The Religious Left lost its spiritual, political, and institutional pillars. It exists today through largely unheeded voices who emerge at places like Union Seminary in New York City. There was also an Evangelical Left, including groups like Evangelicals for Social Action and Sojourners, which tried to stay orthodox while touting progressive politics, but which also has faded, liberalizing on sexuality and unable to stay meaningfully evangelical. 

There will always be religious voices on the political and theological left of course. But its main institutions are all in sharp decline and many are fading away, such that American religion is dominated by voices on the right.

The latest near demise is Faith and Public Life, which is reducing its staff from 19 to two, with a budget that’s quickly declined from $6 million to $223,802. Founded in 2006 by a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister to advocate for progressive causes, it was closely aligned with Mainline Protestantism, as has been most of the Religious Left. As Mainline Protestantism recedes, so too does the institutional Religious Left. The same article in Sojourners, a Religious Left outlet, also admitted that Sojourners, which was founded in the 1970s by activist Jim Wallis, is itself cutting back.  

It’s hard to name a single Religious Left institution today that retains major influence in America. Of course, some MAGA evangelicals call non-MAGA religious evangelicals “Religious Left,” since they themselves have no memory or awareness of the real Religious Left. More on that later.

The Religious Left, unlike the modern Religious Right, emerged from the institutional church, mostly Mainline Protestantism but also including some leftwing Roman Catholic orders that also have lost influence. The Mainline Protestant denominations, chiefly the United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), Episcopal Church, United Church of Christ, American Baptist Church and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), including their predecessor bodies, institutionally embraced progressive politics and theology in the early 20th century. They further radicalized in the 1960s, which is when their 60-year membership decline began. Although the church membership remained more conservative, if passive, the prelates, and agencies became the Religious Left. Most of these denominations had and still have, although highly diminished, lobby offices on Capitol Hill. Their missions boards, publishing houses, and other national ministries, once but no longer influential, also aligned this way.

Mainline Protestantism formed the core of the National Council of Churches (NCC), a once formidable alliance representing, at least theoretically, tens of millions of American church members. It was the chief institutional voice for the Religious Left. The NCC starting in the 1940s, and preceded by the old Federal Council of Churches early in the 20th century, plausibly claimed to speak for the pillars of American religion. Up until twenty or so years ago, NCC presidents met with U.S. presidents and other potentates, made headlines, and the NCC was esteemed a serious political and cultural force. The NCC, once with hundreds of employees at its New York headquarters, now has only several employees in DC and is rarely cited.

There is also the World Council of Churches, based in Switzerland, but which long had a New York office, and which also was an organ of the Religious Left. In the 1960s and 1970s it funded, with church dollars, guerrilla groups, some of them Marxist, fighting to overthrow what was left of European colonialism in Africa.

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