Deep left-wing roots
Faith leaders running as Democrats are not new. If anything, experts say the candidates are tapping into a long lineage of religious advocacy on the left.
“There have always been progressive Christians throughout American history,” said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, the vice president of programmes and strategy at the Interfaith Alliance, an advocacy organisation for religious freedom.
In his work as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a research nonprofit, Graves-Fitzsimmons studies the intersection of religion and politics.
He has tracked the influence of religious leaders to a range of critical moments in US history, from the civil rights movement – with figures like Reverend Martin Luther King Jr – to the push for women’s rights.
Even conservative groups like the Moral Majority once participated in efforts like the environmental movement, championing a Christian responsibility to engage in the stewardship of nature.
“Every movement that we associate with the left or progressive movement in American history has been full of Christians, as well as people of other faiths and the non-religious,” Graves-Fitzsimmons explained.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St Louis, traces the roots of the religious left even further back in US history, to the 19th-century fight over slavery.
“The abolitionist movement was largely a religious movement involving a lot of liberal and progressive Christians in the North,” Burge said.
Fast forward to the turn of the 20th century, and Burge said the country witnessed its “Social Gospel movement”, a period in the early 1900s when theologians and pastors sought to apply Christian principles to issues like poverty and social justice.
“The best-selling book in America was A Theology for the Social Gospel for three years in a row around the turn of the century, which is a very liberal Christian book,” Burge added.
But while the religious right tends to be a more homogeneous group, Burge explained that the religious left is more diverse, with faiths outside of Christianity better represented.
“On the religious right, it’s almost all Protestants and Catholics,” he said.
The religious left, meanwhile, has stronger representation among other faith groups. “You also have Muslims, who are a strong Democratic constituency, as well as Jews,” Burge said, noting that African-American Christians also lean overwhelmingly left.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: aljazeera.com
