'Religious left' emerging as U.S. political force in Trump era
Since President Donald Trump's election, monthly lectures on social justice at the 600-seat
Gothic chapel of New York's Union Theological Seminary have been filled to capacity with
crowds three times what they usually draw.
In January, the 181-year-old Upper Manhattan graduate school, whose architecture evokes
London's Westminster Abbey, turned away about 1,000 people from a lecture on mass incarceration.
In the nine years that Reverend Serene Jones has served as its president, she has never
seen such crowds.
"The election of Trump has been a clarion call to progressives in the Protestant and
Catholic churches in America to move out of a place of primarily professing progressive
policies to really taking action," she said.
Although not as powerful as the religious right, which has been credited with helping
elect Republican presidents and boasts well-known leaders such as Christian Broadcasting Network
founder Pat Robertson, the "religious left" is now slowly coming together as a force in
U.S. politics.
This disparate group, traditionally seen as lacking clout, has been propelled into political
activism by Trump's policies on immigration, healthcare and social welfare, according to
clergy members, activists and academics.
A key test will be how well it will be able to translate its mobilization into votes in
the 2018 midterm congressional elections.
"It's one of the dirty little secrets of American politics that there has been a religious left
all along and it just hasn't done a good job of organizing," said J. Patrick Hornbeck II,
chairman of the theology department at Fordham University, a Jesuit school in New York.
"It has taken a crisis, or perceived crisis, like Trump's election to cause folks on the
religious left to really own their religion in the public square," Hornbeck said.
Religious progressive activism has been part of American history.
Religious leaders and their followers played key roles in campaigns to abolish slavery,
promote civil rights and end the Vietnam War, among others.
The latest upwelling of left-leaning religious activism has accompanied the dawn of the Trump
presidency.
Some in the religious left are inspired by Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic leader who
has been an outspoken critic of anti-immigrant policies and a champion of helping the needy.
Although support for the religious left is difficult to measure, leaders point to several
examples, such as a surge of congregations offering to provide sanctuary to immigrants
seeking asylum, churches urging Republicans to reconsider repealing the Obamacare health
law and calls to preserve federal spending on foreign aid.
The number of churches volunteering to offer sanctuary to asylum seekers doubled to 800
in 45 of the 50 U.S. states after the election, said the Elkhart, Indiana-based Church World
Service, a coalition of Christian denominations which helps refugees settle in the United
States - and the number of new churches offering help has grown so quickly that the group has
lost count.
"The religious community, the religious left is getting out, hitting the streets, taking
action, raising their voices," said Reverend Noel Anderson, its national grassroots coordinator.
In one well-publicized case, a Quaker church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 14 took
in a Honduran woman who has been living illegally in the United States for 25 years and feared
she would be targeted for deportation.
'NEVER SEEN' THIS
Leaders of Faith in Public Life, a progressive policy group, were astounded when 300 clergy
members turned out at a January rally at the U.S. Senate attempting to block confirmation
of Trump's attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, because of his history of controversial
statements on race.
"I've never seen hundreds of clergy turning up like that to oppose a Cabinet nominee,"
said Reverend Jennifer Butler, the group's chief executive.
The group on Wednesday convened a Capitol Hill rally of hundreds of pastors from as
far away as Ohio, North Carolina and Texas to urge Congress to ensure that no people
lose their health insurance as a result of a vote to repeal Obamacare.
Financial support is also picking up.
Donations to the Christian activist group Sojourners have picked up by 30 percent since
Trump's election, the group said.
But some observers were skeptical that the religious left could equal the religious right
politically any time soon.
"It really took decades of activism for the religious right to become the force that it
is today," said Peter Ubertaccio, chairman of the political science department at Stonehill
College, a Catholic school outside Boston.
But the power potential of the "religious left" is not negligible.
The "Moral Mondays" movement, launched in 2013 by the North Carolina NAACP's Reverend
William Barber, is credited with contributing to last year's election defeat of Republican
Governor Pat McCrory by Democrat Roy Cooper.
The new political climate is also spurring new alliances, with churches, synagogues and
mosques speaking out against the recent spike in bias incidents, including threats against
mosques and Jewish community centers.
