Yara Allen: Good evening. Good evening. Can we do this together? Yes. Great. Great.
Just like a tree that’s planted by the water. We shall not be moved. We shall not, we shall not be moved. We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like a tree, planted by the water. We shall not be moved.
We stand against injustice. We shall not be moved. We stand against injustice.
We shall not be moved—oh, just like a tree planted by the water. We shall not be moved.
We’re standing hand in hand, and we shall not be moved. We’re standing hand in hand, and we shall not be moved. Oh, just like a tree planted by the water. We shall not be moved.
(Can we do that first verse again?)
We shall not, we shall not be moved. We shall not, we shall not be moved –oh, just like a tree planted by the water. We shall not be moved.
Alright.
B: Hi. I’m Brandon Nappi.
H: Hi. I’m Hannah Black, and we’re your hosts on the Leaders Way podcast.
B: A Yale podcast empowering leaders, cultivating spirituality, and exploring theology.
H: This podcast is brought to you by Berkeley Divinity School, The Episcopal Seminary at Yale.
B: Well, welcome, everyone, to Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, in particular, our newly renovated Berkeley Center. So we are making history by gathering here today, and by creating the Leaders Way podcast together. So thank you for your presence. Colleagues are here. Staff members are here. Students are here. Guests are here. Know that you are most welcome in this space to be moved by God, but also to not be moved, and to stand strongly in our conviction that compassion and love and justice have a really important role to play in this political election and in every season, and that the churches have an important role to play in helping people understand and discern the path of justice and love and compassion in our country and in our world.
We are so thankful that we could convene this conversation. The Leaders Way podcast has convened several conversations over the last few months at the intersection of religion and politics, those two topics which folks tell us we shouldn’t talk about in civilized space. And yet at a place like Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, we say boldly we must talk about: civilly, respectfully, honoring the full humanity of all of us. But these are urgent and necessary conversations. And I am so thankful to be a part of the conversation with you. My name is Brandon Nappi. I’m one of the cohosts with my dear colleague, Dr. Hannah Black. And, once again, thank you so much for gathering, and we’re so thankful that you’re here.
H: Woo hoo. Well, I have the pleasure of very briefly Well, I have the pleasure of very briefly introducing you to William Barber, who I hope you already know of or know well. The Rev. Dr. William J Barber II, director of the Center For Public Theology and Public Policy here at Yale. He’s the president and senior lecturer of Repairers the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, Bishop with the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries. And he’s been the pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in North Carolina for 29 years. Join me in welcoming the reverend doctor William Barber.
Rev. Barber: Wow. Makes me feel old. Let’s feel old. I was there 30 years. I retired to come to do this work. And, yeah. And you forgot to put up there, in case people might wanna leave the room, I’ve been arrested 17 times for nonviolence and for disobedience one way or the other with people around the country. But thank you for having us.
H: Thank you for being here.
B: And Bishop Barber, I wonder if you could take us back. We have some students with us today. Take us back to those early moments of vocation, and tell us the story of how God called you to ministry and how God called you to this work. How did you know you were being pulled and called in this direction?
Rev. B: When I was born was part of the calling. My family’s calling, what my father and mother were called to do was part of the calling. My running away from the calling and running away from the church and running right into God was part of the calling. And what I learned in seminary, particularly studying under particular professors, helped to strengthen that call. I was born two days after the March on Washington, August 30, 1963. And my mother said that she went into labor on the 28th, but me being somewhat of a rambunctious child, decided to say, let’s wait and see what happens on this March. And so rather than be–she went out of labor. Labor stopped for some reason, and I was born on the 30th, 7:35 AM at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. And interestingly enough, my first civil rights battle was my father saying to the hospital staff, “You will not just put Negro on his birth certificate.” They said, “But that’s what he is.” He said, “No. Actually, he he he’s he has Tuscarawan descent. He has, white or Caucasian descent …” and they went round and round and round until finally they agreed to put “Negro with other descent.” So even then, my father was saying that until you own all of yourself, you’ve not owned any of yourself. My father–my parents were called back to Eastern North Carolina. They would; they my father had gone to the CTS Seminary. He was a rising star in the Christian church, the Disciples of Christ. My mother was a rising star in … with the government. But 17 days after I was born, 70 days after March on Washington, people were blowing up children in churches in Sunday school. There was a bomb that went off to 16th Street Baptist Church and killed 4 girls who were in Sunday school studying the lesson, “Forgive, love your enemies.” And my parents wrestled deeply with … What does this mean? We’ve just had a child. My father’s a minister. He’s from the South. He’s not in the South. He could escape the South. He could not go back. I was headed toward integrated schools because schools in Indianapolis had integrated by that time to some degree. And they said, No. We gotta go back to the south. And so I was pulled back to the south because my father taught me all of his life, my mother, that there’s no distance between Jesus and justice.
