By GD Mills

Left of Eden

"Jesus was a socialist," says the Rev. Mike Howard, executive director of Justice Watch, a transitional living program for former prisoners in the West End. "Anyone who is convicted for serving the poor and the equal distribution of treatment and wealth is a socialist."

A lot of people aren't going to see things this way, but those who view God as a free radical -- rather than an old man in the sky -- aren't looking for public approval. Their faith is all the affirmation they need.

While conservative and fundamentalist churches in the United States get most of the political clout and media attention, spiritual people with progressive views aren't at all uncommon. Many of them would argue that they're actually among a silent majority.

This process isn't revisionist church history. It's not that Howard and other liberal theologians are simply redefining their religions.

For many of them, it comes from an intensive, scholarly interpretation of religious texts -- an attempt to examine Holy Scripture within the cultural and historical context in which it was written. And if that approach qualifies them as radicals, well, most religious leaders have been considered radicals in their time.

Service, not pwer
While talking with a reporter, Howard says he hears gunshots nearby, a common part of the West End's soundscape. It's a community with a lot of brokenness in it, Howard says, but also a well of goodness.

This embattled neighborhood is just one of the places he hangs his collar. He preaches at Horizon, a non-denominational church in Indian Hill, and lives in Western Hills.

Whether he's working with the rich or the poor, he says, his work is basically the same -- offering them salvation through faith in God. The poor, who must live by faith because they lack resources, have an easier time accepting God's love than the rich, he says.

"Because of the allure of power ... that's why it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven," he says. "You can get lost in it."

Howard says compassion for all people is key to his vision of Christianity. Personally, that means serving both the poor and the rich; politically, it means being vocal in his opposition to national immorality such as the war in Iraq.

"Because it's based on lies, subterfuge and deception, (the war) is immoral," he says. "We are looked at by the world as a demon, and I want an America where people look to us for help, not out of fear."

The road to becoming that idyllic America starts by serving and developing relationships with even those who don't share your views, according to Howard. He recently had the chance to meet with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who holds some racist ideas that are repugnant to Howard.

Howard got past this to find what was good in Farrakhan, he says, claiming that to wholly reject him for his faults would be to reject that the minister is also a child of God.

"What if I extended that logic to America?" Howard says. "Then, because America once enslaved blacks, it's no good?"

Howard became a Christian after serving more than a decade in prison for assault and other crimes. He says that his connection with the divine changed him, allowing him to become a minister and a leader in community service work.

"Faith requires that we do service," Howard says. "My faith redefined my life. I experienced the resurrection. My old self had to die and the new me was born again."

In that same way, among many Christian progressives, Christianity itself has been born again -- or at least seen through a lens different from that of the Religious Right. These are people who say that their understanding of the Bible calls them to community service, lives of simplicity and working for justice.

This stands in stark contrast to the way Christianity is portrayed by the Religious Right, according to Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics and editor of the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners.

In a March 27 speech at Xavier University, Wallis said there's a mentality among many conservatives that their personal relationship with God supercedes their responsibility to the world and that this leaves a lot of Americans -- the poor and disenfranchised -- out in the cold.

Wallis said Americans need to be awakened to the real Christianity, one focused on caring for others rather than one that dominates through lip service to God -- a moral center rather than a Religious Right.

The search for truth
The split between conservative and liberal Christians is as old as Christianity itself, according to activist Brian Garry, who considers himself a progressive.

"Paul and James argued about it in the Bible," Garry says. "Paul says, 'You're saved by grace alone,' and James says, 'Show me your faith. I'll show you my faith by my works.' "

Many conservative born-agains don't feel that they're responsible for works of peace and justice, Garry says.

"They don't feel any obligation to the world, but that's not what the Bible and Jesus say," Garry says.

God, he says, is wherever the poor and oppressed are, and railing against their oppression is key to Garry's Christian walk. He's protested the Iraq War, spoken out against abuses of power by the Cincinnati Police and has run for Cincinnati City Council, saying his political activism is driven by his belief in Jesus.

"There was a time in my life when I was sinking down and I thought I was drowning," he says. "God reached down and saved me himself. He used people, but he himself saved me. I know I've been given such a gift that I owe so much back, and every time I give something I get so much more in return that I'm even more in debt."

When he participates in a political action, Garry says he acts in the spirit and in the original Latin meaning of the word "protest."

"The words mean 'to testify for,' " he says.

When he protests, Garry says, he's testifying for his fellow man, his God and his country, though people often think of protesters as anti-American.

