Christian Humanism Still Exists in America: Rev. William Barber's Pastoral Letters to the Democrat and Republican Parties
David Shasha
Reverend William Barber’s Pastoral Letter to the Democratic Party
Dear DNC leadership,
I am writing because of my deep love for this country and my sincere belief that we cannot move forward toward a more perfect union in this moment without your decisive leadership.
I write in obedience to the Bible’s command that our first priority in public life is love and care for the least of these (Matthew 25). This tradition further exhorts all people of faith to say to the rulers and political leadership, “This is God’s Message: Attend to matters of justice. Set things right between people. Rescue victims from their exploiters. Don’t take advantage of the homeless, the orphans, the widows. Stop the murdering!” (Jeremiah 22)
Since the initial midterm results were reported last week, I have heard leading Democrats gleefully celebrating that they held off a “red wave” in this election cycle. While I agree that there is some relief and joy in seeing Americans reject the most egregious forms of extremism, I am troubled by the satisfaction many seem to have with a political reality that will lead to continued policy violence. I am writing to sincerely ask the party to also critically reflect on its approach to building a governing coalition that can pass policies to lift from the bottom so everyone can rise.
Though Black women voted at 98 percent for Biden/Harris and Black people consistently vote 88–98 percent for Democrats, the US will not have any Black women occupying the nation’s governor’s mansions or the Senate after the midterms. The most loyal Democratic bloc is Black people, and the most loyal among Black people are Black women. Shouldn’t the Democratic Party leadership and political operatives acknowledge some remorse that every Black woman who ran for Senate and Governor lost?
Shouldn’t we unpack this? Did Democrats split their tickets when it came to voting for these candidates? Did the national party fully support Val Demings, Cheri Beasley, Mandela Barnes, and Charles Booker? Was there full endorsement and real support from the highest level of Democratic influencers? Why didn’t Democrats frame this as an historic, transformative opportunity, as they did when a Black man ran for president and won in North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia? Why are we hearing that consultants advised Black candidates running for Senate to only focus on abortion rights and democracy—the very thing John Fettermen, who flipped a Republican seat, refused to do?
And—rather than telling a victory story that erases the plight of our democracy and the impending threats in the cases before our Supreme Court—we should tell the truth of how much worst these losses of representative democracy and policy violence will become, if we do not make it a moral and political imperative to ensure passage of the John Lewis For the People Act and a restored Voting Rights Act right now before any more days pass to ensure that there is a realizable fundamental right to vote in this country for all.
Without doubt, defending democracy and a constitutional right to privacy and choice for women were strong top-tier motivating factors for Democratic voters. Many Democrats who held onto House seats could not have won without an increase in turnout among voters under 30, who favored Democrats by 28 points, and reported abortion rights as a strong motivating factor. But a majority of voters in Republican-majority Nebraska and Democratic-majority Washington, D.C., also approved ballot measures to raise wages. And a deeper analysis of the young voters reveals their hope for a filibuster-proof Senate in order to pass many things stalled by Senate rules and the resistance of so-called “moderate” Democrats.
I believe this explains why another low-propensity voter demographic—people who earn less than $30,000 a year—also favored Democrats by 12 points, according to exit polls. Are Democrats chasing the elusive suburban swing vote but not going after the real swing vote that could fundamentally shift the political and economic architecture of the nation? And if so, why? 60 percent of people of color are poor and low wealth, accounting for 26 million Americans. Only 30 percent of white Americans are poor or low-wealth, but that’s another 66 million people. Fifty-five million people of all races make less than $15 an hour.
Poor and low-wage voters make up over 30 percent of the electorate, and in states where the margin of victory has been within 3 percent, poor and low-wage voters make up over 40 percent of electorate. And yet turnout among this demographic has consistently been 20 percentage points lower than turnout among their wealthier neighbors. Don’t Democrats, who have too often take these votes for granted, have an urgent responsibility to find out why this is the case? Since 60 percent of Black people are poor and low-wealth, alongside 43 percent of all Americans and 66 million white Americans, why were the campaigns of Black Democratic candidates not vigorously addressing these issues? What did the nation lose in public policy when these Black candidates lost?
