SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM CONFERENCE
Washington, D.C. May 17-20, 2006
HOW REALISTIC IS THE SPIRITUAL COVENANT WITH AMERICA?
This vision, needless to say, is “unrealistic” in the sense that it does not conform to the assumptions of politicians and editorial writers and t.v. and radio commentators. For most political leaders, that ends the discussion, because they’ve consistently been unwilling to risk any electoral loss for the sake of some higher good in which they believe. But that is precisely why so many Americans have come to distrust them—because if they won’t fight hard for their own beliefs how can they be counted on to fight for the best interests of the society when the going gets rough? Democrats need to learn that in order to win with their ideals they have to be ready at times to lose with their ideals. Or to put it an other way, anyone with a backbone worthy of respect doesn’t reject ideas because they are unrealistic by contemporary standards, but only because they are bad ideas intrinsically.
So, like the women’s movement in its early years, or the civil right movement, or even the movement against the war in Iraq in its first few years, we don’t expect the Congress-people we meet to jump up, throw away their crutches, and embrace a new philosophy. But for those who are tired of the visionlessness of the Left, our attempt to develop a progressive spiritual politics may spur them to develop their own visions, and then the interesting conversations will reignite American politics.
We are a consciousness-raising movement, and so our primary task like that of the early women’s movement, the civil rights movement, or the other major movements that have actually had a lasting impact on American society, the most important thing we can do is not to compromise what we believe in for the sake of short-term political gain, but to advocate for our fullest vision and insist on why it makes more sense than the endless partial solutions that actually don’t work and that end us up in wars and cynicism that paralyzes the most idealistic and leaves politics to the most wounded and deformed.
So when we encourage people to meet with elected officials every year, it is only a small part of what we need to do to get our ideas into the public consciousness, and we are sure that you can devise many more imaginative steps to take. We encourage people in our movement to take the following steps:
1. To get the Spiritual Covenant endorsed by local and national professional organizations, unions, civic organizations, churches, synagogues, ashrams, college and universities, individual legislators and by local City Councils and State Legislatures.
2. To create a Spiritual Caucus in every political party (including but not exclusively Democrats, Republicans, Greens) and seek to convince those parties to adopt the Spiritual Covenant not as another plank but as the shaping plank of their approach to the world.
3. To write op-eds and other means to communicate this vision and popularize it in their communities, workplaces, religious and cultural institutions, and professional organizations.
4. To organize public demonstrations, marches, plays, concerts, playful activities, confrontive activities, and any other legal means to get these ideas discussed.
READ ABOUT THE SPIRITUAL COVENANT WITH AMERICA HERE
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