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TechnoratiCOLUMBUS, Ohio – Left-leaning Christian and social activists see opportunity in an unconventional presidential race and a spiraling national economy: pushing poverty as an election issue.
At a time when more than 37 million Americans are in poverty, including many who are newly poor and paying keen attention, spiritual leaders are encouraging the young to vote and urging voters to select candidates who will fight poverty.
"I feel more momentum, energy and focus on poverty than I have in churches in three decades or more," said Jim Wallis, chief executive officer of Sojourners social justice ministries in Washington.
"Partly, it's a new generation. Baby boomers are becoming church leaders and speaking to a new generation that wants their lives to make a difference. It's a new altar call, if you will," he said.
In Orlando, Fla., participants in Sojourners' Vote Out Poverty initiative have coalesced around a controversial city law that prohibited feeding the homeless in a city park. Opponents got the law overturned in court.
Alan Clapsaddle, associate pastor at the city's First United Church of Christ, said the law's opponents saw it as part of a national trend to criminalize good works.
"You have a hard time getting a jury to convict someone for sharing food. 'Uh, what was your weapon?' 'Um, a ladle?'" he said. "People saw the impact that government could have on faith communities."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson recently visited battleground Ohio to push superintendents in its eight largest school districts to register high school seniors to vote. He has repeated the message — central to his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition — in Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore and New York.
Jackson, whose efforts are separate from Vote Out Poverty, said nine in 10 Cleveland public school students are poor.
"Children go to school in those great numbers," he said. "Many of them do not have reading glasses. Many of them don't have hearing support or dental care. So we've got unemployed parents because of the lack of health care, often second-class schools because of the funding scheme, and then little hope on the back side."
ONE.org, a nonpartisan coalition of more than 100 advocacy and humanitarian organizations, including some churches, has taken up the same cause, operating a grass-roots movement and TV ads stretching across all 50 states.
Sojourners has collected 20,000 Vote Out Poverty pledges from voters to pick candidates who will fight poverty, and thousands more from candidates who have committed to cutting poverty in half by 2019. Sunday sermons on poverty are being delivered around the country.
The movement has been embraced by more than 100 churches in a dozen states, but Wallis said political battleground states are crucial to its success.
"In election times, it's difficult because of all the competition — like right now we're talking about the collapse of the financial markets, last election it was the threat of terrorism. Poverty gets pushed aside," Wallis said.
"These swing states, because there's so much attention, become national forums for the public discussion."
As excited as activists are, however, success is not assured, said David Brady, an associate professor of sociology at Duke University. He said the last time poverty played a role in a national politics was when then-President Clinton was battling with Congress over welfare reform in 1996. Continue »
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