A Spiritual Covenant with America
           
(The Central Vision of the Network of Spiriutal Progressives to be presented to Congress and Media May 17-20 in Washington, D.C.—a summary of the fuller articulation in The Left Hand of God by Rabbi Michel Lerner)

Many liberals and progressives who affiliate with the Democrats are disillusioned with the lack of vision projected by their party, but continue to believe that they will make huge strides without a vision in the 2006 and 2008 elections because of the growing backlash against the foolishness of Republican policies.  They may be right, but unless those Democrats feel that they have a mandate for a new direction, they are likely to repeat the same errors Democrats made when they controlled the presidency and Congress in the early years of the Clinton Administration, promoting policies that appeared to many disillusioned Americans to be less of the dramatic change promised in the Clinton presidential campaign of 1992 than a continuation of the self-interest politics of the Reagan/Bush years and thus undermining the momentary flurry of hope that Clinton’s election generated.

At moments when Democrats are perceived as acting from the same “self-interest” perspective that motivates Republicans, many people who hunger for idealism and allowed their more hopeful side to “come out of the closet” quickly retreated into a deeper cynicism, They opt for more conservative politics and a narrower conception of their own self-interest that involves rejecting policies that might involve higher taxes. Democrats can only expect to have a mandate for fundamental change if they are willing to buck the “political realists” and articulate a policy vision that excites and inspires people to transcend their fears and connect to their most expansive hopes for the world that they really believe in. Democrats in power who continue the rhetoric of fear of the supposedly ever-present terrorist danger or who continue to believe that “we” need to see the economic advances of other countries as a threat to America, or that education must be based on fears that we will lose our competitive edge with China or other countries, are likely to reiinforce the very worldview that will lead to a return to power of the Republicans in iever more extreme forms—because when people feel that the times require fear and power over others, they get attracted to the political parties most experienced in projecting those kinds of dynamics (which is one reason we may see fear and domination of others placed in the national orbit again in the next few months before the next election). 

        The way to start to build a new kind of understanding in America is by challenging the “old bottom line” that teaches people that their life’s activities will be judged by how much they can advance their own material well-being power and prestige. Surrounded by an ethos of selfishness generated by the old bottom line, people increasingly treat each other as vehicles to satisfy their one’s one personal needs. Instead of seeing other people as embodiments of the sacred, they are viewed instrumentally as “useful” or as “human resources” for the sake of advancing societal goals. Living in a society where people regularly absorb and hen act upon this “marketplace rationality” in which “looking out for number one” seems the only rational way to live, many people feel lonely, alienated and scared even in the midst of friendships and marriages—because they see themselves surrounded by so many people who only seem to care about them to the extent that they can “deliver something” or care about their needs.

        What we need, then, is a New Bottom Line, one which judges institutions, corporations, legislation, social practices, health care, our educational and legal systems, and our social policies by how much love and compassion, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity they inculcate within is, and by how much they nurture our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred, who can and to respond to the universe with gratitude, awe and wonder at the grandeur of all that is.

        It is that New Bottom Line that has led us in the Network of Spiritual Progressives to urge people to join us in Washington D.C. May 17-20 to present a Spiritual Covenant with America that will both provide an alternative Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and economistic visions of American society that have been developed by liberal and progressive think-tanks who are trying to help the Democrats out of their dogmatic slumbers. Imagine how different politics would look if progressives were to present themselves as fighting for a New Bottom Line and for this particular way of translating that into political terms. That is what this Spiritual Covenant with Americans is all about. We invite you to join us in taking the idea of the New Bottom Line and the ways it plays out in the Spiritual Covenant with Americans and making these ideas the center of a new progressive spiritual politics (more info at http://www.spiritualprogressives.org)

