On (Not) Losing Our (Civil) Religion

On April 3, 1890, in Lehi, Utah, my maternal great-great-grandmother, Martha Mercer Kirkham, joined with other women to form a local chapter of the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah, an affiliate of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. Women in Utah had been granted the right to vote in local and territorial elections in 1870, but the Edmunds-Tucker Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Cleveland in 1877, disenfranchised Utah women as part of the national government’s effort to crush the Mormon defense of plural marriage. Kirkham wasn’t a plural wife, but she was a voter, and was deeply frustrated at this right being taken away from her. A humble 19th-century Utah woman, she stood and was recorded as saying:

Mrs. President, Ladies and Friends: 

In my weak way will try to address you a few moments. I believe we are in a good cause. We have our rights but have had one great right taken from us. I, for one, felt bad when my vote was taken away. I only had the privilege of voting a few times. If we live as we should do we would vote the same as our husbands, and he, being the head, should know how to lead, which I believe is his place, and woman to follow. I have always believed that if that good feeling that should be between man and wife existed they should be able to walk along together and be one in council with their family, and also in business; otherwise there is confusion. But the woman should not be looked upon as below the intelligence of man. She has the need of it and should try to keep herself posted with the spirit of the times for her benefit and also for the good of her family. How can she impart what she does not know herself? We have need of all we can learn, for how great is the mission of woman, and why should she not be able to have a voice to make law, to govern her sons and daughters? I, for one, would be pleased to have my vote again; it looks rather gloomy now, but no excellence without labor.

Kirkham never did get her vote back; she died at 37 years old in November that same year, and Utah women didn't get the opportunity to vote once again until Utah was admitted as a state in 1896. And of course, I strongly suspect that no one reading this (unless one of those readers are Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth and his sometimes-spiritual advisor, the anti-feminist and Mormon-suspicious Christian nationalist, Doug Wilson) would be fully comfortable embracing Kirkham's acceptance of patriarchy and headship when it comes to family roles. Still, her insistence that she was not "below the intelligence" of her husband--and, by implication, any other person--and thus should enjoy the same legal rights as he is, I think, the deepest, truest aspect of America's whole experiment with self-government, its whole civil religion, that one can imagine. The fact that hundreds of millions--and not just American citizens--have been inspired by this particular principle ought to be evidence enough of that, unless you're one of those reactionary or postliberal conservatives who thinks the very idea of popular sovereignty is an unfortunate canard.

I’ve associated America’s civil religion with the extension of basic democratic rights—most centrally the right to the vote, and thus the right to participate formally in the kind of collective self-governance which the United States, when understood in light of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, is founded upon—many, many, many times. I recognize the theoretical complications with doing so. What I’m doing is trying to connect what some would call “sentimental,” or “bland,” or even “anemic” liberal practices (and voting can certainly seem like all of the above, sometimes) with something tied up with deeply communitarian or cultural or even spiritual understandings of identity and belonging. Much of the scholarly writing on these topics tends to focus on “nationalism” or “patriotism,” and pose the question as to whether or not such feelings can ever be purely “civic,” or whether there needs to be (or inevitably, however unknowingly, must be) some kind of historical or ethnic or religious or linguistic or racial character to those senses of identity and belonging. Those in the latter camp (Vice President J.D. Vance quite obviously is, or at least wants to present himself as such) look upon the articulation of a civil religion or a sense of American identity that involves mostly just individuals exercising democratic freedoms and choices as nonsense.

My response to that—the response that makes me want to both keep those liberal freedoms and expand them and reclaim them when taken away, as my great-great-grandmother did—is to say that Vance, et al, have an exceptionally narrow understanding of how social ties and senses of belonging are formed in the first place. It is, I would argue, an unavoidable facet of human nature to want to understand the actions of individuals (including oneself) as embedded in some sort of collective, morally (and often religiously) substantive—that is, “truthful”—cultural order. This is the fundamentally dialogic character as human beings coming out: our ability to speak, think, associate, and judge impels us to retrieve from or construct through our social lives an arrangement of meaning. The result, as numerous religious historians have pointed out, is that the arguably “unsubstantive” civic actions that we take—like voting—themselves develop over time (through rituals and practices and terminology and traditions and more) into what might be called "voluntary national religious establishments." Not in the sense of an established church, but in the sense that there are forms of life and routines of expression that we come to rely upon, that we come to view as ordinary, or normal. And yes, as such norms develop and put down their roots, the question of defending them (as well as regularly critiquing them) becomes a part of the equation.

