His political strategy: the religious left

The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right, By Michael Lerner, HarperSan Francisco, 408 pp., $24.95

Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor-publisher of the liberal interfaith magazine Tikkun , is forming a national ``Network of Spiritual Progressives" in an effort ``to provide an alternate solution to both the intolerant and militarist politics of the Right and the current misguided, visionless, and often spiritually empty politics of the Left."

His new book, `` The Left Hand of God," is a rallying cry and a theoretical and scholarly analysis of the appeal of the religious right. It is also a kind of handbook for creating a movement ``that can be for the Democrats and Greens what the Religious Right has been for the Republicans," by providing ``intellectual, political, and spiritual inspiration for those in the party even while not being formally aligned when it comes to elections."

Lerner is stumping the country on his book tour much the way the progressive evangelical Jim Wallis did a year ago with his book ``God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It." As writers, speakers, and organizers, Lerner and Wallis have come to fill the void left by the leaders of the civil rights and the antiwar movements in the '60s and '70s.

What the secular left and the Democratic Party have failed to understand, Lerner argues, is that ``human beings are theotropic -- they turn toward the sacred -- and that dimension in us cannot be fully extinguished. People feel a near-desperate desire to reconnect to the sacred, to find some way to unite their lives with a higher meaning and purpose and in particular to that aspect of the sacred that is built upon the loving, kind, and generous energy in the universe that I describe as the `Left Hand of God.' "

Many secularists, Lerner says , believe voters who side with the right against their own economic interests are deluded or dumb or both, but what those critics miss is that ``many very decent Americans . . . get attracted to the Religious Right because it is the only voice . . . willing to challenge the despiritualization of daily life, to call for a life that is driven by higher purpose than money, and to provide actual experiences of supportive community for those whose daily life is suffused with alienation and spiritual loneliness."

The left, Lerner says, ``can't talk about love or kindness or generosity without feeling that it has violated its commitment to a scientistic form of rationalism."

His new book and his Network of Spiritual Progressives will not be the first time Lerner has tried to get his message across to the public and the political power structure. His earlier book ``The Politics of Meaning " caught the attention of the Clintons during their first year in the White House, and Lerner was invited there to speak with them on the subject. When word got out, however, that the Clintons were seeking the counsel of a rabbi about ``meaning" in politics, some members of the media hooted and hollered over what they regarded as a touchy-feely subject and labeled Lerner a ``guru" -- shades of Rasputin!

Before the next elections it would profit the Democrats to take seriously some of Lerner's perceptive and creative ideas . Lerner understands that the secular left needs to tone down its hostility to religion and spirituality if it hopes to win elections in a country in which the vast majority of voters consider themselves religious. Wallis tells the story of a young man in Boston who told him at a book signing it was easier to come out as gay in Massachusetts than to come out as religious in the Democratic Party. Lerner now has his own story of the way religion is perceived along party lines. When a volunteer in the last election said he couldn't attend a Sunday morning meeting because he had to go to church, his committee chairman was confused. ``I thought you were a Democrat," he said.

Lerner hopes to change that perception, and this book is a good starting point.

Dan Wakefield's new book is ``The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate."