Building a New Holy Alliance

As our resident intellectual supreme Frank Cocozelli has written the deplorable state in which this nation now finds itself, is a direct result of the creation some 4 decades ago of An Unholy Alliance between several leading neo-cons and theo-cons. This allowed the far right to capture meaningful control of Christianity in this nation by people with less than democratic ideals, to subvert the democratic process by people motivated simply by greed. I'll let Frank, or anyone else so informed, expand on this bit of history.

My desire here is for this community of progressive Christians to be the vanguard of a new movement, creation of a truly holy alliance, one devoted to funding a progressive Christian social gospel agenda. Recently 3 members of the Board of The Institute for Progessive Chrsitianity, CrossLeft's sister organization, sent letters of introduction to members of the Democracy Alliance, the progressive political organization funded by such notables as George Soros.

Our challenge is to attract the attention of heavy weights in the liberal/progressive community with the intent to develop funding for our agenda. Underlying this challenge is the general reluctance to speak publically about their religious views, by not only them but Democratic Party candidates in general. Sen. Obama's recent problems with remarks about his pastor have not helped.

So my question to this whole community is: How do we position/frame our social gospel agenda in such a way that progressive funding sources will be attracted to and fund potential campaigns on issues of importance to us? We would like to mount e-mail campaigns like Move.on does, but from a sound progressive bibical position. We need funding and the technical expertise to create a technical platform that allows us to mount such campaigns. At present this CL platform does not have the capacity to do so.

If we can mount such campaigns here, we will set a precedent that perhaps will make Democratic Party and progressive Republican candidates comfortable talking about how they apply their religious beliefs in service of this nations poor, and how they would change both domestic and foreign policies to serve the needs of all mankind, not just an unenlightened greedy few.

Systemic to this challenge may be that while some wealthy folk may be progressive politically, they may be, as Nancy Detweiler has pointed out, theologically conservative. This may then may make them perhaps either uncomfortable with and thus unwilling to fund a CL/IPC agenda.

So my friends how do we present our agenda in a light that attracts and obtains funding for our social gospel agenda?

Rich