A Follow-Up on Christian Influence in Kansas (Democratic Edition)

[An expansion upon my latest Insight Kansas column, with the help of an image from The Active Age]

Two months ago, I wrote a column (which I later expanded upon) which addressed, among other things, on how Kansas Christians (which over two-thirds of the population of the Sunflower State identify as) have changed how they make use of their influence as citizens. Obviously the historical develop I was addressing had many causes—technological, socio-economic, and more—but still, it struck me just how many Christians, when they thought about the public-facing aspects of their faith, once regularly aimed to lift up Kansas society to the moral level they held to be scripturally mandated, whether in the form of prohibitions upon alcohol or Sunday closing laws or the abolition of slavery or women’s suffrage or so much more. Today, with a few notable exceptions—mostly pertaining to abortion, LGBTQ issues, and other matters involving personal sexual identity and behavior—the focus is more about providing financial support or legal protection to individuals, families, or businesses that affirm particular Christian standards, and less about presenting their moral message as relevant to social life itself.

One problem with that essay, though, was that as it moved from Kansas’s Carrie Nation past into the present, it came to focus entirely upon Kansas Christians organizing on behalf of and arguing for or against issues and policies that map almost solely onto the interests of the Republican party. In some ways, that’s predictable; for decades, the public language of Christianity (particularly Protestant Christianity, which for a variety of reasons has long been the dominant religious faction here in Kansas) has been owned by the Republican party. But nonetheless, there are still plenty of religious believers in Kansas—especially if you look at Black congregations, or other multi-ethnic Christian churches and groups who aren’t part of the powerful and mostly White evangelical subgroup—who approach the question of how to engage in public life with a focus on collective causes that are more typically associated with Democrats. Some attention needs to be paid to them as well, so this month, for reasons I explain below, I wanted to do so.

Over the past five years, multiple church-based organizations have sprouted up throughout Kansas, sometimes standing on their own and sometimes joining with others that have had a long history within their local communities. Together, these groups could be seen as Kansas instantiations of a national revival of the religious left (which there is evidence for, but which has also been falsely predicted much too often in the past), giving new voice to groups of believers who feel a need to, first, drill down on specific public policy problems, and second, pressure city and county officials to recognize the problems that have been identified and respond to the solutions which these groups recommend. In this, they’ve been making a real, unglamourous difference in many communities across the state.

Some of groups—all of which are multi-faith, but within which Protestant Christian congregations (Methodists in particular) invariably provide the largest number of supporters—include Topeka JUMP (Justice Unity and Ministry Project) in Shawnee County, MORE² (Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity) in KCK and KCMO, Churches United for Justice in Wyandotte County, the Good Faith Network in Johnson County, and the organization I know best, Justice Together in Sedgwick County. I’ve written on the latter organization multiple times before, and I’m proud to be a supporter of their work. But all of these organizations, representing tens of thousands of believers in the Bible’s messages about inclusion, charity, compassion, and justice, have pushed for the creation of municipal IDs (which help homeless individuals begin to rebuild their lives by applying for jobs and aid), for setting up affordable housing funds (which helps bring downward pressure on home costs in genera), for holding corrupt city officials accountable for their crimes (which helps increase trust in government and thus makes more legitimate collective efforts to aid those suffering from abuse and poverty), for creating additional services for those struggling with mental health or facing gun violence, and much more.

Have they been successful in all their work? Not remotely. For example Justice Together, after much internal discussion, elected to throw their weight behind an ill-conceived (but still, in my opinion, defensible) sales tax proposal in Wichita, entirely because of the funding it would have guaranteed to anti-homelessness and affordable housing programs, a decision that ended with egg on their (and my, and many others’) faces. But that hasn’t dissuaded them. Here in Wichita, at a recent town hall on the city’s 2027 budget, Justice Together brought out over 130 people to press their case for the importance of trying once again to secure through the ballot a stable, enduring source of funding for affordable housing and homelessness support, as well as other issues. As Justice Together co-president (and old friend of mine) Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone said at the start of the meeting: “We will not avoid this crisis; we will not stop; we will not be silent.” The turnout was so large the meeting had to be moved to the main city council chambers, and the power of their voice (and vote) was acknowledged throughout the evening.

