Jimmy Hawkins, directory of advocacy of the PC(USA) was among several speakers at the Poor People’s Campaign event on Saturday. Contributed photo
Across the nation from the gathering of the PC(USA)’s 226th General Assembly, the Poor People’s Campaign held an assembly of its own Saturday in Washington, D.C., and it featured spirited comments from two Presbyterian pastors.
The Mass Poor People’s and Low Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March featured talks by both the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-founder of the Poor People’s Campaign and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice, and the Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, the PC(USA)’s advocacy director.
“Our General Assembly is meeting in Salt Lake City this very moment,” Hawkins was to say in prepared remarks before cutting them short. “We have passed resolutions calling for a prohibition on solitary confinement, an end to Christian nationalism, for environmental justice, and issues that impact the lives of countless families in desperate need of support, and we have encouraged Presbyterians to attend the PPC for livable wages and human dignity.”
Hawkins noted that Presbyterians have been calling for just wages for American wages for more than 50 years. “For decades we have called for gender equality and for a woman to be paid as much for her labor as a man doing the same job.”
Presbyterians, according to Hawkins, “stand committed to working to end the scourge of children going to bed without enough to eat.” They’re “engaged in building affordable housing on church property,” citing the redevelopment work by Westminster Presbyterian Church. They’re “dedicated to justice, mercy, and the dignity of every human being,” and they’re willing to “work with the PPC and stand with labor to build a more just society wherein a person who works anywhere is paid a living wage that enables them to live a life where their needs are met.”
Liz Theoharis, co-founder of the People’s Campaign, was also a presenter at the event. Photo by Rich Copley
The Poor People’s Campaign event drew thousands on Saturday. Contributed photo
“Presbyterians are committed to being faithful to our joint declaration on this day that poverty will be a plague that no longer holds in bondage millions of people around the world,” Hawkins was ready to say in his prepared remarks. “It is our pledge that one day we will all be free.”
“We are here for the same reason,” Hawkins said, “so that justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Following the PPC’s co-founder, Bishop William J. Barber II, Theoharis urged the large crowd to “make them hear you in this, the richest country in the world,” where poverty “is a death sentence.”
“Make them hear you because it does not have to be this way. We can abolish poverty and low wealth, and we must do it now,” Theoharis said. “For too long we have been fed the lie of scarcity when we live in a world of abundance. … It is wrong for people to work for starvation wages, to push millions of families off health care, for the highest court in the land to criminalize homelessness.”
“It’s wrong to funnel billions and billions of dollars to war … It is wrong for the world to be on fire and for corporations to stop us from saving this planet. It is wrong for the powerful to deny responsibility for these injustices.”
“But we also know what’s right,” Theoharis said. “It’s right to feed people, to give them health care, to secure the right to vote, to respect the dignity of all work,” Theoharis said. “We as a nation are breaking through the lies that poverty and death are the will of God. We must break through the lies that some lives are more precious than others,” offering as evidence prophetic messages from Micah, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Matthew.
“Sometimes we question, can change really happen?” Theoharis asked. “When we as a people fight, we win. … Putting the poor at the center of our national policies is what can save this nation … We demand justice for the poor, because everybody’s got a right to live.”