BOOK REVIEW Boston Globe


His political strategy: the religious left

By Dan Wakefield, Globe Correspondent | June 28, 2006

The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right, By
Michael Lerner, HarperSan Francisco, 408 pp., $24.95

Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor-publisher of the liberal interfaith
magazine Tikkun , is forming a national ``Network of Spiritual
Progressives" in an effort ``to provide an alternate solution to both the
intolerant and militarist politics of the Right and the current misguided,
visionless, and often spiritually empty politics of the Left."

His new book, `` The Left Hand of God," is a rallying cry and a theoretical
and scholarly analysis of the appeal of the religious right. It is also a
kind of handbook for creating a movement ``that can be for the Democrats
and Greens what the Religious Right has been for the Republicans," by
providing ``intellectual, political, and spiritual inspiration for those in
the party even while not being formally aligned when it comes to elections."

Lerner is stumping the country on his book tour much the way the
progressive evangelical Jim Wallis did a year ago with his book ``God's
Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It." As
writers, speakers, and organizers, Lerner and Wallis have come to fill the
void left by the leaders of the civil rights and the antiwar movements in
the '60s and '70s.

What the secular left and the Democratic Party have failed to understand,
Lerner argues, is that ``human beings are theotropic -- they turn toward
the sacred -- and that dimension in us cannot be fully extinguished. People
feel a near-desperate desire to reconnect to the sacred, to find some way
to unite their lives with a higher meaning and purpose and in particular to
that aspect of the sacred that is built upon the loving, kind, and generous
energy in the universe that I describe as the `Left Hand of God.' "

Many secularists, Lerner says , believe voters who side with the right
against their own economic interests are deluded or dumb or both, but what
those critics miss is that ``many very decent Americans . . . get attracted
to the Religious Right because it is the only voice . . . willing to
challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is
driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of
supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation
and spiritual loneliness."

The left, Lerner says, ``can't talk about love or kindness or generosity
without feeling that it has violated its commitment to a scientistic form
of rationalism."

His new book and his Network of Spiritual Progressives will not be the
first time Lerner has tried to get his message across to the public and the
political power structure. His earlier book ``The Politics of Meaning "
caught the attention of the Clintons during their first year in the White
House, and Lerner was invited there to speak with them on the subject. When
word got out, however, that the Clintons were seeking the counsel of a
rabbi about ``meaning" in politics, some members of the media hooted and
hollered over what they regarded as a touchy-feely subject and labeled
Lerner a ``guru" -- shades of Rasputin!

Before the next elections it would profit the Democrats to take seriously
some of Lerner's perceptive and creative ideas . Lerner understands that
the secular left needs to tone down its hostility to religion and
spirituality if it hopes to win elections in a country in which the vast
majority of voters consider themselves religious. Wallis tells the story of
a young man in Boston who told him at a book signing it was easier to come
out as gay in Massachusetts than to come out as religious in the Democratic
Party. Lerner now has his own story of the way religion is perceived along
party lines. When a volunteer in the last election said he couldn't attend
a Sunday morning meeting because he had to go to church, his committee
chairman was confused. ``I thought you were a Democrat," he said.

Lerner hopes to change that perception, and this book is a good starting point.

Dan Wakefield's new book is ``The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious
Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate."
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© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.