Public Religion Research and the Beatitudes Society Team Up to Offer Holiday Gift Resource

As we enter into this season of holidays, we wanted to pass along a new resource sponsored jointly by Public Religion Research and the Beatitudes Society–the Progressive Religion Bookshelf.  The PRR and Beats team have put together a list of some of our favorite authors, organized across 12 categories, who are writing about the growing movement of people of faith who are working for social justice and the common good.

Here’s the best part: by shopping for gifts here, you not only support these authors, but 4%-7% of your purchase goes to support the work of Public Religion Research and the Beatitudes Society. The store contains books by PRR president Dr. Robert P. Jones, Beatitudes director Rev. Anne Howard, and the growing host of others who are lifting up progressive religious voices.

Please help us spread the word about this new resource. The direct link to the Progressive Religion Bookshelf is http://www.tinyurl.com/religionbooks.

Check out the preview of the Progressive Religion Bookshelf below. (Follow the link above to see the full version of the store):



A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of speaking at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, as a guest of Tom Krattenmaker, frequent contributor to USA Today and Associate Vice President at Lewis & Clark. (Tom, by the way, has a great piece up today at USA Today on recent books that give a new perspective on Jesus and the church by New Testament scholars Bart Ehrman and Marcus Borg and church historian Diana Butler Bass). After the event, I talked at length with George Rede, Sunday opinion editor at the Oregonian, who focused his Easter Sunday column on my recent book, Progressive & Religious. In the piece, entitled “Religious progressives find new acceptance”, Rede talks about the resurrection of progressive religious voices in American public life.

Religious Progressives find new acceptance

by George Rede

Judging from recent headlines, you might think conservatives have a lock on religion. Whether the topic is same-sex marriage, stem cell research or President Barack Obama’s invitation to speak at Notre Dame’s commencement, the same sources from the religious right get top billing.

What’s going on? Robert P. Jones, a professor and ordained minister, has an idea.

Last month at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, Jones talked about his new book, “Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist Leaders Are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

In the book, Jones cuts through the assumption that religion in America — and religious politics — are the domain of the religious right. (Think Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority; Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition; James Dobson and Focus on the Family. Recall their efforts to legislate morality on issues of abortion, sex education and gay rights.)

In reporting these hot-button issues, Jones found, the mainstream media fell into the trap of presenting a distorted picture, virtually defining religion and the public square in conservative terms. Jones’ research shows that for every progressive voice cited in the news media, three conservative religious voices were quoted.

That doesn’t match reality. After all, 14 percent of Americans define themselves as religious progressives versus 15 percent who self-identify as religious conservatives, according to the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey.

Jones spent three years crisscrossing the country doing 96 interviews with progressive religious leaders representing Christianity (both mainline and evangelical Protestant), Judaism (Reform) and Islam. From those interviews, several themes emerged: an emphasis on social justice, a fundamental belief in humanity, a vision for America as a more generous country, an active role in community organizing — plus a conviction that “truth” isn’t the exclusive realm of religious conservatives…

Continue reading the full article from The Oregonian here.

You can also read a longer piece on Progressive & Religious by George Rede, Sunday Opinion Editor for the Oregonian, here.

Progressive & Religious is 50% off in April. Rowman & Littlefield has made my book available at the best price so far ($12.48 for hardcover, expires 4/27). To buy the book at this sale price, click here, and enter promotion code “4S9PROG50″ at checkout.

President’s Faith-Based Advisory Council Taps Four Progressive Leaders Featured in Recent Book, Progressive & Religious

Contact: Robert P. Jones, Ph.D.
rjones@publicreligion.org, 240-638-6403

(Washington, DC) - President Obama’s newly unveiled Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships taps four progressive religious leaders featured in the recent book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). The leaders come from across the religious spectrum, representing Christianity (both mainline and evangelical Protestant), Judaism (Reform), and Islam.

