The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do Better
Robert Wuthnow
Material excerpted from The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do Better by Robert Wuthnow © 2026 by New York University Press. Excerpted with permission from the publisher.
Generations of readers have been amply informed about the Religious Right. Much less has been written about the Religious Left. Its strengths and weaknesses are often mischaracterized by critics on the Right and in simplistic numeric assessments. Studies have explored particular issues in which the Religious Left has been engaged. But it has been harder to piece together the larger picture.
This book describes how the Religious Left is organized. It examines the extensive networks, advocacy hubs, interest groups, and coalitions of which the Religious Left is composed. The chapters show what the Religious Left has been doing over the past quarter century on selected issues. These issues include international debt relief, peacemaking, immigration, climate change, gun control, equity in education, sexual identity, abortion, and economic justice. The chapters examine how progressive religious activism has effectively advocated for mercy and justice, why it has often fallen short, and what has contributed to its persistence.
At this difficult time in our nation’s history, with the danger of democracy-denying authoritarianism looming large, it is tempting to believe that the Religious Left has no future—that it will be starved and repressed into nonexistence. It is perhaps equally tempting to focus on what the Religious Left could have done better.
A more useful approach is to engage the Religious Left through a balanced examination of its strengths and weaknesses. The Religious Left is in many ways vulnerable. Much of what it has accomplished has been done through government funding and with the support of favorable legislation and court decisions. A regime that cuts off these resources seriously weakens its efforts. Yet in other ways the Religious Left has been remarkably resilient as a significant feature of American civil society. It has adapted to changing political circumstances. Its commitment to biblical understandings of mercy and justice has remained central to its work.
The Religious Left has never been a single, cohesive social movement or a unified voting bloc. The label was rarely used until the 1960s, when it became fashionable among conservative writers who disapproved of what they saw happening in America. The Religious Left, they said, was led by misguided visionaries who were soft on communism, seduced by the unrest stirring in Paris and Prague, and receptive to Eugene McCarthy’s ideas about terminating the war in Vietnam. The Religious Left was in their view troublingly modernist, shaped by the “death of God” movement, elitist, and out of step with the Silent Majority.
The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do Better (2026)
There was some truth in these assertions. Dissent was present in the churches. There was plenty of disagreement with American foreign policy in Vietnam. But the Religious Left was more diverse and more internally divided than any of these portrayals acknowledged. There were faith communities that were theologically and liturgically orthodox and that nevertheless favored social justice, and there were radical groups that wanted to reshape the foundations of faith. The Religious Left was older, too. Strands in the 1960s dated back to the nineteenth century. The Religious Left today is a tapestry woven from these stands. It is an aggregation of leaders and groups that work for causes having to do with peace, justice, and social reform. Its leaders and the groups pursuing these diverse causes consider them to be forward looking. Rarely are the causes popular. Rarely do they succeed in mobilizing large numbers of followers.
The legacy that was to inform the Religious Left developed as a response to the social problems accompanying late nineteenth-century industrialization. Most churches were still located in small towns, but cities represented the future. Reformers like Henry George, Josiah Strong, and Walter Rauschenbusch emphasized the problems that working families experienced as they struggled with low wages, insufficient protection against exploitation, and inadequate health and safety provision. Although the churches’ characteristic response was to offer charity, the reformers whom later generations would identify as the Religious Left’s predecessors envisioned a transformation of social arrangements as the key to bringing about an improvement in social justice.
The vision that took shape at the end of the nineteenth century and that informed progressive religious efforts during much of the twentieth century was a collection of ideas loosely drawn together from several traditions. The central idea was that a proper conception of ethics required thinking not only about personal morality but also about the arrangement of social conditions—were these arrangements fair, were they causing harm, could they be improved? It was therefore necessary to think about society, power, social class, wealth, and poverty.