To some, of course, the efforts of these organizations, and the numbers of faithful Christians supporting these progressive causes, is easily dismissed. In their mind, Christian engagement in politics remains the natural property of conservatives, and they point to how some progressives across Kansas have reacted with hostility to the entrance of Methodist minister Adam Hamilton into the race to be the Democratic challenger to Senator Roger Marshall as evidence for their presumptions. That hostility is mostly online and isn’t terribly loud, in my judgment, but it would be foolish to pretend that it isn’t real. In a low-turnout primary election, it might even be enough to sink Hamilton’s chances with the Democratic electorate (despite some of those same voters supporting churches engaged in the social justice work mentioned above).

At an event where Hamilton met with local voters in Wichita last night, I was impressed with how forthright he was regarding this particular challenge. For decades, Biblical language has been publicly owned (at least among White voters and those soliciting their support) by folks on the conservative side of the aisle; Democrats have spent decades articulating secular self-justifications, and sometimes some outright defiance, in response. Given all that, there is bound to be some members of the Democratic primary electorate who will insist that no minister, and certainly no person who—as is obviously appropriate when one works in a pastoral context, as Hamilton has for more than 30 years—approaches some of those same “matters involving personal sexual identity and behavior” with a recognition of and respect for the “tensions” which surround them (he shared a story about his own family history which, in another context, would have sounded like a set-up for an anti-abortion rights argument, except he turned it around into a case for supporting reproductive rights) will ever win their vote. How can someone like Hamilton reach them? Certainly not by downplaying his Christian approach to political questions; he knows that would be impossible, in the same way that organizations like Justice Together understand that eschewing Biblical arguments when they make their case simply undermines the whole point of their existence. The ways in which those inspired by the progressive or egalitarian aspects of the Christian message express themselves publicly have to reckon with pluralism in a way that wasn’t the case decades ago. That’s a complication, to be sure, but also one that aligns the character of the society we live in today—and that, perhaps, is an advantage, however small.

In any case, the history of Kansas shows us that Christian priorities were once as likely to be expressed by Democrats as by Republicans in this state. While that, obviously, has changed a lot over the years, it’s not like the language of faith as an important motivator for collective change ever entirely disappeared from the small liberal corners of Kansas. Expressing it today can’t be something done in same manner as decades past, but this election season, it’s heartening to see a variety of individuals and organizations looking for new ways to keep that expressive process going. I hope they succeed.

Justice Together: Praying, Planning, and Partly (but Not Yet Entirely) Pushed Aside in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Before Christmas, I had some complimentary things to say about Wichita’s city council. Here at the end of the year, though, my thoughts are more critical—though this is really a story about an organization of citizens here in Wichita, one that has pushed and challenged the city council, with some (but not total) success.

Justice Together, an association of nearly 1500 volunteers from nearly 40 Wichita-area congregations, synagogues, and other religious bodies, made local history several months ago, when, at a major public assembly, they pressed and received commitments from various elected leaders that certain positive steps would be taken to assist the homeless population of Wichita. Their well-researched calls for 1) more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, for 2) more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, for 3) a sustainable budget plan for completing and operating the planned Multi-Agency Center (MAC) which aims to bring together resources for homeless individuals, and for 4) a free municipal ID program, all remain on the table. But two weeks ago a proposed set of changes to how the city deals with homelessness threatened to derail the compassionate efforts that Justice Together, along with many other municipal organizations (Wichita’s Coalition to End Homelessness deserves much credit here), had pushed for.

