"Note the irrationality of the left's rhetoric," wrote Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D, a senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the think tank for Concerned Women for America, in a recent column on the rightist Townhall.com.  What caught Crouse's ire was a report published late last year by Pam Chamberlain of Political Research Associates, on the Christian Right's anti-abortion, anti-contraception campaign at the UN.  

Chamberlain refers to the left as "human rights activists" (as though their radical agenda is based on human rights; their mantra is that "women's rights are human rights"). She assumes that international meetings are an exclusive club for elite leftists and that those "bizarre" conservatives -- the people that the Washington Post labeled the uneducated, easily-led religious right -- are crashing the party.

Of course, Chamberlain and PRA do not view international meetings as exclusive or elite; nor do they agree with the Post's long ago, one-time mischaracterization of the members of the Christian right. Crouse's version of rationality does not seem to include the necessity of getting facts right. The word "bizarre" is used in reference to conservative beliefs or actions nowhere in Chamberlain's report.    

Still, there is much there for Crouse to be upset about -- since the report nails what she and her cronies are up to in seeking to disrupt the formation of good and necessary international consensus on a host of important matters.  Crouse's response?  Blow smoke and change the subject.

This weekend, a small event at a big church in Cambridge, Massachusetts may be remembered as a turning point in the struggle with the religious right -- and in the reinvention of the once-dynamic religious left.

For much of the 20th century, progressive religious ideas, organizations, and eventually institutions advanced major movements for social justice in the United States and around the world. Since the end of the Vietnam war, the voice and more importantly, the political and cultural influence of progressive religious communities has declined. Parallel to this, has been the rise of the well-organized religious right political and social movement, accompanied by efforts to sew dissent and division among the historic churches of mainline protestantism.

The quarter century war of attrition that has been waged by elements of the religious and political right against the mainline Protestant churches in America, has gone largely unchronicled. To read the mainstream press, you would think that people were so upset about homosexuality that they want to divide their historic churches into little warring camps. But these conflagrations have been far from spontaneous -- and have always been about much, much more than homosexuality.

A magazine article I wrote recently on this subject has just been posted online. The Battle for the Mainline Churches appears in the Spring issue of The Public Eye.

Here are some excerpts:

Yes, countering the religious right is a culture shock -- in part because there are relatively few people who actually do it, and even fewer who do it well. That is changing. But what is unchanged, is that it is usually quite difficult for people to take-in disturbing new information. And taking-in disturbing new information is made more difficult when it is presented in an unnecessarily alarming fashion, or in ways that exaggerate it's signficance. That's why I was glad to be pleasantly reminded of two organizations that approach these subjects with dedication, cool heads, and a rigorous approach to gathering facts and presenting analysis.