Photo By Rebecca Carter-Novotni

Jim Wallis, liberal Christian author, said in a March 27 speech at Xavier University that many conservatives' personal relationship with God unfortunately supercedes their responsibility to the world.

"We love life and we love Cincinnati and we love America," he says. "We love it so much that we're willing to sacrifice our time and energy to do this work."

Protesting the death penalty and the war is affirming life, he says.

"It's so needed to bring God into politics," Garry says.

He's quick to point out that he didn't say "to bring religion into politics." It's not about foisting a particular religion on anyone or requiring a standard belief, he says -- it's about bringing many different people with divergent beliefs to the table, convicted by their faith to work for the common good.

The big, diverse tent that is the American Left is strong with its many unique points of view but is also difficult to organize, Garry says. Unlike the Christian Right, the Left doesn't rotate about the same axis of belief in one way to God and one vision of God.

"We are fragmented, and that has always been the downfall of the Left," Garry says. "We're like the coat of many colors of Joseph while (the Right) are homogenous. It's very challenging."

Progressive ideals are a major component in Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish movement in the United States, with more than 1.5 million members. It's a liberal movement based in the idea that individuals can interpret scripture for themselves.

Somewhere to the left of this movement is Rabbi Robert B. Barr's synagogue, Beth Adam in Loveland. Barr describes his congregation as coming from a humanistic tradition.

"We focus on the respect that human beings should have for each other," he says. "That is our primary focus."

Barr says his 25-year-old community is committed to the Jewish tradition of social action. Most of the congregation, more than 300 total, participates in Beth Adam's outreach projects, including food and blood drives and serving Cincinnati's homeless at the Drop Inn Center and the Over-the-Rhine Soup Kitchen.

Barr describes himself as a liberal, progressive, religious thinker and says humanistic values underlie his congregation's work.

"We have a big responsibility," he says. "The world isn't simply going to right itself. We're going to have to do that."

Barr says he remains non-partisan as a rabbi and believes that separation of church and state is the most important issue facing the nation today. The Religious Right -- really political and quasi-religious groups, he says -- have in the past two decades co-opted religion's place in society and are trying to impose their will through politics.

He says opposition to gay marriage, end of life issues like the Terry Schiavo case and exhibitions of the 10 Commandments in public spaces are all examples of this trend.

"The Religious Right is unsuccessful in persuading people of their opinion, and so they try to impose it," Barr says. "Politically they're successes, but religiously they're failures."

Barr says he speaks to his congregation about the importance of seeking truth through reason. The search for truth is what religion is really about, he says.

"Truth wasn't revealed 2,000 years or 4,000 years ago for all time," Barr says. "It's a process."

'What we had done'
Avondale's First Unitarian Church started in 1830 and was an early player in the abolitionist movement. A primary tenet of the Unitarian faith is that religious authority resides within a person, not within a religious text, so there's no formal creed or dogma common to the congregation.

There is, however, a guiding set of principles that most members believe in. These include belief in the worth and dignity of all people and a call to social and environmental stewardship.

The congregation is involved in service programs for prisoners and the poor and is focused on social and economic justice.

The Rev. Sharon Dittmar, pastor of First Unitarian Church, is well known for being outspoken in her church. In 2001 she issued a public apology for the exclusion of blacks from the church in the early 1900s.

"It's one thing to say racism is bad," Dittmar says. "It's another thing to look at your role."

Dot Christenson, who chairs the church's Racial Justice Task Force, says this apology was the beginning of the church's current racial reconciliation programs.

"We didn't think we had a right to go and say what other people should do until we had looked at what we had done," Christenson says.

Since then the church has coordinated numerous educational campaigns related to the civil rights movement. Christenson says her church has placed historical markers, developed an annual scholarship program for black youth and purchased black history books for schools.

First Unitarian has also been active in supporting the rights of workers by taking part in product boycotts and has adopted refugees from New Orleans and Kosovo, helping them establish new lives in Cincinnati, according to Mimi Gingold, chair of the Social Justice Committee.

"What drives our work toward social justice are the principals of Unitarianism," Gingold says. "We don't believe in a particular spiritual path. In fact, some of us are atheists."

Gingold says a tenet of Unitarian belief is that religion isn't an answer but a way to search for spiritual life. She says members of her church might not be inspired by the same things as activist Christians or Muslims, but they're often working alongside them.

