(Trends Wide) — left vs. right. Against injustices vs. indifferent to them. Jesus of the Red State vs. Jesus of the Blue State.
Some leaders see faith and politics strictly as a competition against each other: you win by taking sides and crushing the opposition.
But the reverend William J. Barber IIwho has been called “the closest person we have to Martin Luther King” in America today, has redefined a third mode of activism called “fusion politics”: political coalitions that frequently transcend the conservative versus progressive binary.
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Barber, who received a “genius grant” from MacArthur, says a coalition of “rejected agents”—the poor, immigrants, white working class, religious minorities, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community—can transform the country because they share a common enemy.
“The same forces that demonize immigrants also attack low-wage workers,” the North Carolina pastor said in an interview several years ago. “The same politicians who deny living wages also suppress the vote; the same people who want us to vote less are also denying the evidence of the climate crisis and refusing to act; the same people who are willing to destroy the Earth are willing to deny tens of millions of Americans access to health care.”
Barber’s fusion policy has helped the 59-year-old pastor become one of the country’s most prominent activists and speakers. As co-chairman of the Poor People’s Campaign, he has led one of the most sustained and visible anti-poverty efforts in the country.
He managed to electrify the crowd at the 2016 Democratic National Convention with a speech that one commentator likened to a “drop the mic” moment. And at a time when both political parties are accused of ignoring the working class, Barber routinely organizes and marches with groups like fast food workers and union members.
“There is a sleeping giant in America,” Barber told Trends Wide. “Poor and low-income people now make up 30% of the electorate in all states and more than 40% of the electorate in all states where the margin of victory for the presidency was less than 3%. If someone were to get the poor and low-income people to vote, they would radically change the results of every election in the country.”
Starting this month, Barber will take his merger policy to the Ivy League. Yale Divinity School announced that he will be the founding director of its new Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. In that role, Barber says he hopes to raise a new generation of leaders who are comfortable “creating a just society both in academia and on the streets.”
Although he will step down as pastor of the North Carolina church where he has served for 30 years, Barber says he is not retiring from activism. He remains president of Repairers of the Breach, a nonprofit organization that promotes the politics of moral fusion.
Barber recently spoke to Trends Wide about his faith and activism and why he opposes white Christian nationalism, a movement that insists the United States was founded as a Christian nation and seeks to erase the separation of church and state.
Barber’s responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.
He speaks of poverty as a moral problem and has said that the United States cannot tolerate these record levels of inequality. But some extreme levels of poverty have always existed in this country. Why is it so urgent to face these problems and why should someone who is not poor care?
Dr. King used to say that America has high blood pressure by faith, but anemia by fact. In every generation we have had to take a moment to focus on the urgency of now. We will never be able to fix our democracy until we fully address these issues. We will consistently emerge from recessions because inequality hurts us all.
Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel Prize-winning economist) talks about this in his book “The Price of Inequality,” and says that it costs us more as a nation for these inequalities to exist than it does to fix them.
Reverend William Barber II addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28, 2016.
Look how much it costs us not to have a decent (minimum) salary. Two years ago, a group of Nobel Peace Prize-winning economists debunked the idea that paying people a living wage (the US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour) would hurt business. They said it’s not true.
Well, President Roosevelt said that in the 1930s. He said that any corporation that doesn’t pay people a living wage doesn’t deserve to be an American corporation.
I don’t think American society as a democracy can take much more. We are moving toward 50% of all Americans being poor. It is unnecessary.
We say in our founding documents that every politician swears to promote the general welfare of all people. He doesn’t promote the general welfare of all people when he can get elected and go to Congress and get free health care, but then he sits in Congress and prevents the people who elected him from having the same thing as him.
We say that having the same protection before the law is essential. Well, there’s nothing quite like corporations getting all kinds of tax breaks and all kinds of ways to make more and more money, while the average worker earns 300% less than CEOs.
Some people cite the scripture where Jesus says: “You will always have the poor with you” to argue that poverty is inevitable, and that trying to end it is hopeless.
