by Mike Lerner, published in Tikkun magazine, January/February issue
The confirmation hearings and debates about Judge Samuel Alito
facing the United States in January underscore the immense power of the
Religious Right. Fearful that Bush’s nominee Harriet Miers was not
sufficiently conservative, the Religious Right created a firestorm of
protest that caused Miers to withdraw and forced the Bush
Administration to produce a more ideologically appropriate nominee in
the form of Alito, a jurist with extremist perspectives. Even if the
Democrats succeed in developing the backbone to sustain a filibuster
and block this particular nominee, the packing of the courts by
reactionary legislators who share the agenda of the Religious Right has
become the norm for the Bush White House and will continue for the next
several years.
The growing power of the Religious Right requires
more than the predictable array of ‘oy veys’ and cries of
despair. One reason that I’ve written my new book The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right
(Harper San Francisco, February 7, 2006) and why the Tikkun Community
is organizing a second gathering of the Network of Spiritual
Progressives (at All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., May 17-20) is
precisely because Americans need a coherent strategy to respond to the
Right, not just analyses about how dangerous they are. This is a
movement that is not just for people who believe in God or who are part
of some religious community(it is equally inviting to those who are
‘spiritual but not religious’ and who recognize that a progressive
movement today needs a spiritual foundation if it is to take our
country back from the Religious Right.
In his book God’s Politics,
Jim Wallis did an outstanding and politically important job of showing
how far from the teachings of Jesus the Religious Right has wandered.
Bill Press’ provocative book How The Republicans Stole Christmas, and Mark Lewis Taylor’s Religion, Politics and the Christian Right
have done a similarly impressive job of showing how dangerous the
Religious Right has become for our civil liberties, our moral compass,
and our democratic values. The Religious Right is a danger to American
society and to those of us who are serious about God and religion and
do not use either as a vehicle to promote militarist ideology.
Nothing
could be more mistaken than the fantasies now growing in liberal
circles that the Bush Administration is about to lose power, the
Republican Party is in a process of dissolution, and the Religious
Right will soon be isolated and relegated to the junk pile of failed
movements. It is amazing to see how liberals and progressives,
desperate about their own inability to come up with a strategy to
counter conservatives, have now begun to clutch at straws to prove to
themselves that the Right is about to disappear because of its own
contradictions.
True enough, the Bush Administration is in
considerable trouble. It has lost popular support. The air of
invincibility it once held as a result of having reaped the benefits of
being the ‘strong father figure’ at the time of national calamity
during 9/11 are now falling away. Bush’s mismanagement of the Federal
response to Hurricane Katrina, the indictment of Vice President
Cheney’s top aide Scooter Libby for lying in the Valerie Plame affair,
and the continuing impact on confidence in Bush generated by American
casualties in Iraq pushed Bush’s popularity to the lowest in his
presidency. In November 2005, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found
that 57 percent of Americans believe that the President deliberately
misled the country into invading Iraq, while only 33 percent believed
the President to be honest.
The gubernatorial victories of
Democrats Timothy Kaine in Virginia and Senator Jon Corzine in New
Jersey, coupled with the defeat of California Governor Arnold
Schwarznegger’s four ballot initiatives that carefully took aim at the
rights of union activists, government workers, and teachers, have led
some liberals and progressives to imagine a dramatic liberal sweep of
Congressional elections this coming November, when all of the House and
one third of the Senate is up for reelection.
The Bush
Administration may indeed have less legitimacy than it had before,
though with three more years in office, let’s not assume it’s a lame
duck yet. Moreover, the systematic and strategic way that Republicans
reorganized Congressional districts so as to preserve their hold on
Congress is likely to limit the impact in Congressional elections of
the American majority’s disillusionment with Bush. Democrats and
Republicans in the House have both supported measures to protect
incumbents, and in the past three Congressional elections, at least 96
percent of incumbents won reelection. Writing in the New York Times on
November 13, 2005, Robin Toner argued that at most there are thirty-six
seats that might possibly be competitive in 2006 as compared to
eighty-nine in the 1994 election, when Congress switched hands from the
Democrats to the Republicans. While deepening disgust at Bush could
effect what were perceived to be ‘safe’ Republican districts, new
computer technology made redistricting more sophisticated and email
outreach to constituents has made incumbents more easily known by their
constituents and more successful in raising large sums of money to
spend on reelection campaigns that can often only be countered by a
newcomer who is independently wealthy (and often favoring measures that
will protect the class interests of those similarly situated).
