In the Huffington Post, Rev. Donald Heckman recently said that the interfaith movement has a "brand" problem.  In the face of the terrorism, hatred and violence of our time, I would say that those of us committed to moving beyond triumphal religion have more than a brand problem.  We have to raise the ante by moving our interfaith dialogue to interfaith action on a far greater scale than the individual efforts of local faith-based community organizing or even the national coordinators of such local efforts.

It is not enough to welcome an opportunity to be invited into a conversation at the White House.  SCLC would need the Federal government in forging successes for its movement, but the power of the Civil Rights movement was its rootedness in religious vision AND its capacity to harness that vision to serious political action.  I offer the following analysis for consideration by fellow religious pluralists, in the face of the contemporary human crisis, to forge the change we need.

Harnessing the Power of Religious Pluralism

Religious pluralism has come of age.  It is time now for the liberating power of transcending lines of tradition and denomination to be reflected in the creation of a powerful movement to restore democracy and compassion in America.

Increasing numbers of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Secular Humanists (and everyone else devoted to historic spiritual and ethical traditions) recognize that both intra-faith denominational divides as well as divisions amongst faith traditions not only limit our capacity to create an organized force of people to contest the power of organized money in the shaping of our lives.  They also effectively reflect the sin of pride.

The Pluralism Project at Harvard University defines pluralism as “not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity.”   Pluralism is founded on mutual respect.  According to the folks at Harvard, pluralism “means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.”  Pluralism requires us not only to talk but also to listen to each other.

Here in the United States, religious pluralism is finding expression in a growing number of organizations led by Jews, Christians, Muslims and others who are dedicated to seeking economic and social justice out of the vision of our historic faith traditions. All over the country there are faith-based, grassroots coalitions of congregations.  Here in Vermont, Vermont Interfaith Action empowers and engages members of its congregations to fulfill the ancient visions of prophets and sages. Vermont Interfaith Action itself is a member of PICO, one of four national federations of faith-based community organizations like Vermont Interfaith Action. 

These organizations bring to bear the power of organized people of faith against the power of organized money.  All together, about three and half million members of religious congregations are involved in organizing around justice issues of local concern.  Rabbis, priests, ministers and imans participate in the process.  Independent of electoral politics though hopefully influencing it, it is democracy in action.

Outgoing Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes eloquently about rabbinic efforts to establish ties between traditions.   In his words, the sages of Israel showed Jews how “to be true to one’s faith while being a blessing to others.”  Now this is an idea whose time has come:  “to be true one’s faith while being a blessing to others.”

Religious pluralism is not a compromise of any kind, but a shared commitment to a universal vision of compassion, justice and peace, rooted in the particular religious traditions of its participants.  Religious pluralism replaces the ancient zero sum game of one religion claiming to be truer than another.  Instead of the rivalry inherent in religious triumphalism, religious pluralism creates human solidarity. 

*

It is our loss of a sense of human solidarity that endangers democracy in America today.  Unprecedented concentration of wealth now largely controls a political process that is forgetting the need for our elected leaders (or appointed as in the case of the military) to listen to the people.  We clergy and laity of a post-religiously triumphal era, can take the lead.

We need to be doing our preaching out in the public square.    We need to point out that we Americans are losing our rights of citizenship.  Our privacy is gone.  We trade in our privacy for the joys of electronic toys. Our most sacred right to vote is being challenged.  When one remembers all of the sacrifices of the Civil Rights Movement, one is shaken by the Supreme Court’s not upholding a big piece of the Voting Rights Act.

American democracy, to which peoples around the world have looked for inspiration in their struggles for freedom for centuries, is being dismantled.  The United States of America is becoming an oligarchy, governed by small groups of people with a lot of influence.  The amount of money spent on lobbying could feed and house millions of Americans.

The extent of the basic need, and the fact that it is growing, does not register on the conscience of the powerful wealthy, be they rich or super rich.   Those of us for whom the growing plight of those with no or low income is a wound, see what is happening.  It is time for us to rally the lovers of freedom in America.

 It is time for clergy and laity, empowered by the liberating spirit of religious pluralism, to inspire an awakening of the passion to be free to which freedom songs bear witness.  A movement to restore democracy and compassion is a freedom movement.   When “kumbaya” is used as a sneer  it is time for us to be singing freedom songs again. This land does belong to you and me.

We passionately reject the status quo that accepts homelessness as a given; that forces people to choose between heating their homes and having enough to eat to stay healthy.  We reject an economy in which, in 2010, the top one percent held 35.4% of the wealth, while the bottom 99 percent hold 64.6%.  The same imbalance can be seen in the distribution of income.  In 2009, the top 1% of income earners received 17.2% of all income; next 19%, 41.9%, and the bottom 80%, 40.9%. (G. William Domhoff, “Wealth, Income, and Power”)

As people of faith, we reject the idea that human beings have to live this way.  We are inspired by prophetic tradition to work towards equity in all areas of our lives. Since the end of World War II, the progressiveness of the federal income tax has been significantly reduced.  Surely this has something to do with why we now are cutting to shreds the safety net upon which millions of Americans have depended for food and shelter.

We value fairness, a spirit of common endeavor, and a sense of solidarity. We respect otherness.  When two people relate to each other, we respect kindness and compassion as the basis of the relationship.  “Meeting is healing,” Martin Buber said classically.  We understand the ultimate purpose of our faith and ethical traditions as ways towards healing:  personal healing, communal healing, healing of the Earth.

