Achieving and Leveraging Diversity through Faith-Based Organizing

Abstract

After a perceived hiatus of several decades-"perceived" for reasons dis­cussed below-religious progressives have reappeared in the public eye in recent years. Though mostly very marginal players in the Occupy Wall Street movement that made inequality a prominent public issue in American life by framing it as a struggle between "the one percent and the ninety-nine percent; religious progressives have been prominent participants in the subsequent debates over house foreclosures, bank­ing reform, racial inequities in law enforcement and sentencing, and comprehensive immigration reform (Sanati 2010; Waters 2010; Wood and Fulton 2015). Even before the Great Recession, religious progressives had been among the crucial sectors articulating why access to healthcare was a fundamental moral issue (Wood 2007). Their advocacy helped lead to renewal of the State Children's Health Insurance Program that was twice vetoed by President George W. Bush before being signed by President Barack Obama; their subsequent moral advocacy was crucial to the passage of national healthcare reform in 2009-and particularly to its inclusion of significant subsidies for healthcare for the poor and lower middle class (Parsons 2010; Pear 2009).