But
even if secular conservatives were driven from office the way that the
Nixon Administration was, it is a fallacy to equate the power of the
Religious Right with the power of any particular administration, even
one as deeply enmeshed in fundamentalist religious assumptions as Bush
and his allies have been. The reality is that the Religious Right has
shaped public discourse to such a powerful extent that its major
assumptions about foreign and domestic policy are now mainstream(not
just in the conservative press, but also in the dominant corners of the
Democratic Party.
Even out of power, the Right has been far
more effective than liberals in shaping public discourse. Though the
Democratic majority in the House in the 1980s and early 90s thought the
Republicans were little more than minor annoyances, the Republicans
were actually building a powerful grassroots movement precisely because
they had found enough points of common interest to effectively merge
the secular and religious conservatives. Infused with the missionary
zeal of the religious and the funding of the wealthy, this Right was
able to take its ideas into the public arena.
During the same
period when Democrats should have been extending their base, the Left
avoided any form of intellectual clarity. Stung by the failure of
Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century, the Left turned
away from ideology to a mushy ‘everything goes’ relativism. Remember
the classic speech by Jesse Jackson in 1988 at the Democratic National
Convention when he called for a new ‘quilt’ that would incorporate
everyone together into the Democrats, but without any ideological
coherence? How could a crazy quilt welcoming both doves and hawks
attract people? What would anyone get from such a Democratic Party?
Instead
of offering a real vision for the future, the Left segmented itself.
Activists focused on shorter battles and particular interest groups,
leading to infighting about who was more ‘politically correct.’ The few
left-wing intellectuals who refused the PC battles of the late 1980s
developed a kind of ideology against ideology, a misunderstood
postmodernism in which nothing and no one is prioritized and each
one of us is ‘special.’
What American liberals and progressives
have not adequately understood is the importance of ideas and their
impact on politics. So they tend to concentrate on short-term struggles
and leave the ideological sphere to conservatives. Conservatives
understand the importance of fighting culture wars, and have managed to
focus huge amounts of resources on the public development of ideas,
fostering intellectual journals and alternative media, providing
support for campus organizing and for programs designed to nurture
young conservatives early in their careers, and foundations and
think-tanks that can continue the work of applying fundamental
principles to specific political and economic circumstances.
Secular
conservatives have long advocated for the freedom of the marketplace to
solve all problems if unrestrained by government. It was an idea that
had been repudiated by most Americans when that freedom produced global
economic depression and wars. In the post(World War II period, American
conservatives modified their stance dramatically, supporting government
intervention on behalf of corporate power around the world, and
expanded government spending on military-related production, while
retaining their libertarian stance when it came to state protections
for poor and middle-income people. This was not a very persuasive
approach, and depended upon their ability to sell the country the
notion that there was some evil other (communism) that was so imminent
a threat that we would have to suspend the fear of government programs
for the sake of preparing for war. Imagine how difficult it would be to
maintain that line once the Soviet Union itself began to unravel and
its alleged military strength was shown to be immensely exaggerated.
No
wonder, then, that secular conservatives needed to embrace the
Religious Right. The new religious conservatism offered a worldview
unlikely to dissolve in the face of international political
developments. The Religious Right saw the evil in the world as
ontological, built into the very structure of reality and humankind, a
constant threat and temptation that could potentially subvert all of
humanity. The world is filled with evil and distorted people, and life
is fundamentally scary because people are likely to hurt us as they
seek to dominate and control us unless we can dominate and control them
first. The only reason that the world has not been destroyed by all
this evil is the restraining power of God’s will. God is a judgmental
power figure whose parental authority is used to punish the evil and
reward the good, and it is God, not human beings, who must make those
determinations and rectify a perverted world. That rectification will
only happen, though, when Jesus returns to the planet(the Second
Coming(and proceeds to judge all beings, condemn those who have not
believed in him, and reward those who have.
