With Faith As Our Guide

I keep hearing arguments from conservative Christians to the effect that a ‘true’ Christian cannot support the Democratic Party. I may not be able to reach my friends and family members who make these kinds of arguments. Nonetheless, as an organizer who works with faith-based groups, I want to share a different, and I think, more unifying perspective, on the role of faith in politics.

I start with these questions: What are the core values that we share across faiths and life experiences? How do we assess whether candidates, parties, a elected officials, public policies, and institutional practices (in schools, policing, the courts, public health, etc.) are in accord with our values (or at least, are doing no harm) or whether they violate those values? In our work with community groups we spend time drawing out the values we share. Because the members are from diverse backgrounds and identities, we cannot assume anything. Still, there are some commonalities among the kinds of values and beliefs that surface across groups. I would state them in the following ways (others would use different language, reflecting their faith traditions):

· A belief in the inherent dignity, worth and beauty of all human beings everywhere, and that a person’s value and worth cannot be taken away. Every person is too valuable to be discarded;

· We all need help at some point in our lives, and we all deserve to get help when needed. And we each are enriched when we participate in providing help to others.

· When people get to know each other, through civic activities, religious services, cultural exchanges, at the workplace, in other community spaces, the barriers of class, race, gender, differing faith traditions, language, nationalities, etc. tend to break down. We inherently want to connect with each other. This connection allows us to deepen democracy.

· Being part of a community brings meaning and richness to our lives.

· We are stronger when no one is left behind and everyone has opportunity to contribute fully to public life — through democratic participation, in the economy, and in our diverse communities.

· We prioritize protecting our social and natural environments, including the water and natural world that gives us life, and to leave things better for future generations.

Morality in politics transcends any one expression of Christianity, whether it is evangelicalism that hews to the Right or the social justice gospel that is more Left-of-Center. And while leaders from either party may act in ways that violate our shared values, on the whole, the folks I work with tend to support Democrats more than Republicans because they support policies that promote human dignity and thriving, our mutuality, participatory democracy and inclusion, etc.

They are moved to support policies that:

— Protect all workers’ rights and dignity;

— Hold large corporations and financial institutions to the public purpose for which they are chartered (which simply means, as the seek profits, they also should be socially responsible to all of their stakeholders: workers, communities, the natural world, etc. They should at least do no harm. If doing harm is part of their profit-making strategy, then they are violating their charters. For financial institutions, part of their responsibility is to recycle investments into our communities.

— Promote public health and universal access to the healthcare services through all phases of our lives;

— Protect and expand programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (New Deal and Great Society programs that mostly eradicated poverty for the elderly). These serve as models for reducing poverty more broadly;

— Address the crisis of mass incarceration and the systemic problems in current models of policing (recognizing that policing was distorted by the War on Drugs, something that some Republicans will also acknowledge; both parties contributed to these negative trends);

— Ensure decent and affordable housing for all families and individuals;

— Uphold civil and human rights for all people;

— Experiment with public education models that provide the best learning environments for all children (regardless of where they live) and opportunities for everyone to attend college without crushing debt, as well as alternatives to college, and opportunities for life-long learning for all of us;

— Seek humane and dignified solutions for immigration issues, recognizing that we have millions of people in our communities who live in the shadows. This is not good for them or for anyone else. Deporting all of them is both infeasible and inhumane. Republicans used to be more open-minded on immigration issues (Reagan and both Bushes before 9/11). It need not be a sharply partisan issue, but Republicans recently have embraced extreme fear-mongering, ‘othering’ (suggesting that certain immigrant communities are not as worthy as we are of dignity and humane treatment), and outright racial animus (Trump starting his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, for example, which for many of us, is a violation of our values).

— Protect and preserve the natural world; regain our connections with nature; stop seeing nature as something to be exploited for profit (often expressed as ‘stewardship,’ which is a Christian value, or, more strongly, an imperative);

— Embrace opportunities to fulfill the promise of a more inclusive and egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters. It will be multiracial, multiethnic and multi-faith, with more women and people of color in positions of leadership.

At this moment, one party prioritizes these things more than the other party. And this is why a deeply moral person, even the most non-partisan of persons, would lean toward Democrats, away from today’s Republicans, many of whom are using fear and ‘othering’ to divide us while promoting the interests of a powerful economic elite.

I was inspired to share these thoughts based on conversations with family members who are conservative Christians. My hope is to move the discussion beyond the assumption that people of faith must be conservative. Faith leads many of us toward progressive politics.