Hold the presses. To hear the right talk, one would think that there’s not a religious left. But there is and this has always been the case. The difference is that democrats are believers in the concept of the separation of religion and government. Then the religious left do not require that every person of faith think alike. In general they’re respectful of others practicing the dictates of their faith as long as they don’t impose their beliefs on those who aren’t of like minds. Many have left religion institutions behind because they aren’t impressed with those who claim the Christian mantel and who can blame them. Just watching White Evangelicals supporting a morally bankrupt, racist leaning president would send most sane would be Christians running in the opposite direction. But most Democrats do self -identify as being Christians.

Democrats become politically active around issues to lift peoples up, to protect their rights, to correct an injustice which is how they display their moral values.

The talk of the religious left emergence by some political pundits is as a result of a speech delivered by the Democratic Party Mayor Pete Buttigieg who’s running to be the party’s next presidential candidate, when he openly discussed his faith in the context of his being gay.

The GOP conservatives are having a conniption over what Mayor Buttigieg has said regarding his faith, like they’re the only ones who have this right.

While I may have found this refreshing, the left will never walk in lock step when it comes to religion like the right does, and frankly, that’s a good thing.

In general, Evangelicals have become infamous in their singular-minded condemnation of the LGBTQ community as they actively pursue barring them from rights that everyone else enjoys.

Mayor Buttigieg hails from the same State of Indiana as the self proclaimed White Evangelist VP Mike Pence does, but Mr. Pence has chosen to take the mayor’s comments, as a personal attack on his religious beliefs.

As per the 4/12/2019 Rolling Stone report, “Pete Buttigieg Is Fighting, and Winning, a Battle Over Religion With Mike Pence” by Ryan Bort, “The VP says he doesn’t discriminate against anyone. Millions of LGBTQ Americans aren’t likely to agree.”

Excerpts:

“Pete Buttigieg is scheduled to officially announce his candidacy for president this weekend. The 37-year-old South Bend, Indiana, mayor has been steadily climbing in the polls — and in our 2020 Democratic candidate leaderboard — since announcing in January that he was forming a committee to explore his chances of landing the party’s nomination.”

“But it wasn’t until March that Buttigieg’s transformation from long-shot with a hard-to-pronounce last name to legitimate contender began in earnest. During a CNN town hall event at South by Southwest, Buttigieg, an openly gay Christian, was lauded for his deft performance, including how he questioned Mike Pence’s adherence to his faith, wondering whether the pious vice president stopped “believing in scripture when he started believing Donald Trump.”

“How would he allow himself to become the cheerleader for the porn star presidency?” said Buttigieg. The comments drew national headlines. They were also not the last he would make regarding Pence’s Christianity. The latest shots came during a Friday appearance on Ellen, a preview of which was released Thursday.”

“I don’t have a problem with religion,” Buttigieg said. “I’m religious too. I have a problem with religion being used as a justification to harm people and especially in the LGBTQ community. So many people, even today, feel like they don’t belong. You can get fired in so many parts of this country just for who you are, and that’s got to change. I’m not interested in feuding with the vice president, but if he wanted to clear this up he could come out today and say he’s changed his mind that it shouldn’t be legal to discriminate against anybody in this country for who they are. That’s all.”

Link to entire article: Pete Buttigieg Is Fighting, and Winning, a Battle Over Religion With …

But make no mistake, the right fundamentalists/ Evangelicals fear him. As per a 4/16/2019 Raw Story report, a journalist Chris Hedges, one of the people who has championed a left-wing version of Christianity, wrote an entire book on the Christian Right: 2007’s disturbing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” And as Hedges sees it, the Christian Right is a dangerous hate movement that has white nationalist tendencies, promotes a “Christianized fascism” in the US and shows “a strain of deep cruelty, savagery even.”

On April 11. 2019, Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post penned the following opinion piece, “Talk of a rising religious left is unfounded. It already exists.”

Excerpts:

“When South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg started talking religion on the 2020 campaign trail, people listened — for better and for worse.”

