Rise of the Christian left: Why the religious right’s moment may be ending [View all]

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http://www.salon.com/2014/07/21/rise_of_the_christian_left_why_the_religious_rights_moment_may_be_ending/

Rise of the Christian left: Why the religious right’s moment may be ending

From Pope Francis to a generation with new priorities, the finest Christian traditions are being reinvigorated

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
Monday, Jul 21, 2014 04:45 AM PST

It’s hard to tell if the near-constant stream of millennial-centric political think-pieces are perpetuating or reflecting growing curmudgeonly fears about the future of the country. Maybe it’s a little of both, and Fox is probably observing within its competency when it pegs more than a handful of us as “deluded narcissists” – but it appears there’s room for some political optimism among all the moral panic and the reign of the religious right. With millennial religious and political attitudes in flux compared to our predecessors, the upcoming years could be the Christian left’s big moment.

Which isn’t to say the United States has no Christian left history — with Civil Rights and the heyday of Catholic labor in our past, there is healthy precedent — but for the millennial growing up in the age of Jesus Camp and ‘Teach the Controversy’, Christian political activity has almost always veered rightward. Yet if the Culture Wars are losing momentum in light of issues like unemployment — which 76% of millennials identified as a critical issue in a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute survey, compared with 22% who found abortion or same sex marriage critical — how will Christian millennials fall out politically?

One thing seems clear: however they align themselves, it won’t be along typical partisan lines. A recent Reason-Rupe poll of young Americans found millennials to be, in the words of Nick Gillespie, tired of “partisan crap,” which more or less covers it. The Reason-Rupe findings track well with the 2012 PRRI results linked above, which concluded that 45% of young people identify as independent, with only 33% calling themselves Democrats, and 23% Republican. While Reason-Rupe concludes its report hoping millennials’ anti-partisan tendencies will eventually lead them to a kind of libertarianism — socially liberal and fiscally conservative — as it stands, the young favor a variety of policies that tend to the economic left, with majorities generally favoring government guaranteed living wages, health insurance and food and shelter. Nonetheless, roughly a quarter consider themselves some kind of social conservative, and 40% call themselves socially liberal, with the remainder suspended somewhere in the murky middle.

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