Walter Rauschenbusch, whose influential book Christianity and the Social Crisis was published in 1907, was the most widely recognized leader of what became known as the Social Gospel . . . . Social Gospel theology was grounded in a biblical understanding of social ethics. From the Hebrew Bible it drew principles of right living before God that included behaving righteously as a people, observing obligations toward strangers as well as neighbors and kinfolk, and upholding standards of social justice. From Jesus, it drew arguments about love of neighbor, the Golden Rule, and care for the poor, the needy, and the outcasts. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”—the petition that Christians repeated whenever they said the Lord’s Prayer—took on special meaning. The Kingdom of God was an ideal to be worked toward on earth as well as to be enjoyed after death in heaven. “It means justice, freedom, fraternity, labor, joy,” Rauschenbusch wrote. It was something to which all could contribute—parents, farmers, teachers, scientists, merchants, factory workers. It did not imply a particular form of government, but it was resonant with modern democracy, and it required giving special consideration to serving others and working for social justice.
The biblical concept of justice that Social Gospelers emphasized was not only about fairness in personal dealings but also about justice for the oppressed. Although concern for the oppressed was often interpreted by religious leaders as kindness, which could be expressed as helping the needy, caring for the poor, and showing compassion to the disadvantaged, justice implied doing more. Advocating for justice required addressing the inequitable distribution of power that kept some of the population from enjoying the freedom, advantages, and opportunities that others received. Always the questions were, “What do different groups deserve? And what should be done to make things better?” These were matters of perception and interpretation. Advocacy for justice implied that the current system needed to be changed and that it could in fact be changed.
It was not immediately apparent that Progressive-era social activism would focus as much on political advocacy as it eventually did. The religious reformers emphasized congregational ministries, Sunday schools, settlement houses, and charitable programs for the working poor. However, reforming the social system, combating corruption, and challenging monopolies did imply the need for political action—a need that became more evident as the federal government’s role increased. By the 1930s, progressive religious leaders were largely on board with the New Deal. Working for egalitarian democracy implied advocating for executive and legislative intervention.
The optimism that pervaded Social Gospel arguments about the possibility of achieving something close to the Kingdom of God on earth receded over the years, especially with the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust. Reinhold Niebuhr, whose writing shaped a new generation of theological reflection in the 1940s and 1950s, argued that a more realistic understanding of the human condition required contending with the persistence of evil in the world as well as the prevailing inequities of power and material resources. It was thus essential, he believed, to use power and to use it responsibly against the evil uses to which power was often put. “We have lived through a great war in which the idolatrous pretensions of a ‘master race’ have been defeated by power,” he reminded his readers. He cautioned against “spiritualized” forms of faith that imagined virtue being achieved only through ideas about goodwill. “There is no purely spiritual method of preserving minimal justice and order in a world,” he said, “for the world is not purely spiritual. Power is the basis of justice in history as it is of order in the entire natural world.”
Acknowledging the significance of power reinforced the idea that legislation, voting, serving in government offices, and weighing in on policy decisions were appropriate ways of engaging in social advocacy. Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy for civil rights was informed by Niebuhr’s political realism as well as by Rauschenbusch’s vision of working toward God’s kingdom. Rauschenbusch, King wrote, “had fallen victim to the nineteenth century ‘cult of inevitable progress,’ which led him to an unwarranted optimism concerning human nature.” King nevertheless embraced the modified Social Gospel vision he found in Niebuhr, which called for pragmatic means of effecting social change. The beloved community, which resembled Rauschenbusch’s ideal of a “fellowship of justice, equality, and love,” was to be pursued by leveraging the forces of moral power.
