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MICHAEL LERNER

Rabbi Michael Lerner created Tikkun as the Jewish, liberal and progressive alternative to the Jewish conservative magazine Commentary. He founded the Tikkun Community in 2002 – an interfaith organization dedicated to nonviolence, peace, justice, generosity and caring. The organization changed its name to the Network of Spiritual Progressives in 2004 to show that the interfaith organization was not just for Jews. He is the author of The Left Hand of God, The Socialism of Fools: anti-semitism on the Left and Revolutionary Love.

Do you think the American Left hasn’t been proactive enough in seeking out members of the religious Left who share the same positions as them on most issues?

I think it’s a tragic error of liberal and progressive forces to not have made much greater efforts to integrate in their activities, their thinking and their organizations people who are either religious or spiritually inclined. The truth is, all polls show that the vast majority of Americans go to church at least once a month. The liberal and progressive forces talk about a democratic transformation of society, but they are unwilling to reach out to many potential supporters who are either religious or spiritual, except by reaching out in a way that conveys a disdain or demeaning view of people who believe in religion or spirituality.

I did book tours and speeches around the country for my book The Left Hand of God: taking our country back from the religious right and I heard thousands of people tell me how they were trying to be part of a liberal-progressive movement but they ran into what is best described as a deep religio-phobia and antagonism to people who are religious. Liberals and progressives would like these people to be there when it comes to voting for our candidates and demonstrating on the streets. But the culture and assumptions in liberal and progressive circles reflect a deep prejudice that goes something like this: ‘Yes, we want you in our movements, but we think you religious and spiritual people, especially you religious people who believe in God, are at a lower level of intellectual or psychological development than us.’

There are plenty of religious and spiritual people who have accepted that about the Left, but they nevertheless agree with the Left on the issues, so they don’t let this secular elitist attitude drive them away. They end up making the following choice: ‘If I’m going to be part of a liberal and progressive movement then I have to leave my religious or spiritual apparatus at the door.’ This means the Left doesn’t get the benefit of the wisdom that religious or spiritual progressives could bring.

What do you think has changed in the US that has caused a schism between secular and religious progressives? At one time many of the most progressive movements against slavery, child labor and unsafe tenement buildings came out of the church…

The American Left and the liberal forces tend to be very narrow in their focus. They look at one specific issue, instead of coming up with a coherent worldview that helps people see the interconnected nature of our problems and need for a fundamental transformation. We do that in our Network for Spiritual Progressives and through Tikkun. We are trying to get people in the social progressive world to reopen themselves to a coherent worldview.

The best articulator of that worldview, apart from the people who are connected with our Network of Spiritual Progressives, is Pope Francis. The Pope today is the most significant progressive thinker in terms of his impact and outreach to a huge following of people and, in time, if he isn’t killed or he doesn’t die or get forced to resign by unrepentant conservative forces in the Catholic world, he could have a huge impact in transforming the Catholic Church into being more connected with liberal and progressive movements. That’s just what infuriates the conservatives, who have always sought a more repressive, hierarchical and patriarchal perspective.

Can atheists and agnostics recognize these same human needs without being part of any organized religion?

I don’t think that it’s necessary to fit into a traditional religion to have an awareness of spiritual consciousness. To be spiritual means to look at the world from outside of the categories that the empiricists have developed. The empiricists developed a worldview that said: ‘That which is real is that which can be verified through our data or be measured. And that which cannot be measured or subject to empirical verification to our data is not really real.’

This worldview has become the dominant worldview in global capitalism. It’s shared by many people on the Left, Right and Center. This is the dominant religion of the contemporary world. It’s a religion because it has no foundation based on its own criteria; because it cannot be verified through data or be measured. But everybody believes it, so it’s considered common sense. When you’re in a religion, the pervasive religious belief is just obvious, so you accept it instead of asking yourself what the basis of that belief is. The people I call spiritual are those who reject the empiricist worldview and say, ‘no, there are other ways of knowing that are not subject to empirical verification or measurement’.

Do you think international leftists should be pushing for capitalism with a friendly face or for something different that we haven’t discovered yet?

I’m not for capitalism with a friendly face. I’m working for a different society, a society based on love and generosity. Such a society would have to have elements of economic justice and democratic control of the economy that were the intent of socialism (though unfortunately often implemented in a bureaucratic way that rarely gave ordinary people the power it had promised). So I’m calling my vision Revolutionary Love. That society would seek ‘a New Bottom Line’ so that every institution and social practice – corporations, economic policies, laws, government policies, health and education – would be judged to be efficient, rational or productive to the extent that these institutions and the social practices they fostered maximized our capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, ethical and environmentally sensitive and responsible. We need to support each other to be capable of responding to human beings as embodiments of the sacred and capable of responding to the world with awe, wonder and radical amazement.

This is what the Network of Spiritual Progressives is all about: to change the consciousness of America and foster a spirit of generosity and create ‘The Caring Society’ – caring for each other and caring for the earth. Despite the political power of the most selfish elements in our society, most people yearn for a different kind of world, and in my book Revolutionary Love I expand on these ideas. ■