These leaders, like many others on the council, have been at the vanguard in sustaining and reviving a progressive public face of religion. The excerpts below illustrate how these leaders are faithfully and critically engaging their faith and religious tradition to work for social justice and the common good–a hopeful sign in this new era.

• Harry Knox, Director of Religion and Faith Program, Human Rights Campaign. Under his leadership, HRC created a national speakers’ bureau that reaches more than 10 million Americans monthly and a national network for 22 progressive state clergy coalitions around the country. Knox was denied ordination because he is openly gay, and is a former licensed minister of the United Methodist Church in Georgia.

The people that we study now as great thinkers were all revolutionary in their time. They all listened to God first, and then made what they were hearing bump up against the text and bump up against the tradition of the church. And they found that maybe the text and the tradition weren’t big enough to hold what they were hearing from God, and so they said some new things.
-Knox, in Progressive & Religious

• Dr. Eboo S. Patel, Founder and Director, Interfaith Youth Core. Dr. Patel, an Indian-American Muslim, founded his Chicago-based organization to build the interfaith youth movement through service and dialogue. Patel is a Rhodes scholar and serves on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations.

A religious pluralist is somebody who may believe very deeply that their own tradition is the only “right” tradition, but who fundamentally believes in a society where people from different backgrounds have the freedom and the right to live by their own traditions and where they can live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.
-Patel, in Progressive & Religious

• Rabbi David N. Saperstein, Director and Counsel, Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism. Rabbi Saperstein was recently named the most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine. For more than 30 years, Rabbi Saperstein has represented the Reform Jewish Movement to Congress and the administration and lobbied for a variety of social justice issues.

There is hardly a classic text of Judaism that does not resound with both spiritual meaning and God’s call for us to be engaged in creating a better world. You can open up almost any story in the Bible and feel this deep spiritual resonance that speaks across the centuries and embodies this call: that we are called to create a more just and fair world for humanity.
-Saperstein, in Progressive & Religious

• Rev. Jim Wallis, President and Director, Sojourners. Sojourners is a progressive evangelical organization that has been a longstanding voice for poverty reduction, peace, and the environment. Wallis’ book, God’s Politics, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 4 months.

One thing that changes American Christians is direct proximity, relationship to poor people. Revival is going to be triggered when the relationship to the poor on the part of the churches reaches a critical mass.
-Wallis, in Progressive & Religious

These leaders are featured prominently in the recent book, Progressive & Religious, which explains how progressive religious leaders are tapping the deep connections between religion and social justice to work on issues like poverty and workers’ rights, the environment, health care, pluralism, and human rights. The book is the result of three years of systematic research and nearly 100 interviews with progressive religious leaders in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.

The website companion to the book (http://www.progressiveandreligious.org/) also features selected audio podcasts and transcripts with these groundbreaking leaders, including podcasts with Dr. Eboo Patel and Rabbi David Saperstein.

# # #

1. Progressive & Religious 50% off in April. Rowman & Littlefield has made my book available at the best price so far ($12.48 for hardcover, expires 4/27). To buy the book at this sale price, click here, and enter promotion code “4S9PROG50″ at checkout.

Feel free to pass this along to friends and colleagues.

2. We’ve had a successful launch of the book and book tour. I’ve been the recipient of the hospitality of several universities and seminaries (Emory University, Princeton Theological Seminary, Hebrew College and Andover Newton Theological School, MIT, Oregon State University, Lewis and Clark College), academic conferences (American Academy of Religion, Christian Scholars Conference), and local congregations (Oseh Shalom in MD, Oakhurst Baptist Church in GA, and the Interfaith Families Project in MD). I’ve also had the opportunity to do some engaging media talks, ranging from being Rev. Welton Gaddy’s guest on Air America to an appearance on Fox & Friends (!). I’m continuing to book engagements for the second half of the year to tell the story of the emerging progressive religious movement.

3. We also continue to publish compelling “Progressive Religious Voices podcasts series with progressive religious leaders. You can find them on iTunes or at www.progressiveandreligious.org/podcasts. They’re free–come check them out.