And so we come back to the South. My father takes a vow to stay in the South to work in Eastern North Carolina where there’s not a lot of news coverage, but there was a lot of news-making events. And he began to work in fusion politics with blacks and white people who didn’t have decent wages and standing against desegregation. In fact, I went to segregated kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade. My mother was the 1st black woman to integrate the secretarial pool at the high school. My father was one of the first physics and science teachers.
So in some ways, my early life shaped me in that direction. But then, I struggled with the church because I saw many of the churches resist my father’s progressivism, resist this call for activism, and I said, I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna be involved. Plus, there were 500 years of preaching on my father’s side of the family and 300 years on my mama’s side of the family.
And so I told my father, what I like to be is a good cussing deacon. Let me see if I can work that out. And in the Baptist congregation, you know, the deacon is the one that kinda oversees everything. And I didn’t wanna be a preacher. I didn’t want to be it. And I went to school to go to law school. I literally gave up scholarships to Howard, Pascua, and UNC because they had classes in religion. Now I didn’t even wanna be at a school. Now I wasn’t angry at God, per se. I was just angry at the folk that claimed they knew him, and the craziness that was going on. I just couldn’t understand it.
So I went to North Carolina Central to go to law school and ended up getting involved in student government, and president and, and … being president of that school student government. And then my senior year, I got a room that was like an apartment in the dormitory. And that was a big thing at HBCU. No roommate. Had my own shower, my own bathroom.
Didn’t know it was God’s trap. Right? That in that room late at night, it would … I would wrestle deeply with who was I supposed to be, what was I supposed to be doing. And one day after some of those wrestlings, I called home and my father picked up the phone and I said, Dad, dad I need to come home. He said, I know. I said, what do you mean you know? He said, I knew it was coming. Come on home. And we went home, and we went driving down the East Coast along the Atlantic Ocean about a 120, 150 miles, and just talking about the difference between loving God and loving God’s people and the confusion that the two are the same. And really wrestling with, can you do more inside or outside? And it was in that space that I felt a call and knew immediately, and my father told me immediately that, If you really feel called, there is no such thing as a call without preparation.
And I preached my– what we call the trial sermon in March of ‘84. And some people came up to me that day saying, You know, we have a church that’s open, because in certain in this congregation. And my father ran them all away. He said, you better not ever even think about telling somebody you’re ready to preach. You better go to seminary. And I did. And there, I met Dr. William Turner, who’s a student a professor of preaching. I met, former Dean, who was a Tillichian scholar. I began to study Paul Tillich, began to study, the threat of being and non being and all of that meant in philosophical theology. I met C. Eric Lincoln, John Hope Franklin, CG Newsome, who became the president of Howard Divinity School, a great American Christianity Scholar. And as I studied under them, Stanley Hauwas, Professor Herzog, politics of God. And studying under all of them helped me to shape and form a theology. And the one thing that stuck with me was that Dr. William Turner one time taught us in class that a complete theology had to have a triune presentation, if you will. You had to have spiritual power and worship, prophetic social justice, and holiness.
And you had to have a commitment to all three, because one without the other actually was not full theology. If you got holiness without spiritual empowerment and social justice, you have a cult. If you have spiritual empowerment and praise and worship and singing with no holiness and no commitment to social justice, you have a party. And if you have spiritual-social justice with no spiritual empowerment and no holiness, you just have a social justice person that’s gonna end up mean and mad because they’re gonna be burnt out, and they’re not gonna have the reservoir of the Spirit to keep them. And so he taught me, we talked, and, my father died while I was in seminary.
