspecting people are certainly becoming involved in New Apostolic activities without understanding its agenda... full text

President Obama Extends Holiday Greeting, The White House, April 03, 2010 -
...while we worship in different ways, we also remember the shared spirit of humanity that inhabits us all – Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, believers and nonbelievers alike...let us hold fast to those aspirations we hold in common as brothers and sisters, as members of the same family – the family of man...let us remain ever mindful of the unity of purpose, the common bond, the love of you and of me, for which they [veterans] sacrificed all they had; and for which so many others have sacrificed so much. And let us make its pursuit – and fulfillment – our highest aspiration, as individuals and as a nation.... full text