As I explain in my
new book, this vision of God as a punishing father has been present in
many different religious traditions. I call it the vision of a ‘Right
Hand of God,’ based in part on various biblical passages that identify
God’s right hand as the hand of power and domination. And I contrast
this with a very different way of seeing God in the Bible, a way that
emphasizes a more motherly, compassionate, caring, and love-oriented
God that I call the ‘Left Hand of God.’ Both ways of seeing God are
there in the Bible, because both visions of reality have been part of
human experience for thousands of years, so when people encounter the
spiritual reality of the universe, they bring with them their own
conceptual categories and interpret their experience through the
language and worldviews that they already hold.
If
the world is
fundamentally frightening and those who do not share one’s own
religious beliefs are not to be trusted and are doomed to suffer, the
task of converting them and spreading one’s own gospel (good news about
the path to salvation that has been revealed) becomes a central moral
imperative. One cannot expect a government constructed by human beings
who are not already saved by belief in Jesus to find appropriate ways
to solve the world’s problems. In that case, the less government the
better, and the political task is to withdraw energy and power from
government and transfer them to religious communities that can combine
social services with teachings about the right path to salvation. Those
who do enter the political arena must strive to dismantle governmental
programs that do not embody Christian values, and use state resources
primarily to defend us from evil Others around the world and in our own
country (hence, continued support for security spending).
This picture of the world is unlikely to appeal to many Tikkun
readers, but it forms the background of much of the Religious Right’s
political activity, and it offers people a framework to understand the
realities of the world in which they live. In my new book, I show that
the millions of people who are attracted to the Religious Right are not
originally attracted because of this worldview, but rather because
their lives in capitalist society feel empty and purposeless, and that
they hunger for some framework of meaning that can connect them to a
higher purpose. They are sick and tired of a world based on
competition, materialism, and selfishness. And they hear these issues
being addressed by the Religious Right. They find in these religious
communities people who act in very caring ways towards others who have
bought into the religious worldview. Buying in seems a small price to
pay for the nurturing and sense of meaning and purpose that these
communities provide. And once they buy in, they get a worldview that
helps explain much of what is happening in the larger world.
Instead
of blaming the absence of values and the prevalence of narcissism and
materialism on the dynamics of the marketplace, Americans are taught by
the Religious Right that the problem is a militant secular Left that
has, in the name of its extremist interpretations of the separation
clause of the Constitution, denuded the public square of all values.
A
poll commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League in November 2005 (at
the very time when most Americans were expressing disaffection from
George Bush) indicated that 64 percent of Americans think religion is
under attack (57 percent think Christianity is being assaulted) and 56
percent think creationism should be taught in schools. In addition, 64
percent think religious symbols such as the Ten Commandments should be
displayed in public buildings, and almost half think the courts have
gone too far in removing religion from American life. Those numbers
rise steeply for those who attend church once a week or who describe
themselves as evangelicals.
Liberals see this as the
vanguard of a movement that wants to impose Christianity on the entire
population, and that is true for at least some on the Religious Right.
But this really misses what is so plausible in the Religious Right’s
account and hence what gives it mass appeal: the actual experience
people have of feeling surrounded by selfishness and materialism, and
their sense that the only people addressing that problem and coming up
with solutions (however inadequate) are social and political
conservatives. The liberals to whom they are exposed may be willing to
opportunistically throw in a biblical quote or use the word ‘God,’ but
they don’t seem to understand that there is an actual spiritual crisis
afflicting American society, and that life feels very scary to many
people, who then respond to pseudo-solutions like posting the Ten
Commandments on public buildings or teaching religion in schools. It’s
not hard to understand why this fearful worldview gets accepted. First
of all, it corresponds in important ways to the reality of the world as
currently constructed. The capitalist marketplace really does generate
endless struggle between human beings and does in fact encourage people
to seek dominance, control, and manipulation of each other. In daily
life, then, the picture of reality painted by the Right gets confirmed
in the experiences many people have in their own world of work. Second,
there is no alternative worldview contending with this one. There is no
spiritually grounded vision of the world being taught by liberals and
progressives. The Left Hand of God is rarely articulated, has few
institutions committed to promoting it, and has no political force
ready to champion it.
I don’t mean that one has to have an
explicitly God-centered alternative to the Religious Right. The Left
Hand of God promotes a view of the universe that emphasizes the
possibility (not inevitability) of building a world with a New Bottom
Line based on love, compassion, generosity, awe and wonder at the
grandeur of creation, ecological sensitivity, social justice, peace,
and nonviolence.
