'Righteous fight': Warren and Booker call on religious voters to resist Trump

The Democratic liberal figurehead Elizabeth Warren and rising star Cory Booker have a message for left-of-center religious leaders in the era of Donald Trump: keep the faith.

The luminaries of the progressive left drew standing ovations – and calls to run for the White House in 2020 – as they laid out a moral case for resisting Trump’s agenda in a pair of speeches in Washington on Tuesday.

“Our fight is a righteous fight,” Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, told a rapt gathering from the pulpit of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal church.

“These are the moments that matter in ministry and in history when your back is up against the wall and you’re forced to defend your beliefs on every front,” she continued. “As a believer you have two choices: you can back down or you can get in the fight. I don’t know about you this evening but I will fight back.”

Warren and Booker spoke hours apart at the week-long conference, the annual Festival of Homiletics – the art of preaching – which drew hundreds of preachers and seminary students from mostly Christian denominations.The theme of this year’s conference is “Politics and Preaching”.

Senators Warren and Booker – the only politicians scheduled to address the festival – are high on the list of possible 2020 contenders for the Democratic nomination.

The religious right has had a dominating influence on the Republican party’s agenda for decades, while, on the left, the relationship between religious progressives and the Democratic party has been more complicated. Though Democratic leaders and liberal candidates often discuss their personal faith, the party has largely adhered to the constitutional separation of church and state.

But with Trump bursting into the White House with the religious conservative Vic-President Mike Pence by his side and fierce evangelical voter support for his agenda, progressive religious leaders are stirring into action with seemingly fresh ambition to influence the national political debate.

Warren has built a reputation as a fierce consumer champion who takes on Wall Street while Booker is known as a national leader on criminal justice reform, both topics that jibe well with the Christian message of mercy and helping the disadvantaged.

The pews on Tuesday were filled when Warren and Booker each stepped behind the pulpit a few hours apart to share their experiences with faith. They mixed in personal anecdotes and humor but the most striking aspect was their passionate, sermon-like remarks decrying the inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and the GOP leadership that has deepened political and racial divides. Both made efforts to rally religious liberals to step up the fight against the Republican-led push to restrict immigration, repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut social welfare programs.

As Warren wound through her sermon she said of Jesus Christ, to cries of “Preach!” and enthusiastic applause from those gathered: “He tells us what the right side of history is. He tells us that ours is a righteous fight. He didn’t say what you’ve got to do is help make the rich richer. He didn’t say you go out there and help may the comfortable more comfortable. No! He said you looked at the hungry and you fed them.”

Booker implored the audience to look for allies in unexpected corners: “This is not a partisan moment. This is a moral moment in our country,” he said.

The New Jersey senator spoke urgently about the need for criminal justice reform. He argued: “You can tell the truth of a nation by looking at whom they imprison.”

Booker also shared the “two words” that have continued to motivate him throughout his career. In 2004, after aiding a dying teen who had been shot in his Newark neighborhood, Booker said he felt “helpless, angry and bitter”. One morning after the incident, an elderly neighbor saw he was upset and reached out for an embrace, saying: “Stay faithful. Stay faithful.”

There were moments of levity, too. “I tell people all the time – I miss Obama,” he said, pausing for effect, “and I miss her husband too.”

“Cory/Michelle 2020!” someone shouted above the roar of laughter.

Warren, who was raised Methodist, read the parable of the Sheep and Goats, in which Jesus says humans will be judged by how they treat the “least of these”: the poor, the sick, the stranger.

“The Lord says the difference between the sheep and the goats is that the sheep get up and act,” she said, shaking the Bible vigorously.

Since Trump’s election,progressive evangelicals have emerged as a powerful voice in the anti-Trump resistance movement, especially on issues of immigration, healthcare, poverty and the environment.

The Rev Dyan Lawlor, a pastor at Upper Dublin Lutheran church in Ambler, Pennsylvania, who attended the conference, said she was inspired to hear the senators make the moral case for their work in Congress.

“It’s been a year or two of really having to stay the course – fighting for equality, for refugees, for immigration, staying with our allies in Europe. It’s been a tough year,” Lawlor said.

“You can’t really just preach warm and fuzzies from the pulpit in this era.”

After her remarks, Warren gathered on stage for the day’s closing prayer, where the pastor riffed on a phrase that has become a feminist rallying cry, coined in relation to a rebel move by Warren last year when she was shut down by Republicans as she tried to object on the floor of the Senate to the confirmation of the conservative hardliner Jeff Sessions as attorney general. “Send her forth,” the pastor said, “to show the world that ‘Nevertheless she persisted’.”