The Rev. Dr. Otis Moss Jr. "We believe in a theology of inclusive love and justice."

One afternoon last May, the Cleveland Play House's Brooks Theater was filled to overflowing. The crowd wasn't there to see a matinee of a popular play. Instead, the diverse gathering, sporting yarmulkes, hajibs and turbans, represented a cross-section of Cleveland's faith community, and they were revved up.

After this informal congregation rendered ragged versions of such tunes as "Lift Every Voice and Sing," "Cantemos al Senor (Let's Sing unto the Lord)," "Siyahamba (Walking in the Light of God)" and "Peace Salaam Shalom," reading from gold and lavender and robin's-egg-blue song sheets passed out earlier, some of the nearly 100 Northeast Ohio clergy — representing Protestants, Catholics, Unitarians, Sikhs, Jews and Muslims — in attendance began to address the crowd. Their message was clear and strong: Faith has been hijacked to attain narrow political goals, and we intend to do something about it.

That "something" was the formation of We Believe Ohio, whose Cleveland chapter the clergy at the Cleveland Play House were formally christening that day. The group grew out of an endeavor that had begun in Columbus in late 2005 — a similar kickoff event took place there at the First AME Zion Church in March — and out of conversations that people of faith in both cities had been having throughout 2005 as they assessed the impact of the previous year's elections.

"I was the main force, and I don't say that egotistically," says We Believe Ohio originator the Rev. Timothy C. Ahrens of the First Congregational Church of Columbus. "It's just the mighty spirit that is blowing through the state, and it's an amazing force of people pushing back and saying no to the religious right. In mid-October, I sat down over a nice cup of coffee on a Saturday morning and opened the paper and read that [religious right leader] Rod Parsley and his group were on the Statehouse steps saying, and I quote, "We are locked, loading and firing on Ohio.' My next question was, "And what does this have to do with Jesus?' We wanted to have another voice in the public square and to end the monologue and have a dialogue."

Since the 2004 election, the Christian right had been gloating. In many states, including Ohio, conservative voters had turned out to support anti-gay-marriage measures on their ballots. Those measures passed — overwhelmingly in Ohio — and accomplished the mission for which they'd been written, ensuring the reelection of President Bush. The leaders of the religious right in Ohio, the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church and the Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church, both in suburban Columbus, quickly began to plan for the next election.

"Christian conservative leaders from scores of Ohio's fastest-growing churches are mounting a campaign to win control of local government posts and Republican organizations, starting with the 2006 governor's race," The New York Times reported in March 2005. "The Ohio Restoration Project [a supposedly nonpartisan project founded by Johnson] is planning to mobilize 2,000 evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic leaders in a network of so-called Patriot Pastors to register half a million new voters, enlist activists, train candidates and endorse conservative causes in the next year. The initial goal is to elect Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a conservative Republican, governor in 2006."

So what went wrong?

That story involves progressives of faith — a "religious left" if you will — who finally awoke to the fact that three decades of organizing on the religious right has redefined the entire concept of faith in America in ways that don't sit easily with many people.

In mid-November 2005, Ahrens called a meeting, inviting various Christian pastors he knew. About 50 showed up, and they quickly decided that the group needed to reach outside the Christian community. Imams, rabbis and other religious leaders were invited to join the discussion, and together they found common ground.

"People are getting riled up with a state government that is not meeting that mandate of the Supreme Court about education," says Ahrens. "We're not paying our low-income workers enough, poverty continues to increase, jobs continue to leave. Ray Miller, who's a state senator, spoke at an event recently, and he said, "When I came into the legislature in 1981, there was less talk about God and the work of God was done more regularly. Now we talk about God all the time and none of God's work is getting done.' So there's that sense that all this God talk is producing a rather ungodly state of affairs. We're saying, let's lift up poverty as a moral issue and address the needs of those who are poor and those who are left out."

JIm WALLIS His 2005 book God's Politics launched discussions across the country.

Meanwhile, Kara Patterson, who'd been hired by the Cleveland branch of the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ) in 2005 to help get its newly formed Interfaith Taskforce off the ground, went down to Columbus with former executive director Sandy Schwartz to observe what was going on.

"We saw how successful it was and decided to sort of move forward here," Patterson explains. "NCCJ used to be the National Conference of Christians and Jews, so one of our goals is to promote understanding and tolerance between different groups of people and different religions."

The group was having conversations along those lines even before that, however. Recalls the Rev. George Hrbek of Cleveland's Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry, "Last August the NCCJ convened a few of us to explore addressing or providing a different voice than the one coming out of the Patriot Pastors. There were probably about 10 of us that gathered at First [United Methodist] Church, [the Rev.] Ken Chalker's church. And it was a pretty diverse group. We had a series of meetings and crafted a statement and began to gather signatures of endorsement on that statement.

"Meanwhile, the folks under Tim Ahrens in Columbus had established We Believe. So we had made some contacts to find out what was going on there and then to say that eventually we probably need to link up."

