Lookit me, Ma: I'm famous!

As more than 2,000 bloggers descended on Austin on Thursday for their third annual Netroots Nation convention, no small part of the myriad panels and discussions will be focused on religion:

The right to practice it in a hostile secular environment, and how liberal bloggers and can use the language of religion to draw God-fearing Americans to a political movement that has, for so long, been looked upon as Godless.

“Some people think that the progressive side of things doesn’t respect religion too much,” said Dan Schultz, known as “Pastor Dan” and host of “Street Prophets,” a diary on the popular national lefty blog DailyKos. “I think that’s really overstated. What I see as much more of a problem are the conservative types who say you can’t be a Christian if you don’t believe in these 15 different things, most of which come right off the GOP playbook.”

And so's Mrs Robinson and The Red Pen and Chuck Freeman, all of whom are quoted in the article.

You know, I tried to steer the reporter Karen Brooks away from that middle paragraph. I don't anyone who's looked in-depth at the place of religion in the public square in the past twenty years who's concluded that the right to practice it is under any serious threat.

As for drawing God-fearing Americans, well: they're already here. If the hippie freaks gathered at the Street Prophets caucus at Netroots Nation don't convince you, consider this: about 80% of Democrats are adherents of one religious tradition or another. That's lower than the self-described affiliations of Republicans, but it's still an overwhelming majority. So who's Godless?

But I've come to expect this lens for any article on the religious Left. It's nice to see somebody taking us seriously for a change, and nice to see some good quotes from friends.

Advantage: us.

I'd like to borrow John Cole's reaction to a Michael Gerson column in consideration of this piece from the New York Times Sunday magazine titled "Can Leah Daughtry Bring Faith To The Democrats? (This despite religious believers making up some 80% of the party.)

Cole says of Gerson's take on environmentalism:

Got it? Environmental activists are to blame for not working enough with the people who oppose them, denounce them, mock them, work openly to sabotage their efforts, and have created a cottage industry creating and spreading pseudo-scientific babble.

What twisted bastard at the Washington Post reviews these op-eds and thinks they are worth printing? What kind of jackass believes the real problem regarding the environment is the environmental movement, and not James Inhofe. This is like blaming doctors for not being willing enough to work with the tobacco industry to prevent cancer.

Now, this is far from an exact parallel. Evangelicals are not the enemy of the Democratic party. And while it's idiotic beyond belief that the Democratic party's faith outreach team has three Evangelical members, a Catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim but no mainline Protestants, everything I've heard about Leah Daughtry says that she is a thoughtful and effective political operative.

But for crying out loud, can the religious concern trolls please stop kicking the party in the nuts?

The aim, realistically, has been not to win endorsements but to alter thinking, both immediately and over the long term. During the 2004 campaign, by contrast, Terry McAuliffe, was introduced to Warren, whose congregation numbers more than 20,000 and whose books have sold millions. According to “The Party Faithful,” a book by Amy Sullivan, a Time magazine editor, McAuliffe put out his hand and said, with a blank gaze: “Nice to meet you, Rick. And what do you do?”

The fact of the matter is that the Republican party has invested millions, if not billions, or dollars and decades of effort in order to separate conservative Evangelicals from the Democratic party. They have made vilification and downright demonization of Democrats their stock in trade, routinely making the case that they hate faith, people of faith, God, and God's puppy. Yet for all we hear, it's Democrats fault because Terry McAuliffe blew a single conversation four years ago.

Maybe if we work harder all those conservative Evangelicals will fall into our laps!

Richard Land, who has long been the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the public-policy arm of the nation’s largest evangelical denomination, with 16 million members, credits the Democratic Party for reaching out respectfully to the born-again. “It’s certainly a better approach than that of the recent past,” he told me. But the idea that evangelicals, even young evangelicals, are going to subordinate their commitment to protecting life from the point of conception is, he argued, a notion born of Democratic blindness. “I don’t think the pro-choice community has ever really conceived of the anguish and moral outrage experienced by pro-life people over the issue,” he said, then referred to a poll showing that 18-to-29-year-old born-again Christians are more conservative on abortion than their elders. The young, he insisted, may be demanding “an expansion of the agenda” to include peace, poverty and the environment, but they do not want “an exchange of agendas” that would diminish the absolute priority of defending fetal life.

Or maybe they won't.

And please, pretty please with sugar on top, can we have an article on Democrats and religion that doesn't involve a retelling of Mara Vanderslice's life story? I've got nothing against her personally, but surely there is more to the story than the minor career deflation of a single 33-year-old woman.

We're off in a few minutes to swim at the local public pool where we're staying. We need it: it's in the 90's today, supposed to be near 100 over the weekend.

Texas sure is pretty, but I'm not moving any time soon.

Anyway, speaking of hot, take a look at Adult Christianity, a new blog looking at the, umm, spicy side of American religion.

That's going on the ol' feed reader.

Okay, I'm game for a little tennis. Chris Marlin-Warfield responds to my post responding to his post on the curiously low profile of the religious Left.

Chris is not as convinced as I am that the media hide our light under a bushel. After all, he points out, it's not as though people aren't exposed to non-crazy-right-wing religion in their local settings, and if you ask most religious people, they even hold mostly non-insane political beliefs. So why don't people realize that there is such a thing as religion not subservient to the GOP?

