Rise Of The Religious Left?
Not much, says Paul Waldman. His group, the liberal Media Matters For America, has put out a study that claims that conservative religious leaders get far more play in the media than their liberal counterparts – despite the fact that, in America, churchgoers may be a lot more heterogeneous than many people think.
"When you look at those people who are asked to kind of represent what religious opinion is, the conservatives show up a lot more often than the progressives," Waldman told "On The Media." "And in our opinion, that gives a kind of a skewed picture of what the state of American religion is."
Reporters are natrually attracted to extreme religious figureheads like the recently-deceased Jerry Falwell, despite the fact that, as Timothy Noah points out, Falwell wasn't really a significant figure in evangelical circles past the late 1980s. (Noah writes that "[f]or 20 years, evangelicals have chided the mainstream media for treating Falwell's ghastly pronouncements as news.") Right-leaning evangelicals are a powerful force, of course; they were, as even a casual political observer knows, a large part of the reason that George W. Bush has been elected twice. But in focusing on religious conservatives and evangelicals on the right, the media may have paid insufficient attention to other people of faith and their politics.
The press corps isn't entirely to blame: Part of the reason that we don't hear much from relatively liberal religious leaders is they haven't had an organization or brand-name leader to push their message. But that may be changing: Jim Wallis, an evangelical embraced by the left, has become an increasingly high-profile voice, and his Sojourners Magazine is part of a movement that has the Chistian Science Monitor wondering if the religious left could sway the 2008 presidential election.
That isn't to say it isn't still an uphill battle for left-leaning people of faith, who are a long way from establishing organizations that can compete with the likes of the Christian Coalition at its height. But the dividing lines are starting to become increasingly clear: While Falwell dismissed global warming as "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus from evangelism to environmentalism," for example, some evangelical leaders, such as Rick Warren, are now advocating action on climate change. It will be interesting to see whether or not a wider variety of religious voices are embraced by the media in the coming years – or if the simplistic characterization of the intersection of religion and politics spelled out in the first paragraph of this post endures.