The March '05 New York Times article outlined how the religious right was defining the debate for Blackwell's primary opponents, to Blackwell's advantage: "Jim Petro, the attorney general, opposed the same-sex marriage amendment on the grounds that it would invite litigation against companies that provided domestic partner benefits. Betty D. Montgomery, the state auditor, has supported some abortion rights."

Abortion and gays. Gays and abortion. Those so-called "wedge" issues had rocketed the Republican Party to power and had made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from the religious right. It had, to paraphrase former Diebold head Wally O'Dell, delivered Ohio's electoral votes for the president.

The demonstrated impact of the religious right on electoral politics and the direction of the country set off alarm bells among some religious figures who didn't agree with their focus. One was the Rev. John Lentz of Forest Hill Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights, who's on the steering committee of We Believe.

"Two Mays ago, I was asked to preach at the Washington National Cathedral in D.C.," he recalls. "I was preparing a sermon for that and a member of my church sent me something through the Internet about the rise of the so-called Patriot Pastors and the Ohio Restoration Project. I remember I was struck by two things: the one about winning Ohio for Christ; and secondly, the named support of Ken Blackwell. So that caught my attention and made me very worried. So in part I shaped my sermon around that. What is this that's going on in the country? I was truly horrified that my tradition was being usurped and twisted into a theology of narrowness, a theology of exclusion, a theology of intimidation, even, and a theology of making people see it my way or get lost."

While all the participants in the We Believe coalition did not agree on the hot-button issues, they agreed that their faith required them to focus on other things. As the Rev. Otis Moss Jr. told the gathering at the Play House, "Our nation needs recommitment to public education as a cornerstone of a free society. Å  Charity is not a substitute for justice. Å  It's time for every child to have a healthy, safe, moral, loving start. Å  Fifty million Americans without health care is a weapon of mass destruction. Å  We believe in a theology of inclusive love and justice."

Just as Parsley's and Johnson's organizing in the pews and political activism paralleled activity going on around the country with powerful groups like Colorado Springs' Focus on the Family, led by the Rev. James C. Dobson, the nascent progressive faith movement in Ohio paralleled a national awakening as well. New organizations, conferences, books and Web sites started to address issues of progressive faith, while older organizations, such as the venerable Sojourners, led by Jim Wallis, gained new prominence.

Wallis' book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, published in January 2005, launched discussions across the country. Rabbi Michael Lerner's The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right, published in February 2006, spawned the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

JOHNSON All but disappeared by late 2006.

Web sites such as Talk2Action.org, FaithfulDemocrats.com, Street Prophets.com, an offshoot of the big kahuna of progressive Web sites, DailyKos, and FaithfulAmerica.org, a project of the venerable National Council of Churches, provided online communities. In Ohio, a pair of Cincinnati women, Marji Mendelsohn and Janice Weiss, formed WeUnite.com to monitor the activities of the Buckeye State's religious right. Both Jewish, they'd become alarmed by the exclusionary talk of Parsley and Johnson and began attending events such as Ohio Restoration Project's breakfasts featuring religious leaders like Tony Perkins and Phil Burress, "tracking and filing and reading, and meeting and talking to all these scholars and journalists," says Mendelsohn. "We saw the problem was very deep-seated and long-standing."

Groups like Faith in Public Life, which worked with We Believe Ohio to help get it up and running, and Cross Left ("balancing the Christian voice") and its Institute for Progressive Christianity, are giving prominence to the work of people like Frederick Clarkson, an expert on the political activities of the religious right, especially the so-called dominionists or reconstructionists who aim to establish a Christian, theocratic government.

While the religious left was gearing up and trying to hammer out its direction, it seemed like the best-laid plans of Ohio's religious right were fizzling.

While the Ohio Restoration Project held a series of organizing events throughout 2005 and early '06, all featuring Blackwell, those events had ceased by the spring. Blackwell's campaign never seemed to find a strong religious voice, while the faith campaign of Democrat Ted Strickland, an ordained minister, was more nuanced and successful as he drew the conversation away from abortion and gay marriage into areas such as economic growth, health care and education. Blackwell finally announced the support of an assemblage of Christian pastors late in the campaign, in press conferences in Columbus and Cincinnati in late August where he was flanked by less than 30 clergy, many of them from out of state. Where were the 2,000 Ohio Patriot Pastors? And while Johnson attended, Parsley was conspicuously absent.

Parsley resurfaced soon after with a letter to Cleveland-area clergy in which he lamented that he had been spending so much time building his national ministry that he had not gotten to know his fellow pastors in Ohio. He proposed to "get to know you more personally" in a program consisting, he said, of "a brief exhortation, followed by a question-and-answer session and a time of fellowship." Many of the clergy who received this letter assumed that it would be a thinly disguised campaign event for Blackwell, especially considering Parsley's ominous conclusion about "talking about how we can work together to win this state for Jesus Christ!"

