Excerpted from "Beyond the Culture Wars: The Promise of the Emerging Progressive Religious Movement," with the permission of the author, Robert P. Jones.

In the aftermath of the 2004 elections, I did some real soul searching about the role of religion in American public life. For me, this period was the beginning of a three-year journey to find "the other religious America"--authentic voices that are deeply rooted in religious traditions; voices that unite rather than divide; and voices that demand attention to a broader agenda of peace, social justice, care for the environment, respect for pluralism, and the common good.

At the beginning of this journey, I knew most clearly what I was not looking for: the religion of the self-assured culture warriors that proffered a politicized Christianity focused on banning same-sex marriage and abortion. I also knew I was looking for more than a liberal political platform with a thin coat of hastily applied religiosity, the kind of touch-up job one does when selling a house. So I set out to find the religious left, but along the way I found something more important--progressive religion.

In my interviews with nearly one hundred leaders in four religious traditions, I asked for responses to a 2006 front-page Washington Post story that trumpeted, "The Religious Left is back." To my surprise, few of the people I had initially classified as the religious left strongly identified with that term, and many rejected it as too reactionary and narrow. Sister Joan Chittister, Chair of the Global Peace Initiative for Women and Co-chair with Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Network of Spiritual Progressives , captured this spirit beautifully:

I don't want to be part of anything anymore in my life that makes those boundaries barriers. I don't want to be defined as right or left. I want to be defined as a Christian with the world in mind. The people who are really leaders are trying to move us all without internecine warfare into a very spiritual world, a very new world.
I quickly realized two things about what being "progressive" means in this new landscape. First, many leaders took pains to emphasize that they use the term to refer to a social and political outlook and not necessarily to religiosity. That is, while some leaders I talked with consider themselves politically and theologically liberal, many most naturally ground their progressive political views in traditional or orthodox religious beliefs and practices.

Second, the word "progressive" signals a new politics of "progress" that is self-consciously moving beyond the old left-right dichotomies of the culture wars. In fact, one mark of these emerging progressive religious voices is that they are building a strong coalition of left and center, liberals and moderates. Omid Safi, professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina, described what he saw as a healthy rapprochement between left and center Muslim leaders--a phenomenon I encountered across all four religious traditions:

In their own hearts and in their own personal lives, Muslims are beginning the process of commingling these ideas, of taking some of the moral, ethical imperatives of progressives and combining them, mixing them, blending them with the mastery of the tradition that sometimes they have learned from more moderate leaders. I think that's happening, and that's tremendously encouraging.
This combination of progressive moral, ethical, and political perspectives with a "mastery of the tradition" and commitment to religious practice often associated with more moderate or conservative voices is illuminating a promising path forward. It is being ushered in both by a broadening of the agenda among evangelical Christians and by the arrival of significant numbers of Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and other religious voices in the public sphere. This new way is a mark of maturation. Its emergence has certainly produced some growing pains, and it has yet to fully flower. But it is a clear break from the wedge politics of the past, and it represents a new stage of development for religion in American public life.

The last few years have witnessed what E.J. Dionne and others have described as the end of the era of the religious right. The receding tide of the religious right, however, has not left the political field devoid of religion. On the contrary, it has revealed a new religious landscape--an emerging left-center coalition of progressive religious leaders that are reclaiming the root meaning of religion as a force that binds people together to work for justice, the common good, and the healing of the world, including healing the wounds caused by the acrimonious tone and divisive agenda of the Christian right.