We Must Arrest the Attention of the Nation

After arrest at US Capitol, we have been released. We are OK, but all is not well.

In the rotunda of the US Capitol yesterday, while praying in front of the monument that honors the founders of the women’s suffrage movement, we were arrested by Capitol police. We have been released from custody; thank you to everyone who has reached out to ask about us. We are OK, but all is not well.

We were in Washington, DC, yesterday to launch Moral Mondays with fellow clergy, moral leaders, and scores of people who will be directly impacted by the disastrous budget that Congress has just come back into session to work on. Every illegal attempt to slash federal programs that Elon Musk tried to force through DOGE over the past 100 days is now being proposed as law by the leadership of this Congress.

Though the mainstream media has not yet focused on the details of this budget, the facts are clear. Numbers do not lie. You cannot cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget without slashing Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, Head Start, Section 8, and other life-saving and life-sustaining programs that millions of Americans rely on and the vast majority of people support. This is why 12 Republican members of Congress have already written to House Speaker Johnson to challenge the proposed cuts to Medicaid. This is not a Republican versus Democrat debate. It's a life or death decision.

Opening from “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Photo and reporting by Jack Jenkins of RNS.

We are Christian preachers. When we made a vow to preach the good news to all people, in season and out of season, we committed to address life or death issues. This is often intimate and deeply work. We bless babies when they are born, we visit the sick, we welcome strangers to our dinner tables, and we pray with people when they are dying. But life and death work is also public work. As Christian preachers, we are also public theologians. When someone dies from poverty and a lack of healthcare, we cannot lie and say, “God called them home.” We have to tell the truth. They died because we live in a society that has chosen not to care for them.

In the Bible, God calls public theologians to relocate their ministry when life or death issues are being decided in the public square. “Go down to the palace of the King,” God tells Jeremiah in a time when policy was decided in the King’s court. Why does the preacher need to go to the legislative body? Jeremiah is sent with a message for the legislators. “Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place.”

If a preacher knows that legislators are developing policy that will create injustice, it is our duty to “go down to the palace of the King.”

If we know the people are being robbed by a budget that will take from the most vulnerable to give tax breaks to the rich, it is our duty to relocate our ministry to where these life and death decisions are being made.

If our elected representatives are planning to pass a budget that will do violence to the “alien, the orphan, and the widow” by slashing funding at home while funding a bloated military budget that we know is being used to “shed innocent blood” in other places around the world, then we have a moral responsibility to be in our Capitol’s rotunda.

We have a duty to pray—and to pray in public.

Video of prayer at the US Capitol courtesy of Repairers of the Breach

When Jeremiah prayed to God that his head might become a fountain of tears to grieve over the destruction of his people, he didn’t sit and pray in private. He went down to the palace of the King.

When Jesus wept in the Garden of Gethsemane, crying and sweating blood in agony, he didn’t stay there. He went to the cross and made his prayer public.

When our foremothers and forefathers gathered in Southern churches to cry out to God during the freedom movement, they prayed and sang and anchored themselves in faith. But they did not stay in the church house. They marched out into the streets and nonviolently confronted injustice.

This is why we could not abdicate the obligations of our vocation when someone asked us to be quiet.

We appreciate the Capitol police and have prayed with them and for them as they have dealt with the trauma of being assaulted during the insurrection on January 6^th. We thank them for their service and have reassured them that our objection is not to them doing their job. Our insistence on prayer at this moment and in this space is about whether America’s elected representatives will do the job they swore to do when they put their hands on Bibles, the Quran, other sacred texts, and the US Constitution, promising to “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, provide for the common defense, and secure the blessings of liberty.”

We know legislators cannot do this work alone. They are representatives of the people, and the people must help them to do what is right.

We came to the Capitol rotunda to pray for representatives who currently support this immoral budget to see the danger of policy that kills and choose life. We came believing that God can take out a heart of stone and give anyone a heart of flesh. And we came knowing that, whatever their choice, we must nonviolently embody our prayer. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, we must “pray with our feet.” We must trust that, when we align ourselves with the truth at the heart of the universe, our action can unleash power beyond us, setting others free to act and respond in their own way to the moral urgency of this moment.

Now is the time for each of us to stand up and speak up. We willingly and nonviolently submitted to arrest rather than cease our prayer not because we wanted to be arrested, but because we know that now is the time to arrest the attention of this nation.

Now is not the time to shrink back in fear. Now is the time to courageously join our voices in a general lament for the cruelty we are witnessing in the hope that a new movement of love and justice and truth is already rising to overcome it.

No one would be fighting this hard to pass a budget that is so extreme if they were not afraid. The extreme minority of elites promoting this disastrous budget understand the potential power of a coalition of people coming together across race and region, across faiths and family traditions, to build an America that works for all of us. In fact, they may understand better than many of us do how much power we have.

That power is unleashed when we stand up and say, “We are not afraid. We will not hate you. We will transform you through the power of love.” That power, which is greater than any threat or fear, is unleashed when we commit to become the answer to our prayers. It is fleshed out when we inform our communities about what is happen, register people to vote, and rally around an agenda that lifts from the bottom so everyone can rise.

That is why we chose to pray in the Capitol rotunda yesterday. And that is the prayer we hope to embody with a growing and expanding moral movement in this nation until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Moral Monday at the Capitol will continue next week, May 5^th. Register to receive more details.