All of them out-qualify their opponents. When they didn’t win, we lost the possibility of a filibuster-proof Senate. We lost the ability to pass living wages of $15 an hour, which would lift 55 million Americans out of poverty and too-low wages. We lost the ability to ensure passage of John Lewis’s For the People Act and a restored Voting Rights Act. We lost the ability to make the Expanded Child Tax Credit permanent and lift 50 percent of our children out of poverty. We lost the ability to ensure access to health care for all Americans. We lost the ability for the Senate to reflect America’s diversity and for there to be a Black governor in the South for the first time since Doug Wilder. And while we lost the possibility of so many uplifting new policies, we also know that measures to undermine what we have already fought for and won will continue to be pushed through extremist-dominated state legislatures and upheld by extremist judges.
On the House side, Democrats lost the majority. But did you really have to? If you had drilled down and campaigned on the economic issues that the House passed only to see them die to the filibuster, could Democrats have held more House seats? Shouldn’t there be some sober assessment on what the country lost when the house majority shifted? All of the people of color and women chairs in the House are gone. Shouldn’t Democrats reconsider their earlier failure to cut the bloated military budget even 10 percent, at the very height of the Covid crisis? Was there a weakness in limiting the focus to abortion and January 6? Some voices were saying connect the dots, show in messaging that the same political leaders that opposed abortion rights also incited January 6 and oppose living wages, health care, and voting rights.
We lost a lot, and it would be a mistake not to investigate whether the party could have done more to produce the kind of shifts we saw in Pennsylvania and Ohio—increases in Democrats’ share of the vote that would have more than overcome the margin of defeat in several House races. Or in North Carolina, where Democrats have picked up 4 House seats over the past two cycles, going from a 10 Republican/three Democratic delegation to seven Republican/seven Democrats.
Even as there is legitimate thankfulness about holding off a red wave and a simple majority in the Senate, it would be a very serious political mistake not to unpack this, acknowledge the loss, and do everything possible to correct it. The party must look at funding priorities and consulting decisions, recognizing that the threat of a red wave from without was real, but that the forces of racism within are also real and must be confronted. It is not enough for any party to have Black faces in high places. The hope of a multiethnic democracy depends on building a fusion of Black, white, brown, Asian and Native voters that unites the concerns of poor and low-income people with all Americans who believe in an economy where everyone can thrive
Could Beasley and Barnes have won in North Carolina and Wisconsin if the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and the national and state machines had invested more in their races? Did Black Senate candidates in the South and Midwest get the same support that others received? Why did Democratic presidents visit Georgia but not North Carolina or Florida—states the party carried in 2008 and 2012? Why are we hearing that Black Senate candidates ran out of money in the weeks before Election Day? Why weren’t the stars and influencers called out to highlight the possibility of an historic class of Black senators? Why couldn’t President Biden, with all of his policy successes, come south and make his case in Florida, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Georgia? If Trump came, why in the world did Democrats shun Biden and keep him in the North?
Could Democrats not have said, “These are the victories we won with a dead-even Senate,” and then said, “If you give us a majority, we will deliver much more—including fully restored and expanded voting rights, $15 dollar minimum wage, a military budget reduced to fund investments in people and the planet, Expanded Child Tax Credit, and protections for Social Security”?
I applaud the just and moral policies Democrats were able to enact into law over the past two years: lowering prescription drug prices, extending health care subsidies during the Covid-19 pandemic to help some Americans who buy health insurance on their own, investing to address the climate crisis, enacting a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations that earn more than $1 billion in annual profits as well as a 1 percent excise tax on stock buybacks, and empowering the IRS to go after tax cheats. With control of the White House and Congress, you worked with some Republicans to pass a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill for highways, broadband, and other investments.
