Articulating New Liberal Values

In recent years we have fretted over the rise of the religious and political right. In seeking to oppose them, we have appealed to secular principles of freedom and justice. We have argued that, despite recent setbacks, these principles are enduring in their broad appeal and merely need to be defended from an attack of the moment.

Stepping back, perhaps the rise of the religious and political right can be seen in a different context. Perhaps the rise of the religious right is merely a reaction to an increasingly toxic mainstream culture – a culture that is vacuous and obsessed with the gross material rewards of money, sex, and power. In this context, the rise of the right is not the source of cultural sickness in itself, but rather a symptom of the broader cultural sickness of our time. People have gravitated to the religious right because it gives them a system of meaning and understanding the world that the secular mainstream culture does not. If this is the actual battleground of our culture, then the need is not so much to oppose the religious right, as it is to provide a source of meaning to those people who feel swamped by the misleading messages of our media-driven culture.

What we need to offer people is liberal religious perspective that allows them to live meaningful lives, and yes, resist the temptations of the larger secular culture. We need to give people a full and sacred definition of what it is to be human, one that respects the needs of their soul as much as the needs of their body. As religious liberals, we are in a unique position to give people a vision of life that is both meaningful and modern. We can give people a way of understanding themselves that is deep and timeless, yet free from outdated constraints and discredited authorities.

Over the longer term, liberalism is very much in the ascendant. To a large extent on cultural issues, and to a lesser extent on economic ones, liberal values have defined the direction of our politics over the past 100+ years. More people are freer now to live as they choose and believe as they will than perhaps any earlier time in American history.

But over the short term, we feel out-manuevered and over-whelmed. Somehow the conservatives have done a better job of defining and explaining their values. Somehow the conservatives have convinced people that we stand for weakness and pandering, while they stand for strength and pride. My conclusion is that we have been out-manuvered by the conservatives because they have been working hard on it for a very long time. They have been working on defining, explaining, and amplifying their values, while we have coasted along on old slogans and themes. We haven’t done the work of understanding ourselves, what it is we stand for, and why – and then transmitting this understanding to the broader culture.

And the earlier great successes of liberalism have led us to hang onto the old values and ideas that have carried us so far. Namely, the ideas and values of human rights, of social justice, and of personal freedom. And no doubt that these ideas and values have great merit and are a permanent part of our belief system.

But the time may have come for new values, and new definitions of what makes life worth living. Most of all, it has become clear that freedom and progress, as they are currently defined, will not of themselves bring us to a better way of living. Progress needs to be redefined not just to include greater control over our physical environment and greater knowledge by science, but a greater degree of mastery over ourselves and a greater degree of self-knowledge. It is us, humans, that are the ultimate untamed and dangerous force in the universe. Unless we learn to master ourselves, we will destroy ourselves surely. We cannot believe in a progress that does not include spiritual self-struggle and self-examination.

The values that we need to redefine and explore are the broader spiritual values from which our political values arise. These include the value of compassion; the value of love for creation; and the value of the sacred dimension of human life – those needs and aspirations that go beyond the material realm. These values, because they are so deep and because they are so difficult to define, do not provide us with as clear a picture of the role of government and policy as our current political values. But ultimately we need these broad, encompassing values to help us define possibilities for living that are fulfilling and that maximize our opportunity for survival as a species. And our definition of our political goals must spring out of that broader definition of what makes life meaningful. We cannot abstract away the sacred human element from our politics, nor should we.

There is a broader network of spiritual progressives working on this task – defining our spiritual values, defining our political values, and the connection between the two. Their website is: http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/

I invite you to join a study group with me on these issues, on how we define our spiritual values, on how we define our political values, and the connections between the two. I look forward to a lengthy and engaging dialogue on these challenging issues.