It is a deep mistake to think that winning
political power in the short run is the only path to building long-term
support for a liberal worldview. As much as I want to see an end to the
war in Iraq and the war against poor and middle income persons being
waged by the current Administration, I do not believe that putting the
other party in power is sufficient to fundamentally change the current
dominance of the Religious Right in shaping public discourse and
assumptions.
Even if the Republican Party were to lose control
of Congress in 2006 and suffer the loss of the presidency in 2008, the
Religious Right will remain a powerful force in American politics,
shaping not only the politics of the Republicans but also much of the
discourse that is poured out by our elected Democrats.
It would
be nice to wish that reality away, as Alan Ehrenhalt, sometimes an
insightful commentator and executive editor of Governing magazine, did
in a New York Times op-ed (November 13, 2005). Ehrenhalt refers
to the ‘sprawling, wobbly tent’ of the Republican Party in which
‘libertarians, Christian moralists and suburban business owners all
pretend to have similar goals’ but do not. He contrasts this with a
Democratic Party in which, ‘on the issues that Democrats care about
most these days(abortion, the role of religion, the war in Iraq(there
aren’t that many dissenters. The dissenters have left.’ I’d like
to have some of what Ehrenhaft was smoking when he penned those lines,
but they bear no relationship to the deep splits in the Democratic
Party on these issues.
I can tell you where the Republican
Party nominee for President will stand on the war in Iraq in 2008.
‘Finish the job that was correct from the start,’ he will say, but can
you tell me whether the Democratic nominee voted for or against the
war’s original authorizations or continuing funding for that war? I can
tell you that the Republican party’s nominee will favor international
agreements to expedite the globalization of American enterprise and
corporate power, but can you tell me whether the Democratic nominee
will be for or against those policies? I can tell you that the
Republican nominee will have supported George Bush’s nominations of two
of the most conservative appointments made in decades to the Supreme
Court, but can you tell me whether the Democratic nominee will have
vigorously supported a filibuster against those nominees?
Yet
even those questions really miss the deeper level on which there is
fundamental harmony between the assumptions of many Democrats and most
Republicans. When the Republicans tell us that the world is a scary
place and that we must respond to a war on terror by escalating
military involvements, the Democrats rarely challenge this assessment.
The leading Democratic candidates for President in 2008 have been
calling for increasing troop levels in Iraq or sending more coalition
forces to fight in Afghanistan. These are disagreements on details, not
on the substantive vision of how to create a peaceful world. When the
Republicans tell us that the best economic interests of all Americans
will be served by creating a world that is safe for American
corporations, what kind of coherent alternative will Democrats offer
except a litany of specific instances in which that has not been the
case? If the debate between the two sides is simply about how much help
the government should give those most disadvantaged, it really ends up
having little appeal for anyone beyond the technocrats. The key thing
the Democrats are missing here is any alternative vision of an economy
that would not produce negative consequences for so many people.
Without
that alternative, the Religious Right’s perspective seems quite
plausible: ‘let’s not rely exclusively on government to alleviate the
suffering of the disadvantaged or the victims of the marketplace(let’s
mobilize community groups to engage in direct interventions to help
people locally. And what could be a better institution to do that than
the already existing churches?’ they argue.
Moreover, the value
of churches as a source of intervention on behalf of those who are
disadvantaged has another very strong argument on its behalf. Since the
heyday of the New Deal, the Left has championed an interventionist
state, but has restricted its interventions to materialist assumptions:
what people need is ‘objective caring’ in the form of money, food
stamps, rent subsidies, mortgage assistance, etc. We at Tikkun remain
strong supporters of this ‘objective caring’ because we believe that
any real love expressed between human beings must include the love of
caring for each other’s bodies and creating material well-being.
But
what has been absent from the liberal program has been ‘subjective
caring’: helping people feel that they are part of a society in which
people actually do care about them, that they are not just anonymous
cogs in a big machine that periodically spews out some financial
benefits to keep the system from overheating. And this is precisely
what the churches offer but the state does not.
