On the last episode of our series on the Religious Left, Dan speaks with Professor Ruth Braunstein about how the political organization of progressive faith groups, "good troublemakers," and the ways moral humility is good for democracy.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I'm recording today from the studios of WLMC here in Putney, Vermont.
And I am delighted to be joined today by Professor Ruth Brownstein.
She is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, also Visiting Fellow at the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion.
She has recently published a book called Prophets and Patriots, Faith and Democracy Across the Political Divide, and is also the co-editor of a volume entitled Religion and Progressive Activism, New Stories About Faith and Politics.
And so, Professor Brownstein, I want to thank you for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, so I want to sort of dive right in here.
You wrote a piece on the imminent frame called Making Budgets Moral Again.
I want to just throw out for the audience, for people who don't know the imminent frame, they should check that out.
It's an open source online site with just lots of great stuff if they're interested in things like religion and politics.
But your piece highlighted how leaders on the religious left, right, and so that's what we're talking about today, are people from a more sort of progressive social or political perspective also informed by their faith communities.
How people on the religious left are highlighting budgets as a site for manifesting values and moral priorities.
And you wrote, let me just quote from it for a minute here, you said, The release of the poor people's moral budget calls forth decades of efforts to reframe the budget as a moral concern.
This history sheds light on an active, if fragmented network of faith leaders who reject the religious right's decades-long monopoly on public morality.
Their rising visibility during the Trump era has been interpreted by some as evidence of the emergence of a new religious left that could serve as a counterweight to the religious right.
I think a lot of our listeners are interested in this notion of the religious left, but unsure of how it works and where it operates.
Can you give us some more examples of how leaders from various faith traditions are working to build and advance a progressive political coalition based on religion and faith communities?
Can you tell us where do people go to sort of find that or see that, do you think?
Sure, and thanks so much for highlighting that piece.
Budgets are one of the places that groups on the religious left have been focusing for decades.
But really what I think it does help us to see is a window into this broader world of, you know, the quote unquote religious left.
That's a phrase that has been used increasingly during the Trump era.
And it's a word that comes up, you know, every four years, particularly as people are looking at the electorate and saying there's this very disciplined group of voters called the religious right.
and they tend to vote in very high numbers for the Republican candidate.
Is there some group on the left that would offer a counter, you know, point a counterweight to them?
And so there's talk often of, is there a religious left?
And one of the problems is that there is not actually an equivalent group of voters, per se.
When you look at the electorate, the number of people who identify as kind of religious and Democrats pales in comparison to the number of people who That's actually an idea that's been promoted for decades by the religious right.
and we can talk more about why that is, but that shouldn't suggest that the idea of being both religious and progressive is some kind of an oxymoron, that it's impossible to be both.
That's actually an idea that's been promoted for decades by the religious right, this idea that to be truly religious means being politically conservative.
And so there are these groups, and they often operate below the radar of the national media because they are not as well integrated into the Democratic Party coalition.
But, you know, in pretty much any town or city in the country, there's usually, you know, groups of clergy organized, you know, social justice related organizations that are working from a faith perspective on issues that we would think of as politically progressive.
One of the challenges of sort of thinking of them as a coordinated movement is that, A, they aren't very coordinated at the national level, and B, they often reject any kind of shared terminology.
So many of these groups resist the label of the religious left, resist the idea of being religious liberals or religious progressives or spiritual progressives.
And we could talk more about why that is, but there's not one single label that a lot of these groups or individuals will agree on.
And so that creates challenges in terms of weaving themselves together into a coordinated national movement.
But they're there.
Yeah, I agree.
And I think you're onto a great point there that we could probably spend, like, episodes on is why, like you say, all the whys of why there isn't that sort of cohesive shared identity and so forth.
I have a hunch that one of those is another issue that you sort of raise in some of the writing that you do where you talk about how At least within some of what you're calling the religious left, noting that they may not be comfortable with that title themselves, you talk about a kind of moral humility that marks the movement sometimes, that often contrasts in my mind with one of the things that's really projected by
The majority white evangelicalism, the religious right, is a kind of moral certitude, right?
The really complex issues, whether it's gay rights or abortion or any number of other things now, are presented in stark either-or terms with firm answers and clear moral certainty and so forth.
And one of the things that I think you highlight is that some of these more progressive movements are also marked by a certain kind of moral or epistemic humility.
That is an awareness that maybe we don't know all the time what the right thing to do is or what it means to seek justice and so forth.
So let me just throw that out, leading on what you just said.
Is that one of the reasons why it is difficult sometimes to identify these groups or why they don't share a certain shared commonality?
Because, to put it in kind of social science-y terms, they don't draw those firm in-group, out-group boundaries that are sort of demarcated by this kind of moral certitude.
Is that a piece of this puzzle, do you think?
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