But so many poor and low-income Americans continue to suffer without the policies Democrats couldn’t stand together to pass. Even after experiencing it for a short time, millions of families lost the $300 monthly child tax credit that widely reduced child poverty. We lost the hope of plans for free pre-kindergarten and community college, a paid family-leave program, a price cap on insulin for everyone, and the George Floyd reform bill. These bills passed the House only to die in the Senate because two Democrats would not join their colleagues to override the Republicans’ united filibuster. In the aftermath of midterms where total turnout for Democrats did not exceed 2018 turnout, we need to seriously consider the role this deep disappointment with the political process played in limiting our possibilities for years to come.
I am not a party pooper. I was invited to preach the inaugural sermon for President Biden and Vice President Harris. The advisers for that event chose the scripture Isaiah 58 about the call for leaders to be repairers of the breach. This clarion call requires leaders of the nation and pastor/prophets to center the poor in every decision we make. Only then can the nation be repaired in a way that pleases God. At the end of that sermon, I asked that we all listen to the words of a known hymn from yesteryear, written in another time of challenge:
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour
Bend our pride to Thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.
In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
That we fail not man nor Thee,
That we fail not man nor Thee.
Save us from weak resignation,
To the evils we deplore.
Let the search for Thy salvation,
Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee whom we adore.
If running against a mean-spirited, racist and antidemocratic former president endorsing candidates who participated in the January 6 insurrection and support outright attacks on voting, the best the party can do is lose the House, lose so many races with Black candidates running, and eke out a slim majority in the Senate, we have to take pause. We cannot simply end this election season and claim victory while closing our eyes to the issues I have raised here.
Even in victory, the great sports coaches say, “We won, but there are areas we must improve.” As you well know, saving the soul of this democracy is no game.
I am asking the party to give consideration to some of the people who have given the most to build up the party. Think about how they feel—not for the sake of the party, but for the sake of just policies that could lift all people in this nation.
Sincerely,
Bishop William J. Barber II
CC: Senate Majority Leader
Speaker of the House
Congressional Black Caucus
House Hispanic Caucus
Progressive Caucus
Asian-Pacific Islander Caucus
Democratic National Committee Chair
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
From The Nation, November 22, 2022
Reverend William Barber’s Pastoral Letter to the Republican Party
Dear Republican leadership,
I am writing because I love the United States of America and long to see justice for all in this land. After an election when your party won more than half of the votes for congressional seats, I know that we cannot achieve a Third Reconstruction without some part of your coalition making justice for all your aim as well. So I write in hope that at least some of you will remember the critical role your forebears played in America’s First Reconstruction.
My grandfather was a Republican because he remembered the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, who helped establish your party on the notion that a government cannot endure permanently as half-slave and half-free. On the fundamental moral question of whether humans can own other humans, Republicans were right. You not only opposed slavery, but also wrote into your 1860 platform a guarantee of immigrants’ rights and a just, living wage for all workers. This is the party that Frederick Douglass and millions of other formerly enslaved people embraced when they were able to participate as full citizens in America’s democracy. When I review the strategies and policy focus of today’s Republican party, I have to ask, “What happened?”
Those 19th-century Republicans joined together with white Populists in many parts of the American South to elect governments that established universal public education as a right for all people. By the early 20th century, Republican leaders like Theodore Roosevelt were adamant that a commitment to liberty for all also required commitment to universal health care and protection of our common lands from corporate greed.
When the struggle for voting rights in the 20th century led to a Voting Rights Act in 1965, many Republicans voted with Democrats in Congress to guarantee the franchise to Black Americans. Indeed, the VRA was last reauthorized by a bipartisan vote and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush less than 20 years ago. But when some of your colleagues in North Carolina took advantage of the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision to pass a voter suppression bill without preclearance, the state chapter of the NAACP, which I led at the time with Forward Justice as our lawyers, challenged the law in federal court and won with the final decision declaring that your party had engaged in racism with “almost surgical precision.” During one of the hearings, a Republican-appointed judge stopped the lawyers defending the bill that had been passed unanimously by Republicans to ask if they could explain why they didn’t want people to vote.