What liberals
continue to miss is that human beings have other kinds of needs, for
example a need to be valued, to be cared for, to be loved, to be
recognized, and to feel that their life has some meaning and purpose
and is not just a means to someone else’s needs. We call these
spiritual needs. Their fulfillment cannot be easily measured by
objective evidence or quantitative research. So, during the heyday of
the American welfare state, Democrats built government programs that
gave no value to ‘subjective caring,’ and government workers were
penalized if they were so inefficient as to take time to actually show
personal concern about the people who were receiving ‘objective
caring.’
Government officials have tended to shy away from
anything ‘subjective’ and to deal only with those aspects of reality
that are hard-nosed and quantifiable. Is it any wonder, then, that
social programs feel technocratic, bureaucratic, manipulative,
controlling, and unspontaneous?
‘Well,’ you might say, ‘I
don’t really need my unemployment insurance clerk to love me nor my
automobile registration office to make me feel personally welcomed.’
But before being too complacent about that, how about your government
employed doctor, social worker, or the person offering programs to help
people beat drug or alcohol addictions? How about the prison guards or
the nurses at government-run hospitals and rehabilitation centers? What
about teachers and daycare workers? What happens when you have a system
that says it doesn’t care about ‘caring’ or that ‘caring’ is ‘too
subjective a category’ is that people start to have very harsh
experiences with their government services that eventually lead them to
feel alienated from ‘objective’ service providers, i.e., the state.
It
is precisely at this point that the case for de-funding government
starts to win appeal. Having experienced little in the way of real
caring from those government workers that they encountered, many
citizens grow angry at the thought that they are paying these people’s
salaries and then getting back little more than disinterest or
‘attitude.’
That might be only a minor consideration if people
felt that the programs that they were paying for actually had some real
impact in improving the situation of those less fortunate. But
capitulating to the discourse and assumptions of the Right, the
Democrats long ago gave up on full employment, ending all poverty,
rebuilding all cities, and reversing climate change and global warming,
and instead have settled for the status quo. So people pay taxes and
the problems don’t go away, and then they feel that maybe it would make
just as much sense to not pay the taxes at all since they settle
nothing.
‘Yes, but then if you de-fund government, who will take care of those who are still suffering?’
‘We
will,’ responds the Religious Right, ‘and you will too if instead of
just sitting back and hoping for more government programs, you instead
join us in our inner city ministries to the poor and the homeless,
which is what our churches are actually doing.’ Nor is this an empty
boast(the truth is that many churches actively reach out to the needy,
though at a level far lower than what is actually needed.
But
what’s most important is that the churches take caring seriously. They
value caring(and that means that many people experience themselves as
being taken care of by them.
And, yes, that does have salutary
impact on the efficacy of some social programs. Interventions performed
in these contexts can have far greater healing impact than
interventions in which the ‘professional’ delivering the services has
learned that the primary concern is to prove that they have respected
the boundaries.
This caring comes from a worldview that exists
in the religious world and has particular resonance within the
Religious Right: we care for those who share our worldview. Now for me
this is particularly insidious, because it creates a group of insiders
and outsiders, and the outsiders are frequently demeaned. Being Jewish,
I’m part of one of the groups that historically has most frequently
been identified as ‘outsiders’ and hence most frequently been the butt
of anger and hostility from Christian insiders.
No wonder,
then, that Jews became leading advocates for the secularization of
society that seemed possible after the American and French revolutions.
Jews imagined that a secular society would be the safest place for us,
because within it there would be neither Christian nor Jew but only
Frenchmen, English, Germans, Americans, and so forth.
Imagine
our surprise, then, when anti-Semitism returned in full force at the
end of the nineteenth century and became a major ingredient in
twentieth-century nationalisms in Europe. For many Jews, the upsurge of
anti-Semitism in capitalist societies was proof that Jews could never
be safe in Christian states (which led some to a general anti-religious
Marxism wherein all religious differences would be abolished, and
others to a Zionism that preached the need for Jews to have their own
state to defend ourselves from the inevitable return of Jew-hatred).
But for most, the path was to work harder to separate church and state,
and to keep all these contentious issues out of the public arena, where
they could only lead in a fascistic direction.
None of these
responses ever really sought to ask what legitimate needs were being
spoken to by the racist nationalisms that had emerged. If they had,
they could have quickly seen that people were hungry for caring and for
some sense of being valued independent of how well they did in the
competitive marketplace. When Jews were put down for their
intelligence, it was not just some inherent anti-intellectualism or
unstoppable quasi-genetic racism against Jews that was being expressed.
