New Haven Declaration of Moral & Spiritual Issues in the 2024 Presidential Election
As religious leaders in the United States of America, we have gathered at Yale Divinity School's Center for Public Theology and Public Policy in New Haven, Connecticut, to focus our thoughts and center our prayers on the health and well-being of our nation in this Presidential election year. We have been called by God to love God's people and the communities where we serve.
We love this nation, and for this reason we have gathered to reflect on our public engagement as both an act of love and a pastoral responsibility. We know that a well-funded, coordinated political movement has co-opted our faith tradition and is exploiting so-called “traditional values” to undermine democracy and divide people across this land. This distorted religious nationalism has persuaded many well-meaning Christians to focus on a narrow set of divisive cultural wedge issues while ignoring the real moral issues that are at the heart of our Scriptures and tradition.
We repent of not doing more to preach and teach against this misuse of our faith, and we pledge to proclaim in word and deed a public theology that is good news for all people.
We are not alone. We stand in the great moral tradition of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Lloyd Garrison, who insisted that abolition was a moral issue; we stand with Ida B. Wells, Reverdy Ransom, and Walter Rauschenbusch, who insisted that concern for the poor was a moral issue; we stand with Francis Perkins, Howard Thurman, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who preached and practiced worker's rights as a moral issue; we stand with Rosa Parks, Martin King, Dorothy Day, and Pauli Murray, who insisted equal protection for all people is a moral issue; we stand with John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, and James Reeb, who spilled their blood in the nonviolent struggle for voting rights as a moral issue.
We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and we are moving forward together to represent the majority of people of faith in this nation who want a democracy where everyone can thrive.
For this reason, upon reflection and prayer, we join our voices as religious leaders to launch a season of preaching the moral issues of living wages and union rights, healthcare and ecological justice, an end to the spilling of innocent blood, a re-imagination of criminal justice, and the protection and expansion of voting rights and equal protection guarantees. We declare that these are the critical moral and spiritual issues of the 2024 Presidential election. These are the “weightier matters of the law,” and we refuse to be distracted by manufactured controversy about minor issues, even where we honestly disagree.
From the top of the ticket to local state house and judicial races, it is not the job of pastors to tell anyone for whom to vote. But preachers do have a responsibility to make clear how the tradition of Jesus and the prophets speaks to the world today. We must challenge our congregations and the wider public to choose carefully and wisely which candidates for public office best represent our true moral values.
This 9th day of April, 2024, we pledge ourselves to this cause, and we make this public declaration to invite our colleagues around the nation to publicly join us in this commitment.
Bishop William J. Barber, II
Founding Director, Center for Public Theology and Public Policy
Min. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Assistant Director, Center for Public Theology and Public Policy
Dean Greg Sterling
Yale Divinity School
Rev. Teresa Hord Owens
General Minister and President, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the US and Canada
Bishop Yvette Flunder
Presiding Bishop, The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries
Rev. Sofía Betancourt, Ph.D.
President, Unitarian Universalists Association
Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD
Senior Minister & Public Theologian, Middle Church
Rev. Dr. Rodney S. Sadler, Jr.
Director of the Center for Social Justice and Reconciliation
Rev.Dr. Richard H. Lowery
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., PhD
Columbia University
Rev Dr. Rodney E. Williams
Swope Parkway United Christian Church Disciples of Christ
Shane Claiborne
Red Letter Christians
Willie James Jennings
Yale Divinity School
Rev. Jimmie R. Hawkins
Director of PC(USA) Advocacy Offices, Director of the Ministry at the United Nations at Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Rev. Dr. Cynthia L. Hale
Senior Pastor, Ray of Hope Christian Church
Vice President, Hampton University Ministers' Conference
Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson
President, Auburn Seminary
Michelle Dunne, OFS
Executive Director, Franciscan Action Network