Have those within your party who openly promote and defend voter suppression forgotten that you were founded as the party of liberty for all? Why have so many in your ranks embraced efforts to suppress the votes of Black people, Latinos, Native Americans, poor people, students, women, and working people? Is it because you do not believe a majority of Americans will support your platform?
In the South, where I live, most states are led by a Republican majority today, even as they rank among the poorest, most uninsured, and sickest states in the union. This is not what the people want. For instance, though Republicans are a majority in South Dakota, voters there overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to expand access to Medicaid, guaranteeing access to health care to thousands who were uninsured. In Nebraska, where a Republican won the governor’s race with almost 60 percent of the vote, a similar share of the electorate voted to raise the minimum wage. Polling suggests similar public opinion across the South, where your party too often spreads division while low-wage workers of every race struggle to survive.
As I have I tried to understand the commitments of today’s Republican Party, I have studied your platform from 2016—the most recent public statement you have made. You begin with an affirmation of America’s commitment to equality and the Constitution—an affirmation I celebrate. But I come from a long tradition of movements that have challenged Republicans and Democrats to demonstrate their commitment to “establishing justice” by enacting legislation that makes life more just for people who are harmed by injustice. Such people are not hard to find. I have stood with them as they cry out across this land for living wages, access to health care, environmental justice, protection of Native land rights, affordable housing, criminal justice reform, and immigration reform. But your party has not proposed policies that would establish justice for these people. Instead, many within your ranks have demonized them as “anti-American,” “extreme radicals,” or “socialists,” often blaming them for the injustice other Americans suffer. In fact, you often push policies that hurt the very people who have believed these scare tactics and false narratives about their fellow Americans.
What myth will make you vote for somebody who claims to be Christian and then tries to pass polices to take your health care? If Jesus did anything, he healed the sick and never charged a co-pay.
What myth makes you wake up in the morning and say, “Since I’m an elected official, let me figure out how many policies I can pass that will keep the government from promoting the very general welfare I swore to promote”? What myth makes a few people care more about packing the Supreme Court with one person rather than protecting thousands from being placed in caskets during the Covid pandemic?
What myth makes somebody think that allowing public education funds to be cut is going to help your children? What myth makes people think that bad police who kill innocent people make you safer?
Your party is known for launching what have become known as the “forever wars”—conflicts that have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, left millions homeless, and destroyed cities, yet never made us safer. Your last platform reflected your party’s long-standing commitment to military force as the centerpiece of our country’s role in the world—calling for a militarily “resurgent America.” For decades you have backed spending more than half the congressional budget on the military—diverting 53 cents or more of every discretionary dollar away from health care, education, jobs, child and elder care, and other priorities desperately needed by our people.
Your platform says you believe in limited government and the rights of individuals, but when it comes to women and LGBTQ issues, you seem to suggest that the government should legislate some notions of morality.
Your platform claims that political freedom and economic freedom are inseparable and decries stagnant wages, but the legislatures your party controls have consistently refused to raise the minimum wage in states where working people are bound by poverty and its attendant misery. And your party has led the way to block increasing the federal living wage. Just last year, you repeated the lie that raising the minimum wage would hurt society and raise prices and unanimously voted against a $15 federal minimum wage, which would have lifted over 50 million working Americans out of poverty.
A healthy democracy benefits from debate between parties that disagree on the best way to achieve our shared goals. Such is the nature of politics. As I read your platform, your party wants to argue that the personal liberty of all Americans is best supported by a limited government that “cuts red tape” and practices “deregulation.” If that is your conviction, why not be specific about what you intend to cut? Should Americans expect to feel more free when Social Security ends? When Medicaid is done away with? When the Environmental Protection Agency no longer regulates corporations that have poisoned our water? Will those suffering from “stagnant wages” experience true liberty when every corporation is allowed to pay nothing in federal taxes and the infrastructure those businesses depend upon is allowed to crumble?
