Another Washington Post article that tells us more about the Post than about its subject:

Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility
A Different List Of Moral Issues

By Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 20, 2006; A01

The religious left is back.

Long overshadowed by the Christian right, religious liberals across a wide swath of denominations are engaged today in their most intensive bout of political organizing and alliance-building since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, according to scholars, politicians and clergy members.

In large part, the revival of the religious left is a reaction against conservatives' success in the 2004 elections in equating moral values with opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

======================

This is a classic case of the Washington Post confusing its own blunders and lack of attention with reality.

Let's take a look at the "religious left" whose "revival" the Post is reporting. It never went away.

The religious left has been at the core of the most effective and largest antiwar movement the U.S. has ever seen. I challenge you to find a local antiwar group anywhere across the USA -- and there are thousands of them -- and not find a passel of Unitarian Universalists or Reform Jews or Quakers or AME members or United Methodists or Episcopalians or UCC members or liberal Catholics. But of course the Post has never had any interest in the antiwar movement, and especially not this one, which has embarrassed the Post by leading the country's solid turn against the Post's current favorite war.

The religious left is on Capitol Hill every day. Small but potent groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation as well as the offices of the mainstream denominations are up there talking about poverty, racism, justice in U.S. foreign policy, and many other issues all the time. The U.S. Catholic church, despite its increasing obsession with issues related to sexuality and reproduction, continues to make a strong case on economic justice, the death penalty, and other issues where it has long been a prophetic voice.

The religious left has supported grassroots community organizing that has made major strides in every city and many rural and suburban areas on environmental justice, housing needs, lending practices, and empowerment of low income people.

The religious left is doing creative media work -- check out Spongebob meeting with the United Church of Christ or the Maryknolls on global politics -- but the mass media only discusses Pat Robertson's turgid programming.

The religious left is thinking about how to reach all Americans, not just mobilize a small minority, which is what to led to the conference the Post is covering in this article. This conference is a movement that reaches out not only across religious lines but to "spiritual but not religious" people, probably the largest single religiously defined group in this country.

The religious left includes the often invisible African-American churches. These churches led a movement that actually changed this country in the 1950s and 1960s -- the movement that ended legal apartheid in this country. Those churches are not now taken seriously by the mainstream media, even though they are the only churches that actually have a proven ability to be a political force. (And of course there has only been one U.S. Protestant clergyperson who has gained the fervent respect of millions, developed an international reputation, won a Nobel prize, and has a national holiday celebrated in his name.)

Compared to all this, how for real is the religious right? Not very. The Washington Post and the rest of the corporate media has quite simply been successfully manipulated by a few leaders into seeing it as a real and powerful force. The reality is that the Christian Coalition, which was for years seen as such a major force, is almost out of business. Supposed political powerhouses like Robertson and Falwell are not even significant forces in their own local communities. Their power is derivative from the media and from the neo-Republican party.

If the religious right is so powerful, why can't they win on their issues? Even though the religious right has had supposed allies in the White House or running Congress for most of the last 26 years, it has been unable to accomplish its major goals.

A movement rooted in the poorest churches in this country, most of whose members couldn't even vote legally, went from a bus boycott in one small city in 1954 to the Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts in 14 years, even though it had few real sympathizers in positions of power.

What issues has the big bad religious right won?

Not GLBT issues. Sexual minorities, while still oppressed in this country, have more recognized rights than they did in 1980.

Not reproductive rights. Abortion is still legal at a national level.

Not increased power for Christian over other religious groups. Prayer and other religious observances are far less common in public buildings and government-sponsored activities than they were in the 1960s. Muslims are becoming a force in the political life of this country.

Let's face it. The religious right theocratic agenda has made relatively little progress in the last quarter century, despite their supposed power. A Beliefnet article quotes Cal Thomas, formerly spokesperson for the Moral Majority, another much-touted group that shrank to irrelevance, saying "All of the stated objectives of the religious right -- from ending abortion to cleaning up television to restoring family life -- have not been advanced one iota."

The reality is that the religious right is not a movement at all. It is a political gimmick. It is a means for the neo-Republican Party -- the modern version of the Republican party created by Richard Nixon and continued by the Reagan and Bush gangs -- to bring in voters they would not be able to attract to their corporate agenda -- essentially the George Wallace vote, for those who are historically minded. These voters have been used to elect politicians whose real agenda is increasing the wealth of a small group of already wealthy US residenets, and advancing an oil-based foreign policy.