The week before he died, I was called to be the 1st African American– I had been the 1st African American to lead the student government when I was a student–and then I became the 1st African American to preach the baccalaureate service. Now this is 1980. I want folk to hear this, and I was the first African American … in 1988, I was the first African American to serve as student government president the whole year in 1981.
That’s the place I come from. And, I did that back a lot, and the sermon was, “The only Way to Rise, to Go Up is To Go Down,” the story of the Good Samaritan. And my father, who by that time had had a stroke and some other things, but …when I was leaving the building, he walked out with me, and he said, “I think you’re gonna be alright.”
And I said, “Excuse me?” Because he never complimented my sermons. He was the hardest person. I would preach sermons and people would be “Amen” and hitting.
As soon as I get home, he would say, “Go get that–go get the commentary. Go get the Greek lexicon. Go get the—.”
I said, “But, Daddy, everybody said Amen.”
He said, “So what?” You know. “That’s not your … that’s not …You have to be faithful to the text,” and I’m thankful for that to this day. He said, “I think you’re gonna be alright,” and we went home and I didn’t ask him.
I said “Are you okay?”
He said “Yeah.”
I said, “You going somewhere?”
He said, “Maybe.” That’s the last words I heard.
But the night before he died I was preparing to do Sunday school that Sunday, and the Sunday school lesson was about Elijah. Elijah, and I kind of cherished that because I didn’t get to talk to him, you know, and, it cemented in me this calling. And then I was called to be a pastor in Martinsville, Virginia, in 1989, and then left that church after 2 years; came back, became the Director of Human Relations for the state of North Carolina enforcing civil rights laws, fair housing laws; but also was called to a church in Goldsboro, North Carolina: Ringley Christian Church. And too, and then this last thing I’ll say, which really solidified for me the calling. I went to that church, and I told them “I’m not gonna be your pastor.” I was still resisting pastor. I said, “I’ll come and do supply until you get a pastor. I don’t want to pastor. I’m working in government. I don’t … I’ve already done two years. I don’t wanna do it anymore. In fact, I’m going back to law school.” And, two months in, I got up on a Friday morning, 1st Friday in August, and did this. And my whole body went crazy. My legs, everything. I couldn’t move. It was like I started having spasms and everything. They came, picking up with the ambulance, took me to the hospital.
One guy was in the emergency room said, “I think he may have cancer; may have to amputate.”
I’m screaming, “You are not cutting off my leg, I do not have cancer!” so forth and so on. Ended up staying in the hospital about three months ‘til they could find out what I had, which was this rare form of arthritis. And anyway, so I, for about two months while I was there, I went through some depression because up until that time, everything I touched turned to gold. I would be leg pressing 5 or 600 pounds. If I wanted to do something, it was almost if I could do– if I wanted to do it, it happened. If I wanted to be at something, it happened. If I wanted to do something … I said, “God, what is going on here? You want me to preach? And now I can’t walk?” and so forth, and I went into depression.
And one night, a lady came in my room and she said, “I’m … I’ve come in the room to pray for you.”
And I said, “Ma’am, kinda, I just wish you would just leave me alone and go on.” You know, I was on Demerol and all these different pain medicines and steroids, everything. And people sometimes would maybe have hallucinations. You can call it what you want, but I’m’a tell you what happened.
And, she said, “You can’t go anywhere, so I can stay here as long as I want to.” And she said, “I’m gonna pray for you.” And she said, “You have got to get over your own personal vanity. You worrying about how you look. But don’t you realize everybody that God used in the Bible has some disability? Some major impediment that was actually a sign of them being called? The very fact that they had the weakness was the sign that they operated under the strength of God?”
And I said, “Yeah. But I don’t wanna hear that.”
And she said, “But you’re gonna hear it.”
So then she said, “I’m’a pray for you.” And she put her hand on me.
I said, “Ma’am, just …”
She said, “But you can’t get out of bed.” And so she prayed for me, and then she pulled the covers off her legs. She said, “I’ve had two… I’m’a get two prostheses, but I’m going to heaven soon, and I’m getting into brand new legs. But you have got to get over people looking at you walking with a cane, and just walk with God. And when you get over that, you … God gonna use you.”
