'Is This Not the Fast I Choose?'

PRAYER, FASTING, and advocacy are all spiritual disciplines—ones that we need right now. Several faith leaders came together this spring to call our brothers and sisters in our diverse faith communities to tie these three spiritual disciplines together “for such a time as this.”

What kind of time is this? We are living in a time when vulnerable people in the United States and around the world are facing tremendous threats from this administration and this Congress—threats that will be on vivid display in the budget debates that will consume Congress after Labor Day:

• The president’s budget proposes as much as $800 billion of cuts to mandatory spending programs over the next decade. These cuts are primarily aimed at programs that help the poor, including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), Supplemental Security Income (for poor people who are elderly or disabled), and child nutrition programs, to name a few.
• President Trump calls for a $43 billion increase in military spending, reversing the biblical call to beat swords into plowshares.
• The president’s budget proposes deep cuts to foreign assistance—even as four countries in Africa and the Middle East are falling into famine.

We in the faith community must stand up to these deeply flawed priorities, to say that the choice to protect the rich instead of the poor in the name of deficit reduction is an immoral one. Demonizing the poor and slashing programs that benefit low-income people—while refusing to scrutinize the much larger subsidies we provide to the wealthy—is hypocritical and cruel.

In the book of Esther, Mordecai tells Esther that God has put her in a position of influence “for such a time as this.” As the wife of the Persian king, she has access to the one person who has the power to save the Jewish people from destruction.

We find ourselves in a similar moment—with a president and Congress pushing for deep cuts to programs that are vital to poor and vulnerable people. We have the power to influence our elected officials, but that power needs to be rooted deeply in our faith—and used to call upon political leaders to exercise theirs.

Several of us have begun observing a day of fasting on the 21st of each month, and we will continue through the end of the 115th Congress in December 2018. We chose the 21st as the day for our fast because it is the day each month by which the average family on the SNAP program has used 90 percent of its benefits. President Trump’s budget proposal would cut the SNAP program by more than 25 percent over 10 years. Cutting deeply from a program that already leaves poor working families at risk of hunger for nearly one third of each month will greatly exacerbate the problem, causing more families, including children, to go to bed hungry.

On June 21, we marked the second month of our fast by bringing together Christian leaders from across the theological and political spectrum to speak with one voice in opposition to the Trump administration’s budget. We made this joint statement under the banner of the Circle of Protection, a broad coalition of leaders from all branches of U.S. Christianity, founded in 2011 in service of the biblical mandate to protect poor and vulnerable people. It is significant that the first major ecumenical statement during the Trump presidency was focused on protecting vulnerable people.

On June 21, we wrote:

The biblical prophets remind us that how we treat the most marginal and vulnerable among us is the test of a nation’s moral righteousness—telling kings and rulers that the measure of their governance is the well-being of those most in need. ... We have deep moral concerns about the way this budget would impact those we are called to protect. ... Therefore, we call on our members and congregations to contact their representatives to express their Christian convictions on these critical matters of public policy. We will ask all our constituencies to urge their members of the House and Senate to not cut programs that protect poor people and families.

As bipartisan Christian leaders, rising above the political debates, we are determined to focus on the biblical mandate to protect the poor and to remind legislators that budgets are moral documents. “Is not this the fast that I choose,” says the prophet Isaiah, “to loose bonds of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”

Through the sustained spiritual disciplines of prayer and fasting, we can nourish our action and advocacy, renewing our dedication to speak out clearly and publicly in defense of those who need it most. Jesus reminds all who would name his name, “As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.”