Rather, it was the desire of people for the recognition and caring that
was being denied them in every part of their lives in a competitive
market system. People wanted to and still want to feel valued. The free
market gives that to some who are successful, but denies it to many who
are not so victorious in the ongoing struggle of all against all.
There
was nothing ‘rational’ about right-wing movements manipulating the
anger people have at not being recognized or valued and scapegoating
Jews, African Americans, gays and lesbians, liberals, activist judges,
secular humanists, or whoever else becomes their next target.
Right-wing commentator Bill O’Reilly, who in 2004 claimed that liberals
were undermining Christmas, recently tried to make all San Franciscans
another target, and we may yet see neo-fascist forces again returning
to anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred.
Liberals mistakenly
assume that if only the Right were to go away, everything would be
fine. But that’s not true. People experience pain in their lives
because of the ways in which society is organized, not because of the
Religious Right. The Religious Right acts in ways that use and
manipulate pain, and for that it needs to be challenged. But the
challenge will get nowhere if it doesn’t simultaneously recognize these
‘meaning’ or ‘spiritual’ needs.
That’s why the ‘keep values out
of the public sphere’ approach of many secular liberals is such a
non-starter. The public sphere is saturated with the competitive
materialistic values of the society. Institutions are judged to be
efficient if they produce money or power. There’s nothing neutral or
objective about that criterion of productivity(it is itself a
substantive worldview that is built into the normal operations of daily
life, reinforced by an educational system that teaches children to
compete to get ahead so that they can get the right jobs and earn
enough money to be ‘successful.’
Is it any wonder that
people who want different values start to question the worth of our
public institutions and seek to de-fund them, or to send their children
to private schools and get the government to supply funding in the form
of vouchers, or to support candidates who call for lower taxes? They
want a different kind of world in which there is far more caring, and
far more value given to cooperation and love and appreciation of nature
and community.
It is these aspirations that the Religious Right
manages to take advantage of by offering a particular version of caring
that is available only to those who buy into their ideological
framework and accept their narrow and often morally insensitive version
of Christianity or Judaism, Islam or Hinduism.
You can’t answer
such people by simply repeating the old liberal mantras about the need
for separation of church and state. Although I totally support
separation of the state from the imposition of any particular religious
tradition or belief in God, I also know that liberals have not only
separated church from state but also separated spiritual wisdom,
caring, and love from state. This has been inappropriate and has
backfired decisively.
What is needed instead is a substantive
vision of the world we want to see. It must be visionary, must
articulate both a foreign policy and a policy for the economy, and must
explain what it is about human life that makes this vision likely to
work.
Unfortunately, the most that we are going to hear from
the Democrats in 2006 is a repackaging of the series of disconnected
reforms that they’ve been promoting for decades(a noble but limited
attempt to provide their version of the Contract with America that
Republican House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich proposed in 1994, and
which was credited with giving them unity and shared purpose. The
program will focus on education, health care, renewable energy sources,
and transportation. I’ll support it totally. But it will be a far cry
from providing an alternative worldview to that of the Republicans,
though its priorities are certainly a huge advance over those of the
Bush Administration. What it will lack is any coherent explanation of
the world or vision about what the Democrats are for, and will once
again provide a laundry list (though in this case probably a mercifully
short list) of items without a coherent unifying message that could
compete with that of the Religious Right.
I hope you’ll get a
chance to study their program carefully and compare it point for point
with The Spiritual Covenant with America that is the second half of my
book The Left Hand of God. What you’ll see is not just
differences in substance but also, and most importantly, the difference
between a politics that is rooted in a spiritual vision and one that is
not. And as I emphasize throughout the book, a progressive spiritual
vision is held by many people who are ‘spiritual but not religious,’
who do not accept any traditional religious or theocentric worldview.
At the conference on Spiritual Activism in July (some of whose speakers are highlighted in this issue of Tikkun)
we began a process of defining an alternative voice in American
politics. Jim Wallis spoke from his experience in the Christian
Evangelical community, and others represented not only the array of
Christian voices, but also Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu voices
as well as many ‘spiritual but not religious’ thinkers. We hope to
continue this process at our May gathering, which will focus on
bringing the Spiritual Covenant with America into greater national
attention. I hope that you’ll join us there.