The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right

414 Pages·2006·5.71 MB·English

by  Michael Lerner

T HE
LEFT HAND
of
G OD
Taking Back Our Country
from the Religious Right
MICHAEL LERNER
HarperSanFrancisco
A Division ofHarperCollmsPublishers
THE LEFT HAND OF GOD: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. Copyright © 2006
by Michael Lerner. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this
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FIRST EDITION
Designed by Joseph Rutt
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lerner, Michael
The left hand of God : taking back our country from the religious right / Michael Lerner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-06084247-5
ISBN-10: 0-06-084247-4
1. Christianity and politics—United States. 2. Religion and politics—United States.
3. Religious right—United States. 4. Democratic Party (U.S.) 5. Conservatism—Religious
aspects—Christianity. 6. Conservatism—Religious aspects. I. Title.
BR115.P7L37 2005
322'.1'0973—dc22 2005052510
06 07 08 09 RRD(H) 10 9 8 7
I dedicate this book to my grandchildren, Ellie Lyla Lerner and
Jeremiah Jacob Lerner—may they move the world toward more love,
kindness, compassion, generosity, peace, and social justice.
And to Trish and George Vradenburg in appreciation of all the sup
port they give me to continue this work and in appreciation of their
work as publishers of Tikkun and as champions of the need to put
more of our society's resources into curing Alzheimer's disease, assist
ing its many victims, and supporting all the caregivers of those who
suffer from the disease.

