IMHO, that's a wrong way to go. The point of getting religion is, first and foremost, getting it right, not adopting, or adapting ourselves, to what we imagine the religious to believe.
A while ago, in a thread called "In God's Country" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20061106/021935.html>), Jim Straub wrote that SEIU, which is also trying to get religion, may be learning "wrong lessons" from the union's study of megachurches
On 11/7/06, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW someone mentioned how our union SEIU is studying the megachurch
> thing to learn about membership growth. This is true, although
> I fear we're going to learn the wrong lessons from these places.
> Megachurches, in their multi-tiered cadre structure,
> follow what's called a 'small groups' organizational model
> that derives from Alcoholics Annonymous and before that
> communist cadre cells. I think a lot of why the evangelicals grow like
> crazy and the left shrinks, shrinks, shrinks, is that they simply prioritze,
> fund, and engage in organizing more--- altho they call it prosletizing, or
> sharing their faith. The audit that found renewalist christianity to be so
> huge and fast growing cited as explanation the fact that renewalists share
> their faith with strangers up to three times as often per week than other
> religions do. I wonder how they would compare to the left in that regard.
In short, what we can learn from organized religion, above all, is not any ideological tricks or political gimmicks or aesthetic props but the ABC of organizing, which we secular leftists have forgotten, or (more likely) which we remember but, multiply fragmented as we are, do not have resources to put into practice.
In an article that Jim published in MR this year, there is a point on which I especially agreed with him: <blockquote>As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in an article on the religious welfare state earlier this year,
[At] McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Senator James Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers . . . dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the "Career Ministry"; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in DC and operates a "special needs" ministry for disabled children.
While McLean is an archetypal exurb megachurch, Ehrenreich notes that also
many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services -- childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: "First, you find a church." A trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church.1
What separates these evangelical social programs from those of liberal churches or even resources provided by the left is that they implicitly and explicitly harness loyalties to the Republican Party, which seeks to destroy the hard-won public sector that is supposed to provide such safety nets in the first place. . . .
The economic benefits of evangelical faith, however, are not the prime motivators for most peoples' church membership. . . . These churches all have complex mixtures of passion and patronage at their core -- where traditionalist protection of the symbolic cultural status of straightness, whiteness, and maleness mixes with both genuine religious conviction and genuine religious-based social programs" (James Straub, "What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt," Monthly Review 57.8, January 2006, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0106straub.htm>).
In short, fast-growing evangelical churches are like the conservative white version of the Black Panther Party, only much better funded and serving the white suburban working-class masses rather than the Panthers' constituency who were structurally unemployed Black urban working-class masses.
Passion and patronage are also what allowed Khomeinists to out-organize Iranian leftists, elected Hamas, and propelled Hizballah into the leadership position in Lebanon, except that their political program -- populist and anti-imperialist -- radically differs from white American evangelicals' on economic and foreign policies.
We (except perhaps organized labor, in which we do not have positions of power either) can't offer the same degree of politicized material social programs even if we try to emulate them in service to the masses. We can't help that.
But I'd have to say that we, lacking in a new powerful world view since the loss of the myth of inevitable dialectical progress, do not have as much passion for social change as white evangelicals here and Islamists abroad. We are not unlike George Herbert Walker Bush: we lack "the vision thing."
We can rectify _that_, can't we? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>