How Religious Progressives Should Challenge the Anti-State State

[SecularMotion]

Now that most of the shouting is over, I've been ruminating about Sarah Posner's observation that religious progressives failed--big time--to make a dent in the budget ceiling debate.

After about a dozen religious leaders were arrested for praying in the Capitol Rotunda to save funding for the poor and vulnerable, Posner wrote: "Nobody is watching. Nobody is listening. Why? While a minister being led away in handcuffs might make for good press, it's completely ineffectual as a political strategy" because, basically, cutting programs for the poor is old news in America.

Sad to say it, I think she's right.

What the debt ceiling debate brought out in many Americans was not compassionate identification with the perennial victims of structural inequality, but a sense of frustration and a deep undercurrent of fear about the future especially among parents of school-aged and young children. And powerful interests are taking advantage of the national undercurrent of insecurity to push an agenda that privatizes generations worth of public wealth and dismantles government. It is, as political theorist Ruth Gilmore has described it, the emergence of the "anti-state state."

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/joannabrooks/4963/how_religious_progressives_should_challenge_the_anti-state_state/

[Adsos Letter]

1. I am wary that many of the new social conservatives

especially among the Religious Right, want to see any social services handed over to Faith-Based operations. The outcome of that move, especially during a time of rapidly increasing need, could be devastating to Church/State separation.

[Misc85]

2. +1