Fortunately, Wichita’s city council was convinced (or pressured) to bypass the worst feature of these proposed changes, and the role JT played in that effort (in over two hours of public comment before the city council on December 17, 21 of the 24 speakers opposed the proposed changes, and more than a third of those were associated with Justice Together) deserves praise. Still, the fact that the other changes which passed through the council on a 4 to 3 vote will increase the ability of law enforcement to treat homeless individuals from a criminal rather than a compassionate perspective is evidence of how much more, and perhaps how much further, the kind of activism JT represents has to go.

As was pointed out by multiple speakers (as well as a couple of members of the council from the bench), the proposed changes in Wichita’s policies were less rooted in local changes (though Wichita’s homeless population has increased, as it has in cities both large and small across the country, for dozens of often intertwined reasons) than they were in national decisions. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its majority decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson last summer, making it clear that criminalizing “public camping”—a euphemism that we all know is ridiculous (“camping” is a voluntary recreational activity, while sleeping or residing outside without shelter in public places is practically never either of those) but seem doomed to use anyway—would not be considered an unconstitutional punishment someone for their condition, but would instead be considered a nominally constitutional punishment of an action, the door to more aggressive enforcement of anti-homelessness policies was kicked wide open. Honestly, those of us Wichitans who recognize both the increased costs as well as the lack of compassion which the further criminalizing homelessness entails should probably be grateful that the city’s proposals didn’t go any further than they did.

As someone who has been associated with Justice Together since its beginning in early 2023, I received word of the prayer meeting being planned for the day of the city council meeting. Multiple faith leaders set the tone for the dozens who gathered for the meeting by emphasizing that pushing back, in whatever peaceful way we can, against adding burdens to the lives of those suffering from whatever mix of causes—poverty, trauma, mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or all of the above—which had left them living without permanent shelter was a shared religious demand. As I’ve written before, JT is not a radical organization; rather, it is a serious, careful, realistic group of believers, who work in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1) researching and proposing responsible plans premised upon compassion and justice, and then 2) presenting their plans before elected leaders in ways that create tension, thereby hopefully forcing action and progress. That was the plan a few weeks ago, with a summary of the changes Wichita’s government was proposing and an action plan laying out a bullet-pointed list of Justice Together’s primary concerns handed out beforehand. (The individuals in the photo above, from the Justice Together prayer meeting before the city council chambers on the morning of December 17, are, from left to right: Pastor Chad Langdon of Christ Lutheran Church; Deacon Lory Mills of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Justice Together Co-President Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone of Ahavath Achim Congregation; and Rev. Dr. Karen Robu of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Topping the list of those concerns was that the city, in the wake of Grants Pass, intended to “remove a requirement that a shelter bed be available for anyone displaced by an encampment removal”—in other words, to no longer oblige law enforcement to confirm that there are beds available at public shelters before enforcing anti-“camping” rules and forcing a homeless person to move from whatever location of rest they’d found for themselves. This central issue was highlighted by Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, the co-president of Justice Together, when he stood to speak before the city council (two other speakers, Revs. Travis Smith McKee of the Disciples of Christ and Jacob L. Poindexter of the United Church of Christ, later underscored Rabbi Pepperstone’s demand): the “removal of bed space verification” from those tasked with the often ugly task of disrupting the attempt of the homeless to find a secure corner or underpass somewhere in public space has, in his words, “no compassionate rationale that I can conceive of.” He challenged the city council to strip that policy change from the proposal, which resulted in some city leaders playing hot potato, suggesting that this odious proposal was really just a matter of police protocol. But thankfully, whomever ultimately owns this obligation, the result was a positive one. The policy changes voted on ended up preserving this restriction, thus making it at least still slightly difficult for those experiencing homelessness to be forced to move and to abandon many of their possessions like herd animals and not human beings.