Even as we cherish the particularity of our own traditions, we pledge ourselves to deepen the bonds amongst us by identifying primarily as human beings, beyond the boundaries of our faith traditions.  We are dedicated to working together to lift up the vision of justice and peace that is the essence of our particular traditions.

We know that the core of our particular traditions is an unconditional love that easily trumps the selfishness, the greed, of our times.   We commit to opening our hearts in a fundamental way.  No longer will we abide homelessness as a fact of American life.  No longer will we accept a culture of dependency for food and shelter.  We demand a return to the morality of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society that secured democracy in America by recognizing the centrality of compassion to the continuity of our freedom.

We ask all Americans to reflect on the words of President Dwight David Eisenhower in his Farewell Address of 1961:

“The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.  The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city every state house, every office of the Federal government. . . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. “

Unfortunately, President Eisenhower’s warning was not heeded.  Now the Federal government is dismantling eighty years of carefully constructed programs to ensure social and economic justice in the United States.  Once again, Americans are experiencing a level of poverty amongst elders that the legislation of the New Deal was intended to prevent.

Significant numbers of older Americans—particularly Latinos, African-Americans and single women are living in poverty.  The percentage of Americans between the ages of 75 and 84 who are new to poverty recently doubled. (http://www.nextavenue.org/ artile/2012-06).  Efforts to address this poverty are limited by the contempt in our culture for “entitlements” which really are nothing more than social and economic supports created to insure that we do not abandon our elders in old age.

This poverty is directed related to the growth of the military-industrial complex against which President Eisenhower warned. According to the Washington Post this past January, “Since 2001, the base defense budget has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion—and that’s before accounting for the primary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”  The United States spends vastly more on its military than any other nation.

Of course we need a national defense, but much of our military hardware is not relevant to the threats we now face.  For example, the F-35 fighter-bomber was conceived in the 1980s towards the end of the Cold War.  The cost of this plane over the course of its use is estimated to be one and half trillion dollars, the most expensive weapon system in the history of humanity.  It is but one of billion dollar weapon systems that maintain extraordinary high level of military spending year after year.

Economists like Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier demonstrate the ways in which military spending is inefficient in creating jobs.  They write that “spending on the military is a poor source of job creation relative to spending on the green economy, health care, education, or even personal household consumption.”

Specifically, “$1 billion in spending on the military will generate about 11,200 jobs.  By contrast, the employment effects of spending in alternative areas will be 15,100 for household consumption, 16,800 for the green economy, 17,200 for health care, and 26,700 for education.  That is, investments in the green economy, health care and education will produce about 50-140 percent more jobs than if the same amount of money were spent by the Pentagon.” (Pollin and Garrett-Peltier, “The U.S. Emplyment Effects of Military and Domestic Sending Priorities: 2011 Update)

Living in faith communities, to which the poor come for assistance, we know the fallaciousness of the idea that voluntary organization like religious congregations can meet the vast need of many millions of Americans for whom there are no jobs, and many millions more who earn so little it I no exaggeration to calm then wage slaves.

The base line of human rights is the dignity of being afforded food, shelter, and health care without having to sacrifice the freedom of citizenship by becoming a client of the State.  The role of the federal government in affording such human rights is indispensable.  Without it, we will continue to drift away from democracy and freedom in America.

There are institutional reasons for the lack of compassion at the center of American life.  Members of Congress collect campaign contributions from corporations whose leaders receive millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses and whose stockholders reap large dividends.  There is a vicious cycle of vested interests.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. learned a half century ago, these interests are fiercely defended to the point of political assassination.

In 1967, when Dr. King first publicly opposed the Vietnam War, he called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Time magazine characterized his words as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”  After 9/11, two or three wars later, it continues to be difficult to speak out against the violence perpetrated in our name by the United States of America.   To criticize the bloated military budget of our country, at a time when basic human needs of our own citizens are not being meet, calls into question our respect for our neighbors and members of our own families who have sacrificed their limbs, their minds, their lives in the service of our country.

We want to be clear.  Pointing to the size of the military budget is not to dishonor the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have responded on our behalf to attacks on us here at home and elsewhere in the world.  For their service and their sacrifice, we are profoundly grateful.

Indeed, the great expense of military hardware comes at the expense of existing programs to serve veterans.  Programs to care for the epidemic of post-traumatic stress now are being eliminated or reduced—even as the number of suicides in the United States military doubled from 2005 to 2012.

As we reach out to clergy and laity around the country, we know that each locality has its own key issues which reflect the injustice of America today.  We clergy and laity in Burlington, Vermont have come together to insist on our democratic right to insist on public debate about the wisdom of basing the F-35 fighter bomber at the Burlington International Airport in the midst of the most dense neighborhoods in Vermont, throwing good money after bad in the continued development of the F-35 fighter-bomber.

We are astonished by the effort of our political and business leaders and leaders of the Vermont Air National Guard to insist on the F-35 being based at the Burlington International Airport, refusing to engage the many citizens who are opposed to this basing in any fair, free exchange of ideas.  We will be in touch with others around the country as events develop.

We call upon our colleagues, clergy and laity throughout America, to bring the liberating spirit of religious pluralism into the particular political debates in our country which are the ground of the struggle to restore democracy and compassion in American life.  Just as Committees of Correspondence in the different colonies supported each other in the effort that resulted in the American Revolution more than two centuries ago, we clergy and laity in Vermont pledge to establish and maintain communication with our colleagues across the country, as together we defend the freedom for which Americans have sacrificed their lives over the course of American history.