Faith in Public Life Action endorses Joe Biden for President of the United States and Senator Kamala Harris for Vice President of the United States. This endorsement is our first ever statement of direct support for a presidential and vice presidential candidate. Although every election carries important consequences, 2020 marks a uniquely grave and urgent moment. To seek justice and to correct oppression (Isaiah 1:16-17) at such a time as this requires bold confrontation of a morally unfit president.

 

The United States faces a moral crossroads with life-and-death stakes for our people, our democracy, and the future of our planet. A second term for President Trump is unthinkable. An effective response to the moment requires a new president and leaders up and down the ballot who believe in democracy and the government’s responsibility to play an active role in alleviating suffering and establishing justice. 

 

President Trump and his administration have already earned a permanent moral legacy of death, intentional cruelty and needless suffering. In his first term, his administration has deliberately and brutally traumatized immigrant, refugee and asylum-seeking families at the border, in detention facilities and in communities nationwide where ICE agents brutally tear apart families every day. The president’s negligent, incompetent, dishonest handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed vastly to the toll of over 220,000 Americans dead, 8 million infected, 8 million pushed into poverty, and countless people scarred forever by grief or permanent health damage. He has brought shame on our nation and imperiled the future of the planet by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. He has used executive orders to attack the human dignity of LGBTQ people via discrimination in healthcare, employment and many areas of everyday life. Only through incredible popular mobilization was he prevented from stripping health insurance from millions of Americans by repealing the Affordable Care Act. 

 

A second term for President Trump would only bring more death, destruction and disintegration. His failure to take COVID-19 seriously, efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act, continued reliance on fossil fuels that will accelerate climate change, and assault on the very people he has targeted over the past four years would not relent. He will continue to enrich the wealthiest corporations, hedge funds and shareholders on the backs of our struggling neighbors and families. 

 

President Trump also poses an existential threat to democracy. By repeatedly inciting white supremacist violence, seeking to suppress voting in communities of color, falsely claiming that he has the power to not accept the results of the election, ordering the tear gassing of protesters, illegally soliciting foreign interference in his reelection, and in numerous other ways, the president has shown a disloyalty to the Constitution that no believer in democracy can abide. He is morally illegitimate. We commit to defeating him at the ballot box.

 

A Biden-Harris administration can steer our country toward justice, dignity and health. After four years under the Administration of a vicious and vitriolic white supremacist, we need a steady and empathetic president who cares for people. The Biden-Harris campaign have proposed policies that would be large strides forward in many areas of deep concern to people of faith, such as health care, climate change, humane immigration reform and LGBTQ equality.  

The Biden-Harris campaign has committed to taking urgent action on the most wounding of the Trump administration’s actions that have harmed immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers; discriminated against LGBTQ people; undermined civil rights and voting rights; attacked health care; and increased pollution. Such measures are an essential first step toward ambitious legislation such as the Green New Deal, comprehensive immigration reform, the Equality Act, and full restoration of the Voting Rights Act.

 

As people of faith, we will always pursue the bold, visionary change that our country needs to truly remedy the sin of systemic racism, the imbalance of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and many more moral shortcomings. We call on the Biden-Harris campaign to commit to bringing the faith community’s vision and moral power into their administration. 

 

At this perilous moment, the command to love our neighbors calls all people of faith into deeper, more urgent, more direct political engagement than ever before. For Faith in Public Life Action, that means endorsing Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris. In our judgment, electing them is not only politically preferable, but morally essential. Let our children’s children not sit under the yoke of oppression decades from now, wishing that we had done more in this moment. Let them not in pain and bitterness ask, “what good was their faith?”