The issues that left-wing faith leaders addressed were concerned with poverty, injustice, rights violations, and discrimination. Those who addressed these concerns—including Jews, Muslims, and Christians—believed that religious faith should be relevant to social conditions. . . . The societal issues that progressive religionists addressed evolved from decade to decade, usually in tandem with or as reactions to other movements and developments. Social Gospelers’ attention focused on the rising industrial working class through advocacy for trade unions, child labor laws, public health, and sanitation. In the 1920s, progressive leaders argued against inflated prices and in the 1930s advocated for the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies. They opposed totalitarianism, were divided about communism, supported America’s role in World War II, and in the 1950s were again divided about Cold War policies and nuclear weapons. They became supporters, sometimes reluctantly, of the civil rights movement, and advocated against the Vietnam War. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Religious Left’s focus was defined increasingly by the Religious Right, as progressive activists contended against the Right’s views on abortion, gender, and sexuality
Although progressive religious leaders worked with secular leaders, their strategies reflected the unspoken norms of religious institutions. These norms varied among Protestant denominations and among Catholics and Jews but generally included the following: first, that people of faith should strive to get along with one another, and, if that were not possible, that there was at least strength in working together, attempting to achieve harmony, and treating adversaries with respect; second, that even the most democratic religious organizations were in principle, if not also in practice, hierarchical, which implied that people of faith should take leadership and adherence to authority into account, even when engaging in dissent; third, that deliberation and debate in making decisions was valuable; fourth, that discourse in the form of speaking, preaching, and writing was a worthwhile form of advocacy; fifth, that persuasion through policy statements and resolutions was preferable and that more active methods, such as demonstrations and protests, were better left in reserve; and sixth, that reforms should be made within faith communities themselves before, or in addition to, reforms in other institutions.
Progressive religion’s identity was defined as much by its adversaries as by its advocates. In 1968, shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the Wall Street Journal argued that clergy activism for civil rights and ending the war in Vietnam was simply a misguided quest for relevance. Religion should be concerned with “such questions as the nature of man, the meaning of life, [and] the individual’s place in the universe,” the journal editorialized. “What is left out is religion’s main business: Love and God and the transcendent.” The accusation was not new. From the start, Social Gospelers had been charged with minimizing individuals’ need for salvation, with violating the separation of church and state, and with promoting communism.
But progressive religion also benefited from the adversarial culture in which it participated. Advocacy was “against” as much as it was “for.” It was against injustice, poverty, low wages, unsafe working conditions, child labor, and racism. Dissent was built into religious traditions’ conceptions of themselves.
Scholars of social movements have been cautious, though, about generalizations. Outcomes must be assessed in terms of interim as well as ultimate goals. Advocacy is not only about achieving favorable legislative policies, executive branch programs, and court decisions. Advocacy is also concerned with agenda setting, gaining access to the decision-making process, and monitoring implementation. Especially when religion is involved, advocacy consists of bringing moral claims to bear on public discourse and on policy decisions. There are tactical victories as well that include learning something, pivoting, keeping an organization alive, and preventing the opposition from winning.
The progressive legacy that religious organizations forged from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century was the foundation from which the Religious Left continued its work in the coming years. The idea that faith communities should be concerned with social issues as well as with individual salvation implied that advocacy and activism should be interested in social justice. The Religious Left’s precedents were evident in many of the organizations that had been established decades earlier and, more so, in the conviction that faith leaders could work cooperatively across religious traditions and with secular organizations. If the optimism that had inspired the Social Gospel was gone, there was still the belief that justice was a worthy goal, and that effort was necessary to achieve that goal.
My contention is that the Religious Left has massively reinvented itself in recent decades. Its organizational structures—its advocacy hubs, networks, and coalitions—are more specialized, strategic, diverse, and intersectional compared to their counterparts in the 1960s. It now relies less on denominational lobbyists than it did in the past and more on interfaith alliances. It is more agile than it was, making use of social media to address emerging issues and developing expertise to tackle the complexities of such issues as gun violence and climate change. And its religious leaders are more often welcomed as allies who work with secular nonprofits, government service agencies, and advocacy groups.
While the Religious Left has reinvented itself in these ways, its core convictions are undiminished. Progressive faith communities’ moral strength comes from their faith that God cares about the good of humanity, wants the world to be better than it is, and encourages people of faith to be engaged in acts of mercy and kindness. These faith convictions are expressed in diverse ways that respect the different ways in which faith traditions live out their relationships with the sacred. They nevertheless serve as a common foundation that sustains motivation and inspires hope.
Robert Wuthnow is the Andlinger Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a founding Director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion. He is the author of numerous books and articles about religion, culture, and politics, including most recently Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy (2021) and What Happens When We Practice Religion? Textures of Devotion in Everyday Life (2020).
Recommended Citation
Wuthnow, Robert. “The Religious Left: What It Does and How It Can Do Better.” Canopy Forum, June 30, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/06/30/the-religious-left-what-it-does-and-how-it-can-do-better/
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