As someone who works for a living on campaigns I know first hand of the value of volunteers and the hours that they put in on behalf of the candidate.  They are the gears that make a campaign move forward.  The more you have the faster your campaign is going to move and progress towards an Election Day victory.  

That’s why I am thoroughly impressed with the new campaign initiative from Tom Perriello’s bid for Congress.  They just launched a 10% tithe of volunteer hours to go back towards the community and service projects around the district (Devilstower beat me to it).  The campaign kick started the idea with 42 volunteer hours over the past weekend by constructing a house for Habitat for Humanity in Charlottesville, participated in a food drive and serving food to the hungry at a church.

In the interview that I had with Tom a few weeks back I was struck by this:

Q: How has your faith tradition helped shaped your political and social views?

A: I grew up in a church that preached the social justice message of the Gospels and called me to the teaching of Mathew 25. Sunday was a time that we heard about poverty, torture, and war and our moral obligation to care for and love our neighbor. My political views and my efforts to live a life of service were shaped by the prophetic call in Micah to serve the least among us and to "do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." As a Catholic, I know I will always fall short of this aspiration, but it remains my guiding light.

With this new initiative it seems that Tom and his campaign are further practicing what they preach.  They are actually taking time away from campaigning to help out in the community.  Granted the community service is good publicity for the campaign and is in a way campaigning the overall effects are moving towards the common good in Virginia’s fifth district.  I think it's a testament to the kind of representative that he would be in D.C.

While we await a response from Mike Huckabee and Huck PAC in regards to Pastor Dan’s two simple questions (I should state here that I have been in contact with someone and will hopefully get a response):

1.  Will you affirm the Christian faith and the American principles of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness by signing the Evangelical Declaration Against Torture?

2. Will you require the candidates supported by your campaign to take a stand against torture?

I wanted to share with you a great answer regarding torture from a faith perspective.  It comes from Tom Perriello, a Democrat running for Congress in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District.  Tom is a stalwart in the progressive faith movement as he helped found Faithful America and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Q: In 2004 as co-director of Faithful America you aired commercials on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya featuring prominent religious leaders apologizing for the treatment of prisoners in Abu-Gharib. Why did you feel that was necessary to come from religious leaders and should they be apologizing for actions taken by military officials?

A: Torture is immoral and, in my reading, an act of blasphemy against the image of God in another human being. When our leaders make the decision to condone torture, something powerful in the soul of our country is suffocated.

Torture also undermines our national security, produces bad intelligence, and puts our troops at risk. The images from Abu Ghraib became powerful propaganda weapons for Osama Bin Laden to use in recruiting a new generation of terrorists to threaten our great nation. Terrorism is fundamentally immoral and a grave threat to our country, and one purpose of our ad was to blunt the recruiting bonanza that Bush handed to Al Qaeda in the wake of those images. One of the many things this Administration has never understood about the threats we face is how to fight back successfully against their propaganda battle. I am proud that we were able to produce an ad that spoke to America’s highest principles and helped make us safer at the same time.

As for whether one can ethically apologize for someone else’s actions, the theologians and faith leaders involved in this ad were careful to make it an expression of regret, and not an apology in order to clarify the lines of culpability. Our great nation could use a boost of people taking personal responsibility seriously, so it is distressing to see this Administration refuse to step up to the plate. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, it has repeatedly had our men and women in uniform take the blame without taking its own responsibility for this disaster. The religious leaders in our ad exemplified what moral leadership looks like.

From a faith perspective, conservative or progressive, torture is, as Tom says, immoral and against the image of God in ourselves.  As for politically, Tom states the obvious reasons against the use of torture, hurting our world image and it being a way to recruit more terrorists.

Tom seems like a guy that we could really use in D.C. and if you don’t believe me please read the rest of the interview.

We need to hear the voices of political, religious, and cultural leaders on this issue, but more importantly we need to look into our own hearts and our own conscience from there we must realize that torture is wrong.

As mentioned below, my intertubes were tied in a knot for most of Friday, so I missed hearing about Tom Perriello's apparently controversial post at TPMCafe until late last night. Our own RussellKing explains in more detail, but the basic issue was this paragraph in the midst of a diatribe against the "Culture of Greed":

(2) Internet Porn: Censorship may not be a viable or appropriate solution, but do any of us honestly believe that the ready availability of internet porn is not destroying something sacred within us? Study after study shows that porn tends to depict women in violently subjugated positions, and can shift norms of sexual expectations. Get a group of liberals in a room and there is little they will not pass judgment on, but when we start to talk about this in our politics, the conversation starts and ends with “So what are you going to do, censor it? Repress people sexually?” This is an irresponsibly false choice. Part of the conviction politics I outlined earlier this week is about calling things as we see it.

That was enough to set some folks off. It sparked a heated conversation, which Perriello responded to by asking "Should We Fear A Religious Left?'

The short answer to that question is: yes. Paranoia about political factions is a fine part of the great American tradition, after all. But we also should be a bit leery of the implications of this argument:

The Separation of Church and State is inviolate, but it does not mean the division of politics and ethics. For as long as we want to say that the Iraq war is “wrong” we are operating in a realm of ethics. We can make a purely strategic argument (this makes us less safe), a legal case (preventative war breaches international law) or an explicitly moral argument (preventative war is wrong/un-American), but each of these has an underlyng normative position (our safety is paramount, the rule of law is inviolate, preventative war is wrong). A nation cannot live on laws alone, it requires an ethical people to devise and uphold them.

This just moves the argument back a step, of course. Instead of chewing over the role of religion in society, the conversation shifts to the sources of ethics and whether or not a common ethics is possible across lines of belief. There might be something to that philosophically, but politically, I think it's a dead waste of time. More important, it privileges ethical intent in a political system where professed intent is abundant but carry-through is in short supply. Call it the Barack Obama problem: hell, yeah I'm afraid of the Religious Left if what it adds up to is another damn excuse for politicians to signal their ethical stance without actually doing anything.

Or to put it another way, normative statements about Iraq are fine, but unless they result in meaningful steps toward withdrawal, what are they worth?

But to come back to the presenting issue (porn), Matt Stoller had a post up at OpenLeft whose title I plundered for this piece. I had a bit of a problem with Matt's headline, in that I'd never actually heard of Tom Perriello before this week, and I'm unaware of any progressive religious issue group that has pornography as a major concern.

Which is not to set myself up as a gatekeeper by any means. I'm hardly the most insider of personalities, and I would never presume to own the definition of "the Religious Left." My point is simply that there's not enough of a coherent movement to say that the Religious Left is coming out against this or in favor of that. Unlike the Religious Right, which has been controlled by a few, well-coordinated groups, we progressive faith types are pretty loosely-knit. That's in fact one of our major struggles, though of course increased coordination wouldn't be without some trade-offs.

In fact, what you find out is that there are real differences even among religious folks, some of whom are more conservative on social issues than others. I don't begrudge Perriello his position on porn, even if I think it's wrong. But by the same token, I don't think it's fair for that position to stand as representative of The Religious Left with no more evidence than Perriello's say-so.