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Jan/Feb 2001 issue (#49)
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Send your letters to the Free Press, PMB #178, 1463 E Republican St, Seattle 98112. Keep them short. Longer letters will be edited down. Letters do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Free Press. Letters which respond to Free Press articles will be given precedence.
I have been a longstanding supporter of your paper, and your reporting is generally very good. But you do have one weak spot, common to many knee-jerk, secular progressives: an ugly blindness when it comes to religion.
Your November/December issue offers homage to Michael Lerner, the Jewish guru favored by Hillary Clinton. [Ed's note: see also interview with Michael Lerner in this issue] For guilt ridden liberals, Judaism is the one religion acceptable to admire, I suppose to make up for the Holocaust and American and other forms of vicious anti-Semitism. Judaism is, indeed, an ancient tradition proclaiming God's power over human empire and standing with the poor and powerless against the rich and haughty.
But at the same time, you repeatedly take cheap potshots at Christianity, whether at the absurdities of fundamentalists or the rigidities and narrowness of institutional Catholicism. Criticism of institutional injustice is, of course, warranted, whether found in religion, government, or academia. But you throw out the baby with the bathwater in your style, which is not only bad strategy but intellectually dishonest given the history of progressive movements throughout history and in the Northwest.
Who were the biggest forces for change in the 20th century? Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., two deeply religious men. There is little doubt that the civil rights movement was primarily and remains a religious undertaking. And not only that: the movements against apartheid, against the death penalty, against nuclear weapons, whether internationally or locally, have all been spearheaded by people of religious faith. Locally, folks like Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, Church Council of Greater Seattle President Bill Cate, and Washington Association of Churches Executive Minister John Boonstra have been instrumental in organizing church people against the Trident submarine, mistreatment of indigenous people and their sacred sites and fishing rights, the WTO, and others. Grassroots movements of church people have been the primary force opposing the US Army's School of Assassins in Georgia. The Jubilee 2000 movement (named after a biblical tradition) has been key in urging debt relief in Africa and Latin America. Voices in the Wilderness has tirelessly witnessed against the deadly US sanctions against Iraq. The list goes on and on. Green Party leader Joe Szwaja knows this, as his attendance at many church-sponsored events shows.
Wake up, folks. You are needlessly alienating your largest constituency and at the same time, showing yourselves as closet reactionaries in denying the power of Jesus, the most radical person who ever lived, in the lives of people in our area and throughout the world. The greatest single inspiration to work for justice is the trust that the Creator's power of life is always greater than empire's death-dealing.
Shalom,
--Wes Howard-Brook Seattle
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