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, which encourages alliances between Jewish and Muslim women,
has tripled its number of U.S. chapters to nearly 170 since November, said founder Sheryl
Olitzky.
"This is not about partisanship, but about vulnerable populations who need protection,
whether it's the LGBT community, the refugee community, the undocumented community," said
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, using the
acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
More than 1,000 people have already signed up for the center's annual Washington meeting
on political activism, about three times as many as normal, Pesner said.
Leaders of the religious right who supported Trump say they see him delivering on his promises
and welcomed plans to defund Planned Parenthood, whose healthcare services for women include
abortion, through the proposed repeal of Obamacare.
"We have not seen any policy proposals that run counter to our faith," said Lance Lemmonds,
a spokesman for the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit group based in Duluth, Georgia.
Trump son-in-law to testify on foreign contacts in Russia probe
ared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a top White House adviser, has volunteered
to testify to a Senate committee probing whether Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential
election, the White House said on Monday.
The allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian actors were behind the hacking
of Democratic National Committee emails last year linger over Trump's young presidency.
Democrats charge the Russians wanted to tilt the election toward the Republican, a claim
dismissed by Trump.
Russia denies the allegations.
But there has been no doubt that the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak,
developed contacts among the Trump team.
Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Feb. 13 after
revelations that he had discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with Kislyak and misled Vice President
Mike Pence about the conversations.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Kushner is willing to testify to the Senate Intelligence
Committee chaired by U.S. Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican.
"Throughout the campaign and the transition, Jared served as the official primary point
of contact with foreign governments and officials ... and so, given this role, he volunteered
to speak with Chairman Burr's committee, but has not received any confirmation regarding
a time for a meeting," Spicer told reporters at his daily briefing.
The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate panel also said Kushner had agreed
to be interviewed.
At the same time, a mystery rooted in Trump's claim that he was wiretapped by then President
Barack Obama during the election campaign deepened with the disclosure that a top congressional
Republican reviewed classified information on the White House grounds about potential
surveillance of some Trump campaign associates.
U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence
Committee, visited the White House the night before announcing on Wednesday that he had
information that indicated some Trump associates may have been subjected to some level of intelligence
activity before Trump took office on Jan. 20.
Democrats have said Nunes, who was a member of Trump's transition team, can no longer
run a credible investigation of Russian hacking, the U.S. election and any potential involvement
by Trump associates.
Top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi last week called Nunes "a willing stooge of Trump."
Nunes spokesman Jack Langer said in a statement that Nunes "met with his source at the White
House grounds in order to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the
information provided by the source."
White House spokesman Spicer did not shed any light on who at the White House helped
Nunes gain access to a secure location.
"I'm not going to get into who he met with or why he met with them," Spicer said.
"I will leave it up to him and not try to get in the middle of that."
It was the latest twist in a saga that began on March 4 when Trump said on Twitter without
providing evidence that he "just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump
Tower just before the victory."
FBI Director James Comey told Congress last Monday he had seen no evidence to support
the claim.
Trump's mention of wiretapping drew attention away from U.S. intelligence agencies having
said that Russia tried to help Trump in the election against Democrat Hillary Clinton
by hacking leading Democrats and spreading disinformation.
Nunes told reporters on Wednesday that he had briefed Trump "on the concerns I had about
incidental collection and how it relates to President-elect Trump and his transition team
and the concerns that I have."
After an uproar over the allegations and the fact that he briefed Trump first before members
of his own committee, Nunes apologized on Thursday for the way he handled the information.
A congressional source said congressional investigators have questioned agencies directly
to try to find out what intelligence reports and intercepts Nunes is referring to, but
that as of Monday the agencies were still saying they did not know what Nunes was talking
about.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that Nunes was on his way to an event late Tuesday
when he left his staff and went to review classified intelligence files brought to his
attention by his source, whom he has not identified.
The White House had seized on Nunes' remarks to bolster Trump's unproven assertion that
Obama wiretapped his campaign headquarters in Manhattan's Trump Tower.
Nunes and some other Republicans have focused much of their concern over the investigation
about the possibility that some Americans' names have been improperly "unmasked" and
released to the public in leaks about the investigation of whether Trump's campaign
colluded with Moscow
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