So the next morning, I got, I was sitting up on the side of the bed. Doctor Kenny said, “What’s goin’ on?”
I said just, “I’m ready.” And I said, “But I need to meet Miss Watson. Miss Watson came in last night.”
And they said, “Okay.” And they went, and looked and they said, “We don’t have a Watson on this floor.”
And I said, “Well, check the hospital.” They did. And I started laughing. I said, Okay … And I said, “Well, God sent me an amputated angel to pull me out of a state of trusting myself as opposed to trusting God. And so now, I don’t care if you see me with canes. I don’t care, you know, because I know what God has done and how twelve years ago they said I wouldn’t walk again. But after twelve years in a wheelchair and on a walker, the only time I didn’t hurt was when I was baptizing and preaching. The only time it didn’t hurt. And so, all of that kind of makes up … the people I’ve met, my family. It’s not one singular thing, you know? But I do like to say, I found out how you can run away from God and run right into God.
H: Yeah. Thank you for that. I think one thing that stood out to me, among many things, is this feeling that we can have this love and devotion and even trust in God, and a deep frustration with God’s people. And something I’ve been thinking about ever since the conference last spring was this idea of being vehemently nonpartisan, yet deeply committed to Christian values, and how that ought to be a motivating force in the way that we as spiritual leaders, as spiritual people interact with the world around us, and especially as we’re looking at an upcoming election. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that. We had a great conversation on this show a few months ago with our colleague, Jonathan, about values. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. How do we how do we use values as a guiding light and maybe even overcome division that way?
Rev. B: Well, I don’t know if we can overcome it because it is the, as Walter Wink would say, it’s the work of the enemy. It’s the work of the evil one to divide. And that work is not going to subside because it’s in us. We are terribly divided even amongst ourselves. You know? Fosdick preached a sermon about being crazy and he lifted it from his original meaning, which means to be torn. Right? So there’s a little craziness, a little division in all of us. We’re deeply torn.
But your faith is found in the midst of your doubts, not outside of them. The great hymn of the church, it says his blood reaches to the highest mountain, and it flows the lowest valley. But the second verse said it soothes my doubt. Doesn’t say it erases them. Said it soothes my doubts and it calms my fears to look to the cross, to look to one who did not choose any particular political side, but chose justice and chose love regardless of who was in office.
When I think about the prayer in Mark’s gospel, that really is one of the greatest prayers in scriptures to it –because it gets a young person delivered. When the man brings his son to the disciples and they offer him religion rather than a relationship, that he comes to see Jesus and they put him in church, and they surround him and get in a circle, and they start going through their religious prayers and all of that. And Jesus comes down the Mount of Transfiguration, and he runs up to the disciples—Jesus, and said, “I came to see you and your disciples,” and Jesus says, “How long? How long? How long?” And then Jesus starts … Look, he starts doing what they should have done; asking questions, How long has he been like this? What’s going on? And in the process, Jesus finds out that he’s not just deaf, he’s deaf and dumb. And then he looks to the man, the father, and he says, “Do you believe?”
And the great prayer of faith is, “Lord, I believe, but help thou my unbelief.” And I don’t think … if you’ve if you’ve not prayed that prayer regularly, maybe you don’t really know what prayer is. “Lord, I believe in a democracy, but help thou my unbelief. I believe we can get together, but when I see some of the divisions, lord, help thou my unbelief.” And there are plenty of things to put a strain on our faith. But yet, as Paul Tillich says, when you face the threat of non-being, whatever you claim at that point as your god, that really is your god. You know? And boy, do we have a lot of threats to being itself going around.
Racism, you know … division … poverty killing 800 people a day, 295,000 people a year, the wealthiest country in the world. 350,000 people died from–during COVID from the lack of health care, not from COVID, but from the way we deliver services. COVID was allowed to metastasize and spread because we didn’t start in the homeless camps. And so … we were treating other places. If we’d have started in the homeless camps and among the poor first, what difference it would have made in the whole way in which the disease has carried on. And I can go on and on and on. But in the midst of that, to be nonpartisan is not to be nonpolitical.
