Faith Versus Trump Religious Leaders Are at the Forefront of the Opposition.

• Author: Gunn, Erik

On Monday, December 4, the day after the first Sunday in Advent, a group of Christian clergy and leaders of other faiths gathered in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. They were there to challenge the pending Republican plan to rewrite the nation's tax laws--a plan that will shower billions of dollars of tax breaks on the wealthy while effectively raising taxes on those making less than $30,000 a year.

The multifaith collection of clerics had first requested meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but the Republican lawmakers declined, organizers said. Then, as the several dozen religious leaders gathered in the Capitol rotunda to pray, Capitol police officers issued an ultimatum: Leave, or face arrest.

For many of those gathered--including the Reverend William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina-based activist organization Repairers of the Breach--arrest would have been a familiar experience. But on this day that outcome was avoided.

Instead, the group left the rotunda and walked to the United Methodist Building down the street. There, the faith leaders announced the launch of a new national Poor Peoples Campaign, cochaired by Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, a Presbyterian minister and codirector of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The campaign will employ direct action and civil disobedience, as well as public education and voter registration, to draw attention to issues and mobilize disenfranchised citizens.

Drawing its name from an initiative that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was building when he was assassinated in 1968, the Poor Peoples Campaign seeks to address moral challenges on multiple fronts: poverty and racism, deepening class divisions and environmental degradation, state violence and anti-LGBTQ discrimination. "This is not about saving any one party or policy agenda," Barber told the assembled throng, "but about saving the soul of America."

The group's pledge to nonpartisanship is genuine. Barber spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 that nominated Hillary Clinton for President, but he also tells The Progressive that "Democrats have not done enough to talk about the working poor." None of the many presidential debates held during the primary or general election campaigns, he says, included any substantive discussion about poverty, restoring the Voting Rights Act after it...