The progressive blogosphere is abuzz with the “Accountability Now” project. This is how co-founder Glenn Greenwald describes it:
Accountability Now has a “single guiding principle of challenging the institutional power structures that make it so easy, so consequence-free for Congress to open up the government coffers for looting by corporate America while people across the country are losing their jobs and their basic constitutional rights while unable to afford basic health care.”
I think Pastor Dan is dead on when he says, ”So if the religious Left wants a place at the table – even one that is not identical to that occupied by the Religious Right – this is going to be the kind of thing we’ll have to take on.”
Yeah it is hard politics. But that is life. We vote. We volunteer. We donate. We should hold our leaders accountable for what we sent them there to do. That is why last week’s pseudo-State of the Union was so great. Obama spoke about the change we expected when we elected him.
Sometimes it seems that religious progressives are coming up short in terms of holding the people we worked hard to get elected accountable. The reason for that is simple. We do faith outreach in the most difficult races in the country. Think of the recent campaigns that had a major faith-outreach component – Strickland in Ohio, Sebelius in Kansas, Kaine in Virginia, Heath Shuler in North Carolina, Tom Perriello in Virginia, and the list goes on. These candidates win tough races. And, in order to hold office, they often take moderate positions on a number of issues. Further, because the religious progressive movement is really just growing, we put our full force behind these tough races in helping them craft “common ground” positions. Often, because of this political reality, we find ourselves holding these swing-district positions because the people we’ve worked hard for do.
The relation of the religious left to our supported candidates is drastically different than the religious right. The religious right wins in extremely conservative districts. They will challenge sitting Republicans who are not in-line with them. They do not have much interest in reaching across the isle, because these seats are won by being as conservative as possible.
The religious left, however, targets swing districts. We have never, to my knowledge, challenged a sitting democrat (no organization has really ever existed to do so). Because we challenge in swing-districts we lean in a bipartisan direction (M25 is one of the few organizations willing to get behind candidates in a partisan manner). And, because so many of us came from religious right backgrounds, we understand their culture a lot better than they understand ours and tend to be beholden to some of their issue-frames.
Religious progressives are not captivated by two issues. In my opinion that makes us more complete citizens, which is better for the body politic. But, not having one or two big issues also makes it harder to galvanize support. For example, as much as I care about SCHIP, it just does not get people fired up the same way a Prop. 8 does.
That is kind of the lay-of-the-land, but where do we go from here?
