Religious Progressives Flex New Muscle in Pushing Healthcare

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

With a new television ad out today and a national conference call featuring President Obama scheduled for next week, religious progressives advocating universal healthcare coverage are flexing their organizing muscle in a way not seen since the movement was jolted into action by the 2004 election.

"This is the most organized we've been around a legislative goal," says Katie Paris, program and communications director for Faith in Public Life, a progressive beltway group that got off the ground after the '04 election and is coordinating faith-based efforts to push Democratic plans for healthcare reform.

This morning, a coalition of progressive faith groups that includes Faith in Public Life, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, and Faithful America—none of which existed before the 2004 election—unveiled a pro-healthcare reform ad that will air nationally on cable television and announced the president's participation in the conference call, scheduled for next Wednesday.

"I can't remember any president doing anything like this," says John Green, an expert in religion and politics at the University of Akron. "Presidents have tried to reach out to religious groups, but typically it's done beneath the radar."

Organizers hope the call will attract tens of thousands of religious Americans who favor Obama's backing of a government-controlled healthcare plan. One of the groups involved said that it alone is aiming to sign up 15,000 participants for the call.

"This is a fundamental moral issue," says Jim Wallis, an evangelical activist who leads a group called Sojourners, which helped sponsor the ad and organize the call. "The healthcare system is broken. It's leaving too many sick people by the side of the road, and too many Samaritans are taking care of them."

At a time when conservatives have made headlines by disrupting Democratic-sponsored town hall meetings on healthcare reform, Democrats hope that religious communities will provide some much-needed organizing muscle. Protesters at the congressional town halls "want to stop an honest, civil, and moral conversation," says Wallis. "The faith community is going to stand in their way."

To the extent that religious voices have been spotlighted so far in the debate over healthcare reform, much of the attention has been on religious conservatives, who allege that Democratic healthcare proposals will subsidize abortion and compromise end-of-life care. The campaign by religious progressives helps Democrats counter the impression that religious Americans generally oppose healthcare reform.

In addition to the TV spot and next week's conference call, the faith-based healthcare campaign—officially called "40 Days for Health Reform"—will feature prayer meetings in scores of congressional districts and an effort to encourage clergy to sermonize on healthcare over the last weekend of August.

Some of the organizations involved in the push for universal healthcare coverage, like Sojourners and the PICO National Network—which stands for People Improving Communities through Organizing—have been around for decades. But Wallis was less influential through the George W. Bush years, when Democrats were largely out of power and less interested in intensely partnering with evangelical leaders.

Ever since the Democratic Party's dramatic 2004 losses were blamed largely on its failure to connect with religious voters, the party has worked to close the so-called God gap—while a bevy of progressive groups have sprung up to challenge the religious right.

PICO, which boasts 1,000 member congregations and which supplied most of the religious figures featured in the new pro-healthcare reform ad, was founded in 1972. But it became active in national policy battles only in the past five years or so. "There was this sense that here are big issues that we just cannot solve at the community level, and healthcare was the biggest," says Gordon Whitman, the group's director of policy.

Since last November's election, PICO members have met with Obama aides on a handful of occasions. "This by far will be our biggest national campaign," Whitman says of the push for universal healthcare coverage.

Most of the groups involved in promoting the Democrats' healthcare reform proposals reject the "religious left" label, though many have close ties to the Democratic Party. "The effort spans the spectrum," says Faith in Public Life's Paris. "Including progressives, moderates, and conservatives supporting healthcare reform as a profoundly moral issue."

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