For years, liberals — even liberal people of faith — have been wary of fusions of faith and politics, careful not to pierce the boundary between church and state.
But at this year’s Wild Goose Festival, an annual Christian gathering that convened July 11-14 in a campground along the French Broad River, many attendees asked the same question: What if my beliefs are by implication political?
This year was Wild Goose’s eighth iteration since 2011, when the first gathering was organized as an American version of the Greenbelt festival in the United Kingdom. It is a curious blend of music festival, activist strategy session, and spiritual revival, all swirling below the Mason-Dixon Line in a mountain retreat where mud is plentiful and cell phone signal is not.