This piece from National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” talks about the work of Public Religion Research, Robert P. Jones’ new book, Progressive and Religious, and the change in the political landscape from 2004 to 2008. The full text from NPR’s website is available here.

How McCain Shed Pariah Status Among Evangelicals
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

When it comes to evangelicals, John McCain has remade himself in eight short years. The Republican candidate was a pariah to religious conservatives during his run for the White House in 2000. This time around, he’s not exactly a Messiah but he has won over his base…

“I think 2004 really was the high-water mark of the religious right in America,” says Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research and author of Progressive and Religious.

Jones says the culture wars do not excite religious voters the way they used to.

“What we had in 2004 was a very artificial constriction of religion to be about abortion and same-sex marriage,” he says. “We also had in a way we hadn’t seen before an artificial constriction of religion to be about one political party. And it’s not sustainable.”

Jones’ polls show abortion and same-sex marriage don’t even rank in the top five issues for evangelicals, much less other religious voters.

Continue reading the full piece from NPR here.

A new article by the Oregonian profiles a new survey conducted by Public Religion Research on the issue of torture among southern white evangelicals.

Torture and Evangelicals: Faith takes a back seat
By Tom Krattenmaker

The new findings about evangelicals and torture certainly won’t help in that regard. Commissioned by Mercer University and the Washington-based Faith in Public Life, and conducted by Public Religion Research, the survey finds that 57 percent of white evangelicals in the South believe torture can be justified. By comparison, an earlier poll by the Pew Research Center finds just 48 percent of the general public in support of torture.

Even more illuminating is this finding from the new poll: The evangelicals surveyed are far more likely to turn to life experience and common sense (44 percent) than Christian teaching (28 percent) in forming their opinion on torture. In other words, the segment of the population presumably most serious about their Christian faith is disinclined to be guided by the Bible on one of the central moral questions we face.

It comes as some relief to know that a different result emerged when the pollsters tweaked the question and challenged those surveyed to re-approach the issue with the Bible in mind, particularly its “do-unto others as you would have them do unto you” precept. Then, a majority agreed that torture should never be used.

Religion scholar Robert P. Jones, whose polling firm conducted the survey, believes evangelicals’ support for torture probably stems from two major impulses: Fear, and the understandable but unrealistic yearning for absolute safety from terrorists.

“When you reach for ultimate security and find it ever more elusive, you then begin to rationalize your principles in the way you treat people,” says Jones, author of the new book “Progressive and Religious.” “It extends all the way down to doing things that [before 9/11] would have been unthinkable, like rationalizing away the Geneva Conventions, and talking about how in these times we’re living in, the old morals don’t apply.”

…

You can read the full article from the Oregonian here.

Note: The complete version of this article can be found my “Dispatches from the Beltway” column at ReligionDispatches.org.

The release of the massive American Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life this week provides a new window into an old question that has preoccupied sociologists for more than a century: Can religious traditions, with their particularity and ancient roots, survive amidst the pluralism of the modern world?

The Pew Forum findings clearly cast an affirmative vote; Pew found that American religion is increasingly diverse, that most Americans have a non-exclusivist understanding of their religion (70% of the religiously-affiliated agree that many religions may lead to eternal life)—and that religion is alive and well under these conditions, with more than half of Americans continuing to say that religion is very important in their lives.

These findings cut against the grain of some of the dominant streams of sociological theory and recent public discourse. Sociologists have often tried to predict not whether, but how quickly religion might succumb to the alleged corrosive power of modern pluralism. More than a century ago, Karl Marx famously declared that religion’s last refuge was to be found in the sighs of oppressed workers as they toiled in the twilight years of a doomed capitalist system. And Max Weber lamented that amidst the tempest of competing value systems in the modern pluralistic world, trying to imitate the life of a religious exemplar like Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha was doomed for purely practical reasons.

More recently, secularization theorists believed the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s would finally kill off traditional religions. They too were convinced that the coexistence of so many competing belief systems in the same social space would ultimately prove destabilizing to all of them.