It is to be very clear that no party has a line on God, has a hook on God, has a hold on God. When I was asked to speak at the Democratic convention 2016, on Thursday night on prime time with 6. …66million people they said would be watching, my answer was first, “No.” People said “You crazy! That’s an opportunity!” No. I’d have to … I’ve got to talk to them about what it means to do it. What are they saying? They came back again. “Will you please?” No.
Because I don’t let me then finally I said “Well let me tell you what I would do if I was called. I said, “First of all, I have to go as a moral voice and not as a partisan voice.” I said,
“Secondly, I will not say the candidate’s name 10 or 15 or 20 times. I’m not gonna do that, and I’m not gonna stand up there and suggest that one candidate can fix it all. First of all, that’s foolish. Not only is it the one person I’m not gonna get up there and say and –what’s your name? Hannah. ‘And Hannah is the person.’ They know that’s the problem with our politics now. We’ve forgotten the most important word, we. We the people, not I the person. I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna do what I had just seen this other pastor do at the Republican. And I’m gonna talk about –I’m gonna talk from a moral perspective. I’m gonna expand the line. I’m not gonna talk about liberal versus conservative because I don’t believe in that language. That language is puny. It’s weak. It comes out of the French Revolution when those on the right wanted to–the monarchy and those on the left didn’t–it doesn’t fit our times. It gives you no place to go. It doesn’t have any imagination in it.
I said, “I’m gonna use moral language,” and they said, “Well, okay.” And then they said, Well, right. What’re you’re saying?” So I wrote … and then those of you all who remember, I talked about how until we get to a place where the Palestinian child and the Jewish child are both considered as equal before God and people … and I talked about this heart problem that we have when people wanna use power to hurt and harm. And at first, some people were like, “Well, we can just have you do the benediction. We, you know, we don’t really want you to make comments on policy.” I said, “Why? Because I won’t… toe the line?” I said, but you are asking for a moral leader. Not a perfect person. God … Moral doesn’t mean I’m perfect. Being a Christian moral leader means that I’m going to look at these things through the … I’m gonna take the principles of faith, love, and justice and mercy and faith and redemption and grace, and lay it on top of every piece of legislation. I’m gonna take the pronouncements of Jesus. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, the brokenhearted, the blind, the least of these. And I’m gonna ask, does this piece of public policy … what does it mean for these people today, the least of these? I’m gonna take the constitution, put it on top. Does this policy establish justice? Does it provide for the common defense? Does it promote the general welfare? Does it ensure domestic tranquility? And if it doesn’t, doesn’t matter what party it is.
You know, I grew up in North Carolina where we fought Democrats 15 years to get same-day registration and early voting and to block … so I, we, I didn’t grow up in a way that I could afford to be partisan, period. The strongest position is to be in a position where, number 1, as Sam Prott used to say, The most dangerous person is somebody– you don’t want a thing but justice. And then you come at issues from a moral perspective, as I tell folk– I’m a conservative and I’m a liberal, you know? I want a conservative justice, I want to liberally spread it everywhere. And you–and you say that I’m apolitical, I’m registered independent by design, and our movement isn’t and our campaign is not partisan, because the truth of the matter is all of our politics needs a moral adjustment.
And let me say this last; I know it’s time. For instance, right now, there’s a lot of stuff I could talk about but right now we’re talking about, say … what one presidential candidate, Trump, is talking about what he’ll do to immigrants if he gets elected. But part of the reason he can talk about it now is because we didn’t stop it when Eisenhower did it through Operation Wetback. That in other words, sometime what we’re seeing is a repeat of past. Right?
We talk about the divisions we see today, but we forget that the southern strategy’s design was to divide. They said it. “Our goal is to deliberately divide the country, lie if we get caught doing it because the only way we can win is by positive polarization.” They put that in writing. We talk about people needing a living wage, but neither party since 2009, neither party when they had both parts of congress and the presidency, has raised the minimum wage. So minimum wage is $7.25, and it’s been there since 2009. So you … while you can critique what’s in front of you, you can’t just critique one side. The challenges we see going on with the Haitian people in Springfield–but there’s a long history of ignoring and dismissing our Haitian brother and sister. In fact, America, was … didn’t want black folk in the 1700s to even deal with the Haitian people because they didn’t want black folk in America to get an idea about revolution from what the Haitian people did. Right?
