1. An interesting thing about writing a book on the Religious Left: when folks talk to me about it, the convo often includes a discussion of all the different stories to tell.

It's a reminder of how little has been written about the modern RL compared to the Religious Right.

2. E.g., in just the past few months *several* (fantastic) books have been published by journalists/academics about various elements of the Religious Right — its leaders, ideology, theology, organizations, etc.

To me, the discrepancy points to the difficulty of unpacking power.

3. To be sure, the Religious Right has been very successful in modern times when it comes to accumulating and actualizing on power — especially in the ballot box and at the courts.

But far less attention is paid to how the *left in general* accumulates power, much less the RL.

4. The modern progressive coalition is hyper-complex, and represents a myriad of sub-coalitions who are often presumed to have little to no power—and for good reason.

But when the coalition moves together, it's clear that politics shifts with it—and the same is true for the RL.

5. For a researcher or reporter, the task of assessing that coalition—its history, its various leaders/permutations—is absolutely *daunting.* And if broken into pieces to tell those stories, it can look like the left (and the Religious Left) isn't actually powerful.

E.g...

6. One of the left's (and especially the Religious Left's) chosen power-building techniques is protest. It's a method often used by those with limited access to power, as it's usually literally about persuading the powerful—not *becoming* the powerful.

And movements take *time.*

7. Consequently, when a movement succeeds, it can be difficult to credit individual leaders — especially modern progressive protest movements, which can often appear essentially leader-less when compared to leader-focused protest movements of the mid-20th century.

8. So the success of modern protest movements are often chalked up to a general sense of "cultural change," and while early activists are sometimes credited, it's typically described as a sort of amorphous natural phenomenon that was simply bound to happen eventually.

9. The result is the presumption that the left — and, by extension, the Religious Left — is weak or anemic, more riding the tide of cultural change than causing it.

But that fails to account for the activists and communities that helped will that shift into existence.

10. All of which is to say: assessing the power of the Religious Left can be really, really hard, because it operates in ways that are counterintuitive to our popularized understanding of how power works.

But that doesn't mean it's not powerful.

Because, well, it is.

11. That's why my book spends time on movements that initially appear to be wildly disconnected from one another.

But if you hang in there, it slowly becomes clear how they operate together.

And yet: there are so many more stories to tell! https://www.amazon.com/American-Prophets-Religious-Progressive-Politics/dp/0062935984/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=