When Maria asked that question, I took a moment to reflect on my own journey. Just a few years ago I made plans to give up on it all. I was frustrated with my church for not organizing more effectively and speaking more boldly. I also held off on my ordination after graduate school, expressing cynicism about my church's capitulation to conservatives on women's issues. While representing the Presbyterian Church at the United Nations in the early '90s, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Christian right's effort to curtail the global women's movement did little to help my cynicism — until the day I led a UN panel on religion, women, and AIDS. The first person in that packed room to rise and ask a question introduced herself as a Nigerian Pentecostal woman. I braced myself for her response to our panelists who had spoken about condoms, sex education, gay rights, and feminist theology. She wasn't mad about those things at all. Instead, she said, "Where have you been for God's sake!" She was appalled that she was only just now hearing about the panelists' faith-based resources on AIDS. That is when I decided that I had to be ordained. My cynicism was a luxury the world could not afford. I had for too long let others articulate my faith. After five years of hesitation, I was ordained a Presbyterian minister in the United Nations Chapel surrounded by colleagues of all faiths, banners of the world's religions, and the flags of all nations.

So it is in part because of the testimony of an isolated, bold Nigerian Pentecostal woman that I stand here today. And today I'd like to deliver a word of hope and of promise: A new day is dawning in the American values debate. There is restlessness across the country that is prodding people of faith to try something new. In one corner of the country it looked something like this:

On October 16, 2005, the Reverend Tim Ahrens rose to relax and read the morning paper. The headlines told of an Ohio Restoration Project and Patriot Pastors event on the statehouse steps. The Patriot Pastors, as many of you know, have been turning conservative churches into political machines for far right Republican candidates with rhetoric that might make Pat Robertson blush. Taking a sip of his coffee, Tim read that during the event, the Reverend Rod Parsely declared to the gathered crowd, "We are locking, loading and firing on Ohio!"

Tim spit his coffee across the room. Within days he wrote and called many of my local colleagues asking them one question: "Is what you are seeing in the public square reflective of the Christian faith you have known and lived?" Across central Ohio the answer came back a resounding "NO!" Tim's e-mail to his colleague has blossomed into a statewide interfaith coalition of clergy and lay people named We Believe Ohio.

We Believe has reached millions of Ohioans with the message that our faith traditions call us to work together for justice for all people, especially the most vulnerable in society, and that faith should not be used to divide and promote intolerance or be manipulated for political gain. Their media appearances and organizing helped shift the climate in Ohio in 2006 and continues to raise the level of public debate in the state.

There is a values quake happening in Ohio. And it's happening across this nation. WB founder, Tim Ahren's, put it this way on the day after the midterm elections in 2006: "I am proud to be a Christian leader in Ohio today. I am proud of those in all faith traditions with whom I stand to make a brighter and more beautiful future. We love God with our whole hearts, minds, and souls. We love our neighbors as ourselves. We are multi-cultural and multiracial. We are bridge builders. We love humanity and don't seek to demonize others. We are faithful and moral to the core of our souls. But we will not impose our faith and morality on others."

For progressive faith leaders across this country, 2004 was a watershed moment. They were determined not to let the stereotype of the conservative "values voter" describe faith and politics in America any longer. New movements have bubbled up at the grassroots, and older organizations are implementing new communications and organizing strategies to address the values debate. New organizations like Faith in Public Life have been founded to support these activists and amplify their work.

From We Believe Colorado to Faithful Arkansas, from Alabama Arise to Christians for the Mountains to the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, states and cities are reclaiming their voice with more sophisticated media and organizing work. On the national scene there is the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Interfaith Power and Light, Let Justice Roll, Faithful America, Crosswalk America, Evangelicals for Human Rights, Jews for Human Rights — the list could go on and on. Our FPL website is a testimony to this resurgence, if you subscribe to our daily newsreel on faith and politics or have visited our online directory/Google map of 3,000 faith organizations in all 50 states, you know it's undeniable!

In the '80s, Princeton religion historian Robert Wuthnow wrote a groundbreaking book called the Restructuring of American Religion. Americans, he said, no longer identified their faith primarily by their denomination — Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian — but by whether they were conservative or liberal. Today, there is another restructuring occurring — one that challenges the Christian right's hegemony over public debates.