And so there’s there’s this depth of problems and what … And so what you need is sometimes a movement that says, “Look. Let’s forget Democrat and Republican. I know the practical side of that when you have to vote, you just have to decide who you’re gonna vote for. But I’m not gonna make my decision based basically on a party. I’m gonna make my decision based on principle. And here are the principles. Systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism are contrary to my basic principles as a Christian. And I’m gonna–and so what I’m gonna do is look at candidates and where they stand. I know I’m not electing Jesus. He’s already that’s that’s–devil. I can’t vote for Jesus. I ain’t gotta vote for god. I gotta vote for a human being. But I’m gonna look at where they stand in relationship to those critical issues and how their policies line up. And if, in fact, I vote for them, am I, once they get in the office, going to be able to push them?
But what I’m not gonna do is just say somebody’s just right because of a particular party they’re in. Because something’s wrong when 140,000,000 people are poor and low-wealth in this country, and you have not had a presidential debate in the last 15 years that is focused on that.
H: Yeah. The phrase the least of these comes to mind. Yeah.
Rev. B: I mean, this thing–do you think, I mean, let me let me run some numbers for you. And this is why we need to be engaged. We just pushed out to 8,000,000 poor and low income voters this weekend. 8,000,000. We sent them a report card, a nonpartisan report card on where both parties and both and the 2 presidential candidate major stand on the issues. We sent them a video of their peers saying why they’re voting not from a partisan perspective but from a moral perspective. And we sent them information to make sure they know how to register. And we’re saying, You need to look at this report card very clearly. We can’t tell you who to vote for what you need to know and so you can be… you can be deeply political without being partisan. You can have power. You can in fact–we said, And you need to do this because poor people and low- income people now represent 30 percent of the electorate in this country. 30%. And in so-called battleground states, which we really don’t know which states are battleground, because 40% of the electorate doesn’t even vote, but for conversation purposes, there’s not a state in this country where the margin of victory was 3% or less where poor and low-wealth people don’t make up 43% of the electorate and where if just 20% of those people, if they voted an agenda, not a party, an agenda, they could change the outcome.
So in Wisconsin, the last time the electric the election for president was determined by 20,000 votes. 1,200,000 poor and low wage folk did not vote. And the number one reason they didn’t vote is nobody talks to them, and they don’t hear themselves discussed in the conversation. All they hear is middle-class, wealthy, so forth and so on. So lastly so our point is mobilize a powerful, deeply moral but nonpartisan– give folk the information, be like a refrigerator, and tell on everybody. Let it all go and say this is where they stand on the issues, and then let people look at that and make their decision based on their values and based on what they’re deeply concerned about.
And tell the least of these that every now and then, god makes it so that the stones that the builders reject have an unusual power to be the cornerstone, and that’s where we are right now. The the the salvation of this democracy is gonna come from the very people that we have rejected in terms of health care and poverty and wages, and that’s that’s the part that’s the largest swing vote in this country, and Celinda Lake, who’s a major political resource person, said this the other day in a and she said, let me tell you. They’re right. She said the largest potential swing vote in this country is poor and low wage folk. Any candidate that’s not talking to them is considering political suicide and the nation now and, what kind of democracy we have or if we have a democracy worth having.
Because not we’re not gonna have a democracy. Russia got a democracy. It’s the kind of democracy you have. So, the issue is what kind of democracy we have. Is it a democracy that lifts from the bottom so that everybody rise?
That’s the question. The question is not our greatness. You know, you got on the one side, Trump saying, I wanna make America great again, which makes me say, now where’s this again you wanna go to? I mean, give me a year that hinders that that’s you wanna go back to. Then on the other hand, you have some democrats that will stand up and say, no.
America’s great because we got the greatest g GMB. We got the greatest. We got greatest. We got greatest. We got great.
Both arguments to me are flawed from a theological perspective because here’s the question. It’s not whether you can make it great again. It’s not whether it’s great now. What are you gonna do with your greatness? Didn’t King say everybody can be great, but how you become great?
