Poor People’s Quest Eyes ​“Policy Violence”

During a week when Christians will contemplate the death and resurrection of a savior, the Rev. William J. Barber II, the leader of a revived national Poor People’s Campaign, stopped by Yale University’s Battell Chapel Tuesday night to point the way for how the United States of America might resurrect its moral compass.

He said the country has lost that compass because of systemic racism, systemic poverty, and the ​“heresy and malpractice of the theology of Christian nationalism and the way in which it has hijacked the moral framework of the nation.”

And he called on the crowd to focus not just on physical violence, but ​“policy violence.”

“Yes, we should be terribly upset when an officer kills an unarmed person, we should be terribly outraged by a gun industry that protects assault rifles before children,” Barber said. ​“But in this context, gun violence is not the only source of violence that we live with. There is policy violence and attention violence.”

A pastor from North Carolina, Barber is the president of Repairers of the Breach, a not-for-profit, that along with Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice has taken up the unfinished work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Poor People’s Campaign.

Barber has become the face of a movement that is pushing forward on an agenda that says the moral concern of people of faith is not abortion, the suppression of LGBTQ people, prayer in school, gun rights and states rights. It says the true moral compass focuses on lifting people out of poverty, ending oppression and disenfranchisement, and putting a stop to the devastation of the environment and militarization for the sake of a war economy.

Barber told the crowd gathered in Battell that the United States today is a place where people have fewer voting rights than they did 53 years ago when the Civil Rights Act was passed. In the last eight years — before President Donald Trump was elected — states have passed laws that suppress the vote and gerrymandered districts to disenfranchise people of color and women.

“We’ve not seen an attack on voting rights like this since Jim Crow,” he said.

He said the United States is a place where when you add up all of the people who receive some sort of assistance from the government — many of them women and children, and many of those are white — nearly 45 percent of them are poor. Yet in the last presidential contest, there was no debate devoted specifically to the problem of poverty and how people die because they lack access to decent wages and healthcare. There was no debate that focused on voting rights, or on the war economy.

Barber said that over 6,000 people die every year for every one million who do not have health insurance.

“They died not because God called them home. But because their congressmen and their legislators, who by the way get free health insurance, won’t allow them what they have,” he said. ​“This is not your granddaddy’s America. This is right now.”

Russians Didn’t Pass Voter Suppression

His remedy? Don’t let those who have proven that their God is money and not Jesus Christ hijack the country’s morality or its democracy. People shouldn’t be distracted by tales of Russians and adult film stars, he said. Russians didn’t pass the laws that suppressed voter turnout in the last election; they didn’t gerrymander voting districts, and they won’t be the ones trying to change how the census is counted, he said.

“That ain’t really the pornography that I’m concerned about,” he said, alluding to the president’s alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. ​“It’s the pornographic sums of money that have been put into politics that I’m concerned with. It’s the illicit adulterous relationship between the Supreme Court and Big Business that produced the bastard child of Citizens United that concerns me.”

He said the election of Trump isn’t the problem but ​“the symptom of a deeper moral and spiritual malady.”

Holding up the Bible, Barber said the instruction for pushing back against the violence of apathy, the violence of oppression and the violence of ignoring poverty and the violence of immigration policy that unfairly targets black and brown immigrants can be found in the Book of Amos. In Chapter Five, the people are admonished to show their love for God by interrupting their everyday routine and organizing and taking to the streets to ​“make the nation cry over how bad things are.”

But the organizing noted in Amos, on which the Poor People’s Campaign is modeled, is to tug on the heartstrings not of politicians, Barber said, but of God. The campaign is asking at least 1,000 people in each state and the District of Columbia to commit to 40 days of nonviolent, moral direct action. He said the hope was to get 20 states, but so far there are organizers in 39 states, including Connecticut.

Barber said this is a moment in this generation when people have been called to take on injustice.

“Could it be that God is waiting on us?” he asked. ​“America can be changed. Not just saved but made better.”

Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, author of Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom From Slaveholder Religion, urged attendees Monday to participate in the Poor People’s Campaign with the same type of fervor that one might offer those seeking salvation. Because in a way they were seeking salvation. Salvation from a country that is rolling back the many civil and human rights gains for which so many people fought.

“The extremism in this country that is being done in the name of God is an offense not only to my faith but to every person created in God’s image,” Hartgrove said.

Click the Facebook Live video below to watch Barber’s entire sermon.