Radical Grace
July – September 2006

Why We Need a Progressive Spiritual Consciousness in America

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

If progressive ideas about the economy, social justice and peace were enough to win popular support, the liberal and progressive forces would have retained power for the past thirty years. The polls indicate that most Americans agree with the liberals when it comes to these issues. They also agree with the left in its rejection of sexism, racism and homophobia. So why do they vote for the Right? For years many on the Left have implicitly or explicitly maintained that the only plausible answer is that Americans are stupid or more racist, sexist and homophobic than they are willing to admit to the pollsters. The implicit message: we are so much smarter and more together than the rest of the American public. Few realize that it is that message itself that gets communicated to many Americans and becomes one of the main reasons that many don’t trust the Left.

That was one of the many things I learned during an ongoing thirty year project of psycho-social empirical investigation of why Americans, whose material interests should lead them to the Left, are nevertheless voting for the Right. By avoiding simple interviews and instead conducting 8 week groups, my colleagues and I were able to develop a deeper level of trust with middle income working people, and what we learned at first astounded us, and then eventually reshaped our understanding of American society and to develop what we now call a progressive spiritual politics.

What we heard over and over again is that many middle income working people are trapped in lives that feel unfulfilling, frustrating, and ultimately meaningless. Yet people hunger for a framework of meaning and purpose that could transcend the selfishness and materialism of the competitive marketplace and would root them in what a recent Religious Rightwing best-seller (23 million copies to be exact) calls “the Purpose-Driven Life.”

The people in our groups taught us about the dynamics of the workplaces faced by most Americans: guided by an old Bottom Line that judges each person by how well they contribute to the maximization of power and money for the people at the top, and governed by the “common sense” that one must maximize one’s advantage without regard to the other lest they advantage themselves at your expense. This “looking out for number one” translates quickly into seeing other human beings primarily in terms of how they can be useful to advance your own interests. Kant described that as seeing people as means rather than ends, and Buber talked about it as developing an “I-It” rather than an “IThou” relationship.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is Editor of Tikkun magazine, Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, and author of ten books, the latest is The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), from which these ideas are excerpted. He is anxious to hear from people who would like to work with him on building a Network of Spiritual Progressives.
Email:<RabbiLerner@tikkun.org>

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