“Right-wing pundits were apoplectic — Fox News host Laura Ingraham called him “sanctimonious and self-righteous” — but the effect was even greater on the center-left. “Buttigieg is a symbol for a rising Christian left,” one CNN op-ed enthused. “Buttigieg is telling Democrats that they should concede nothing to Republicans on the topics of faith and values . . . because Democrats advance policies that happen to be consistent with our deepest faith traditions,” The Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared. Even Mayor Pete himself seemed to embrace the talk of a revitalized religious left with real electoral power. He told The Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “I think there’s an opportunity hopefully for religion to be not so much used as a cudgel but invoked as a way of calling us to higher values.”

“The religious left — perhaps a bloc of Democratic voters waiting to be mobilized, perhaps a segment of faithful people waiting for a leftward awakening — is always just about to happen. It lingers, always, on the horizon, a shadow cast by the electoral power and political clout of the religious right. Will it ever arrive?” What would it look like?”

“Talk of a rising religious left is puzzling in part because there is an already existing religious left — it just lacks the money, numbers and partisan leverage of the religious right. In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that roughly 59 percent of registered Democratic voters described themselves as Christian, with the single largest bloc inside the Christian set being black Protestants. The presence of these religious voters in the Democratic coalition is probably why so many presidential candidates do engage in faith-talk: Setting Buttigieg aside, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) have also been vocal about their Christian faith on the stump this season. (Indeed, Booker, too, was once hailed as an emblem of the rising religious left.)”

“While white evangelical Christians make up the single largest religious bloc in the Republican Party (and have for decades), the biggest single bloc in the Democratic Party belongs to “nones,” who claim no religious affiliation. And their share is growing. In 1997, nones made up just 9 percent of the party; in 2017, 33 percent. Democrats do not appear to be growing more religious with time; neither does it appear likely that any particular religious constituency will gain the kind of dominance within the party that evangelical Christians have achieved on the right.”

“Nor are America’s faithful moving to the left. Ryan P. Burge, an instructor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, recently looked into the political shifts taking place among the United States’ religious population. Using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, Burge tracked changes in party identification among Christians between 2008 and 2018. Of 34 traditions, Burge wrote, “just seven moved leftward on the partisanship spectrum, while 27 moved to the right.” In a phone interview, Burge theorized that, as churches move to the right, their liberal members don’t necessarily respond by forming religious-left offshoots, but instead leave religion altogether. A person in that situation, Burge mused, might simply say: “I think I’m done with religion, because there’s no place for me.”

“None of which means that there aren’t leftist activists who are religious: The Poor People’s Campaign, co-led by the Rev. William J. Barber II, is an excellent example of contemporary left-Christian organizing. Members of the Catholic Worker movement continue to protest war and injustice, and smaller, grass-roots religious-left activism still regularly springs up at the local level.”

“But religion simply isn’t the mass mobilizing force on the left that it has been on the right. Republicans have been successful in fashioning a unified identity for right-wing Christian voters regardless of denomination: The religious right, after all, includes any number of evangelical-adjacent groups, including “evangelicalized” white Catholics. The crux of their alliance is opposition to abortion and liberal views on sexuality — but the religious left has no such unified identity, in part because it has no such unanimously agreed-on priorities. And while the Republican Party has many millions of right-leaning religious voters to draw upon, Democrats face a much more fractured, increasingly nonreligious base. It’s hard to see where the rising tide of a religious left will swell from.”

“And that may be, in some sense, for the best. The religious left is at its most authentic when standing in opposition to earthly power, serving as a prophetic conscience for all those who wield it for ill — consider, for example, the successes of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Aligning with power on a large, institutional scale does not necessarily improve the political prospects of a religious constituency; neither does it guarantee a fair bargain spiritually. ”

See: thinkprogress.org/ Evangelical college students say they don’t want Mike Pence to be their commencement speaker – The vice president is facing backlash from students and alumni who say he doesn’t represent their Christian values.vange…