Undaunted
Democrats Channel the Power of Faith, Welcoming All to Join
Today’s Democrats’ most effective display of moral integrity, political leadership, and savvy communication came on the steps of the Capitol last Sunday (although corporate media failed to give it a fraction of the attention it deserved). House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) began before sunrise, opening with a prayer. They spoke about their experience in the Black church, their deep-seated faith in America, and the connection between the two. By ones and twos over the course of the day, dozens joined them on the steps, and many more stopped to watch and listen.
Faith leaders and progressive activists (e.g., American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten; president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Maya Wiley; and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler) joined Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware (a Yale Divinity School graduate who often speaks on how faith informs his politics), Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Adam Schiff of California, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, and more than a dozen House members from Maryland to Missouri; Florida to California. Some offered prayers; others spoke of their lifelong commitments to their neighborhoods; still others focused on the plight of those dependent on programs like Medicaid and SNAP—lifesaving programs that Trump would (and still might) eviscerate.
“Booker and Jeffries spoke at the beginning of the sit-in, which began around 6 a.m., about their religious upbringings, saying they would usually be attending services on Sunday morning but instead were hosting the conversation on the Capitol steps,” NBC News reported.
Again and again, they addressed the MAGA attack on America as a violation of fundamental religious and moral principles. During the day-long vigil, they spoke about the “redemptive power” of faith and good works, shared stories about their families and struggles, and stressed leaders’ obligation to care for the neediest among us.
Booker set their tone and intention, declaring:
“Martin Luther King said, ‘Budgets are moral documents,’ and that’s the spirit we come here with this morning.”
He asked others to “give your own testimony to your moral urgency that you feel, to maybe your faith traditions or moral traditions that ... motivate you at this moment to speak out—maybe share your story of what the threat of this bill does to you and your lives.”
Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware delivered stirring remarks that spoke to the “power of prayer, the power of persuasion and the power of the people.” She asked, “What path will we choose to pick? People say, ‘we are better than this.’ No, we are this. Do we want to be better than this?” This sort of tough love and raw and earnest emotion is rare in D.C.
Democrats certainly did not ignore Donald Trump’s constitutional outrages, but their focus was on the cruelty MAGA gleefully inflicts on ordinary people. “Republicans in Congress are proposing cuts that will take food from children, healthcare from the sick, and dignity from those already struggling,” Booker said. “It’s wrong. To stop it, we all must say so—clearly, courageously, and together. Speaking out and speaking up is how we will convince four Republicans in the House and Senate to do the right thing and vote No.” He added, “This [budget] bill, we believe, presents one of the greatest moral threats to our country that we've seen in terms of what it will do to providing food for the hungry, care for the elderly, services for the disabled, health care for the sick.”
Observing that none of what transpired in the first 100 days was “normal,” Jeffries weighed in: “Republicans are crashing the economy, undermining American values, assaulting our democracy, and driving us toward a recession. Now, they want to jam a reckless budget down the throats of the American people that will end Medicaid as we know it and rip food from the mouths of children, seniors, and veterans. Enough.” Sounding as exasperated as many of us feel, he asked rhetorically: “What kind of people would actually gut Meals on Wheels in service of trying actually to deliver massive tax cuts for their billionaire donors like Elon Musk?!”
If the goal was, as Booker proposed, to “center the stories of people who will be affected by this bill that will cut Medicaid so savagely and so many other things, to give tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans,” the gathering succeeded. If the aim was to reach hundreds of thousands of Americans on a host of social media platforms, that succeeded as well.
But most of all, Democrats succeeded in reclaiming the language of faith, which resonates with hundreds of millions of people. They read from scripture and multiple works from different religions. They reminded Americans that faith is what you do, not merely what you say. In weaving together stories of family and foes, of trials and tribulations, they took the struggle against Trump out of the abstract, technical, and legalistic pattern omnipresent in D.C. to ground it in their and America’s shared experience and humanity.
Dressed in casual clothes in the bright sunlight, they seemed less like politicians and more like neighbors, fellow congregants, and passionate citizens. There is a place for high-flying rhetoric, booming rhetoric, and sophisticated argument in public life, but if Democrats can remember how to talk to and with regular people, to express empathy in nonpartisan and moral terms, and to demonstrate tenacity in support of Americans, they can recover Americans’ trust. But they will only accomplish that if they can reach connect with ordinarily, apolitical Americans, dampen many people’s cynicism and fatalism, and offer a more humane vision of American governance.
Today, we salute Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker, and all who joined them for their collective act of undaunted, empathetic leadership. May they keep it up and inspire other Democrats to demonstrate their own acts of courageous devotion.
And don’t forget the pastors that were arrested inside the capitol rotunda last week who were quietly praying in protest of bill.
Statement from the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, following his release from custody:
In the rotunda of the US Capitol yesterday, while praying in front of the monument that honors the founders of the women’s suffrage movement, we were arrested by Capitol police. We have been released from custody; thank you to everyone who has reached out to ask about us. We are OK, but all is not well.
