Religious Left Decries Federal Spending Cuts at D.C. Rally

For religious leaders opposed to limits on federal spending, it was a busy weekend.

With two weeks to go before the federal government’s short-term funding measure would expire, the National Council of Churches (NCC) and other liberal religious groups convened for the ninth annual Ecumenical Advocacy Days (EAD) conference at the end of March to protest possible restrictions in budgeted international aid and domestic spending, particularly as they affect women in poor countries. The event reportedly drew 800 participants from across the country, nearly all representing left-leaning Mainline denominations like the United Methodists, Episcopals, and Presbyterians USA. (For Saturday’s plenary session, read Mikhail Bell’s report.) 

The weekend conference, themed “Development, Security, and Economic Justice: What’s Gender Got to Do with It?,” summoned social justice advocates “to pray together, to learn together, and to act as one faith voice in support of persons who are struggling to survive,” according to NCC general secretary Michael Kinnamon in his opening plenary address. 

But as is typical with the yearly conference, “action” is invariably interpreted as a full day of congressional lobbying – precisely the activity that topped off the weekend. Speakers, including feminist activist Ritu Sharma from Women Thrive Worldwide and Linda Bales-Todd from the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, urged participants to act as “prophetic voices” on Capitol Hill as the debate over the 2011 spending bill raged on.  

The conference strongly echoed Jim Wallis and the evangelical left’s “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign in its characterization of the federal budget as a “moral document” – which has tended to render any resistance to the expanding role of federal programs in society as an affront to the teachings of Jesus. 

Joshua DuBois, Pentecostal minister and director of President Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the White House, similarly encouraged EAD participants following Kinnamon’s opening address. 

“On behalf of President Obama, I just really want to celebrate this ecumenical community,” DuBois said. “Every single year, not only do you come to town and speak to issues of concern to you, but to the least, the last, and the lost in our world; but then you leave and that energy that you brought and the concern that you brought resonates over the course of the year and has an impact in Congress, and indeed on our country.” He concluded: “I’m proud that with you, we’ve accomplished a lot over the last couple years,” while citing the role of Mainline denominations’ push for Obamacare as an example. 

Ritu Sharma, in preparation for Monday’s lobbying, briefed participants on the status of two particular bills: the Violence against Women Act, a 1994 initiative up for re-authorization this year, and a new bill, the International Violence against Women Act (IVAWA), passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and up for vote this summer. She aggressively condemned the notion that diminishing funds for domestic and international anti-poverty measures could substantively impact the federal budget. 

“We need to explode this myth that somehow the U.S. gives ten, or 20, or even five percent of our budget to foreign assistance, and somehow that is how we solve our fiscal problems, or even make an impact on it,” she said. “To say that we are going to make an impact on budget balancing or the deficit on the backs of poor women and girls, [and] mothers, is a lie of unconscionable nature.” 

JustFaith Ministries executive director Jack Jezreel emphasized the church’s responsibility to minister to the poor, arguing that social justice programs within the church, though extensive, have been woefully inadequate to effect social change. It’s not the church’s doctrine that’s off-base, Jezreel said. “It’s my conviction that the major challenge ahead is not a lot of theological investment on the part of our faith tradition or church leadership, or a lack of good will in the pews, or the current pop political drift,” he alleged. Jezreel argued that the church, as a whole, has been turned inward – more focused on itself than on “sending and advocating.” 

Jezreel’s “sending and advocating,” however, did not allude to Christ’s call to “make disciples of all nations.” 

“Sending is about mission,” he said. “Sending includes helping resettle refugees in our hometowns, serving meals in a soup kitchen, advocating for immigrants, and the poor, and the vulnerable… it is providing care for battered soldiers, and advocating for the end of war… It’s the work of community organizing and peacemaking.” 

“It’s the work outlined and given a vocabulary by language like, ‘solidarity’, ‘advocacy’ ‘compassion’, ‘oiko’, and ‘forgiveness’ in its many, many forms.”  And, he added, “this is the work you’ll be doing tomorrow,” referring to EAD’s lobbying day on Monday.

NCC President Advocates Government Redistribution 

The tendency among many religious officials to posit federal programs as an extension of the church’s calling has been a recurring theme over the past several months of budgetary haggling, though many have tacitly acknowledged the dangers of living beyond the nation’s fiscal means.  But National Council of Churches president Peg Chemberlin insisted that we should not be entering a period of fiscal austerity when worldwide needs are so great. 

“America is in a crisis, anybody notice?” Chemberlin said, not at all referring to America’s towering federal deficits. “It’s a crisis that’s taking root in a paradigm of scarcity, even as we live in a time of abundance. We’re becoming a country that screams, ‘There’s not enough!  There’s not enough!’” 

According to Chemberlin, this “paradigm of scarcity” has induced a national spiritual crisis which, she said, distorts our understanding of how much we really have. “There is enough to go around – enough that I can afford to give up some of what I have,” she said, seeming to christen the government’s redistributive function, rather than the church, as the moral counterweight to society’s excesses. “In fact, I can’t afford not to give, because not to give is to fall prey to the fear that keeps us from experiencing the abundance.” 

Chemberlin argued that if we somehow “understand ourselves as living in abundance meant for everyone, as a community, [and] as a country… then we can all be free of the threat of scarcity.”  She optimistically added that most of the world’s problems could be solved simply by applying these “values of abundance and inclusion.”

She enthusiastically concluded:  “Let us demand… that we will not be satisfied with a paradigm of scarcity, a paradigm of exclusion. We will not be satisfied, because we know better. We know better.  There is enough grace to go around.”