        Here is the Spiritual Covenant with America

1. We will create a society that promotes rather than undermines loving and caring relationships and families.  We will challenge the materialism and selfishness (often rooted in the dynamics of the competitive marketplace) that undermine loving relationships and family life. Every institution or social practice that encourages us to see others as instruments for our own advancement rather than as embodiments of the sacred must be reconceputalized and rebuilt so that it instead maximizes our capacities to be loving and generous and caring. We will challenge cynical attempts to reduce life to self-interest. And we will oppose the cheapening of sexuality that regularly occurs as marketers use sex to sell their products and seek to do so with teens and now pre-teens. Sure, we need full employment, child care, flex time, a coordinated assault on poverty,  and many other economic changes, so we support all these elements of the traditional liberal agenda—but our spiritual focus goes beyond the normal liberal list of demands to insist on a fundamental change in the values that our society promotes: our society must be safe for love rather than fostering the qualities in people that make love more difficult to sustain: cynicism, harshness, individualism, self-centeredness,  despair about ultimate meaning, insensitivity to the possibility of transformation, and fear.
      CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Family support always posed in terms that emphasize economic entitlements, but since everyone knows that family breakdown is not confined to those lacking economic supports, the liberal appeal is seen as just using the family issue for its pre-existing agenda rather than actually addressing the fear in people’s lives about the breakdown of loving commitments and the resultant feelings of loneliness. We agree with the supports, but see them as necessary but not sufficient.
      CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Family support for them conservative ideology often means restricting the rights of gays and lesbians to marry (as though that had anything to do with why families break up), teaching women to be subordinate to men in family life (a strategy that requires women to give up their own natural intelligence and wisdom to “go along” with men, rather than to build partnership relationships based on mutual respect which have a much stronger foundation and greater prospect of lasting), opposing abortion (but giving little support to the child one it is born) and providing religious communities in which families are embedded are central (a positive aspect of the conservative agenda which has to be emulated by creating progressive “communities of meaning” but without a right-wing ideology governing them.

2. We will take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for ethical behavior, reviving the sacred element in sexuality, shaping a purpose-driven life connected to our highest values, building an inner spiritual life, devoting time and energy to caring for each other as well as in self-development, affirming pleasure and humor and joyfulness and celebration of the grandeur of the universe and the mystery of being, and recognizing that government cannot replace our own efforts to build a spiritually grounded life. We will be compassionate toward each other, recognizing that each of us is unlikely to be the fullest embodiment of our own highest ideals.
  CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberal politics rarely articulate any sense of personal responsibility, because they claim that these issues are “personal” and have no role in the public sphere. We agree with them in opposing legislation on these issues, but not in believing that they have no appropriate public place. A movement can foster an “ethos” as well as legislation, and that is exactly what we did do when we fostered the ethos of respect for women, gays and lesbians, and minority groups. Taking personal responsibility is not just a personal issue. It is an issue of creating a form of community-creation that encourages, supports and rewards people for so doing, and that is absent from the liberal discourse. of the liberal world.
  CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives talk about taking personal responsibility as their alternative to badly needed social programs whose funding they continually seek to slash (health, welfare, education, support for the poor and the homeless). They claim to be concerned about poverty, but then say that individuals should take responsibility for eliminating poverty (for example, urging people to take jobs that don’t actually exist particularly given inadequate child care) or homelessness (but then they don’t actually take homeless people into their homes each night to provide the ‘personal responsibility’ alternative to abandoning the homeless to hunger and the streets of our cities).. So when we talk about taking personal responsibility, we do so not to replace government and societal programs, but to address areas in our own personal lives where we could have a huge impact.

3.  We will build Social Responsibility into the normal operations of our Economic and Political Life. The Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the U.S. Constitution that we propose requires corporations to get a new corporate charter once every ten years which would only be granted to those corporations which could prove to a jury of ordinary citizens that it had a satisfactory history of social responsibility. This is one step toward our larger goal of transforming the bottom line in our economy, government, and social institutions.
While seeking support and endorsement of the SRA, we will encourage public officials to establish a Social Responsibility clause onto every contract-awarding process, so that corporations competing for public funds must present a detailed social responsibility report and private citizens and local community groups and unions can challenge the accuracy of that report to the governmental body deciding on awarding of city, state and federal contracts of over $100,000.