Justice Together also opposed, along with other groups, expanding the number of city workers who could wield that kind of police power against the homeless, another proposed change which the city council was convinced to drop. Unfortunately, though, the other priority of JT—opposing “a change to shorten the notice to vacate period before an encampment is removed, from 72 hours to 48 hours, and in some cases, allow removal without notice”—went through. Perhaps that’s unsurprising; the city staff made it clear in their presentation to the council that there was, functionally speaking, only two elements of the proposed changes which they considered truly substantive: getting rid of the bed requirement, and allowing for the more immediate removal of homeless persons and the clean-up of their sleeping locations. Despite complaints that went far beyond the religiously motivated—there were speakers who challenged the proposed ordinances from libertarian perspectives on human rights, and conservative speakers who pointed out all the additional costs which ramping up enforcement requires—Wichita will, beginning probably in mid-January, join the host of American cities that are responding to the increase of the homeless population with even more criminalization, even if conjoining that with some additional compassion.

That additional compassion is obviously vital. Justice Together’s slogan for their (in retrospect, only partly successful) action was “Invest in a Fully Funded MAC, not Criminalization of Homelessness,” and there was much discussion of how to move forward with finding the funds necessary to keeping the plans for the MAC on track, and many supportive words from city council members for doing so. (There was an update on plans for the free municipal ID as well, which still seems to me likely the most important single non-structural action Wichita could take to assist the city’s homeless.) Ultimately, though, those who have dedicated so much time and effort to Justice Together must now consider their next steps.

Do they accept this defeat and continue to focus on pushing our elected leaders on the social justice issues which they have not foreclosed? That seems most likely; what JT’s volunteers are best at is speaking practically about policy options and researching how other cities have funded programs or dealt with changes in the legal landscape is the kind of action that appeals to their skill set best. But there is also the possibility of reconsidering what kind of, and how much, tension they can productively generate—perhaps while looking towards this year’s municipal elections, with the aim of changing one of those 4 yes votes. Becoming an interest group which actively promotes or opposes candidates would give Justice Together a very different and much more contentious vibe, yet political challenges are part of the toolkit of any successful advocacy organization, whether they’re used or not. (Sometimes, simply the knowledge that an organization could organize their forces—in this case, many hundreds of mostly middle or upper-middle class Wichitans in dozens of well-established religious congregations, the great majority of which are likely voters—can be persuasive enough.)

Justice Together has worked with and through the religious faith of thousands of Wichitans over the past 2 years to advance the conversation about social justice in our city. As a supporter, I am curious to see how its leadership will continue to try to advance our shared ideals, even as the opposition to some of what has been labored over pushes back. As in so many other ways, 2025 will be a very telling year.

Justice Together: Pushing for Justice one City and one Step at a Time

[A version of this piece has appeared in Kansas Reflector and Religious Socialism.]

Back on May 9, something remarkable happened in Wichita, something similar to other remarkable things which have happened in recent years in Lawrence, Topeka, and elsewhere across Kansas.

At the Century II building in downtown Wichita, elected and agency leaders—specifically Wichita Mayor Lily Wu, Sedgwick County Commission Chairperson Ryan Baty, the managers of both Wichita and Sedgwick County, and leading representatives from COMCARE, and the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services—stood in front of over 1300 people and committed to take certain specific local policy actions to address homelessness and mental health crises. At least one of the commitments they made—supporting the creation of a municipal “Air Capital” ID card--will be controversial, and may already be in the process of being walked back slightly by Mayor Wu. Still, you don’t often see such public support for social justice actions coming from city and county leaders in Kansas, so applause—and encouragement!--for those who brought them to the stage is much deserved.

The group which brought them together and laid out the commitments which gained their assent is called Justice Together, a group I’m proud to have been a participant in from the beginning, though I play no organizational role in it. In early 2023, Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, a friend and occasional interlocutor from the Ahavath Achim Congregation here in Wichita, told me about an interfaith group that was coming together to try to move social justice issues forward in Sedgwick County; I’m not a leader in my religious congregation, but I started to attend out of curiosity. At the very first meeting, I was gratified to find Louis Goseland, a Wichita-born community organizer that I remember from Sunflower Community Action and other justice-related associations from more than a decade before. He was back in Wichita as a regional coordinator from the Direct Action and Research Training Center or DART, an umbrella organization that has been working with church congregations and other community groups to help them apply the best lessons of religious activism to motivate their members towards specific social justice goals.

