Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1995 18:00:55 -0500 (EST) From: Chris Purdom Subject: IWG Washington Monthly letter The following went out on IWG letterhead listing 2 congregations, 4 religious organizations and 19 clergy from 9 denominations. If you are in the general Philadelphia area and represent a congregation or religious organization or are clergy, let us know if you want to be added - all faiths are welcome. We will also be happy to help start similar organizations in other areas. Visit the web page at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/religion/orgs/iwg/. December 14, 1995 The Washington Monthly 1611 Connecticut Ave. Washington, DC 20009 Dear Editors: Thank you for Amy Waldman's "Why We Need a Religious Left" and Jonathan Rowe's "What's Un-Christian About the Christian Right." On some points, however, we disagree with their analyses, especially the emphasis on financial issues and policies. With a strict Genesis-based theology, a sincere belief that God has deeded them America, media interests, a personal desire to run the government, and an unholy alliance with the beer industry, the Radical Religious Right has taken on a wide array of seemingly unrelated issues. They are tackling abortion, affirmative action, AIDS funding, the American Library Association, the Catholic hierarchy, church-state separation, communications regulation, education standards, entitlement programs, the environment, evolution, family planning, feminism, flag burning, free speech on the internet, gay rights, the Justice Department, lobbying by tax-exempt organizations, multiculturalism, the National Endowment for the Arts, protection of religious minorities, public television, school prayer, sex education, student loans, taxes, and teachers' unions. All of these activities are designed to dumb down the population, defund organizations and agencies supporting individual liberty and the rights of the opressed, increase individuals' dependence on local churches, censor ideas and images challenging their heteropatriarchal theology, centralize religious authority, and increase the personal wealth and power of a few rich familes backing and controlling Religious Right organizations. Previously the religious left has dealt with one issue at a time, as with slavery, civil rights for southern blacks, the Vietnam war, and U.S.-funded terrorism in Central America. But unlike these issues, none of the Religious Right's issues has the direct emotional and ob- vious visual impact of people being shot or assaulted by government officials, American soldiers returning home in body bags, or U.S.-trained terrorists (or our own soldiers) killing unarmed civilians. Radical Right policies limit the quality and length of people's lives, but showing that impact to people takes a concerted education effort. And this time the opponent is not the government, but another religious group; there is an understandable reluctance on the part of church leaders who have seen such examples as Northern Ireland, India and Bosnia to engage in inter- religious policy debates. Secular social attitudes have progressed rapidly in the last 30 years compared to the glacial rate of change within the church. The bulk of mainline protestants, formerly thought of as the religious left, are now thoroughly in the mainstream or slightly to its right on gender roles, sexual orientation, sex education and religious pluralism. But non-sexist, non-heterosexist, pro- sexuality belief systems have been developed by such diverse religions as Unitarian Universalism, Neo-Paganism, Reconstructionist Judaism, and the gay-rights and feminist movements inside The Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical and mainline protestant churches. While these groups are not huge, and are not all comfortable with the label "left," they are growing rapidly and are slowly overcoming a reluctance to take on the Religious Right, coalescing into the new Religious Left while maintaining their identities. Sincerely, Barbara Purdom Christopher Purdom Interfaith Working Group Coordinators