What Religious Progressives Bring To The Party

By Sara Robinson

Created 07/08/2009 - 2:21pm

I spent several days over last weekend as a volunteer webworker covering the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly [1] in Salt Lake City. These annual confabs are always a highlight of the summer for me as a UU. They're also one of the best shows going if you want to remember, all the way down, what it means to be liberal in America -- or understand, once again, why religious liberals are so critically important to the ultimate success of the progressive project.

There are a lot of theories of change; but like many of us, I'm particularly drawn to the one that says that if you want to change reality, you start by changing the story. Worldview, narrative, discourse, framing, whatever word you want to use for it -- the stories we tell about how reality works are the frameworks through which we set priorities, evaluate the good and the bad, establish value, and make meaning. And those priorities, evaluations, values, and meanings in turn drive the more concrete political decisions we make about how we solve problems and invest our resources -- and thus determine what kind of world we actually end up making.