The Rev. Bill Gupton of the Heritage Universalist Unitarian Church in Anderson Township focused on reconciliation in a recent sermon. He calls America's political divisions "fault-lines that have also begun tearing at the very fabric of our social structure. Taken together, these rifts -- based, as they are, on profoundly different views of the world and of humanity -- are the two main fronts in what has come to be known as 'the culture war.'

Photo By Ron Reblando

Pastor Stephen Van Kuiken at his new church, The Gathering, in Over-the-Rhine: "The cross is a symbol of integrity. Jesus died because he stood up for what he believed and wouldn't back down."

"Today, we are split into Left and Right, red state and blue state, Trinitarian and Unitarian, Muslim and Christian, gay and straight."

The differences can be bridged only by those willing to earn trust by living out equality in their daily lives as Jesus did, he says.

"He reminded those around him of what they had forgotten: that the unclean and the unhealthy, the prostitutes and lepers and children and women and even the hated Samaritans were, all of them, human," Gupton says.

'Domination-free'
Sister Alice Gerdeman is a staff member of Cincinnati's Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center (IJPC), which does advocacy and educational work to counter war, end the death penalty and build economic justice for the poor and minorities. She says her organization includes people who are not all Christians and not all progressives, although it has aspects of both.

"I don't think we should be a Christian nation," says Gerdeman. "I don't think we are a Christian nation."

Those who believe America should be a religious state are alienating many good people, according to Gerdeman.

"These people are being told their value system is not valued," she says, adding that her Roman Catholic faith guides her decisions and still teaches her to be respectful of others' faiths.

Gerdeman's faith also gives her a different perspective from her right wing counterparts. The concept of "an eye for an eye," often used to justify war and vengeance, is actually a Jewish law that limits the amount of retribution one may take, she says.

Returning an injury with an equal injury is the absolute maximum we are to do, Gerdeman says.

"The next sentence spoken by Jesus is, 'But I say, "Love your enemies," ' " she says.

Non-violence is at the core of the IJPC but is just a part of the way the organization's members express progressive ideals. Kristen Barker, an IJPC staffer, says some of the more than 2,000 households associated with the organization include those who have deliberately decided to live among the poor or have limited their income to such a level that they don't pay federal income tax and therefore don't financially support the war. Others eat lower on the food chain, eschew automobiles and live as simply as possible so that their impact on the earth is minimal and they live as citizens rather than consumers.

IJPC staffer Eunice Timoney-Ravenna says that faith expressing itself in a person's political life and that political life influencing the personal life is cyclical. One choice feeds into the other, she says.

Communing with the poor helps her organization know what it needs to do in Cincinnati, Timoney-Ravenna says. She says that the words of the oppressed are often prophetic -- not in the sense that they tell the future, but heralding what's wrong with society.

"It comes from the suffering, it comes from the oppressed," she says. "They are the voice that can identify the oppression."

Barker says that her belief in Jesus as a worker for justice is well-grounded in her Catholic faith. Directives by Roman Catholic bishops have historically included acting on behalf of justice.

"The kingdom of God is a domination-free society," she says. "I see Jesus as offering an incredible break with patriarchy, with hierarchy."

Gerdeman says this is part of the Christian way of countering the culture of violence, consumerism and "me-ism."

"Probably, at their root they are all the same," she says. "Part of what we try to do is to be for others."

These values express themselves in such IJPC actions as counter-military recruitment drives at high schools, offering alternatives to military service anti-war protests; and participating in ecumenical conferences that bring Christians, Muslims, Jews and people of other faiths together to discuss ways to craft a more just and peaceful society.

"Part of the problem with the Religious Right's agenda," Timoney-Ravenna says, "is the idea that 'God is on my side,' as if they have a monopoly on the divine. I think that's where the error begins."

One can argue the merits of faith without denigrating others, she says.

"One could argue that, if you limit the divine to the way that you understand it, that's idolatry," Gerdeman says.

She cites the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhardt, who said that the hardest thing he ever had to do was to give up his God.

"It's not that he gave up on God, it's just that his idea of God was way too small," Gerdeman says. "When you begin to think you have it all figured out, you're probably the most wrong you've ever been."

Gerdeman says Christian progressives will probably never have the same sort of lock-step structure as the conservatives.

"Even the dichotomy of Left and Right is false," she says. "There isn't, at least for some of us, a liberal agenda. If we are (an underdog), that's OK."

Timoney-Ravenna says that, historically, progressive and conservative movements have worked in cycles.

"I think there have been so many successes," she says, pointing to the civil rights movement. "I don't think we should be deflated in any way by the recent elections."

