JUST WHAT WOULD JESUS CUT? Sojourners Supporters and Partners Challenge Congress on Budget Cuts 28FEB11 thru 28MAR11

UPDATES on the struggle for a moral budget, something long overdue for this country. An interesting note, the proponents of tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for big oil and the rest of corporate America and increasing the Pentagon budget and so increasing the profits of the military-industrial complex can not, dare not, claim theirs is a moral budget in any definition of the word. That fact alone should give pause to their supporters, and should empower those fasting, praying, and taking other actions promoting a moral budget as well as strengthen the resolve, steel the courage of the decision makers in Washington to pass a moral budget worthy of a nation that has declared itself Christian to the rest of the world.   Click the header to go to the SOJO blog...

Sojourners Supporters and Partners Challenge Congress on Budget Cuts

by Tim King 02-28-2011

Thanks to Sojourners supporters and our partners, there is a full page ad in Politico today asking Congress, “What Would Jesus Cut?” The ad is signed by nearly 30 national Christian leaders and challenges our legislators to remember that a budget is a moral document. (See the ad here.) More than 10,000 Sojourners activists have sent emails to members of Congress also asking, “What would Jesus cut?”, and 1,000 activists have sent members bracelets that read, “WWJC?”
The ad comes just a few weeks after the House passed a budget that disproportionately cut programs that protect the poor and help lift them out of their poverty. The House budget includes significant cuts to programs such as Head Start, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and critical international aid programs.
The advertisement calls for Congress to defend:

• International aid that directly and literally saves lives from pandemic diseases
• Critical child health and family nutrition programs — at home and abroad
• Proven work and income supports that lift families out of poverty
• Support for education, especially in low-income communities

The following statements were also issued by three of the ad’s signers:

Cutting programs that help those who need them most is morally wrong. Reducing the federal deficit is critical for our nation’s long term health but it should not be done at the expense of the most vulnerable. When Jesus talked about how God will judge nations, he said that God will focus on what we did or did not do for the neediest among us.
-Rev. David Beckmann, President of Bread for the World and World Food Prize laureate

As evangelical Christians, we stand committed to a biblical solution in respect to America’s fiscal crisis. A biblical framework reconciles deficit reduction with the preservation of spending for compassionate empowerment domestically and abroad. As we cut spending in so many areas, which we should, let us not cut funding for Matthew 25 and Luke 4 (the poor and vulnerable). For at the end of the day, our nation’s greatest asset lies embedded in our commitment to ‘the least of these.’
-Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the country’s largest Hispanic Evangelical organization

People of faith will be profoundly disappointed if the debate on the budget splits along partisan or ideological lines. For us, the matter of how the people’s money is spent is not a question of Tea Party slogans or liberal polemics. Our faith requires us to preach Jesus’ love for the poor, and to declare our conviction that the budget must not take away support from Americans who live in poverty — millions of whom are working families with children seeking a way out of their desperate situation with help only the government can provide.
-Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, which represents 45 million people and 100,000 congregations in the U.S.

Tim King is communications manager and special assistant to the CEO at Sojourners. Follow Tim on Twitter @TMKing.
http://blog.sojo.net/2011/02/28/sojourners-supporters-and-partners-challenge-congress-on-budget-cuts/ 

