The American Friends Service Committee, the Unitarian Church, a gamut of other protestant churches do NOT resemble your caricature.

Why distort the reality of spiritual effort so, by a slogan?

You don't like Tikkun for example, of the religious left?

Sometimes you sound like an idiot Philip.

I appreciate your sailing into uncharted waters. I don’t necessarily agree with your terminology in this post, but at least at this point, I think I understand your point.

Now that I have left Uris behind, I’ll surely admit that I don’t know any answers but I do believe that America is the greatest gift to and for the Jewish people since the beginning of the Exile. So I tend to stress the notion of religious liberty and a separation of church (synagogue) and state more than just pure secularism, although , again, I understand.

I offer an observation simply for consideration: strategic analysis is based upon assumptions that typically rise out of a worldview. And, more times than not, a worldview is going to bump up against and overlap theological interpretations. When it comes to Zionism, I think this certainly applies to the “religious left” and even avowed atheists such as Dersh. He after all approaches Zionism with a religious zeal (something the Satmar rabbis have warned us about, at least from what I can tell.)

So anytime I see examples of strategic analysis, I try to look for assumptions, which then help me construct a possible worldview of the person, group, or nation offering the analysis. From there, I then try to determine the perhaps unexpressed intent of the one offering the analysis.

If you asked me to construct a worldview based upon the statement by Wilder, I would first refer to Gorenberg’s work (among others) and then say that underlying this analytical content is an intent — or impulse — to rebuild the Third Temple by human hands at the same place where the Al Asqa Mosque now stands.

Anyway, I understand what you're trying to do, but you need a different term for it. Secular liberals who are kneejerk Zionists–well, I'm not clever enough to come up with a phrase, but "religious left" doesn't cut it.

These people are not left. They are as far right as you can get.

The real "religious left" are the "true" religionists, ie those who interpret religion in terms of justice, compassion, mercy, truth, forgiveness etc.

Someone who uses religion to justify slavery, murder, empire etc are what is called "the Antichrist" (false prophets – Pat Robertson, confederates etc). "The Beast" of course is the emperor.

All this is common knowledge in Christianity but even you as a progressive Jew should not make the error of describing right wing fundamentalist fanatics as the "religious left".