Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Talk to Action began just a week ago, founded by blogger Bruce Wilson, me, some fellow kossacks including Pastordan, and -- a half dozen writers who are brand spanking new to the blogosphere. It's an engaging and formidable bunch; the writing is terrific and the discourse is civil even as the subjects are always hot.

Here are excerpts from my opening remarks:

We are delighted that you have decided to join us in this pioneering discussion. We are also delighted to have with us today, my fellow contributors to the current special issue of Mother Jones, magazine, Susan Jacoby and John Sugg; as well as Senior Editor Monika Bauerlein, and Communications Director Richard Reynolds....

We are also honored that former Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO) will also be joining us. (One of our featured writers, Jonathan Hutson discussed Hart's new book here last week, and highly recommended it.)

Talk to Action is different than other blog sites, as you will see if you read our statement of purpose and site guidelines carefully. (If you haven't yet, please do, it's important.) Also, please excuse us. We are only a week old, and are still putting up material about the site; resources, and more. Each time you come back to visit, you will notice improvements both small and large...

Getting back to the e-conference, I just want to note that the first sentence of our statement of purpose reads: "Talk to Action is a
platform for reporting on, learning about, and analyzing and discussing the religious right -- and what to do about it."  That's why we invited
Mother Jones to come over and talk a bit about their extraordinary issue on religion in general, and their articles on the religious right
in particular. Please give Mother Jones your congratulations for undertaking this, and for producing so much important material.

In order to be able to fully and meaningfully participate in this e-conference, please read the feature articles by our guest writers, Susan Jacoby and John Sugg.  They have offered short introductory statements, but even they cannot do justice to the breadth and depth of
their work. Susan's article details much about how and why the framers of the Constitution had such a clear-eyed view of the relationship between religion and government. John Sugg explains the role of the theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement in the Christian Right. Some of us have written quite a lot about this subject over the years. But it is only in the past few years that Reconstructionism and the wider dominionist movement has become more widely understood and written about. If you read the front page posts on Talk to Action over the past week, you will find more discussion of dominionism and Reconstructionism than I think I have ever seen in one place outside of Reconstructionist literature and web sites. John's article couldn't be more timely...

I am tempted to say that my own contribution, to this issue of Mother Jones which seeks to chart some, but certainly not all, of the known universe of the religious right, speaks for itself. But that isn't quite true.

I have heard a lot of wishful thinking over the years, often in print, that the Christian Right is dead. These repeated reports of the death of
the Christian Right were, like Mark Twain's famous obituary, "premature." But these statements were important because they signaled a profound ignorance of the Christian Right on the part of those who wrote or said these things -- and everyone who believed them at the time. In fact, the Christian Right has, over the years, built a formidable infrastructure of radio and broadcast operations, sophisticated political organizations,Washington lobbies, colleges, universities and law schools and more. Most of this did not exist three decades ago -- at least not on the scale it does today.

My advice to anyone reading this is: Get to know these organizations, their leaders and thinkers, and how they do the things they do.  They will
be playing a central role in American public life for the rest of your lives.

Mother Jones' Senior Editor Monika Bauerlein writes in her statement:

"Together with the rest of the Mother Jones editorial staff, I helped conceive, edit, and produce the magazine's special issue on religion and politics. We chose this topic to add some light to the enormous amount of heat being generated about religion and politics now--from the hackneyed analyses of voters' concern with "moral issues" to candidates' now-routine genuflections to the noisiest (though not necessarily most representative) preachers out there...  Personally, I'll confess that I thought I knew a fair amount about the intersections of religion and politics before starting to work on this issue--and I discovered that not only do I know squat..."

Bauerline is not alone. Few people are very well informed on this subject. At Talk to Action, we are about learning, and what I call "learning in the open." Sure we have people with lots of expertise. But we are all learning, and we want to foster an environment that is less about attitude and opinion, and a lot more about learning the things we need to know to engage in the central struggles of our time.