Photo By Andy Houston

This March 11 Justice for Immigrats rally at St. Peter in Chains Catherdral, organized by the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, demonstrates many liberal Christians' belief that Jesus was a worker for justice.

The larger issue goes beyond liberal and conservative perspectives, Gerdeman says.

"I fully believe that the power of goodness is stronger than the power of evil and that good will win out and is winning, even if we can't see it," she says.

'A little oasis'
At The Gathering, a small church in Over-the-Rhine, one of the most striking images one sees is the communion elements placed on a rainbow flag.

Pastor Stephen Van Kuiken says he believes the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus' name to be a representation of an ancient vision of God's feast for all peoples.

"Part of it is the goodness of diversity, that we are all created differently," he says. "The colors represent different sexual orientations, and we see that as a good thing and as an affirmation of unity amidst the diversity."

Van Kuiken, who is straight, leads a congregation of about 50 people, about half of whom are gay, he says. His church is a breakaway from Mt. Auburn Presbyterian Church, where he used to work.

He was ousted from that church for performing gay marriages and formed his own congregation to remain honest to his values.

Van Kuiken says he's always supported gay relationships and has respected them as he does heterosexual unions. Mt. Auburn Presbyterian calls gay marriage "holy unions" so as to be palatable to church members around the nation.

"Really what they're doing is a marriage," he says. "There's a ring, vows, a unity candle and they're going to have sex. Everybody knows that's what's going on. It's the equivalency of marriage. It forces you to be duplicitous in the Presbyterian Church."

Van Kuiken says he's stopped doing the legal part of straight marriages in protest. The gay marriage ban is a violation of the separation of church and state, he says, blessing one marriage and condemning another.

He describes his new church as his attempt to "just be honest and having some integrity and not having to hide. My actions and beliefs need to be as consistent as possible."

Communion, he says, should be a celebration.

"Often what has happened in Christian orthodoxy is it's turned into a sacrifice of an innocent one to satisfy an angry God, a substitutionary atonement," Van Kuiken says. "The whole notion of a god who requires a sacrifice to be happy runs contrary to the life of Jesus."

Jesus' death was a result of the establishment's resistance to his revolutionary message, Van Kuiken says.

"The reason that Jesus died was not to make God happy and save us from God's wrath," he says. "The cross is a symbol of integrity. He died because he stood up for what he believed and wouldn't back down. We don't see the death of Jesus as a good thing."

Van Kuiken's sermons regard Jesus as a radical mystic, prophet and activist, through not necessarily more divine than anyone else. One sermon regarded the Jubilee Year, which was a part of Jewish law under which debts were to be forgiven every seven years and, in the 49th year, wealth was to be redistributed throughout the community.

"This ethic is out of compassion and justice that reordered and restructured society," Van Kuiken says. "It calls for everything to be turned upside down. (Jesus) didn't base his life or his message on a meritocracy. ... The whole notion of grace is that you don't get what you deserve; you get more than you deserve."

Music at The Gathering is different from other churches, too. Gone are songs that refer to God as vengeful and punishing.

"I don't view Jesus as the son of God, but rather that is more metaphorical," Van Kuiken says. "Jesus is a gateway, an approach to God. We're much more like Jesus than we are different. I believe that Jesus did not want to be worshipped and Jesus did not see himself as God, and the parts of scripture that say this are layers that were added later."

Van Kuiken says Jesus' life and message helps him understand who God is. The crucifixion is "evidence of the resistance, a warning for those who follow in his steps. If you're not encountering resistance, then you're not doing it right."

Politics and faith have one thing in common -- they're about how we treat each other, according to Ariel Miller, an advocate for prison reform and prisoners' rights and executive director of the Episcopal Community Services Foundation.

A Christian is called to look on others as a child of God, she says.

"Democracy has some overlap, but it's not a perfect fit at all," she says

For Miller, Christianity is God's call to love others as he has loved us.

"And it's damned hard," she says. "Can we create a little oasis where people are treating others with love?"

That ethic extends to convicts, to the downtrodden and also to the Left's opponents, the Christian Right, she says.

Miller says that proving she is correct about a given issue isn't necessary -- just speaking the truth in love is enough. She says she's much more interested in ways that she and persons with diametrically opposed views can work together to get something done.

"It's very easy to assume that other people are the enemy and we have all the answers," she says. "It's very seductive. But we have to do better than that. In the faith community, it's about communion and community, which is much harder work than competition." ©