Progressive faith leaders aren't the only ones reclaiming their public voice. A new generation of white Evangelical leaders who represent a large percentage of moderate and progressive Evangelicals are becoming more prominent in public debates. A new generation of moderate leaders is seeking to expand the Evangelical agenda to include the environment, Darfur, AIDS, poverty, and torture and is searching for a new approach to the issues of abortion and gay rights. Florida mega-church pastor Joel Hunter took the helm of the Christian Coalition only to be asked to leave because he sought to expand its agenda. He has become a prominent spokesperson in Florida and nationally on the environment and poverty. Last year James Dobson launched an attack on the National Association of Evangelicals vice president (for Government Affairs), Richard Cizik, calling for him to be fired for his work on climate change. The NAE refused to do so and reprimanded Dobson. Dr. David Gushee, a professor and the head of Evangelicals for Human rights, just released a book called The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, in which he claims that the Evangelical right increasingly recognizes that it was manipulated by the Republican Party, and that fewer and fewer Evangelical Christians will be attracted to the mood of angry nostalgia for a lost golden Christian America. Polls indicate that a younger generation is rejecting the fundamentalism and narrow agenda of an older generation. Just a few weeks ago Johnathan Merritt, a 25-year old seminarian at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary got prominent Southern Baptists to sign a statement saying they had been too timid about addressing climate change and likened the destruction of creation to ripping a page out of the Bible.

A key question that emerges of particular concern to this audience is what affect a broader agenda has on the "below the belt" issues, such as abortion. One answer is not good. The emerging new Evangelical leadership could choose to preserve their traditional and hardened positions on abortion and gay and lesbian issues because they feel they need this conservative foundation in order to be able to take on a largely progressive agenda on other issues. This approach is no doubt a challenge for us. The other answer — and herein lies immense hope and possibility — is that the new Evangelical leadership could take this transformational moment in their movement as an opportunity to redefine themselves also on the most divisive cultural issues and look for shared values with progressives.

The good news is we are already seeing signs of the second possibility.

In October 2007, leading Evangelicals (including mega-church pastor Joel Hunter, Redeem the Vote's Randy Brinson, Joe Battaglia, and David Gushee) and progressives mapped out a way forward on the issues that have fueled the culture wars. They outlined a way forward together on the toughest cultural issues, including abortion, gay and lesbian issues, the treatment of human embryos, and the role of religion in the public square. It's important to emphasize that these leaders in working for common-good approaches did not seek split-the-difference compromise. "Compromise," they said, "is not an end unto itself, and if done for its own sake, it can lead to solutions that are worse than the problems they address." The two sides found steps they could agree to, and agreed to work on them together and not use each other for political gain.

In terms of abortion, they agreed to a legislative agenda to reduce the need for abortions, prevent unintended pregnancies, and support women who wish to carry their pregnancies to term. Areas of agreement included: sex education with an abstinence emphasis, medically accurate and complete contraceptive information, better access to contraception for low-income women, after-school programs for kids, and help for parents on communicating their values to their teens, Medicaid coverage of pregnant women and SCHIP coverage of children, addressing domestic violence against pregnant women, help for pregnant women and young mothers who want to stay in school, and expanding adoption assistance. A detailed report on this can be found in Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at the Shared Cultural Values Between Progressives and Evangelicals published by the think tank Third Way.

This effort was not about making Evangelical progressives or progressives Evangelicals, but if this helps to reach a truce in the culture wars, that would mean a seismic shift in the political landscape.

Even with all of this exciting news I think it is dangerous and naïve to proclaim the demise of the Christian Right — we've done that too many times already and I hope we've learned from that mistake. Their infrastructure is still in place. And especially in times of war and economic downturn nothing sells more than fear. However this time, there is a force that can give the Christian Right a run for its money. Add to this mix a faltering economy and unpopular war and we can expect 2008 to be one of the most unpredictable years in religion and American politics since the Reagan victory in the eighties. For the first time since the civil rights movement, American debates about values and public policy could tilt in the progressive direction.

The political philosopher Michael Sandel has written, "Where political discourse lacks moral resonance, the yearning for a public life of larger meaning finds undesirable expression. ... Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread." For decades progressives have, unintentionally perhaps, left a vacuum that the right has filled. We now face an opportunity to fill that vacuum with discourse that leads people toward solutions and out of ideology. It's a window of opportunity we dare not miss.