What is great? What if you have the greatest medical system hit hit in the world, what is the moral responsibility of that system? Are you can you have the greatest and then know that 87,000,000 people in this country are either uninsured or underinsured? Is that is that meeting the moral responsibility of greatness? 55,000,000 people making less than a living wage of $15 an hour, 8 Democrats and 49 Republicans in 2020 voted against voted against raising the minimum wage.
Is that a moral way to use power? You see 50,000,000 people being affected by voter suppression, not black people 50,000,000 people now are affected by the voter suppression over a 1,000 voter suppression laws have been entered since 2013 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg told us that the the cut section 5 the Voting Rights Act was like taking off your take putting up an umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm is that great just to have us going backwards on the on the very heart of the democracy, which is voting? 51% of all our children in this country being poor and or low wealth, is that leaving that undealt with? Is that how we should use our greatness? 43% of our adults, 1 third of all poor people live in the South, 1 third of all poor white people live in the South.
There’s not a state in this country where you can work a minimum wage job of 7.25 and afford a basic 2 bedroom apartment. The government says today that if you make $14,000 a year as a single person, you are in the lower middle class. We have a role that needs to be played that is nonpartisan that questions these allegiances we’ve given to numbers and given to visions, and and and and and the last thing I’ll say is when I was I was at the UN, and the special repertoire for poverty messed me up. I was at the UN talking about these issues and really thinking about, you know, bringing bringing bringing some charges, at the UN against the way the poor were treated during COVID, particularly. And we were going out he stopped me.
And he said, don’t you serve on the Pontifical Academy for Politics and Social Justice with Pope Francis? And I said, yeah, I’m part of that group, I don’t know why they called me, but I’m part of that group, and he asked me a couple of questions. He said, Rambo, I need to talk to you. Come over here. Come closer.
I sit there. He says, look, I’m not a person of faith, but we basically have 3 lies. He said, I I’ve looked at all the data. All the data. And he said, we basically have 3 lies that we keep accepting as truth.
He said the first lie is anytime you even start talking about addressing the issue of poverty and low wages, uh-uh uh-uh too much money, too tax. We don’t have tax. He said, remember, that’s a lie. With the re we got plenty of resources. He said, if you don’t think we have plenty of resources, let a war start.
Yeah. He said he said, if you know ever know the one bill that always gets bipartisan support is military budget. He said just 10% of the waste, not even the the the waste that could be used to fix most of the problems that we have, just by 10% of, but that’s seen as something you don’t touch. Right. And it’s in his couch that if you do, you’re making the country weak.
He says, so that’s a lie. We have the money. And and he said, the second thing that’s a lie is we don’t know what to do. He said he said, you he said, you could there are about 3 or 4 programs, child tax credit, earned income tax credit, a few other things. If we made them permanent today, he said, stand right here.
You could reduce poverty among children and IE family 50%. One vote. He said if you if you pass the minimum wage of $15 an hour, which, by the way, was what was asked at the march on Washington. March on Washington wasn’t just by I have a dream, doctor King speaking. They had an agenda, and the first item on the agenda was to raise the minimum wage, by 75¢, index it with inflation, which would have made the minimum wage about $2 an hour.
And if you index it with inflation to now, it would’ve been about 17, 18 an hour. That was the agenda. Sadly, we don’t focus on the agenda. We just focus on the last part of a 17 minute speak. And he said, we know what to do, and folk know we know what to do.
We know every answer how to fix this stuff. He said, but here’s the third line, and that is that these are not moral issues, that these are not issues that are judging our democracy. And until we come to that place to see these issues as moral issues, just like we saw the need for women to get the right to vote, just like we saw civil rights movement, that it is it is it is back the hope the nation is at fault. And then he said to me, I don’t really believe in God, but I know a God sized problem when I see one. He said, and and and and if this isn’t something that you ministers should be working on and people who claim faith, then what is it?
We need a voice. He said, we need voices that call us out of these these crazy little isolated pockets we get into and focus and help us to be be delivered from this deception. The deception. Yeah. Thanks for listening to the Leaders Way podcast.
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Peace be with you.