To make this happen, we will also seek public funding of all state and national elections and instant runoff procedures for counting votes.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—They Liberals continually seek to legislate minor restrictions on corporate avarice and social irresponsibility, and usually fail to get those passed such laws adopted because of the tremendous power of corporations to influence provide financing for the legislators who must pass these bills. Meanwhile, corporations throw all their weight into opposing each little reform measure. We seek one big reform which that would end the need for countless smaller reforms. While the SRA may take several decades to pass, the struggle for it will concentrate attention on the systemic nature of the problem we face.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives typically oppose any attempts to put constraints on corporate social irresponsibility because they believe that the best good for all will be achieved if each corporation pursues its own self-interest unrestrained and then the profits it amasses will “trickle down” to the rest of the population.

4.  We will reshape our education system to teach the values of love, caring, generosity, intellectual curiosity, tolerance, gratitude, awe amd wonder at the universe,  democratic participation and environmental responsibility. We will emphasize education for these values without abandoning necessary reading and writing skills—and focus on learning respect, thanksgiving and awe for the wonders of the universe, and celebration of all the goodness that has passed on the cultural and scientific wisdom of the human race.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberals focus on getting better pay for teachers and more money for building schools with lower teacher-student ratios. But they’d be far more effective in getting support for these important demands if they gave more attention to demands about the moral and spiritual content of what is being taught.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives correctly criticize the values that are actually being taught in our schools (materialism, competitiveness) but then fail to note that these values reflect the values of the marketplace that conservatives champion. And they propose false solutions whose underlying intent is to dismantle the public school system or at least wildly under-fund it and thereby “prove” that everything “public” must be a failure and that the only good thing is the private sector.

5. We will seek a single payer national health care plan and also broaden the public’s understanding of health care. Our physical health cannot be divorced from environmental, social, spiritual, and psychological realities—and the entire medical system has to be reshaped in light of that understanding, focus on prevention, encourage alternative forms of health practice along with traditional Western forms, and insist that because human beings have many levels of reality, health care must reflect that rather than seek to reduce the human to the merely material.

CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberals seek the gradual addition of benefits for different sectors of the population but leave the whole system in the hands of the profiteers, thus guaranteeing that their proposed changes will be undermined by the insurance companies and drug companies who raise their costs to make huge profits and thus make these health care reforms unreasonably costly. The single payer plan does not increase but decreases the total amount spent on health care by the U.S.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives continually place private profit over public need when it comes to health care. They think of health care as something that needs to be earned rather than as a sacred obligation we have to care for each other.

6.  We will be stewards of the environment. We will champion voluntary simplicity and ethical consumption while seeking to change the global economy so that it is ordered in rational and sustainable ways. We will bring spiritual wisdom into daily life to change our addiction to endless consumption and challenge the media and advertising-driven belief that how many and how costly the things we own are the measure of our worth in the world.
CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberals fight for partial reforms which rarely take into account the systemic and global nature of the problem and rarely notes that for every reform they win, there are ten new areas in which environmental damage is intensifying. They have no global plan or willingness to imagine how to recast the global economy to make our planet environmentally sustainable. And they liberals avoid any serious discussion of, much less fostering, an ethos of voluntary simplicity.

CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVES- Conservatives cheerlead for policies that actually reduce the amount of land protected from corporate abuse. They put the interests of corporate profit above their responsibility to be stewards of the planet, and often deny the urgency of global warming and other environmental disasters.

7.  Foreign policy and homeland security transformation: We will build a safer world and a rational approach to immigration through a strategy of non-violence and generosity that eliminates poverty both in the US and in every other country.  The well-being of Americans depends on the well being of every other person on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself. We will support a Global Marshall Plan to use 5% of the GDP of the advanced industrial countries societies—each year for the next twenty years) to end global poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and inadequate health care. This will do more for homeland security and military safety than sinking trillions of dollars into wars and strategies of world domination that can never work and are immoral. Ending poverty both at home and abroad is both an ethical and security priority.

