'Religious left' emerging as U.S. political force in Trump era

[workinclasszero]

'Religious left' emerging as U.S. political force in Trump era
By Scott Malone Mon Mar 27, 2017 | 11:18am EDT

Since President Donald Trump's election, monthly lectures on social justice at the 600-seat Gothic chapel of New York's Union Theological Seminary have been filled to capacity with crowds three times what they usually draw.

In January, the 181-year-old Upper Manhattan graduate school, whose architecture evokes London's Westminster Abbey, turned away about 1,000 people from a lecture on mass incarceration. In the nine years that Reverend Serene Jones has served as its president, she has never seen such crowds.

"The election of Trump has been a clarion call to progressives in the Protestant and Catholic churches in America to move out of a place of primarily professing progressive policies to really taking action," she said.

"It's one of the dirty little secrets of American politics that there has been a religious left all along and it just hasn't done a good job of organizing," said J. Patrick Hornbeck II, chairman of the theology department at Fordham University, a Jesuit school in New York.

"It has taken a crisis, or perceived crisis, like Trump's election to cause folks on the religious left to really own their religion in the public square," Hornbeck said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-religion-idUSKBN16Y114

[Bucky]

1. "it just hasn't done a good job of organizing"

The religious left follows too closely the philosophy of Paul of Tarsus. They work in silent service to their fellows, pray in closets, and generally do good works. And that's it. And that's all well and good, except then they've abandoned the PR stuff to the right wingers who cloak themselves in God-talk and mostly accumulate power and fortune... while not giving a flip about the harm done to the working class (and the world's people and the environment) by the right wing politicians they support.

They need to clean their own house. They need to borrow a move from Jesus and throw the money grubbers out of their temples. Until they stand up and denounce the American Pharisees (700 Club, Franklin Graham, Jim Bakker, etc) and the closet Saducees like Joel Osteen, they'll remain out voiced and outpowered.

[Wounded Bear]

2. I'm an irreligious bastard and firmly believe in separation of church and state...

but I welcome any help we can get to turn back this tide of toxic pseudo-religious shit from the right. I suspect that most of the Christian Left would not like a theocracy either.

Oh and Reuters, this crisis is not 'perceived.' It is real. Terrifyingly real.