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rug

(82,333 posts)
Thu Jun 12, 2014, 07:57 AM Jun 2014

"Progressive" Religion Or Just Religion?



June 11, 2014
By Brie Loskota
Brie Loskota is the managing director of theCenter for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.

Last week HuffPo Religion's executive editor Paul Raushenbush wrote about a "stunning resurgence" of progressive Christianity. The right, he notes, had been the "default religious voice" of the final three decades of the twentieth century—but its loud, extended run may be over.

Why did progressive religion languish for so long? Ed Kilgore has explained this way: 1) the religious left is a smaller and less homogeneous movement than religious conservatism; 2) secular progressives have little use for religion; and 3) when political progressives do decide to reach out to faith groups, they generally reach out to conservatives.

This last challenge, Kilgore reminds us, tends to reinforce the belief of both religious conservatives and many secular observers that the only authentic faith traditions are those that identify godliness with patriarchal cultural conservatism and/or literalist approaches to sacred texts.

This discussion about progressive religion reminds me of the discourse around moderate Islam. These modifiers for religious identity represent an attempt to map spiritually motivated social engagement onto broader political trends in a way that distorts both religion and politics. “Progressive” is usually shorthand for the blue side of our nuance-flattening red/blue political division. When the term “moderate Muslim” is used, the person speaking or writing is usually a non-Muslim who is trying to gauge where Muslims fall in a stark “us vs. them” perspective on the world.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/7822/_progressive__religion_or_just_religion/
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"Progressive" Religion Or Just Religion? (Original Post) rug Jun 2014 OP
"Take it back" is becoming a rising battle cry. cbayer Jun 2014 #1

cbayer

(146,218 posts)
1. "Take it back" is becoming a rising battle cry.
Thu Jun 12, 2014, 01:21 PM
Jun 2014

Progressive/liberal religious people and groups need to reclaim all the ground they have lost with the rise of the religious right. They also need to build larger "interfaith" coalitions that include secular and non-believer groups.

And liberal/progressives of all beliefs or non-beliefs need to recognize that we all have more in common than we have differences and stop beating each other up. Those that want to attack our fellow travelers need to be challenged and, if they are unable to see the value of working together, they should be marginalized with the goal of having them do the least damage.

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