His proposed get-together, at Mt. Sinai Church on Woodland Avenue on September 19, did contain some veiled plugs for Blackwell, according to the Rev. Lentz: "He didn't mention Blackwell but, for Pete's sake, everything he said, preached — "We're heading on the wrong path, forgotten our Christian base, we've got to get out there and vote our values.' It was the code language. I'll never forget his words about painting the vision of America. He said that back in 1954, 70 percent of the nation saw themselves as Bible-believing Christians and remember what the country was like then. And he said, we've projected out and in 20 years only 15 percent or something like that of people will believe that they're Bible-believing Christians. And it could get so bad that America could turn into — and I remember I almost laughed out loud — we will become like Sweden."

There was no dialogue whatsoever, Lentz recalls, and he and other observers said the event seemed more a promotional event for Parsley's growing religious empire, complete with a full array of merchandise for sale in the lobby.

Johnson, meanwhile, failed to show up for forums in Cleveland on three occasions, including one in September sponsored by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy which was scheduled to include a variety of religious and legal voices.

Where had their enthusiasm for influencing electoral politics gone — or had it just gone underground?

"I wouldn't be surprised if both Blackwell's campaign and these guys realized that it was going to be counterproductive because they were beginning to generate a very serious and I think effective backlash," says Lentz. "And I think that even the threat that some pastors started a lawsuit in terms of the separation of church and state endorsement, they really did a lot of backtracking."

In December 2005, a group of Columbus-based pastors, including the Rev. Eric Brown of Woodland Christian Church, one of We Believe Ohio's Columbus co-conveners, complained to the IRS that Parsley's and Johnson's churches had violated their tax-exempt nonprofit status with openly partisan campaigning.

Rabbi Jack Chomsky and the Rev. Tim Ahrens At the Cleveland We Believe kickoff.

Surprisingly, the IRS seemed to take it seriously. The following spring the IRS issued a warning covering nonprofits and churches around the country to knock off the openly partisan political work. That could have had a dampening effect on the right's plans in Ohio.

"When the IRS is knocking on your door and asking for your financial records," says Frederick Clarkson, "and you know that you've been way over the line, and if you don't know your lawyers are telling you Å  and ok, it's campaign season and there's all these people keeping an eye on you. What do you do? You pull back and you live to fight another day. Blackwell was going down anyway, right? Yeah, they had great hopes for him, but hey, it wasn't working out. So Parsley and Johnson, who have big empires to maintain, they make smart choices. They had enough strength to get the nomination for Blackwell, but the combination of his obvious extreme views and his personal connection to the voter suppression [in the 2004 election] made him damaged goods at the outset."

Clarkson also feels that some of the Patriot Pastor talk may have been exaggerated because that's just human, as well as Pentacostal, nature.

"In Pentacostalism in general, there's a great deal of, shall we say, very expansive talk. Sometimes you can believe the truth of your biggest vision as an inevitable reality. And I think that's probably what happened to their original game plan."

Looking ahead, Clarkson expresses both caution and hope.

"These guys [in the religious right] are so far unanswered by our side," he says. "There is no religious left as an organized movement. As individuals, as small clusters of peoples, but as an organized movement in the [same] sense of the religious right, no. One of the things people need to get their minds around is the idea that the religious right is winning because we're not competing. Some people say, "How can you talk to those people?' Well, there's some people you can talk to and some people who you can't. We're competing for the people who you can talk to, and if we don't, we lose.

"They've accomplished a good bit of what they've accomplished not because society or conservative Christianity is any more conservative or any more religious than it has ever been," he continues. "It's because they've figured out how to relate their particular ideas about what being a Christian is to their idea of what the nation should be. They became very well organized. And they recognized that the principle avenue to power in the United States is electoral politics. I think the first thing we need to understand is that it's not about religion. It's about power and, sure, they're about the relationship between religion and power, but it's not first about religion."

We Believe Ohio is still in the early stages, trying to work out how to stay focused while maintaining its commitment to diversity. Last year it threw its voice behind the successful campaign to increase the minimum wage. In February it held a retreat to hash out its goals and organizational structure. And it's just announced "We Believe Ohio Day of Prayer in Action" May 3, on which clergy will lobby both the legislature and the governor's office on expanding health care and addressing school funding.

"A lot of this is still in formation," says Lentz. "I think it's both one of our great weaknesses and great strengths that we want a variety of voices at the table and we honor and appreciate discussion. We've got to discern where the spirit is leading us and we're struggling in a good way. We're beginning to develop a statewide coordinating team so that Columbus and Cleveland can work together. This is a movement that is just beginning.

"The reality is that the religious right, this unholy trinity of big business, big government and big religious right churches, has been working at this for 30 years," Ahrens adds. "Now we're talking to each other and we're getting organized so I think all of those things are very positive. I had conversations in six cities today with people that want to be a part of We Believe Ohio. Lorain, Dayton, Youngstown, Cincinnati. People are reading about this. People are picking things up in different places and saying, "Thank you, someone's finally doing something.'"