And We will challenge the globalization of selfishness promoted by Western corporations (and their clones in China, India and Japan) and promote spiritual values of solidarity, caring for others, and love as the most effective way to build a sustainable society and to achieve “homeland security.” Our path to a world of peace must be a path of peace, social justice, sensitivity to cultural differences and to environmental needs,  and non-violence. We will maintain an army on our borders and carefully search every container that comes into the country, and redirect the trillions of dollars that will otherwise be spent on military to ending global poverty and creating adequate education and health care. So while we support the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the creation of an international Non-Violent Peacekeeping Force to prevent conflicts from escalating, we do so in the context of a coherent global policy that immediately implements the Global Marshall Plan (not by dumping money into the hands of corrupt governments, but through cooperation with non-governmental organizations committed to human rights, democracy, environmental sustainability, and enhancement and respect for native cultures and traditions).

We seek full rights for all immigrants who have made it to our shores. And we will solve the immigration issue in the only possible way—by making the countries from which immigrants are fleeing much more economically successful. Instead of imagining new methods of repressing of the desire that so many immigrants have to live a life freed of extremes of from poverty and political oppression, we will support the Global Marshall Plan in ways that would build the economic infrastructure of the “underdeveloped” world, ensuring that its benefits flow to all people and not just to the economic elites of those countries. We seek a world in which open borders are the norm and there is no fear that the rich countries are being overrun by immigrants because their wellbeing has improved so much in their own countries.

          CONTRAST: LIBERAL AGENDA—Still stuck in the militarist assumptions of the past, liberal politicians compete with the conservatives about “who is most effective” in projecting American power and domination around the world. They are more concerned to prove that they are “tough” than to prove that they actually have policies that could conceivably address the issues that drive people into wars and terrorism. Similarly, their correct desire to avoid repression of immigrants does not link to a coherent answer to “what can be done to prevent future millions from risking their lives to get across our borders if we create incentives for them to take such risks?”

                  CONTRAST: CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Though quick to demand testing of the effectiveness of liberal programs,  conservatives have never proved the effectiveness of their strategy of providing security through wars and the domination of other countries. Distorted by their own “arrogance of power,” they can neither acknowledge that 5,000 years of war-making has not worked to bring peace and security but only, century after century, increased the numbers of people killed in wars. Nor can conservatives see that their wars have actually undermined the internal life of America and increased our propensity to rely on violence as a solution to otherwise frustrating problems. They call for more repression of countries that do not follow our rules, and the repression of immigrants, but seem unable to acknowledge that such programs do not work

8.  We will seek the separation of Church, State and Science. We will protect our society from fundamentalist attempts to impose a particular religion on everyone, but will not fall into a first-amendment fundamentalism which attempts to keep all spiritual values out of the public sphere. We will protect science from invasion by the state, religion or corporate priorities, but reject “scientism”—the worldview that claims that everything capable of being known or worthy of our attention can be fully described in scientific terms.

CONTRAST: THE LIBERAL AGENDA—Liberals mistakenly confuse the separation of Church and State with the separation of spiritual values from the state. They claim to be defending the neutrality of public space, but fail to realize that there is already a religion operating in the public space, the religion of the dollar, of materialism and selfishness, the religion whose highest belief is that all that is real or at least all that can be known is that which can be verified through sense datum or measured by the principle of exchange (which, for the public realm, usually means: money, the one thing most easily validated and measurable). Thus, liberal defense of the first amendment is based on the false assumption that we actually have a neutral public space and that it must be protected from all values.

