All participants in the discussion probably agree that the secular left is a very marginal force in society with very little possibility of effecting meaningful change in the short term.
Understanding why this is so is necessary. Which would include understanding religious affinity. Why do people who would not find time for a trade union meeting or antifa plenum go to service every sunday? The mobilizing power of the churches is impressive. If a congregation hears from their reverend that they should mobilize to stop a Nazi march or demand debt forgiveness for developing countries, they do. And they go on the streets to protest social cuts.
There are a lot of aspects of churches I don't like. But the weakness and marginality of the left can't have anything to do with the lack of an emancipatory affinity in the population at large, since churches are able to tap into it. Why can't the left?
[WS:] To explain this, a better understanding of cause-effect relationship would be helpful. In social participation, social affinity networks are the cause, while ideological affiliation is the effect of those networks and social participation they produce. In the past, unions and socialist organizations did not create social affinity networks, but rather tapped into the already existing ones. Those social affinity networks were created by living and working conditions - people living in the same villages and moving en masse to cities in search for jobs, dwelling in the same tenement houses, working in the same factories. Unions and socialist organizations simply tapped into those networks, built their organization on them, and turned them into their political strength.
If you fast forward 100 years - all those old social affinity networks are now gone, thanks to the advances in living standards, suburbanization, disappearances of large factories from Europe and the US, more individualized transportation system, social mobility, etc. In fact, we live very solitary nomadic lives, chasing corporate jobs, buying new houses, relocating to different states and with each move - leaving most of our "old" social affinity networks behind. This is especially true of the US, but EU is catching up.
In this alienated, solitary world, "organic" social affinity networks are a rather rare commodity. Religion is one of very few social institutions that actually create such networks, the other ones being educational institutions and the military. And since social affinity networks are in high demand, this explains the immense popularity and political strength of organized religion in the modern world.
What did the unions and socialists in was not the weakness of their ideology or even political strategies and the repeated ad nauseam "organizing," but the fact that the rug of social affinity networks on which they stood was pulled from under them by modernization.
One more thing - Joanna is 100% right about the Quakers and Unitarian Universalists. They can put many self-styled campus radicals to shame.
Wojtek