More about that ridiculous Loconte editorial...

To refresh your memory, see here. I posted about it here (at the end of the post).

Here is a response from a Michael Lerner emailing to members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I'm only quoting the P.S., because he can be a bit long-winded and this segment is the most on-point for our purposes:

P.S. A few of the many distortions in Joesph Loconte’s piece in the NY Times:

1. Jim Wallis was not an organizer of the Berkeley conference to which he refers, but was one of the speakers at it (and had parts of it that he supported and parts he did not). His Call for Renewal* organization, like the Network of Spiritual Progressives, is one part of the emerging new Religious/Spiritual Left.

2. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid do not identify with the Religious/ Spiritual Left, though they may have their own personal religious beliefs. When the Democratic Party adopts religious language or attempts to reframe its same old programs in religious garb, it is not acting as the Religious Left but as the opportunistic middle seeking any tools it can appropriate for its own self-interest. We in the Religious Left are not a branch of the Democrats or any other political party.

3. It is ludicrous to deny that the Bible has a political agenda. What exactly do you call a document that demands that people stop work one day out of seven, and one year out of seven, leave part of their crops for the poor, forgive all debts once every seven years, and redistribute land back to the original roughly equal distribution once every fifty years.

That Scriptures can sometimes be illegitimately appropriated to justify some aspects of a political program does not prove that there are no specific political implications of the holy writings. La Conte is correct that the Bible does not justify every specific spending program by the Democrats, but it doesn’t follow from that that the Bible does not mandate some spending programs on the poor.

4. The fact that we had one of our fifty workshops specifically addressed to "spiritual but not religious" people is singled out by Loconte in the article below as a way of signaling that we are not really religious at all. This is simply false. We are a movement of people some of whom fit into traditional religious communities, some of whom are struggling to change those communities to make them more spiritually alive, and some of whom are not part of those communities but nevertheless recognize that the empiricist/ materialist account of the universe is inadequate and misses a fundamental dimension of reality. That is further explored in The Left Hand of God. Loconte would prefer to ridicule by innuendo than engage with the openness and breadth of the new Religious/Spiritual Left.

5. Many on the religious Left oppose the war in Iraq and many of the other policies of the U.S. government. But we do not spend our energies comparing the US to Nazi Germany, and we are proudly patriotic in affirming the many good aspects of American society even as we draw from religious sources to critique aspects that are immoral and deserve to be changed.

*Jim Wallis' organization is actually Call to Renewal.