For years, the Moral Mondays movement has combined faith with challenging the halls of power, framing policy fights as moral imperatives. Now, the movement’s taking aim at proposed federal budget cuts that threaten Medicaid, food assistance, and housing support.
Indeed, for the second time in as many weeks, faith leaders were arrested Monday in the rotunda of the United States Capitol while reading from the Bible and praying for a moral budget that centers people. The protesters called the cuts a “sin and a shame” that will wreak havoc on America’s “least of these” as Jesus identified them in the gospels.
“We will not bow, we will not be bought, nor will we back down. Silence is not an option,” one of the faith leaders, Rev. Dr. Hanna Broome, director of religious affairs for Repairers of the Breach, said on Monday. “Faith does not belong only in the sanctuary.”
Broome went on to note that “righteousness is not partisan” and the people of faith who showed up to protest this budget “stand as guardians of the soul of this democracy.”
Budgets are moral documents, reflecting a nation’s values. And this one, she said, tells a “shameful story.”
The budget “might be written in ink, but it bleeds blood. Bombs are funded, but babies are deported. Child tax credit rolled back,” Broome said.
Just as she demanded Congress do its job, she likewise challenged faith leaders. “Do your job. This is not a time for quiet pulpits. Cry out aloud and spare not. When prophets pray, empires crumble.”
Broome, along with four other faith leaders, was subsequently arrested after refusing to stop praying inside the Capitol rotunda.
The High Stakes of the Budget Fight
At the protest, retired pastor Rev. Alvin Jackson, who was also arrested, shared from a recent report published by Repairers of the Breach, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Economic Policy Institute, about the impact the at least $1.5 trillion in cuts will have on the Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Head Start. Jackson also outlined how policies that suppress the minimum wage, weaken unions, and roll back labor protections threaten decades of progress for working people.
Dr. Leslie Copeland-Tune of the National Council of Churches called the budget “violence in its own way,” emerging like a phoenix from the very pit of hell. She urged accountability, noting that when there is no shame, there must be resistance.
“Where Do We Stand With the Poor?”
In a recent op-ed, pastor and civil rights activist Rev. William J. Barber II, who founded Repairs of the Breach in 2015 — and was arrested at the Capitol on Monday, April 28 — wrote that what’s happening with the budget is “a crisis of civilization,” and democracy.
“This is not about being Black or white, left or right. This is about life and death,” he wrote.
Barber also joined Monday’s gathering by phone.
“The nation is watching you all to make sure you have the kind of prayer the widow had when she kept knocking, in spite of the unjust judge; the kind that has tenacity,” Barber said.
He invoked theologian Howard Thurman’s question: “Where do we stand in relationship to the poor and disinherited?”
Barber explained that “Moral Monday is not only about praying but building powerful coalitions and getting our lawyers to find all kinds of ways to challenge these things in court.”
But wherever there is immoral destruction going on, there must be moral dissent, he said. “We’re going to pray. Stand in your faith. And if you have no religious faith, then stand on your belief in the moral arc of the universe,” he said.
Barber also said when he prays, “I’m sanctifying my life to say I will stand. I will have an eternal dissatisfaction at what is going on. If America really knows what is going on, they will come alive in what is one of the greatest moral actions of our time.”
Those protesters who weren’t arrested on Monday hand-delivered a letter to Congressional leaders asking them to also pray and consider the people who will be affected by the budget. Republicans hope to have the final budget with these cuts passed by Memorial Day.