I am not claiming that there aren't millions of people in the USA that, for example, oppose abortion on religious grounds. But there are also millions among us that believe the federal government is hiding the truth about UFOS, and millions of us who believe that the death penalty is immoral, and millions who believe that CEOs are overpaid and their pay should be limited by law. But the latter three groups don't have a political party celebrating and pandering to them, nor do they have the media taking them seriously as a force.

It's one thing for an ordinary person, who may or may not be particularly devout, and who does not have a lot of time or resources to do political analysis, to be fooled into voting for a neo-Republican who uses Christianity for his or her own ends. But it's another thing for the Post, believed to be one of the best newspapers in the U.S., to treat the religious right as a serious mass-based movement. Why do they do it? Here are some likely reasons:

1) The Post is a corporation, not a democratic collective of journalists. Those who own the Post, not the largely moderate to liberal rank and file reporters, set the overall tone of the paper. Those owners are committed to the pro-war and and pro-profit goals of the neo-Republicans, even if they are uncomfortable with some of its wackier actions and words. They could care less about the individual voter for the religious right, but they are very close to those who benefit from those voters.

2) The Post staff, like that of most larger newspapers, is largely composed of people who are secular by inclination, highly educated, suburban, and know little about people who attend church regularly, let alone those who belong to independent fundamentalist churches or are in more conservative denominations. (There is polling data on this here.) They know little about the Bible or theology. Post staffers have no problem believing that the average churchgoer is obsessed with homosexuality and abortion. They are willing to believe pretty much anything about those people -- they handle snakes, live in trailer parks, etc. etc. -- if it's what they are told by someone who seems to be an expert. So all the right had to do was claim to be the experts on Christianity. (Never mind that there are dozens of sociologists and clergy who actually are experts on who U.S. Christians are and what they believe.)

3) Like the corporate media in general, the Post is lazy, as an institution. (Obviously, there are individual reporters and editors who actually work hard.) It likes to tell the same story over and over, to not do its homework, and to have comfortable relationships with those in power. It would take groundbreaking actual work -- and get the Post into controversial gray areas -- to actually go out and examine what is going on in the various religious communities in the U.S. "Right growing, left invisible, mainstream gone" is just an easier story to tell.

4) If the story of the rise of the neo-Republicans is not the story of a mass movement of religious right voters, then other factors would have to be looked into. The Post would have to look seriously into the great shift of wealth in this country, which is the real motive for the neo-Republican push. It would have to look at the fact that the neo-Republicans are the heirs to a Confederate political agenda, and at the continuing centrality of race in U.S. politics. It would have to do some introspection into the corruption of the media. In fact, the story of the religious right essentially provides an alibi for the Post and other corporate media. "It wasn't our drumbeat of lies and evasions that created a mass base for the neo-Republicans, and it isn't that the neo-Republicans are advancing an agenda for their personal profit by pandering to racism (and sexism and homophobia). It's those wily and brilliant religious right leaders and the fanatical insistence of their wacky snake-handling followers" is the message of the corporate media. The reality is that if the media had simply stuck to the truth on a few issues -- for example, the radical disconnect between Al Qaeda and the Ba'ath Party, or the perversion of the U.S. tax system to the harm of most of us -- our recent history would be very different. And suppose the corporate media had made clear that voters of faith were, in most cases, not fanatical supporters of the religious right agenda, and had reported that the neo-Republicans like Dick Cheney were people who don't believe in fundamentalist Christianity and who intend to give grassroots believers little or nothing....

As for r eligious moderate/left congregations and religious activists, they are not only not "gone," they are at the heart of the antiwar movement, at the heart of serious efforts to alleviate poverty, at the heart of the pressure of global economic justice, and increasingly they are present in environmental struggles. They are in all those places because of their deep moral concern for human life, for honesty in public affairs, and for the common fate of all human beings. Unlike religious right leaders who have gotten funding, media visibility and political connections from their work, these people of faith get no secular rewards for their work.

In years to come, if people of faith in the U.S. are discussed, it is that work and those people who will be remembered. It is the many long unheralded hours of meeting the needs of the hungry, of people with AIDS, of those who need housing, that will be remembered -- most of it done, in my forty year experience with poverty work, by people on the religious left as the Post defines it.

Most of those people have historically had little interest in putting out a press release, in heralding their own work, in trying to get into the media. But now, as this conference shows, they are beginning to learn to do those things. They are being forced to, because of the shameful actions of the Post and other corporate media, which have allowed religion to be identified with war, racism, misogyny and homophobia. Now, with this conference, the Post notices the religious left. But they were present all along. The only difference is that now they are organizing -- not just against injustice, as they have all along, but against their own media-imposed invisibility. And that's a story the Post can't even begin to grasp without turning itself inside out.

You can see a previous rant along these lines here.