I have listened as your party has debated how to process the results of the midterms, where MAGA Republicans seem to have underperformed while some other Republicans won congressional seats that had been controlled by Democrats. Some suggest that Republicans can win a governing majority by simply going back to what the party was before Donald Trump. But a more thorough soul-searching is needed. The party of Lincoln now promotes a vision of liberty that would delight the Southern Democrat and pro-slavery Senator John Calhoun. Since the civil rights movement, Republicans have embraced a Southern strategy that offers cultural wedge issues as surrogates for racial resentment.
Let me remind you, the Southern strategy was born out of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, when George Wallace ran as an independent and demonstrated the power of white backlash beyond the South, across the suburbs and the Sun Belt. Kevin Phillips advised Nixon that the Republican Party could win without Negro votes, by painting the Democrats as a “black party.” Phillips predicted “a new American revolution coming out of the South and West” because of fears and objections raised by the civil rights movement’s victories.
Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips called this “positive polarization,” and developed ways to divide the country for political advantage. The aim, wrote Buchanan, was to “cut the Democratic Party and country in half.” “My view,” he said, “is that we would have far the larger half.”
He noted that “white ethnics” in the North were also ripe for the picking, correctly predicting, that the Irish Democrats in New York would turn Republican “because they don’t like the Jews and Negroes who run the New York Democratic Party.” The South became the base for a new Republican Party.
This divide-and-conquer strategy wasn’t new. They just found new tactics to make it work post–civil rights. And this is the political formula that produced the audience for Fox News and Donald Trump.
The tactics we are seeing today have their roots in the states’ rights movement that began before the Civil War with the fight for laws to maintain slavery. Confederates militarized it; the KKK added violence; Plessy legalized it; it was picked up and continued by Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace. It became the Southern strategy, and it was picked up by Ronald Reagan, continued by Pat Buchanan and George W. Bush. Donald Trump just charismatized it, pushed it with media savvy, and convinced greedy elites to invest billions of dollars in it.
In Trumpism, the chickens have simply and sadly come home to roost. As the Bible says, the sins of the fathers have set the children’s teeth on edge. This is not a moment to pivot. You must own this history if you want to repent and be transformed.
I am a preacher, so I know firsthand what’s in the book that your politicians so often claim as a guide for your party’s vision. The Bible is clear that not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” is doing God’s will.
The prophet Isaiah declares, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?”
Isaiah 58 teaches that when we attempt to engage in religious activity without loosing the bands of policy wickedness, and when we refuse to honor the image of God in all persons—especially the poor—a nation sets up its own destruction and disables its ability to be an enlightened nation that can repair its breaches.
So we always have to hold any policy up against the standards Scripture sets for justice, love, and mercy in human affairs. If you want to make the Bible your guide, then you must ask how your rejection of living wages impacts the poor people whom Jesus blessed. If Jesus says the nations will be judged by how we care for the sick, how can you go on resisting some expansion of health care to cover every American? If every person is created in the image of God, how can you continue to support measures that will deny some people born or naturalized as citizens of this country the right to vote?
I write to you because I know your party’s history and I know repentance is possible. It is, in fact, celebrated in one of our nation’s hymns, which says:
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
If liberty is to be real for every American, we must have a Third Reconstruction to write a level playing field into law. Republicans have been part of every stride toward a more perfect union in this nation’s history, and I believe you can be today. I pray this appeal finds you willing to seriously consider what this moment demands and ready to act with courage.
Sincerely,
Bishop William J. Barber, II
CC: Chair of Republican National Committee
Senate Minority Leader
House Minority Leader
National Republican Senatorial Committee
House Republican Campaign Committee
From The Nation, November 30, 2022