The paranoia some feel about how the changes which extending the notion of equality into ever more arenas and ever more aspects of life (from property and religion to race and gender, from voting and military service to marriage and participation in high school sports) may threaten those norms is not unreasonable. But what is unreasonable is the claim that the push and pull over our norms and social constructions, over the bonds and beliefs which constitute our civil and religious order(s), is itself somehow beside the point, and that really all that matters is some kind of sovereign declaration of identity. (Which necessitates a nation-state with a unified executive capable of issuing such declarations, perhaps.) Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded that the difficulties people like Vance highlight are short-term ones, ones that—in particular in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.” That is substantive stuff—that’s what makes for strong citizens, and thus strong families and strong neighborhoods. (As my great-great-grandmother Kirkham put it, “how great is the mission of woman, and why should she not be able to have a voice to make law, to govern her sons and daughters?”)

As a matter of theory and history, the complications in making these connections are many. Saying that America’s Jeffersonian creed, the affirmation that “all men are created equal,” and that therefore—especially once the U.S. Constitution was forced, following the Civil War, to bring the principles of the Declaration into its fundamental law—the affirmation that American citizens by right enjoy the ability to vote and act and build lives unconstrained by some natural hierarchy, itself constitutes our civil religion, our “voluntary establishment,” in an entirely substantive and not merely “civic” way, is to claim a lot. Some would argue that it claims too much, and that it would be much better to seek to articulate a liberal vision of equality and democratic participation and anti-hierarchy without messing around with claims which necessarily require a faith in an establishing “people” who are substantively articulating themselves in the first place. I find those arguments fascinating. But I’m enough of a liberal republican, a believer in both individual democratic rights and in the places and communities—the many diverse publica of the American nation—wherein we collective exercise them, to trust that, whatever else was wrong with the Founders original understanding of this American experiment, these principles, the principles that my great-great-grandmother humbly hoped to be able to exercise again before she died, are ones that this country can still run with, can still both defend and critique, can still build upon.

I don’t think America has lost its civil religion yet. I still believe in the power of ordinary people to organize (as those women in the Lehi chapter of the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah were), to express themselves (as Martha Mercer Kirkham stood up to do), and to vote, thus placing themselves, as citizens, on the same level as everyone and anyone else. Understanding the challenge posed by those who threaten that which binds these practices, these perspectives, this power, together with their own personal demagogic declarations, whether as performers of anti-democratic epic theory or just plain old-fashioned bread and circuses, is probably the first step to making sure we won’t. 

 

 

Getting Direct About the Politics Behind Kansas’s August Amendment

Walking around my Wichita neighborhood over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed something about the yard signs encouraging people to “Vote No” on the constitutional amendment to allow for the popular election of Kansas Supreme Court justices come August 4. (Until just the past three days, I hadn’t seen with my own eyes any “Vote Yes” yard signs, but I have now seen a couple.) These yard signs are, in their color, font, and design, basically identical to many of the “Vote No” yard signs I saw around my neighborhood four years ago, when the vote to change the language of the Kansas state constitution so as to eliminate any judicial support for abortion rights was decisively defeated. Just look and see:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Relatedly, over the past few weeks my home has received about a half-dozen mailers encouraging a no vote this August. (We’ve received exactly one “yes” flyer thus far.) Two of those mailers were particularly emphatic, insisting that this vote is about keeping the Kansas Supreme Court “fair and impartial” and preventing “billionaire political donors” from influencing the justices by paying for the political campaigns judicial candidate would have to run to win a spot on the Court. I’ve no doubt about the sincerity of those who created these messages, and the arguments they’re making are entirely valid. But the fact that both were mailed by Planned Parenthood Great Plains, an organization dedicated to preserving abortion rights in Kansas, is worth noting nonetheless.

