When your team is on top, there’s no need to complain
That the rules that you play by aren’t fair
So let’s look at the interfaith statement again
But let’s notice which names are not there.
Something was bugging me last night; there was a reason I was not optimistic about the interfaith statement I wrote about. It wasn’t until I woke this morning that I realized–it’s not who’s on the list, it’s who’s off it.
You can always tell who is in front in a political race by who is not complaining about negative advertising, or PACs, or the influence of this group or that. Winners (even short term) like the current system; losers want to fix it.
Let’s look at the list again:
American Islamic Congress
American Jewish Committee
Anti-Defamation League
Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty
Interfaith Alliance
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)
Hindu American Foundation
Muslim Advocates
National Council of Churches USA
Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF)
Sikh Coalition
Union for Reform Judaism
The United Methodist Church – General Board of Church and Society
United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries
Do you see the word “Catholic” there? How about “Mormon” (or “Latter-Day”)? Nope, and nope (nope). And don’t bother looking for dominionist groups, either.
And like Kyoto, it doesn’t work unless the biggest offenders sign on. But the biggest offenders have nothing to gain from this agreement, and risk looking like losers if they sign.
What looked like a promising start, looks more and more like a coalition of the powerless.
The good thing about coalitions is that, if used properly, they can overpower the single, powerful groups. Just like our labor unions or the ACLU; they give power to the individual people who don’t have it by collecting all these individual people together. So it is true that this won’t have a huge impact if no high-impacting individual groups join it, it may have an impact if the groups that signed do more than just sign it.
Whether or not they will, or whether this is just a PR stunt like so many things, remains to be seen.
It’s interesting to look at who is a member of the NCC:
http://www.ncccusa.org/members/
But you’re right, and here’s what you might consider bad news in this case, from 2010, along with some numbers:
http://www.ncccusa.org/news/100204yearbook2010.html
I should have read this post before commenting on the last one.
I think the Lorax has a point, if this coalition actually steps up and really does what it says it’s goals are then I think it might have enough collective clout to make a big enough noise to make it clear that the religious right does not speak for all religious folks in this country. I applaud their goals and hope it works. I’ve always said that while I may believe all religions get it wrong, I’m pretty okay with working with the reasonable ones and agreeing to disagree.