Liberal

I've been a member of Crossleft for over a year now. In that span of time I've learned a lot about an alternative more progressive view of Christianity from reading the posts of the regular bloggers. During this past year, Crossleft has had insightful and sometimes heated discussions on the election season, the religious right, cultural issues, poverty issues, and the responsibility of christians to take on the social issues of this country. Every morning after preparing some oatmeal and feeding the cats, I turn on the computer and one of the first sites I start reading is Crossleft. My wife thinks I'm addicted.

One could say that my life has been a series of debates. This is not to say that I’m argumentative. I’ve just been lucky in my life to have had friends with whom I could talk about issues and debate politics and religion. Although I’m fairly liberal in my politics, I’ve had in my life a fair amount of conservative Republican friends with whom I used to be able to debate on points of disagreement and while still maintaining a sense of respect for each other. Somehow, though, those type of talks have become less frequent in the past couple of years. I’m not sure if people in the past few years have just become more polarized along certain positions and are no longer tolerant of differing opinions. It’s become rare to meet that kind of friend, that friendship of opposites, and I miss those type of conversations.

In an interview with the Comics Journal in 1988, Jules Feiffer, the political satirist, said:

"I've always seen liberals as people who've taken radical ideas, whether from socialists or communists, finding ways of redefining them, relabeling them, reforming them, compromising them, and then improving the society with them. And the liberal's job generally has been to process and homogenize the more radical notions out there for some time and make them acceptable to the mass society. And to that extent, liberals have played an important part. That liberals innovate anything is questionable. But that they innovate anything worth innovating is doubtful. The innovation comes from more radical sources generally."

This is something that I've been coming across a lot lately in books and documentaries about progressives history: the interdependence between the radical and more moderate wings of a progressive movement. In the women's suffragist movement, for instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton provided many of the arguments and radical ideas on women's equality that society later adopted, but Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone did the dirty work of building coalitions of more moderate and conservative people for the immediate goal of getting women the right to vote. In the book "Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone", author Robert C. Cottrell wrote of the New Deal:

This is something that I was just curious about. What are the things that influenced all of you to become Progressive? Was it books that you read, experiences that pushed you in a Progressive position, heroes that you admire? How far to the left do think you have to be to be considered Progressive? If you were influenced by the Bible to a Progressive position, what parts of the Bible played the most important role in you becoming Progressive?

I'm just wondering if this would be of interest because I'm realizing that everyone has some very individual views on being a Progressive. Donny gave his own personal definition, NYGaribaldi talked about the difference between liberalism and socialism, Bill talked about his influences from the Green Party and sources like ZMagazine. David talked about how instead of a large tent, Progressive Christians may be more like little tents that clump together and that seems appropriate to me.