We were in Washington, DC, yesterday to launch Moral Mondays with fellow clergy, moral leaders, and scores of people who will be directly impacted by the disastrous budget that Congress has just come back into session to work on. Every illegal attempt to slash federal programs that Elon Musk tried to force through DOGE over the past 100 days is now being proposed as law by the leadership of this Congress.
Though the mainstream media has not yet focused on the details of this budget, the facts are clear. Numbers do not lie. You cannot cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget without slashing Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, Head Start, Section 8, and other life-saving and life-sustaining programs that millions of Americans rely on and the vast majority of people support. This is why 12 Republican members of congress have already written to House Speaker Johnson to challenge the proposed cuts to Medicaid. This is not a Republican versus Democrat debate. It's a life or death decision.
We are Christian preachers. When we made a vow to preach the good news to all people, in season and out of season, we committed to address life or death issues. This is often intimate and deeply work. We bless babies when they are born, we visit the sick, we welcome strangers to our dinner tables, and we pray with people when they are dying. But life and death work is also public work. As Christian preachers, we are also public theologians. When someone dies from poverty and a lack of healthcare, we cannot lie and say, “God called them home.” We have to tell the truth. They died because we live in a society that has chosen not to care for them.
In the Bible, God calls public theologians to relocate their ministry when life or death issues are being decided in the public square. “Go down to the palace of the King,” God tells Jeremiah in a time when policy was decided in the King’s court. Why does the preacher need to go to the legislative body? Jeremiah is sent with a message for the legislators. “Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place.”
If a preacher knows that legislators are developing policy that will create injustice, it is our duty to “go down to the palace of the King.”
If we know the people are being robbed by a budget that will take from the most vulnerable to give tax breaks to the rich, it is our duty to relocate our ministry to where these life and death decisions are being made.
If our elected representatives are planning to pass a budget that will do violence to the “alien, the orphan, and the widow” by slashing funding at home while funding a bloated military budget that we know is being used to “shed innocent blood” in other places around the world, then we have a moral responsibility to be in our Capitol’s rotunda.
We have a duty to pray—and to pray in public.
When Jeremiah prayed to God that his head might become a fountain of tears to grieve over the destruction of his people, he didn’t sit and pray in private. He went down to the palace of the King.
When Jesus wept in the Garden of Gethsemane, crying and sweating blood in agony, he didn’t stay there. He went to the cross and made his prayer public.
When our foremothers and forefathers gathered in Southern churches to cry out to God during the freedom movement, they prayed and sang and anchored themselves in faith. But they did not stay in the church house. They marched out into the streets and nonviolently confronted injustice.
This is why we could not abdicate the obligations of our vocation when someone asked us to be quiet.
We appreciate the Capitol police and have prayed with them and for them as they have dealt with the trauma of being assaulted during the insurrection on January 6th. We thank them for their service and have reassured them that our objection is not to them doing their job. Our insistence on prayer at this moment and in this space is about whether America’s elected representatives will do the job they swore to do when they put their hands on Bibles, the Quran, other sacred texts, and the US Constitution, promising to “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, provide for the common defense, and secure the blessings of liberty.”
We know legislators cannot do this work alone. They are representatives of the people, and the people must help them to do what is right.
We came to the Capitol rotunda to pray for representatives who currently support this immoral budget to see the danger of policy that kills and choose life. We came believing that God can take out a heart of stone and give anyone a heart of flesh. And we came knowing that, whatever their choice, we must nonviolently embody our prayer. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, we must “pray with our feet.” We must trust that, when we align ourselves with the truth at the heart of the universe, our action can unleash power beyond us, setting others free to act and respond in their own way to the moral urgency of this moment.
Now is the time for each of us to stand up and speak up. We willingly and nonviolently submitted to arrest rather than cease our prayer not because we wanted to be arrested, but because we know that now is the time to arrest the attention of this nation.
Now is not the time to shrink back in fear. Now is the time to courageously join our voices in a general lament for the cruelty we are witnessing in the hope that a new movement of love and justice and truth is already rising to overcome it.
No one would not be fighting this hard to pass a budget that is so extreme if they were not afraid. The extreme minority of elites promoting this disastrous budget understand the potential power of a coalition of people coming together across race and region, across faiths and family traditions, to build an America that works for all of us. In fact, they may understand better than many of us do how much power we have.
That power is unleashed when we stand up and say, “We are not afraid. We will not hate you. We will transform you through the power of love.” That power, which is greater than any threat or fear, is unleashed when we commit to become the answer to our prayers. It is fleshed out when we inform our communities about what is happen, register people to vote, and rally around an agenda that lifts from the bottom so everyone can rise.
That is why we chose to pray in the Capitol rotunda yesterday. And that is the prayer we hope to embody with a growing and expanding moral movement in this nation until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
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