Pentecost was a highly significant Christian event that occurred fifty days after Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Unlike Christmas and Easter, it is not widely celebrated even by many devout Christians, and certainly not by the general public.
This year, though, Jim Wallis and his friends/supporters are promoting what he is calling “Pentecost witness for a moral budget.”1
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| U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks to the media on May 22 after the House narrowly passed the "big, beautiful bill." |
Jim Wallis’s Substack
blogsite is called “God’s Politics.” On May 8, he
posted a call there for people
to join him on June 10, two days after Pentecost, in “a public procession and
vigil led by clergy and congregants, religious and lay leaders, at the U.S.
Capitol before a key Senate vote.”
That vote will be “on a reconciliation
package that threatens to slash care for the sick in Medicaid, limit feeding
the hungry in SNAP, and crippling other vital social programs that support and
uplift vulnerable people among us.” It may even restrict Medicare.
It will likely be early July before the
Senate votes on the budget bill, but on May 22 (at 6:56 a.m.!), the House
passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB) by a vote of 215 for and 214
against, with one dissenting Republican House member voting “present.”2
Wallis has long emphasized that a budget
is a moral issue. That is because tax policies and government budgets affect
people’s lives. They have moral consequences—and the moral standard is the
biblical vision of economic justice. (Jim wrote about that in his best-selling
book God’s Politics, 2006.)
The Poor People’s Campaign is also
emphasizing a moral budget. At 7:56 a.m. on
May 22, exactly one hour after the House passed the BBB, the leaders of the
Poor People’s Campaign wrote that “now 215 Republican members of the House have
put their name on this one big, ugly payout to billionaires.” (I encourage you
to read their full blog post here.)
The prime leader of the Poor People’s
Campaign is William Barber, whom I have mentioned, and lauded, several times
since first introducing him in a September 2016 blog post. (He was also on my
list of Ten Most
Admired Contemporary Christians that
I posted in March 2017.)
The week before Wallis’s June 10 event,
Barber is hosting a protest on the east side of the Capitol, in front of the
Supreme Court at 11 a.m. (ET) on June 2. In announcing that gathering, Barber wrote,
As the cries of the poor grow louder and the policies of the powerful grow colder, we must rise. Across lines of faith, race, and region, moral witnesses will converge at the very steps where justice has been delayed, where truth has been trampled, and where budgets have become weapons against the vulnerable.
Now is the time to protest the harmful
provisions of the BBB. Even though it
will be more than a month before the Senate votes on their version of it, now
is the time to be aware—and to make others aware—of how immoral the
House-passed version of the BBB is.
Before the House vote, the President was touting
the “merits” of the BBB. He is reported to have said, “This is the greatest
bill … the most important bill this country, just about, has ever done, in
terms of size and scope. That’s why we call it the great, big, beautiful deal.”
However, as Mark Wingfield posted on May
27, “Apart from evangelicals and die-hard Trump supporters, America's religious
leaders find the president's ‘big beautiful bill’ … to be immoral, unkind and
un-Christian.”3
That’s why now, a
month and more before the Senate vote, as a Pentecost witness for a moral budget,
we who agree with Wingfield and the religious leaders he cites need to write
our Senators, urging them to vote No—and maybe we can convince friends and
family members to do the same.
_____
*1 On May 29, Jim posted a Stackpost article (here) similar to what he posted on May 8. Many of you know who Jim Wallis is and my longstanding appreciation
for him, but if you don’t, please take a look at the blog post I made about him
in July 2021 by
clicking here.
*2 See
here for details about the content of the BBB on a government website. Since
it is such a “big” bill, it includes much more than merely budgetary matters.
*3 Wingfield is Baptist News Global’s executive director and publisher.