CONTRAST: THE CONSERVATIVE AGENDA—Conservatives often seek to privilege Christian values in the public sphere and get lots of support from many Americans who know that when their children come home from school drunk with the disease of “making it” in the larger society (either through good grades to get the best career, or by physical prowess and active domination over others) and “making it in their peer group” (either by conforming to the peer group standards of the group or, increasingly for young girls, by responding to the sexual pressure championed by a growing sector of the media even for pre-teens,) these children are responding to a public sphere drenched in corrupt values which loving parents want to resist. Using this perfectly legitimate desire for alternative sets of values, the conservatives offer rush in with a repressive agenda that will do little to solve the social problems, and in addition will or seek to eliminate or dramatically weaken the actual functioning of the separation clause of the Bill of Rights.

Neither liberals nor conservatives understand how much “science” is driven in its choice of research topics by the requisites of the marketplace, so neither has seriously addressed how to protect science from the pressures of both the economic marketplace. And those same pressures exist, though in somewhat different form, in many religious communities which have become dependent on the support of the wealthy or those who have bought into the assumptions of the marketplace to keep their open. Too often this has resulted in a clergy more subordinate to the fund-raisers than to their own highest moral and spiritual values.

We seek to change all this.

This vision, needless to say, is “unrealistic” in the sense that it does not conform to the assumptions of politicians, and pundits in the mainstream mass media. For most Democratic Party leaders, that ends the discussion, because they’ve consistently been unwilling to risk any electoral loss for the sake of some higher good in which they believe. But that is precisely why so many Americans have come to distrust the Democrats—because if they won’t fight hard for their own beliefs, how can they be counted on to fight for the best interests of American society when the going gets rough?

Liberals and progressives (including the leaders of the Democratic Party) need to learn that in order to win with their ideals, they have to be ready at times to lose with their ideals. Or to put it another way, anyone with a backbone worthy of respect doesn’t reject ideas because they are unrealistic by contemporary standards, but only because they are inherently bad ideas.

      So, like the women’s movement in its early years, or the civil right movement, or even the movement against the war in Iraq, we don’t expect Congress to embrace a new philosophy. But for those who are tired of the visionlessness of the Left, our attempt to develop a progressive spiritual politics may spur them to develop their own visions. This is when interesting conversations will reignite American politics.

      We are a consciousness-raising movement, and so our primary task like the other major movements that have had a lasting impact on American society is to not compromise what we believe in for the sake of short-term political gain. We must instead advocate for our fullest vision and insist on why it makes more sense.
   

So when we encourage people to meet with elected officials every year, it is only a small part of what we need to do to get our ideas into the public consciousness, and we are sure that you can devise many more imaginative steps to take.

We encourage people in our movement to take the following steps:

1.  To get the Spiritual Covenant endorsed by local and national professional organizations, unions, civic organizations, churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, college and universities, individual legislators and by local City Councils and State Legislatures.  2. To create a Spiritual Caucus in every political party (including but not exclusively Democrats, Republicans, Greens) and seek to convince those parties to adopt the Spiritual Covenant not as another plank but as the shaping plank of their approach to the world.  3. To write op-eds and other means to communicate this vision and popularize it in their communities, workplaces, religious and cultural institutions, and professional organizations.  4. To organize public demonstrations, marches, plays, concerts, playful activities, confrontational activities, and any other legal means to get these ideas discussed.

The full version of the Spiritual Covenant and what it implies can be studied in The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, chapters 9-12.  Please get and read The Left Hand of God and create a study group on it.

    The Network of Spiritual Progressives is holding its national conference May 17-20 in Washington, D.C. at which it will seek to present these ideas to the public, the media and the government.  It is not too late to register: http://www.spiritualprogressives.org  or 510 644 1200 (during working hours, Pacific Standard Time).

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, author of ten books including most recently the national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, California. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). To help get this message in your local or national media, you may wish to approach them and ask them to cover the Spiritual Activism Conference in D.C. or to interview Rabbi Lerner (which can be arranged by calling one of his assistants at 510-528 6250 during work hours, Pacific Standard Time). You can write to the Network of Spiritual Progressives: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or The Network of Spiritual Progessives, 2342 Shattuck Ave, Suite 1200, Berkeley, California 94704.  http://www.spiritualprogressives.org