Religious Left Leadership

In an earlier post I spoke about the leadership of the religious right, and how it is changing. I expressed my happiness that the new leaders are addressing other pressing issues that face this nation. Now I want to address the leadership on the Left.

The Left spends entirely too much money, energy, and time on promoting its favorite few issues, and many of those issues affect a small number of people. There are huge problems that affect many people that the Left isn’t addressing adequately because it is so engaged in promoting gay marriage and making sure there are no controls on abortion. Unfortunately the Religious Left’s positions on issues are indistinguishable from the secular Left’s. We Christians, I thought, are supposed to not go along with the culture, but to struggle against the immorality and sinful aspects of the culture – to be “salt and light” as Jesus put it.

Think of the other problems facing this country and the world that nobody seems to be adequately addressing: the terrible conditions women face in many countries, the slave trade, kiddie porn, other exploitation of women and children, rampant malaria in Africa (which kills more people than AIDS), the exporting of American jobs overseas, the exploitation of workers in other countries by the use of “Free Trade Zones”, and, of course the severe problems we face in this country, most of which hit the poor the hardest:

·high cost of energy;
·dependence on foreign sources for oil;
·higher costs for food;
·lack of universal health care;
·unfavorable trade balance;
·running a huge deficit in the federal budget;
·a social security system that must be fixed;
·and high levels of air pollution.

When the Left does address an issue, its solutions are usually too extreme to be practicable and acceptable to most of the nation. Moreover, the Left is unwilling to compromise so that there is deadlock – for the Left, it’s all or nothing. Yet these issues must be tackled, and the Religious Left has the clout to make some things happen, even if the result isn’t exactly what they wanted. We have to start somewhere.