c. 2004 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Twenty-four religious leaders have announced a nationwide effort to expand the political debate on values beyond abortion and gay marriage to incorporate subjects such as housing, education and crime control.

The clergy, most of them politically liberal to moderate, have joined together under a “New Voices Campaign,” unveiled Thursday (Nov. 18). They are united by the belief that the 2004 presidential and congressional campaigns were dominated by discussions about divisive cultural issues that have little to do with the quality of life of the people their churches serve.

“Issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage are important, but they are not going to put food on our table; they are not going to help our children get a good education; and they are not going to do anything about the high murder rate in our cities,” said Deacon Allen Stevens, administrator of St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in New Orleans.

Stevens brought to a Washington news conference copies of recent articles published by The Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans outlining brutal murders that killed a disproportionate number of children this month in the city. Who can argue, he said, that protecting the youngest and most innocent isn’t a compelling moral issue?

“Scripture tells us whatever you do to the least one of these, you do unto me,” Stevens said.

National Urban League President Marc Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans, joined with the ministers and pledged his support for their efforts. He said it’s important that new members of Congress, in particular, hear from groups that consider a range of moral issues broader than the few outlined by conservative religious organizations.

The Rev. Kendall Baker of the United Church of Christ in Seattle said his explanation of why the 2004 campaign centered so much on abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research is that they generate emotional responses and can be discussed by politicians and the media with “yes and no responses.”

“I think the reasons a few issues have been dominant in this last election is because it is easy to organize people in a voting way around them,” he said. By contrast, Baker said, debate about how best to deliver health care or provide decent housing are more complex and don’t lend themselves to the kind of emotional sound bites that often dominate campaigns.

Tom McClusky, director of government affairs for the Family Research Council, one of the conservative groups that made a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage a high priority in 2004, said he can agree with the ministers who call fighting crime a moral imperative.

But on matters such as housing and health care, he said, conservative religious leaders prefer less government involvement and more reliance on individuals, community and church groups than do liberal advocacy groups, making consensus difficult.

As to whether too much emphasis has been put on the same-sex marriage and abortion issues, McClusky said it’s “just a fact that most faiths have been brought up to believe in protecting human life and that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

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But the Rev. Harold Mayberry, pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Oakland, Calif., said many churchgoers whom he knows believe that politicians aren’t talking about issues that affect their lives. Religion should be all about uniting people, he said, but that the religious and moral issues that dominated the 2004 campaign were unfortunately among the most divisive facing American today.

Bishop Roy Dixon, prelate of the Southern California 4th ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ, said the ministers involved in the New Voices Campaign represent 50 religious affiliations. Their hope, Dixon said, is to set up a spring meeting with President Bush and Democratic and Republican members of Congress to press what he considers a more complete and compelling moral agenda than was offered in the 2004 campaign.

It would be a mistake, he said, to marginalize the New Voices Campaign as the work of disgruntled Democrats unhappy about Republican victories in the presidential and congressional contests.

The effort to highlight other moral issues, which is being led by Pacific Institute for Community Organizing National Network, is made up of Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and liberals, Dixon said.

“God has immensely blessed our nation with democracy, providing persons of all faiths or of no religious affiliation with opportunities to work together to help shape our shared public life,” Dixon said.

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(Bruce Alpert writes for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans)