As Rev. Dr. Barber recently said at his consecration as bishop, “In America and around the world, the rejected are gonna lead the revival.”
For Religion Dispatches, Kairos Center communications coordinator Nicholas Laccetti reflects on the necessary relationship between the unity and leadership of the poor and the call for a national moral revival, and how this analysis differs from the recently trendy idea of a “revived religious left”:
…there is a fundamental difference between the position of Kairos and the usual idea of the religious left. It isn’t just that a properly crafted moral message will reach the hearts of generally good-natured American believers and turn them into supporters of something like the Poor People’s Campaign.
Instead, it needs to be clear that there is no potential for a moral revival in this nation without centering the leadership and unity of the poor and dispossessed. It is the ethics of the poor that need to be made normative if we are ever going to see the “radical revolution of values” that Dr. King called for in his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in 1967.
It is the poor and dispossessed as a class whose ethics and struggle must be centered if we are going to have a real moral revival — not the ethics of the “religious left” or of progressive Democrats. Luckily, doing just that — centering the leadership and unity of the poor in all our attempts to create change in this country — is not at all contrary to the values of those of us who identify as Christian.
Read the rest of the piece here.