c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Evangelicals for Social Action, which prides itself on taking a progressive stance on public policy issues, has come out in support of school vouchers, a stand usually associated with religious conservatives.

In a statement released Thursday (Sept. 18), ESA said the positive results so far of limited school voucher programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee warrant further exploration of the concept as”a matter of justice and equal opportunity.” ESA said poor families deserve the same right to opt out of dysfunctional public schools _ even if they need public help to do so _ that wealthier families can afford on their own.”Freedom of conscience must not be merely a luxury or privilege of wealth,”the statement said. If”significant”new voucher programs prove successful, ESA said,”no ideological straightjacket will prevent us from demanding their widespread adoption.” In an interview, Ron Sider, president of the Wynnewood, Pa.-based ESA, said the voucher statement was not a retreat from the group’s historic record of progressive action on such issues as universal health care and sanctions against the former apartheid government of South Africa.

He noted past support for school vouchers voiced less publicly in ESA publications.”We’ve been gradually moving toward this,”Sider said.”We don’t want to be read as some kind of religious right group not caring about (public school teachers’) unions or the poor.” The ESA statement was released as Congress prepared to tackle the issue of vouchers for Washington, D.C., schools. House and Senate Republican leaders, citing chronic problems with District of Columbia schools, want to attach a voucher program to the district’s annual appropriations bill currently up for consideration. Sider said ESA supports vouchers for district schools.

Vouchers _ also called public scholarship programs _ provide parents with tax dollars to be used for private school costs. Because the money can be spent on secular or parochial private schools, voucher opponents have challenged in court the Cleveland and Milwaukee programs in cases that remain unresolved.

The ESA statement also was signed by several prominent African-American church officials and other progressive Christian leaders.

Rep. Floyd Flake, D-N.Y., a strong supporter of vouchers and an African Methodist Episcopal Church pastor, called the backing of the black church leaders a sign of the”groundswell”of support for vouchers in the nation’s inner cities.

Flake, speaking at a Capitol Hill luncheon at which the ESA letter was released, said inner-city support for voucher programs is growing because”the poor in our cities are the people who suffer the most from ineffective public school systems.” The African-American officials signing on included the Rev. Bennett W. Smith Sr., president of the historically black Progressive National Baptist Convention; the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, a consortium of six African-American seminaries in Atlanta; the Rev. Cecil L. Murray, pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles; and Bishop George D. McKinney, a San Diego-based leader of the Church of God in Christ.

The Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America; the Rev. Richard Hamm, general minister and president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ): and the Rev. Jim Wallis, editor of the progressive evangelical magazine Sojourners, were also among the more than three-dozen signers of the ESA statement.

MJP END RIFKIN