My point is simple. On the surface, the constitutional referendum Kansans will vote on this August 4 is simply a question about changing one of the elements of our state’s constitutional structure, a merit-based structure that emerged over 80 years ago, was first adopted in Missouri—Kansas adopted it about in 1958—and was quickly adopted by many other states concerned about corruption in partisan election judicial-selection systems that were then common (though in recent decades has been rejected by voters in multiple states seeking greater democratic accountability from their justices as well). But substantively, this constitutional referendum is actually a vote about possible policy outcomes—and while that’s usually not being said by those most engaged in the campaign both for and against the referendum, I suspect that pretty much everyone paying attention already knows it.

Earlier this month, Amii Castle, a law professor at the University of Kansas, said this quiet part out loud, using the very words of some of the strongest Republican backers of the amendment—Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson—to show that this proposed amendment is rooted explicitly in the failure of the 2022 anti-abortion amendment, and the desire to get different judges on the Supreme Court so as to get different rulings regarding abortion rights in Kansas. Knowing that, why shouldn’t those who want to defend those rights campaign on the same terms as well?

Castle, though, received some push-back on social media and elsewhere for being so explicit, with some of those opposed to the amendment insisting that constitutional principles of judicial neutrality supposedly protected through Kansas’s current, somewhat complicated system of choosing Supreme Court justices (nomination by a judicial commission, appointment by governor, and retention elections at the conclusion of a judge’s term) are the paramount concern.

As someone who teaches the arguments over those constitutional principles, I respect the claims of those—including some former members of the Kansas Supreme Court itself—who believe that Kansas’s procedure for choosing justices is worth preserving simply on its own terms. But as someone who is also theoretically suspicious of most efforts to keep the messiness of electoral politics out of the judicial side of our government, I find myself rather more appreciative of those who choose instead to present the possible policy consequences of electing the members of the Supreme Court more directly

Does this mean that I don’t respect Kansas’s system for choosing Supreme Court justices? Not at all—I can see the civic virtues of the prioritization of professionalism and at least nominal nonpartisanship in our selection process. But I can also see its democratic flaws. For example, the fact that despite numerous contentious decisions over the nearly 70 years during which this system has been in place in our state, not a single Kansas state Supreme Court justice has ever lost their retention election, provides—at least to my mind—just as much evidence of the limitations of the democratic checks upon our appointed state justices as do Kansas’s gerrymandered congressional districts when it comes to questions of democratic representation.

Many might challenge me right here—in what sense should “democratic checks” or “democratic representation” be at all relevant to the judicial branch in the state of Kansas, or anywhere else? Isn’t the judicial branch supposed to be counter-majoritarian, a set of referees and umpires who are not playing the political games of democracy, but who rather are simply imposing the apolitical rules and processes of the majesty of the law?

Responding to that challenge would require me to get into the “theoretical suspicions” I referenced above. Specifically, my two-fold suspicions that 1) the emergence of the idea of an independent judiciary actually does not match the historical struggle toward creating a system wherein the democratic sovereignty of the people was both recognized as legitimate and hopefully made somewhat compatible with good government (it is worth noting that, originally, judicial elections were seen as a way of ensuring judicial independence, by allowing “the people,” rather than legislative, professional, or political elites, to choose who will administer the courts); and 2) that the actual practices of preserving judicial independence from the messy political reality of a people working through their governing structure so as to exercise that sovereignty don’t actually accomplish what people—many of them judges—think they do. (As one scholar put it pithily over 25 years ago, stating calmly what millions who have watched the Roberts court rule on voting rights, presidential immunity, and more over the past 15 years, "The assumption that independent judges use their freedom to decide impartially according to the law is contradicted by the empirical evidence.")

