[lbo-talk] Not in Search of the "Salt of the Earth" (Re: TimetoGet Religion)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 12/2/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Yoshie writes:
>
> > Maybe your being a Canadian is getting in the way of fully
> > appreciating the American conditions, but to speak of the "relations
> > between the secular and religious left" or to say that "[p]rogressive
> > clergy and church people have always been an important part of the
> > left" obscures the American problem: in the USA, there is NO mass
> > institution on the Left that is largely made up of secular leftists.
> > NONE.
> >
> > One, we do not have a mass social democratic party; two, most
> > Democratic voters are religious; most trade unionists are also
> > religious.  A tiny minority of secular leftists belong to this or that
> > miniature socialist sect, and most secular leftists are loose canons
> > who do not have any enduring mass institution they can call their
> > secular leftist base.
> >
> > In short, the only organized mass institutions on the broadly defined
> > Left are (1) explicitly religious institutions and (2) secular
> > institutions that are largely composed of religious individuals in the
> > USA.  That's the American point of departure, a unique point of
> > departure among the industrial nations.
> ================================
> The antiwar and civil rights movements of the 60s didn't include both
> secular and religious leftists? The Central American solidarity committees
> of the 80s? That's news to me. Of course, most Americans describe themselves
> as believers to some degree or another, more so than Europeans or Canadians,
> but it's misleading to describe the mass of liberal Democratic voters and
> trade unionists as "religious" in the same sense as you would Southern
> Republicans, who define themselves largely in terms of their religion and is
> an important contributor to their social conservatism.

Secular leftists don't understand religious rightists, but secular
leftists don't understand religious leftists either.  Just because
religious leftists are on the Left politically doesn't mean that they
are less religious than religious rightists.  Religious leftists like
my partner (who also happens to be a member of a trade union also)
take their religion, which is a contributor to their leftist belief
and practice, seriously, and they do politics through their religious
institutions as well.


> If you're using the term that loosely, then I know of no single Canadian
> institution either which isn't "largely composed of religious individuals",
> including the NDP. I lived in both Canada and the northern US and my
> impression is that the political culture is more alike than different.

Canadians are much less religious than Americans: "Only 29 per cent of
Canadians say religion is a very important part of their lives, in
contrast to 59 per cent of Americans who give it high personal
importance" (Michael Valpy, "Canadians Giving Up on Religion, Poll
Finds," Globe and Mail, 10 September 2004,
<http://www.wwrn.org/article.php?idd=3925&sec=74&con=5>
<http://www.culturescanada.ca/media/news.php?detail=n1095093677.news>).
-- 
Yoshie
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