Contents
Introduction 1
PART ONE: America's Spiritual Crisis 37
1. The Real World's Bottom Line 39
2. Signs of Crisis 55
3. The Voice of Fear and the Voice of Hope 77
4. Enter the Religious Right 93
5. Elitism on the Left 115
6. The Religion of Secularism and the Fear of Spirit 127
7. How the Left Lost Hope 161
8. From Power to Purposelessness:
The Fate of the Democrats 183
viii Contents
PART TWO: The Spiritual Agenda for
American Politics:
A New Bottom Line 213
Introduction 215
9. The Spiritual Covenant with America 227
10. The Family, Sexuality, and Personal Responsibility 241
11. The Caring Economy and Nurturing Society:
From Social Responsibility to
Human Connectedness 279
12. We Will Make You Safer:
The Strategy of Generosity for Foreign Policy 321
Conclusion 357
Appendix One: Next Steps 365
Appendix Two: How to Do Politics with Spirit:
Building the Culture of a Spiritual Politics
Movement 377
Acknowledgments and Resources 3 83
Index 393
Introduction
The unholy alliance of the political Right and Religious Right threatens
to destroy the America we love. It also threatens to generate a popular
revulsion against God and religion by identifying them with militarism,
ecological irresponsibility, fundamentalist antagonism to science and
rational thought, and insensitivity to the needs of the poor and the
powerless.
In the following pages, I will explain how a progressive spiritual pol
itics can help rescue this country from its current self-destructive
course. By addressing the real spiritual and moral crisis in the daily
lives of most Americans, a movement with a progressive spiritual vision
would provide an alternate solution to both the intolerant and mili
tarist politics of the Right and the current misguided, visionless, and
often spiritually empty politics of the Left.
The first section of this book details the spiritual and psychological
needs that the Right was able to address in ways that allowed it to grow
powerful and that the Left ignored and misunderstood (thus precipi
tating its decline) over the past thirty years. In the second section, I'll
present a Progressive Spiritual Covenant with America that could ad
vance a progressive political revival in the coming years.
We live in a world in which a technocratic rationality has replaced
an awareness of spirit, flattening the way we experience nature and
each other. Social theorists from Max Weber to Zygmunt Bauman have
described the disorientation and desperation that this has caused to
2 Introduction
people in the modern world. In the United States this process has
reached its fullest development in the form of a bottom-line mentality
that judges every activity, every institution, every social practice as ra
tional, productive, or efficient only to the extent that it produces
money or power.
This way of organizing our society promotes selfishness, material
ism, and disconnection. We are encouraged to live on the surface of
things, to deal with other human beings as though they were mere ma
terial objects to be manipulated for the sake of our own self-interest,
and to relate to the physical universe as though it is nothing more than
a resource to satisfy our personal needs. Nature becomes another com
modity to be bought and sold. Human relationships become increas
ingly instrumental, utilitarian, and manipulative, as people learn to see
each other through the frame of "How can other people be of use to
me to serve my needs?"
Professions are no longer seen as vocations serving the common
good or the God of the universe but become instead simply careers,
opportunities for individuals to accumulate money and prestige for
themselves.
Most of us have learned to accommodate to a world that has been
flattened, made one-dimensional, disenchanted, despiritualized. And
yet, we feel an abiding hunger because human beings are theotropic—
they turn toward the sacred—and that dimension in us cannot be fully
extinguished. People feel a near-desperate desire to reconnect to the
sacred, to find some way to unite their lives with a higher meaning and
purpose and in particular to that aspect of the sacred that is built upon
the loving, kind, and generous energy in the universe that I describe as
the "Left Hand of God." The Left Hand of God view encourages us to
be like this loving God. As the Talmud teaches, "Just as He is filled
with mercy, compassion, and loving-kindness, so should you live your
life manifesting mercy, compassion, and loving-kindness to all whom
you encounter." I will contrast that notion of God in this book with the
"Right Hand of God," which sees the universe as a fundamentally
scary place filled with evil forces. In this view God is the avenger, the
big man in heaven who can be invoked to use violence to overcome
those evil forces, either right now or in some future ultimate reckoning.
Seen through the frame of the Right Hand of God, the world is filled
Introduction 3
with constant dangers and the rational way to live is to dominate and
control others before they dominate and control us.
It is the search for meaning in a despiritualized world that leads
many people to right-wing religious communities because these groups
seem to be in touch with the sacred dimension of life. Many secularists
imagine that people drawn to the Right are there solely because of
some ethical or psychological malfunction. What they miss is that there
are many very decent Americans who get attracted to the Religious
Right because it is the only voice that they encounter that is willing to
challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is
driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experi
ences of supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused
with alienation and spiritual loneliness.
Many Americans have a powerful desire for loving connection,
kindness, generosity, awe and wonder, and joyous celebration of the
universe. These desires are frustrated by the way we organize our soci
ety today. A progessive movement or a Democratic Party that speaks to
these desires in a genuine and spiritually deep way could win the pop
ular support it needs to create a world of peace, social justice, ecologi
cal sanity, and human rights.
It may be hard to foresee today's Democratic Party becoming a
champion of love or kindness or generosity or spiritual sensitivity to
the grandeur of the universe. That party, at least as it exists in 2006, is
so dominated by self-interested politicians who rely on the backing of
the wealthy and legitimacy from a corporate-dominated media that
they'd be unlikely to embrace a discourse of love or a practice of awe
and wonder in response to the miracles of creation. Nevertheless, it's a
mistake to get crystallized in the static. I remember how hard it was in
1968 to imagine that the Democrats would ever be responsive to the
ideas being developed by the antiwar movement, the women's move
ment, and the gay rights movement. Yet much changed, and changed
within a few decades. That can happen again. It is already happening
in regard to the war in Iraq, and it can happen on the even more fun
damental levels proposed in this book.
The Network of Spiritual Progressives can be for the Democrats and
Greens what the Religious Right has been for the Republicans: a move
ment that energizes and provides intellectual, political, and spiritual
4 Introduction
inspiration for those in the party even while not being formally aligned
when it comes to elections, a movement to which the party responds
with serious attention, respect, and commitment to taking parts of its
program and placing it at the center of the party's agenda. While a pro
gressive spiritual politics is unlikely to move hard-core fundamentalists
or those who have made an idolatry of their worship of the free market,
there are millions of others who could be reached were they to experi
ence the Democrats, Greens, and liberal/progressive movements as
really challenging the ethos of selfishness and materialism in daily life.
As I watch the likely Democratic Party candidates for president in
2008 scramble to position themselves as mainstream, I am all too aware
that taking this kind of spiritual politics seriously is going to require a
huge leap for many of us. So in much of this book I'm going to talk to
our most skeptical side and address the doubts that are certainly likely
to be most prominent. I'll present a plan for how to structure a society
that is humane, generous, peace-oriented, and ecologically responsible,
and I'll challenge our depressive certainty that these kinds of changes
are never going to happen.
Some Democrats think that they don't need these changes to win
power, and they may be right in the short run. The current implosion
of the Bush administration as it wallows in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, a failing war in Iraq, and scandal and indictments at the high
est levels of government may be enough to provide Democrats with
election victories in 2006 and 2008 (though Republican redistricting is
likely to dampen the chance for a Democratic landslide in 2006, and
electoral fraud has increasingly characterized American national elec
tions where so much is at stake).
But Democrats have won elections, even the presidency, before—
and yet the movement of intellectual and political energy keeps on slid
ing to the Right, and so Democrats in office often end up acting from
the assumptions of the Right in order to show that they are "realistic"
and "non-ideological."
I invite you to compare the Democratic Party agenda for 2006 with
the Spiritual Covenant with America you'll find in the second part of
this book. The Spiritual Covenant isn't just doing "more" or more rad
ical versions of the Democrats' agenda—while incorporating many of
the specifics of the Democrats' program. Rather, it represents a whole