The article cited above is quite long, but if you want to read it all, which I
hope some of you do, here is a link to it:
Faith
leaders decry 'big beautiful bill' as immoral and un-Christian
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Thank you, Leroy! I think you have liked or commented on my FB post open letter to my Senators Cornyn and Cruz, urging them to eliminate the section in the big beautiful bill that would give the executive virtual immunity from any judicial contempt citation. I think this is the most I can hope for from my two senators. Probably more than I can hope for from Cornyn, who is up for reflection next year, and is already under threat of primarying by DJT.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting comments early this morning, Charles. (I have waited to respond, hoping to have several to respond to one after the other, but for some reason only you and local Thinking Friend Jim Koger are the only ones who have made comments so far). But the issue that you mentioned is of grave concern also, and I am impressed by your being so pro-active and writing your U.S. Senators from Texas about the matter.
DeleteThe BBB is certainly a wide-ranging (big!) bill which encompasses a variety of provisions that extend beyond the budget items which I emphasized, as did Jim Wallis and William Barber. They both decried the way the BBB as passed by the House will hurt the neediest people in the nation, "the least of these" about whom Jesus spoke of in Matthew 25.
Good morning Leroy and thank you again for your thoughtful posts. I would have more respect for this bill if it were attempting to lower deficit spending, the sheeps clothing that is often donned to make this bill seem palatable. But unfortunately, it is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, removing vital services from those who need it most, to enrich the wealthy and our defense budget. I have a son on the spectrum and parents who rely on this assistance, both of whom have limited incomes to supplement insurance on their own. I fail to see how those in Congress touting their religious affiliation can find any justification for approving this budget. Also, as Charles pointed out, inserting unrelated language to legislate a further degradation of democracy into law, is shameful.
ReplyDeleteI also appreciate you posting comments this morning, Jim. I certainly agree with you that it seems hypocritical for politicians such as House Speaker Johnson, who publically says that he is a Christian and a man of prayer, to push the passing of the BBB which will harm so many needy people.
ReplyDelete(See this AP news article posted on May 23: https://apnews.com/article/speaker-johnson-trump-tax-bill-christian-prayer-f82ed140d9110d5cc7b4029b681ea9eb )
Correction: "publically" should be "publicly"
DeleteThese are not comments directly related to my blog post, but Doug Pagitt, head of Vote Common Good organization, sent out an email about thirty minutes ago that speaks to the issue addressed in the blog article:
ReplyDelete"When Iowa constituents confronted Senator Joni Ernst at a town hall this morning about the devastating Medicaid cuts in the GOP's budget plan — cuts that would kick at least 10 million people off healthcare — someone in the crowd shouted out the obvious: 'People are going to die!'
"Ernst's response? She smirked and said, 'Well, we're all going to die.'
"Yes, Senator Ernst, we are all going to die. But it should not be due to the choices of our politicians.
"This moment perfectly captures the moral bankruptcy of MAGA politics. They shrug off the human cost of their policies.
"Ernst tried to justify these cuts by falsely claiming they target 'illegals' receiving Medicaid benefits. It's just not the truth, as undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for Medicaid and have no way to access those benefits.
"These cuts will affect millions of vulnerable American citizens, all to give the wealthiest Americans a tax break.
"This is exactly why Vote Common Good will be active throughout 2025 to flip Congress. We cannot allow politicians like Ernst to treat human lives as expendable while they serve the wealthy and powerful."
If all the Republicans seem to be on something (not "on to"), perhaps a new piece of news will put at least a bit of the horror into perspective. HuffPost reports that Elon Musk appears to have been high on drugs such as ketamine. Not sure what Trump's excuse is, unless it is in the first verse of Martin Luther's famous hymn. (The Prince of Darkness grim...) You can read the HuffPost article on Musk here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-drug-use-white-house-ketamine_n_6839c03ee4b03a503eaaa87a?0fn
ReplyDeleteI also saw this earlier on the New York Times website:
Delete"As Elon Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, he told people he was taking so much ketamine that it was affecting his bladder. He was also taking Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and he traveled with a daily medication box of about 20 pills."