The issue of whether evangelicals, or other strong believers, can be accommodated in the progressive "big tent" is contingent on the left's willingness to appreciate and even respect the role religion plays in their life, despite their own divergent philosophies.
Whether or not a political realignment of believers is at hand we have yet to see, but there have been liberal Christians devoted to social justice since Jesus himself associated himself with the weak and poor of his society (if he actually did any of this, or existed at all, is a question I won't even begin to tackle here). More recently, Christian groups like Jim Wallis' Sojourners magazine have taken up the mantle of combining God and progressive thought.
But there remains a serious gap of understanding between the bulk of reason-loving leftists and their faithful neighbors. Many of my friends, especially those who I met in and since college, characterize themselves as atheists, or at least indifferent agnostics. A significant minority of them find religious feeling so strange and negative an influence as to defy explanation. Drawing on the writings of acclaimed atheists like Richard Dawkins, they see religious theory and practice as little more than a "God delusion" obfuscating the rational truth about the world.
While I respect and often agree with the ideas and the rationales of these thinkers and their supporters, my lived experience of religion has kept me from discounting its potential for good. I grew up regularly attending Presbyterian and Congregational churches with my family, even serving as a deacon (board of around 15 congregants who help guide the running of the church) at the Trinitarian Congregational Church in Concord, Mass.
Before I go on, I should say that I wouldn't characterize myself as a "believer" by any measure. Many of the sermons at my church didn't even talk about faith all that much. The focus was on introspection, reexamination of life and relationships, and fellowship. I found in my youth group an open community, devoted to valuing each other as humans inherently worthy of such consideration, not as the disparate sets of talents and flaws we each carried through our high school hallways.
This was not a particularly "religious" group. The point was not, as in many similar evangelical groups (Young Life, in particular, which had a strong presence in our town), to deepen our personal relationship with Jesus. But we did meet every week to play games, talk about important things in our lives, go camping and hiking, and generally build a friend network outside the Balkanized world of the cafeteria. These were not my closest friends (many of them I seldom saw outside the group), but without them my adolescence would have been a far more difficult period.
If there was one coherent spiritual strain that resonated especially strongly with me then, it was a hearty skepticism regarding man's perfectability (one that many skeptics of religion would be well served to carry into their often rhapsodic musings on science and progress). One regular prayer at my church, one that has always stuck with me in the years past my frequent churchgoing, contains the line: "[g]ive me the courage to venture normal love with average people." I found, and still found, something refreshing and bold in the idea of it taking courage to acknowledge the battles you can't win, and the challenge of forging a good life out of imperfect material. The starkness of the task reminded me of Kierkegaard, but with sober judgment taking the role of his fear and trembling faith.
Progressives, and all of us, really, could use a dose of this kind of humility. Grant people their own inconsistencies and irrationalities, their failings and hypocrisies, from evangelicals to economists, and hope that they will accept you for yours. Once you accept this, politics can go back to the delicate dance of compromise and coalition-building, and past the confused resentment of irreconcilable worldviews.
-- Will Payne
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