The daughter of a Baptist preacher who was once the dean of the Howard University School of Divinity, Newsome came by her faith and her preaching honestly, yet almost all of the publicity that followed her act of civil disobedience stripped her protest of its theological tenor. Such is the fate of much of the activism of the so-called religious left: if it is successful, it is subsumed by broader causes and coalitions; if it fails, it is forgotten. For all the opprobrium directed at the religious right, the activism of religious leftists suffers a different fate, alternately ignored and fetishized, trotted out every election cycle with a tone befitting the Second Coming: always just about to happen. This year’s Presidential race is the most obvious occasion for the new book “American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country,” by the reporter Jack Jenkins.
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That is all too often the tone of coverage of the religious left. In her book “The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap,” from 2008, the journalist Amy Sullivan observed the contradictory ways in which religious liberals and religious conservatives are covered by the mainstream press, with the faith of right-wing politicians generally taken at face value, while those on the left are often ignored, treated with skepticism, or disparaged as insincere and pandering.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/is-there-a-religious-left
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