But despite the predictions, religion would not go quietly into that good night. By the 1980s, most of the world experienced not the decline but the resurgence of public religion, especially in literalist/fundamentalist forms that were explicitly anti-modern (and importantly, in many parts of the world, anti-colonial). Religious extremists across traditions hit the headlines so forcefully and often violently that they became the public face of religion through the 1990s.

Faced with insurmountable data, chastened theorists now allowed two tracks for modern religion: secularization/decline on the one hand or anti-modern retrenchment on the other. These basic assumptions have driven much of the contemporary public discourse about religion, from Samuel Huntington’s vision of a future marked by a “clash of civilizations” organized around monolithic religious identities to the more recent declarations by Christopher Hitchens and other neo-atheists that “religion poisons everything.”

But the recent Pew data, and my own research among progressive American religious leaders in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, demonstrate that decline and retrenchment are not the only options. A new public face of religion is emerging….
….

Read the rest of the article in my “Dispatches from the Beltway” column at ReligionDispatches.org.

You can read more about the emerging progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

For much of the last two decades, voices that are both progressive and religious have been like the “the Whos” in Dr. Seuss’ classic Horton Hears a Who, yelling “We are here! We are here! We are here!” just to be noticed. This is how Rev. Tim Ahrens described it in an interview I conducted with him last year about the founding of We Believe Ohio in 2005 (for the full interview see my forthcoming book Progressive & Religious). But in just a few short years, the Whos have indeed been heard.

We Believe Ohio has grown from a few religious leaders responding to a single email into a broad organization that includes more than four hundred pastors, priests, rabbis, cantors, imams, and other religious leaders all over the state. These religious leaders have come together in an unprecedented way to reclaim a progressive voice for religion in the public square.

The growth of We Believe Ohio contrasts sharply with the fate of Rev. Russell Johnson, a fundamentalist megachurch pastor who had one of the biggest megaphones in Ohio in 2004. With his 2,000-member Fairfield Christian Church, Johnson ridiculed the early participants of We Believe Ohio, joking that their combined congregations could fit into a phone booth. Along with Rev. Rod Parsley—the movement’s bombastic mouthpiece who called on Ohio Christians (who he called the largest “interest group” in the state) to “lock and load” to defeat the “hordes of Hell”—Johnson was the force behind the so-called “Ohio Restoration Project,” an attempt to recruit “patriot pastors” to register one million “values voters.”

But by late 2007, Johnson had fallen. The pinnacle of Johnson’s work turned out to be supporting the failed bid of Kenneth Blackwell for governor in 2006. And he found himself in a swirl of controversy: the IRS placed a lien on him and his wife for failure to pay $22,269 in income taxes and penalties from 2002 to 2004; his church and the school and hotel it owns showed a net operating loss of $1.5 million for its fiscal year ending in June 2007; official complaints were filed against his church for violating its tax-exempt status in backing Blackwell’s campaign; and although neither he nor the church officially cited problems with his leadership, Johnson resigned his post as pastor in October 2007.

In the meantime, Ohio Christians clearly voiced their preference for a candidate that shared all their values rather than a candidate running on a narrow divisive platform of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Blackwell was handily defeated by Ted Strickland, a Methodist minister who stumped as a “Golden Rule Democrat” and who, as a senator, insisted on paying for his own health coverage as long as his constituents were not covered. According to the 2006 NEP exit polls, Strickland gained fourteen points among voters who attended religious services once per week or more, compared to support these voters gave Senator John Kerry in 2004. And voters, including a majority (fifty-one percent) of weekly church attenders, overwhelmingly supported a long-overdue ballot measure to increase the minimum wage.

Especially since 2006, I have been struck (and heartened) by the contrast in the energy, new ideas, and accomplishments among progressive religious groups and the flagging, tired efforts to trot out the same old lines among the religious right….

Read the rest of the article at Religion Dispatches.