But rather than hauling out my legislative supremacist bona fides and rehearsing my radical small-d democratic recriminations about judicial review and unelected and unaccountable judges, etc., etc., let me take the more reasonable route. If I might have at one time taken a more burn-it-all-down position, age—and the lessons of Donald Trump’s presidency—have made me more sympathetic to finding ways to preserve the accomplishments of bourgeois constitutionalism, even as we need to focus radical critiques more directly to where changes to its legal and socio-economic structures are most needed. In the meantime, I agree that it’s important that we retain at least some belief in the supposedly non-partisan, supposedly apolitical character of the judiciary—what another scholar called the “secular religion of constitutionalism,” the faith that the “rule of law” will continue to work so long as we “believe it works.” The complicated, practical question is, to quote one more legal theorist, “when (if ever) does the cost of enabling judges to act upon their political preferences or attitudes by insulating them from democratic accountability exceed the benefits of protecting them from threats to their tenure that compromise their capacity to adhere to the rule of law?”

Viewed this way, the proposed amendment to be voted on in Kansas this August really comes down to a specific accounting of likely political costs. For me, that means that Kansas’s merit-based system for selecting judges has, simply for a variety of unpredictable historical, political, and sociological reasons—the occasional tendency of Kansans, as an unconscious counter to the overwhelming Republican majorities elected to the state legislature, to elect Democrats to the judicial-appointment-making governorship? the concentration of Kansas lawyers (and thus possible members of the Kansas Supreme Court Nominating Commission, or for that matter actual possible Supreme Court candidates) in a handful of more urban, actually growing Kansas counties? something else?—worked pretty well, insofar as protecting basic liberal rights are concerned. Hence, my appreciation of those who look at the campaign over this proposed amendment, like the makers of the yard signs I mentioned above, and see it in terms of the substantive political possibilities inseparable from it.

When defenders of the current system make it a matter of high principle—judicial impartiality!—I can’t help but want to dive into the relevant theoretical and historical arguments, and ask for evidence why I should believe that the highest court in our state judiciary somehow would be fundamentally broken by obliging it to operate like the state supreme courts of more of more than 20 other states. But if you just make it all about the politics which arguably are unavoidably interwoven into any judicial decision anyway? Then my vote—especially since the language of the amendment gives no guarantee that any hypothetical election system that our Republican legislature may set up would be non-partisan or based on particular districts, both of which are in my opinion good balancing tools when it comes to electing judges—is clear. And my bet is that, remembering 2022, the votes of most other Kansas will be the same.

From Collective to Individual: Easter Thoughts on Constantine, Carrie Nation, and Changes in Christian Influence in Kansas (and Everywhere Else)

[A meandering and marginally holiday-appropriate extension upon my latest Insight Kansas column.]

Decades ago, the Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas—a man who has made his name articulating, in his voluminous writings, a radical, pacifist, vaguely-Anabaptist political theology, one which is suspicious of Christians understanding themselves as a force for justice or morality in the modern world, but instead sees Christianity as a call to form communities which reject and propose a complete alternative to our world of competitive economies and militarized states— wrote an essay in which he made an odd confession. In recounting he and his wife’s honeymoon in Ireland back in the late 1980s, he talks how they stopped to shop in a small village near Kerry named Sneem. It was a Thursday in mid-May, and to his surprise the shops all started to close around 11am. When he asked a shop owner what was going on, he was told that it was the Feast of the Ascension, and the traditional day for first communion in that part of Ireland. Leaving the closing shop, he watched as “little boys and girls appeared from everywhere fitted with white suits and white dresses,” marching to the local church for Mass, after which they would come out of the church, circle the fountain in the center of the village square, “while everyone in the town cheered and clapped.”

Unsurprisingly, given his theological views, Hauerwas acknowledges, in writing the essay years later, that he’s pretty suspicious of the Catholic doctrines he was seeing entwined with the social life of the town. But he also wrote “I could not suppress the thought: ‘If this is Constantinianism, I rather like it.’”