Every time they say that, they are misquoting Jesus. Because that is not what Jesus meant or said. He was saying, yes, the poor will always be with you, because he was quoting Deuteronomy [15:11]. The rest of that scripture says that the poor will always be with you because of your greed. I’m paraphrasing it, but that’s the meaning. The poor will always be with you is a critique of our unwillingness to tackle poverty.
To have this level of inequality exist is a violation of our deepest moral, constitutional and religious values. It is morally inconsistent, morally indefensible, and economically unsound. Why wouldn’t you want to lift 55-60 million people out of poverty if you could by paying them a basic living wage? Why wouldn’t you want that amount of resources to go to the people and then back into the economy?
I want to ask you about Christian nationalism. What’s wrong with saying that God loves America and that the country should be built on Christian values?
God doesn’t say it. That’s what’s wrong with it. The scriptures say that God loves all people and that if a nation is going to embrace Christian values, then we have to know what those values are. And those values are certainly not anti-gay, anti-people who may have had an abortion, pro-tax cut, pro-partisan, pro-gun. There is nowhere in scripture where you see Jesus holding things like that.
Thousands of people march through downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in what organizers describe as a “Mass Moral March” near the state Capitol building on February 8, 2014.
Jesus said that the Gospel consists of good news for the poor, healing for the brokenhearted, welcoming all people, caring for immigrants, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned. Christian nationalism tries to sanctify oppression and not liberation. Try to sanctify the lie and not the truth. At best, it is a form of theological malpractice. At worst, it is a form of heresy.
You never hear people who call themselves Christian nationalists say, “Jesus said this.” They say, “I’m a Christian, and I say so.” But that is not enough. If it doesn’t align with the founder, then it’s faulty.
Is he evangelical?
I am very evangelical. I tell people that I am a conservative, liberal, evangelical Christian. And what that means is that I believe in Jesus, not to the exclusion of other faith traditions because my founder said “I have others who are not of this fold.” I believe that love, truth, mercy, grace, and justice are foundational to a life of faith. And for me, being an evangelical means beginning where Jesus began.
The word “gospel” is good news. Jesus uttered that word in his first sermon, which was a public policy sermon. He said it to the face of Caesar, who had hurt and exploited the poor. He said it in the Nazareth ghetto, where people said: “Nothing good could come out of Nazareth.” He said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to announce good news” – gospel – “to the poor”. That is what evangelism is to Jesus. That is the type of evangelism that I accept.
He has had health problems over the years. How do you keep going year after year and avoid getting burned out?
I read the Bible once looking specifically to see if I could find any person in the scriptures that God used in a significant way and not be physically challenged because of it. And I couldn’t find it. That helped me overcome any attempt to feel sorry for myself.
You know, Moses couldn’t talk. Ezequiel had strange types of post-traumatic syndrome and emotional problems. Jeremiah cried all the time because of his fight against depression. Paul had a physical thorn in the flesh. Jesus was familiar with pain.
Police keep watch as the Rev. William Barber and other activists demonstrate during a rally in support of voting rights legislation outside the US Supreme Court in Washington on June 23, 2021.
Then I checked the story and couldn’t find anyone either. Harriet Tubman had epileptic-type seizures. Martin Luther King was stabbed before doing the March on Washington and after that he had a respiratory disorder.
During covid, I thought deeply about death and mortality. I have some immune deficiencies and problems like that. I have battled this ankylosing spondylitis for over 40 years. At any moment, my body could shut down.
During covid, as I continued to meet people, I sat down one day and said, Lord, why am I still here? I’m no better than these people. I know I’ve been close to covid. My doctor told me that if he gave it to me, I probably wouldn’t do well.
As I was reflecting one day, it occurred to me. The question is wrong. The question should never be why are you still alive? Why are you still breathing? The right question is: What are you going to do with the breath you have left?
Because at any moment, the scriptures say that we are one step away from death. And so I’ve decided that the breath I have is too precious to waste on hate, on oppression, and on being mean to people. It should only be used for the cause of justice.
John Blake is the author of “More Than I Realized: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”
