[US] Taking on poverty may help Democrats win over religious voters

From The San Jose Mercury News

BY FRANK JAMES
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON - Christian activist the Rev. Jim Wallis told hundreds of religious protesters gathered near the Capitol Wednesday that there was a scandal this December, but it wasn't the conservative-stoked controversy about retailers and others using "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

"The Christmas scandal is the budget out of this House of Representatives, a budget which is an assault on low-income people, on poor families," said Wallis, who was arrested by Capitol Hill police along with 113 other protesters - as they knew they would - for blocking the building's entrance.

Budget legislation under consideration by House members and senators has angered many religious people, who see caring for the poor as central to their faith, because of nearly $50 billion in spending cuts to programs such as food stamps and child care subsidies.

That anger has only been heightened by nearly $60 billion in tax cuts that are under consideration and critics say would largely benefit the wealthy.
So Wallis invoked the Christmas story of Mary who, upon being told she would give birth to Jesus, thanked God for, among other things, humbling the mighty and exalting the lowly. Wallis, leader of Sojourners, a Christian social justice group, did so to claim that Congress' budget violated a central message of that first Christmas.

"They are reversing Mary's priorities," Wallis said. "This budget and the tax cuts fill the rich with good things and sends the poor away hungry. That's why we're here."

For Wallis, a best-selling author who has argued that progressives have been passive and allowed conservatives to exploit faith as a highly potent political issue, the event was another chance to gain momentum in reclaiming the religious high ground in national policy debates. Wallis is the author of "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It."

In recent years, the moral ground has seemed to be held mainly by the religious right, whose members have placed issues of personal morality like abortion and gay marriage in the spotlight and helped determine elections as a result.

But Wallis and other progressive religious leaders who believe the poor have received short shrift hope that, by emphasizing the religious obligation to help the poor, they can reframe the debate.

At the same time, that might help lift the fortunes of Democrats who voters say are more concerned with poverty than Republicans are, but who have suffered political defeats because their party is perceived as being less hospitable to people of faith. In the last two presidential elections, Democrats lost - by significant margins - voters who considered themselves deeply religious, and this has been an issue many in the party said must be addressed if Democrats are to return to power in Congress or the White House.

"Arousing the nation's conscience is not an easy thing to do, but to the extent it does work I think it will help the Democrats because many of the people who would be influenced by that are likely to vote Democratic," said John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

"Some of them may have voted Republican in the last election because of the particular mix of issues, terrorism whatever," he said. "But if these questions of poverty and justice are couched in religious language, they may very well respond," though some voters concerned about poverty might still vote Republican but demand that programs that help the poor not be cut.

"The more you're able to inject your rhetoric, your agenda and your approach with the language of `it's immoral to have people living in poverty in this great country of ours,' the more you're going to be able to fight the slippage that the Democratic Party's been having since the Clinton era in terms of reaching out to middle America," said Laura Olsen, a political science professor at Clemson University in South Carolina.

She cited as a potential model former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who made poverty a central theme of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 before being named John Kerry's running mate. Now considering another presidential run, Edwards heads the Center of Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina Law School.

The appetite for such appeals seems to be growing. A Gallup poll conducted shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck found 75 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the federal government's anti-poverty efforts. And that dissatisfaction has held fairly steady. Four years earlier, 71 percent of those polled felt similarly.
Wednesday's "vigil" in Washington was one of more than 70 held around the country to try to force the Republican-led Congress to back off the spending and tax cuts, according to Sojourners.

At times, Capitol Hill had the feel of a revival meeting in the frigid outdoors as the protesters gathered on the steps of the Cannon House Office Building. "Don't tell us about being faith-based, don't tell us about compassionate conservativism," said Frederick Haynes, pastor of Friendship West Baptist Church, a 10,000-member megachurch in Dallas.

"When our government stands before God Almighty, Jesus will say I was hungry but you cut food stamps," Haynes said. "I was thirsty but you cut Pell grants. When I needed surgery I was not part of your social class so I was denied access."

Along with the Catholic nuns and mainline Protestant ministers, the protesters arrested Wednesday included Christian evangelicals such as Wallis and Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, and Mary Nelson, a founder and former president of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community group based in Chicago.
Evangelicals, long known for being insular and focused on issues of personal morality rather than social justice, have recently been broadening their list of concerns to include poverty. The National Association of Evangelicals, for instance, earlier this year adopted a document that cited as among God's concerns "justice for the poor."

"I know that the God who demands of me that to live out my faith means to stand up for justice and to care for the poor and to walk with and to stand with those who are oppressed, I know that same God is demanding the same thing of our congresspersons ...," Nelson said at a press conference outside the House office building.

"I would issue a challenge to the congresspersons in this building and across the way to say come walk with me in my neighborhood," Nelson said. "Come talk to the folks in my neighborhood and they will tell you that they're working two jobs and falling farther behind. That they have kids who are sick and don't have health insurance. ... Then see if you can with good conscience vote for this budget and these tax cuts that are going to make it even worse."