My personal take on Christianity is far more compatible with Hauerwas’s radical writings than it is the village of Sneem, at least as it existed in 1988. I didn’t grow up with any familiarity with the traditional calendar or liturgy of Christian history, and thus have no nostalgic connection to any of it; Mormonism was and remains, for all its internal structures, bureaucracies, and hierarchies, a decidedly low Christian church. Even though Melissa and I have informally brought many Christian traditions and holidays into our family life over the decades, and even though my own communitarian sensibilities have led me to be a lot more sympathetic to civil religion than most of my religious community, I still can’t say that I feel any sympathy whatsoever for Emperor Constantine, who wedded the Roman Empire and Christianity into one politico-theological whole, and thereby changed the movement began by Jesus forever. And yet, I can understand where Hauerwas was coming from nonetheless. Because here in Kansas, for all my liberal Christian (and liberal Mormon)—to say nothing of outright leftist bona fides, there is one vaguely Constantinian-ish figure I kind of like nonetheless.

Carrie Nation is a figure of folklore in Kansas, but a rather stunted one. Her work on behalf of the poor and prisoners, her marches in support of women’s rights, and much more from her remarkable life are not part of her cultural legacy, in the same way that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which supported so many vital progressive causes and social reforms, is mostly reduced in America’s national memory to one thing alone: the drive to prohibit liquor. In the case of Nation, that’s not entirely unreasonable; if someone engages in violent “hachetations,” destroying the property of saloon-owners and getting herself arrested on the regular, the fact that she’s doing it in part as a protest against predatory capitalism is likely to get a bit lost in the noise. Still, while I have no great desire to live in the strict Protestant Christian world that Nation imagined as normative, and haven’t ever been inclined to take a hatchet to those establishments and interests that I might be tempted to sign up in support of a new Prohibition against, I still respect where she was coming from. The prohibition against the sale of alcohol for consumption was the law in Kansas at the time (the Sunflower State actually held to Prohibition longer than any other state, only ending it in 1948, and Sunday liquor sales only became legal here in 2005), so wasn’t she really just expressing a legitimate small-d democratic frustration at business owners (and those who patronized those businesses) for rejecting a popular majority of Protestant Christians across the state had demanded through the ballot?

This is where this conversation becomes one that dives deep into the meaning of democracy, and specifically the power of democratic majorities in pluralistic environments. The fear of the tyranny of the majority is central to liberal democratic formulations, of which the American Constitution is at least nominally one such; it is for that reason, or at least partly for that reason, that contemporary liberals in America are quick to see any kind of moralistic majoritarian movement as, by definition, a threat to liberal rights. I don’t think they’re wrong to hold to that fear; the threat (and now the damage) which Trump has brought against our constitutional order has made me a lot more sensitive to the “bourgeois ends” that constitutional protections provide. But ultimately, I remain a participatory democrat (along with being a Christian socialist and left communitarian); I think that a false idolization of and an obsession with protecting individual sovereignty can, and does, get in the way of collective civil expressions that ought to be taken seriously when it comes to defining—and, perhaps, even improving—our shared common life. The fact that those collective expressions might be—as they were in Sneem, and as they were in the mind of Carrie Nation—rooted in broadly (if not universally) accepted religious principles doesn’t strike me as an obvious argument against them.

Which, at last, leads me around to some current news from Kansas.

Recently Senator Chris Blasi (my own state senator, elected—though not with my vote—from our district in west Wichita) proposed an amendment to an education bill in the Kansas state senate. The amendment would have changed the law to mandate that Kansas schools never schedule games or other activities on Sundays, or on five days around Christmas, or on the four days of Holy Week beginning with Maundy Thursday and continuing through Easter, or on the week around the 4th of July—or on Wednesdays. Since the Kansas State High School Activities Association, a private body that has been licensed by the state to coordinate policies across Kansas’s public school districts, already functionally does nearly all of the above, it is that last mandate which drew the most attention.

The ideas behind the proposal were grounded in serious arguments over the time demands piling up in the lives of students, and I take those ideas seriously. Long experience has taught me that I am hardly alone in being constantly frustrated by the expectations which both competition over students (and thus state and scholarship dollars) and our tragically internalized meritocratic obsessions have done to what are supposed to be curricular complements to in-class education: sports and debate and theater and music and the like. And yet, when looked at in terms of its practical implications, the facts were immediately obvious: the proposed amendment would primarily serve the interests of churches (again, primarily Protestant ones, even though one of the originators of the proposal was a Catholic priest) and parents that want their children and students attending religious activities on Wednesday nights.