Two reasons come to mind. One is purely mechanical: with the retrenchment of the newspaper business, more and more local outlets depend on wire services for content. This leads to a curious situation where the subject of faith and politics is covered almost exclusively in the political part of the paper, with local coverage reserved for pancake breakfasts and community do-gooding. So the national media have a disproportionate influence in how the conversation goes. And as we know, the national media discourse is pretty much broken.

The other reason is more psychological, and stems in part (but only in part) from the dynamic outlined above. That churches, synagogues, temples, etc., participate in food pantries, ecological advocacy, restorative justice programs, and whatnot is indeed a not-conservative agenda when measured against the right wing obsession with abortion and homosexuality. But for the most part, it bounces off many people as being not particularly political, but just what churches do. So, give away food or collect donations for AIDS relief in Africa: that's religion. Issue bellicose statements in defense of a particular vision of family values: that's politics.

The only exception for this for centrist or liberal churches would be marching against the war, but nobody pays attention to anti-war protesters anyway.

Chris concludes with the thought that

What I want to suggest is not that we on the religious left somehow need to build our own media empires, though utilizing alternative media is good, nor that we should concentrate on delivering votes as Pastor Dan suggests in the first comment on his post. What I think we should do, and what I will begin discussing next week, is build the educational infrastructure necessary to successfully produce political theologies on the left in a democratic fashion and work to alter the sort of conversation that appears on the left when religion is discussed.

I actually am not convinced of the wisdom of becoming a partisan GOTV movement, either. That's Fred Clarkson's position, and he's welcome to it. But given the brass knuckles approach to politics espoused by the Religious Right, a hard-edged partisanship might be what it takes to raise a corresponding profile on the left.

Come to think of it, my most recent position is that we don't need to change the "conversation that appears on the left when religion is discussed" so much as we need to drag the religious conversation leftward. That is, I don't see progressive hostility to or misunderstanding of faith as nearly the problem that having a religious discourse with Jim Wallis as its left-most pole is.

That's by no means a slam at Wallis, only to say that he's really a centrist, even a bit right of center on some issues. So if we want to have a vibrant conversation around religion and progressive ideas, we need to engage actual, you know, progressives.

Perhaps that's what Chris means above, and I'm just misunderstanding him. In any case, I look forward to hearing more from him on the subject. Your serve!

Came into my sister's house near Ft. Hood this morning to be greeted with an article in the Dallas Morning News:

Moving their energy and political activism from the virtual world to the blood, sweat and tears of the real world is the goal of more than 2,000 progressive bloggers from across the nation who converge on Austin today for their annual convention.

The four-day Netroots Nation event, with its job fairs and campaign training and panels, is nothing short of a boot camp for bloggers on how to take their intensity and connections off their laptops — and use them to push their political agenda.

We're in Austin this year precisely because bloggers have learned how to push a political agenda: the Texas blogosphere is a jewel in the crown of the netroots movement. They have done and continue to do great things in the land of Shiner Bock and dead armadillos.

Turns out we're not the only game in town this weekend:

Running parallel to Netroots Nation, and bringing its own list of marquee speakers to town Friday and Saturday, is the Texas Defending the American Dream state summit.

This year, organizers added a focus on new media to the event, with speakers such as columnist Robert Novak, blogger and author Michelle Malkin and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr set to appear. Conservatives concede their movement has a long way to go to catch up with Netroots Nation. They expect only 300 to 350 attendees, which means Austin probably will be big enough for the two of them.

You can find more information about RightOnline at their site, including the agenda. I notice that there's not a mention of religion in it, compared to two panels and a worship service at Netroots Nation. Apparently, the conservative movement couldn't give a fig about religious voters any longer. I wonder if tmatt will write a pissy post asking whether God is at RightOnline?

You're going to have to put up with a fair amount of short form blogging from me in the next couple of days. I'm too scattered and too busy.

But already things are pretty cool here at Netroots Nation. Saw Paul Krugman getting a cup of coffee as we came in, and Al Gore - Al Freakin' Gore!! - singlehandedly delayed this morning's panels with a barn-burning keynote this morning.

And I heard about this program to pull together 1,000,000 volunteers in the next couple of years: Service Nation. You can go and type in your Zip Code, and they'll hook you up with events and opportunities to serve in your area.

Can't argue with that.

[editor's note, by PoliSigh] Crazy morning--see you later for Happy Hour


Please join our community in prayer.  Just leave your prayer requests and pray for the requests of the community. I welcome all people to join in as the power of prayer/good energy is undeniable.

If you have any favorite prayers or passages or quotes or meditations, please send them to me to share, meeshka1@msn dot com

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Thank you!

Good news, everyone: the Netroots Nation organizers have threatened promised to live stream large portions of the conference, and to store them for later reference. That apparently includes all the panels. So if you can't make it to Austin - or you're too busy drooling over Ezra Klein - you can still catch my panel on the religious Left. Just tune in at the appropriate time on ustream.tv, apparently.

Even cooler, Jesus' General has organized a Netroots Nation presence in Second Life, where still more of the conference will be live-streamed. That includes the Multi-Faith Worsip Service. Coolest of all, Brillig is up to her eyeballs in that effort.

So come, hang out, or just stay glued to your computer the whole weekend. Whatever.

See you "there".

Can it possibly be Friday again?  I just managed to screw up the settings on my Outlook mailbox linked to school, so now I can't access all my old mail....grrrr......We are having some rollicking storms, so I am going to keep this short--What are you up to?  Any plans for the weekend?  What are you eating and drinking? See you later!