Achieving social justice through legislative action

An examination of "faith and fiscal policy" took center stage at the 15th annual State Fiscal Policy Conference sponsored by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) Nov. 13-15 in Washington, D.C.

More than 300 public service activists from across the country, including more than one dozen AFT members and staff, attended the conference to get the latest fiscal outlook on state and federal revenues available for government programs.

"All of you are doing the work of economic justice on the ground," Jim Wallis, founder and editor of Sojourners Magazine, told the crowd. "Whether you are religious or not, I consider it the Lord's work."

CBPP is one of the nation's premiere policy organizations working on fiscal policy and public programs that affect low- and moderate-income families and individuals.

Wallis noted the significance of the faith community's participation in the conference.
"Most faith communities are working on the ground with poor people but they don't have people doing budget work," he said.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne said there is a movement, "an examination of conscience," among conservative Christians who want their churches to broaden their advocacy to the poor, social justice and the environment.

If references to the poor were cut out of the New Testament and the Old Testament, "you have lost a lot of the message," noted Dionne, who often writes about the intersection of faith and politics in America.

The speakers took issue with the morality of the Bush administration's fiscal priorities from the accumulation of a record federal deficit, the burden of which will fall on future generations, to tax policy under which low- and moderate-income individuals are paying a disproportionate share of their income compared to wealthier taxpayers, to cuts in federal grant programs in human services that largely serve that nation's poor. They noted that government programs often are the means through which the poor achieve self-sufficiency.

The multidenominational panel called for "moral budgets" that "make tax policy work for the common good," as Ron Jackson, executive director of the D.C. Catholic Conference, put it.

An exit poll, conducted after the November 2006 midterm election by Zogby International for Faith in Public Life, supports the notion that people of faith are concerned about public policy and the poor.

While the poll found that Iraq was the top moral issue influencing voters in the 2006 election, nearly 58 percent of those surveyed identified poverty/economic justice and greed/materialism as the most urgent moral crisis in American culture.