I’m familiar with that want—one of my first teaching jobs was at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, AR, and I quickly learned there that keeping Wednesday evenings free for Bible study (including cutting back on mid-week homework assignments) was a local imperative. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jonesboro was also a dry community; alcoholic beverages were illegal throughout the city (as of 2019, they started to allow alcohol to be served in restaurants, but retail sales are still banned). Such—dare we call it…”Constantinian”?—social structuring around broadly shared religious principles obviously isn’t unknown in Kansas, given all I said about Carrie Nation above. But times have changed—mostly for the better, I think, but changed nonetheless. Hence my sympathy for state Senator Caryn Tyson, who commented “It’s a sad day that we have to legislate this….Years ago, it wasn’t even an issue. It was a standard and acceptable. But here we are.”

The movement of American society—or even just Kansas—towards a mostly more secular, and definitely less collective, way of thinking about religious influence in the context of democratic representation is, of course, not absolute. For example, here in Kansas, the Republican party has used its super-majorities in the state legislature to push harsh anti-transgender legislation, which have impacts on as ordinary functions of daily life as access to public bathrooms, high school sports, or using drivers licenses as a form of identification. This can absolutely be understood as a moralistic crusade that attacks individual rights. But completely aside from what I see as the serious flaws (indeed, arguably the evils) in the religious reasoning behind the justifications for these attacks is the methodological orientation of the attacks themselves.

In some ways, it is evidence of the way in which most religious majorities in my state and across the country—at least those associated with the politically conservative Christianity that has shaped so much of Republican politics over the past half-century—understand their democratic responsibilities. After all, the overall aim of these laws isn’t so much about transforming society through shared, legally mandated practices, but rather a clearing away from society (or from their preferred vision of it) those individuals whose personal actions of identification or participation or sanitation they see as a violation. Again, focusing solely on the how this thinking approaches the structures of social life, t would be as if Carrie Nation hadn’t attacked saloons, but instead had stood respectfully outside their door, and contented herself with chasing down individual drinkers after they left. Not much collectivity there.

So perhaps, given its incompatibility with how American Christians think about their place in civil society today, it wasn’t surprising how quickly the legislature abandoned this Wednesday restriction proposal. But then came another proposal, one even more revealing.

Overriding a veto by Governor Kelly, Republican majorities in the Kansas legislature guaranteed income tax breaks to those who join “health care sharing ministries.” These are private health care cost-sharing pools, ones usually organized by churches and not legally obliged to cover the conditions which publicly supported and regulated insurers must (this was the main reason for Kelly’s veto). They often restrict participation on the basis of one’s religious behavior as well.

In our late capitalist, neoliberal world, the idea that people will try to carve out for themselves, their families, their neighbors, and—yes—their churches a space wherein they can create their own alternative forms of mutual support is something I can only celebrate. All praise for decentralized, interstitial action, says I! And yet, the idea that such inter-personal associations ought to receive state support lands in my mind basically the same way other Kansas, GOP-led legislation has, such as their successful push to guarantee that students attending private religious schools and home schools will have the exact same access to publicly funded school resources that public school-attending children across the state. The goal, upon reflection, isn’t about working through shared institutions to find compromises that improve them (by their own moral and religious lights, obviously) for everyone. Rather, it seems mostly aiming to enable those living in accordance with what they understand their faith to require to escape the costs and complications of doing so in the religiously diverse America (and Kansas) of today.

So in the end, put it this way: once, Christians—which include up to 70% of all Kansans—would regularly argue and vote in ways that took seriously the shaping and the improving of the daily routines of our shared social life. But now, it’s more typical to argue and vote so as to make certain that believers can be included in all the benefits of that social life, while still maintaining some separateness from it. Call it a shift from collective aspiration to individual protection, perhaps. This is a shift which is entirely predictable, given the atomization and privatization of so much of American life. Why shouldn’t we accept that our political disputes over matters relevant to the living of a Christian life need to be—and, given the pluralism of American life, ought to be—expressed in terms of individualistic choices, rather than anything collective?

So yes, it’s a reasonable change. But still, this Easter, I’m not sure Carrie Nation would be entirely pleased.

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.