DART started in Florida in 1982, working primarily with church ministries that served the interests of senior citizens; since that time, it been able to help build over 30 additional interfaith movements across the country, including several here in Kansas. DART was instrumental in the formation of Justice Matters in Lawrence, which has raised millions of dollars for a locally managed Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and JUMP (Justice, Unity, and Ministry Project) in Topeka, which is working to bring a mental health crisis intervention program to Shawnee County. Similar interfaith organizations, representing dozens of different churches and faith-related groups, have been formed with the assistance of DART in Wyandotte and Johnson counties.

In Wichita, Justice Together includes nearly 40 denominations—mostly mainline Protestant, but with Catholic, Mennonite, Unitarian, Baha’i, and Jewish synagogues part of the effort as well. Over the past 14 months, they have worked through their church groups to develop specific plans to assist those struggling with mental health (funding to provide free bus passes to those in crisis and to pay for staffing for 24/7 on-call psychiatric help) and homelessness (sustainable funding plans for an integrated agency center, and the aforementioned municipal IDs). It is those plans they asked all these local leaders to support, and which all of them committed to do so.

This is DART’s method, one that they’ve adapted from the history of activism in so many of the churches which they work through, as well as directly from the history of civil protest. Months of research, parishioner outreach, and consensus-building culminates in what they call a “Nehemiah assembly,” an idea taken directly from chapter 5 of the book of Nehemiah in the Bible—specifically Nehemiah 5:12, where the prophet Nehemiah, having heard the cries of the people for justice, presented their pleas to the nobles, rulers, and priests, and “took an oath of them to do as they had promised.”

Justice Together’s strategy, following those of dozens of other similar church-based DART organizations across the country, isn’t directly confrontational; their goal is explicitly not to generate walks-outs and protests. But it does aim to generate tension: to make a well-researched and achievable case, and then publicly, in front of hundreds of newly activated religious citizens (the great majority of whom are, crucially, registered and informed voters!), demand action. This is the kind of tension central to Reverend Martin Luther King’s position, which Justice Together explicitly cites: to raise just enough heat that “a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

It's true that the plans Justice Together developed don’t involve structural change. Their call for more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, and a sustainable budget plan for a Multi-Agency Center to bring together resources for homeless individuals are all needed and important, but not radical; nearly all of these involve projects that the city of Wichita, or the county, or COMCARE already have in front of them. But the fact that Justice Together managed to elicit public support for a free municipal ID program? That is a genuinely transformative step.

Having a reliable form of ID is desperately needed by many in recovery or on the streets when it comes to accessing welfare, getting housing, applying for jobs, and so much more. And it is also something which Republican leaders in Topeka have repeatedly attacked as a backdoor to legalization for undocumented immigrants, leaving aside the complication that access to state services often depends on a simple form of reliable identification. Wyandotte County introduced municipal IDs in 2022, and former Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple had pushed for his city to do the same; both such efforts, as well as those being contemplated by other cities seeking to address this genuine need on behalf of their poorer and unhoused residents, were knee-capped by the Republican majority in the legislature, leaving this small, crucial reform very much in limbo. Mayor Wu’s comments after the commitment-making assembly, during which she said her affirmation “was really a commitment that we will sit together between [the] city and county to talk about this,” reflects the political disagreements which lay ahead.

Thus, a real test confronts Justice Together: will they find a way to publicly hold city and county leaders accountable to their promises. Will they be able to push the negotiations that will have to take place in such a way that the municipal ID goal, which everyone in the movement has extracted a commitment towards, doesn’t get killed by elected and appointed leaders fearful of blowback from ideologues who share the paranoia about illegal immigrants that is unfortunately common among Kansas Republicans? Time, as always, will tell. Whatever their ultimate success, though, the fact of this group’s existence is a reminder of the long history in America of people of faith organizing public support on behalf of specific social justice actions. 

To me, their presence here in Wichita is a blessing in itself.