Budgets Are Still Moral Documents

by Brian McLaren 02-28-2011

The “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign, launched by Jim Wallis and the good people of Sojourners, assumes that massive budget cuts are coming, but raises the question of where we start. If budget cuts are a fiscal necessity (more on that in a minute), asking what we cut is a moral necessity. The campaign’s title, therefore, is intended to attract the attention — and stimulate the conscience — of American Christian voters. We all need to be reminded in the midst of what can become budget-frenzy that budgets are moral documents, and that the love of money can cause people to commit all sorts of evil things.
I agree that living within our means is a financial necessity, and long-term deficit spending is stupid and short-sighted. I think it’s sad, however, that Republicans have managed to paint Democrats as the bad guys on this, since it was a Republican administration that most recently turned a surplus into a deficit through tax cuts for the wealthy and two unfunded (and at least one unfounded) wars. I also think it’s sad that our discussion of the deficit jumps too quickly to prescription, not taking adequate time for careful diagnosis.
Such diagnostic examination would explore a number of causative factors, including the possibility that our national debt is in large part a consequence of a broken political campaign system where votes can be bought with the currency of short-sighted, self-interested promises. In this system, Republicans can buy votes and loyalty from rich people and want-to-be-rich people through tax cuts and promises of more security through an ever-bigger military. And Democrats can buy votes and loyalty from poor people and want-to-help-poor people through entitlements and promises of a stronger economic safety net. The latter strikes me as a more honorable form of vote-buying, I suppose, since poor people need help more than rich folks do. But buying votes isn’t a great way to run a democracy either way. One hopes more attention will be paid to these dimensions of our deficit in the process of reducing it.
The Republican House recently unveiled their plan for deficit reduction. Their proposal represents what Republican Michael Gerson rightly calls a squandering of an important Republican legacy. That’s why it’s important for more and more Republicans to speak up — not against getting our fiscal house in order — that’s a necessity — but about what should be cut and why. And Democrats need to enter the fray, not as anti-Republicans, but as responsible partners, and, probably in this case, balanced and thoughtful leaders who tell the whole truth that needs to be told, inviting the American people to be grown ups and face the facts.
Cutting programs that save lives in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is morally unacceptable. Far better is to ask questions like these:

• How can we increase taxes on what we want less of (pollution, waste, pornography, tools of violence) and reduce taxes on what we want more of (work, earning, education, research and development, alternative energy, etc.)?
• Why does a small segment of the super-rich control a larger and larger portion of national wealth; what are the consequences of this trend; and what should be done about it?
• What percent of the national budget should be spent on the military? Are we heeding Eisenhower’s well-known, but too-little-heeded warning and advice about the “military-industrial complex”?

Eisenhower, we should remember, was a Republican. Like Gerson, he had a broader and more intelligent vision than the narrow, one-dimensional, reactionary one we see sweeping today’s Republican party like a tsunami of tea. Perhaps this is a good time to remember his parting words as he left the presidency 50 years ago this year:

So — in this my last good night to you as your President — I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I — my fellow citizens — need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation’s great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing aspiration:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
That is the kind of American moral ethos I hope will prevail in re-calibrating the American budget in the weeks and months ahead.
Brian McLaren is an author and speaker whose new book is A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith.
http://blog.sojo.net/2011/02/28/budgets-are-still-moral-documents/ 

Faith Leaders Announce Fasting, Prayer, and Action

by Evan Trowbridge 03-28-2011

Facing scribbling reporters and flashing cameras at a packed room in the National Press Club, Jim Wallis and a band of faith leaders stood together this morning to declare the beginning of a hunger fast in response to immoral budget cuts that target poor individuals.
Standing with Jim was Ambassador Tony P. Hall, executive director of Alliance to End Hunger; Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World; Ritu Sharma, president of Women Thrive Worldwide; and one dozen other leaders committed to fasting, prayer, and action in defending those who are often left without a voice as lawmakers decide their fate.
“We do not fast today against fiscal responsibility. We fast against political hypocrisy,” Jim Wallis said, criticizing members of Congress who are focused on cutting programs that help poor people instead of going after wasteful corporate tax loopholes and military spending.
“There is a difference between deficit hawks and deficit hypocrites,” Jim Wallis said.
Tony Hall, who completed a 22-day fast while a member of Congress in 1993, said that the stakes are even higher now.
“17 million U.S. children are going to bed hungry,” Hall said. “We’ve talked and talked and talked. And we’ve lobbied and we’ve reasoned and we’ve sent letters and we’ve admonished. That’s why we’re having the fast. It’s time to call in God.”
Jim Wallis said the true focus of the fast shouldn’t be on those who were at the head of the room. Rather, he said, it should be on the collective action of each individual who is willing to stand up against immoral and unconscionable cuts to vulnerable individuals.
“We are calling on people to fast and pray, and if a circle of protection forms around these programs, that’s the power of it,” Jim Wallis said.
More than 3,000 Sojourners supporters have already joined this “circle of protection.” Please consider doing the same.
View photos from the event:




Evan Trowbridge is the communications assistant at Sojourners.
http://blog.sojo.net/2011/03/28/faith-leaders-announce-fasting-prayer-and-action/