Love and Fred Phelps

In his new book, The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back From The Religious Right, Michael Lerner argues that people take two different two approaches to both life and politics.

One approach is based on hope and love and seeks to heal the world. The other is based on fear and seeks to dominate all who disagree with the fearful. People who operate out of fear believe they have to dominate others because they believe those other people are trying to dominate them, Lerner writes.

I'm still reading Lerner's book, so I can't tell you yet, if I agree with everything he says. However, if he does nothing more then describe the politics based on hope vs. the politics based on fear, then Lerner will have made an important contribution to public debate. I suspect that Lerner's paradigm isn't new or even unique to him. However, I've never seen its political ramifications discussed as clearly and in as much detail as Lerner does.

This week we witnessed an interesting example of that paradigm at work on In This Moment.

I blogged in Yet Another Fred Phelps Commentary about the need for all of us -- myself and my political allies included -- to admit that there are times when we should let go of politics and be silent. The topic was the Phelps family's new hobby of picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. I noted that I thought that such picketing was a bad idea and should end.

A member of the Phelps family hopped over (electronically speaking) and posted a series of furious comments, designed to insult me and anyone who agreed with me. In often incoherent and increasingly lengthy lists of Bible quotes, he also appeared to be trying terrify me with thoughts that I was going to be horribly punished by a vicious God.

My crime? I am a woman who is in love with another woman. I suspect I may also be doomed to burn, in his mind, for disagreeing with him about the law and the First Amendment.

What I find most fascinating about this person's response to my blog is that he missed the point. Yes, I was arguing that his family should stop picketing funerals, but I was also arguing that everyone deserves to be treated with love and decency -- even families who work so hard to hurt others. I don’t mean this as a put down. I am not saying this in a kind of sneer, declaring that even those people deserve love. I mean this sincerely.

What I said is that all mourners should be treated with compassion. No one's funeral -- not even the funeral of Fred Phelps when his time comes -- should be picketed.

However, the Phelps family emissary missed the point. The fact that I think his family should be treated with compassion, apparently, was of no interest to him. In reading his responses, I got the feeling that he may not even have been able to see that I was offering him compassion.

"You cannot understand the love of God until you understand His hate," this fellow wrote.

I disagree.

I believe that you cannot understand God at all, or even understand the secular universe, without first understanding love. And you can't do that until you are able to see when love is being offered to you.

Peace to you all this weekend.
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Mike Hendricks at the Kansas City Star had an interesting take on the Phelps family.

Meanwhile, the Kansas Senate unanimously passed a bill Thursday limiting picketing at funerals. "We want people to be able to bury their dead in peace," Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, said.

While the Left abdicates, real pain drives voters into the arms of the Religious Right

Given the fact that you folks – all couple hundred of you – read me because I am totally brilliant (note sarcasm), it pains me to have to admit that another author has figured out something I’ve been fumbling with for months now.

Please click over to AlterNet and read Finding Spirit Among the Dems and then run out and buy Michael Lerner’s new book “The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back From the Religious Right.” (HarperSF 2006). Lerner is the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synogogue and editor of TIKKUN magazine: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society.

The writer at AlterNet called Lerner’s new book a paradigm-shifting work that “doesn't just change the view so much as it changes our way of viewing.” From what I can tell from reading the story, I think that writer may well be right.

First, Lerner clearly identifies the chasm that separates the two sides in what I suspect is the real cultural struggle going on in the world right now. That war isn’t necessarily between political ideologies, but between approaches to life. Lerner says:

The Left Hand of God means looking at the universe through the perception that love, kindness, generosity and caring for others are the central ontological realities of life, and that when they do not manifest in the world in which we live, the world is distorted and needs to be healed. The Right Hand of God, conversely, means looking at the universe through the perception that life is a struggle of all against all, and that the only path to security is through domination of others.

I find those words compelling because they match my spiritual approach to life. However, Lerner also has ideas for the secular and the political. He explains that the reason the Religious Right is drawing people is not because those folks are brainwashed or idiots. It’s because they are in real pain, suffering from the flaws in our society, and the Religious Right is not only talking about that pain but claiming to have a cure.

This is the point I was fumbling to make in my piece, The Lesbian and the Fundamentalists, when I talked about a “hole” in society.

Lerner says it so much better and clearer than I did.

[M]any of the millions of people who get attracted to the Religious Right are not motivated by excitement for their political program, but by the experience of community, caring for others, and its ability to recognize and address the deep distortions in life that are caused by a societal ethos of materialism and selfishness.

Unless Democrats and the political Left understand this, they will never succeed at the ballot box again, Lerner argues.

By its tone-deafness to the spiritual suffering of the American people, the Left continues to miss the fundamental crisis that demands a social transformation, and in so missing this reality, it clears the path for reactionary forces to enter the spiritual arena and manipulate that crisis in destructive and potentially fascistic directions.

Amen to that.

Now that Lerner has defined the problem, what are we going to do about it?