NSP Spiritual Covenant with America    

 (excerpts  -   for full text go to www.spiritualprogressives.org)

1.  Relationships and Families:   We need a culture that nurtures the spiritual and emotional underpinnings of family – a culture that honors nurturing, love, gentleness, and kindness . . . and provides equal respect to both women and men.   We will challenge the materialism and selfishness that undermine loving relationships and family life. 

2.   Personal Responsibility for Ethical Behavior:   We will see others as embodiments of the sacred which maximizes our capacities to be loving, and generous and caring.  We will be compassionate toward each other, recognizing that each of us is unlikely to be the fullest embodiment of our highest ideals. We take the responsibility to inform ourselves of what is happening in the world around us – and what we can do to create positive change.    We respect diversity, honor those with whom we disagree, and forgive those who offend us.    

3.   Environmentally and Socially Responsible.   We will build social responsibility into the normal operations of our economic and political life.     We seek to eliminate poverty, ensure full employment, provide for public safety, and require that those who regulate our economy, our health systems, our communications, our utilities, and environmental and consumer safety do so in ways that protect the common good.    The Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that we propose requires corporations to prove that it has a satisfactory history of social responsibility.  

4.    Reshape our Education System:   We support education that fosters children’s capacities to be loving and caring human beings and helps students grow into responsible, ethically and ecologically attuned adults.   We will teach the values of love, caring, generosity, intellectual curiosity, tolerance, gratitude, awe and wonder of the universe, democratic participation and environmental responsibility.

5.   National Health Care Plan:  Everyone deserves affordable health care.  We will seek a single-payer health care plan and broaden the public’s understanding of health care.   We propose a new model of care that looks after our health in all dimensions:  physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.    

6.  Stewards of the Environment:   We will build new technologies, new systems of transportation, new forms of planning for our cities that release us from dependence on fossil fuels and help us live in a more sustainable manner.   We will champion voluntary simplicity and ethical consumption while seeking to change the global economy so that it is ordered in rational and sustainable ways.   

7.  Foreign Policy and Homeland Security Transformation.   We will build a safer world and promote a rational approach to immigration through a strategy of nonviolence.  We will harness American generosity to heal the pain caused by hatred, poverty, hunger, inadequate health care, inadequate education, and the manipulation of the global economy so as to serve the interests of advanced industrial societies and their allies among the elites of third-world countries.  The well-being of Americans depends on the well being of every other person on the planet and the planet itself.   

8.  Separation of Church, State and Science:  The values to shape our life – kindness and generosity, caring about the impact of our actions on the well-being of others, love of knowledge and an appreciation of the accumulated wisdom of humanity, gratitude for all the goodness that surrounds us,  justice and peace – are shared by many secular as well as many religious people.    We will foster respect and tolerance for all religious communities and paths, as well as for nonreligious orientations.      We will seek to protect our society from imposed religion as well as lack of spiritual values in the public sphere.  We will promote scientific research and rational thought and not allow the priorities of science to be set by the corporate marketplace or be restricted by religious dogma.  

We seek to change all this.  We are a consciousness-raising movement, and so our primary task . . . is to not compromise what we believe in for the sake of short-term political gain.   We must instead advocate for our fullest vision and insist on why it makes the most sense as the path to heal American society..