http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/william-barber-and-mlks-legacy-of-church-based-activism.html

....First of all, Barber insists on a theological challenge to the white conservative Evangelicals who are so important to conservative Republican politics, especially in the South. In keeping with King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” which challenged the narrowness and hypocrisy of the Southern white Protestant churches, Barber accuses the white conservative Eangelicals of his day of “liberalism” in picking and choosing Biblical justifications for their conservative cultural and political positions while ignoring the broad Gospel injunctions to concern for the poor and the outcast. In the 2016 book he wrote with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement , Barber had this to say about the Christian right that has been so powerful in his own state since the days when Jesse Helms stood athwart the state’s politics like a colossus:

We cannot let narrow religious forces highjack our moral vocabulary, forces who speak loudly about things God says little about while saying so little about issues that are at the heart of all our religious traditions: truth, justice, love, and mercy. The movement we have witnessed—the movement we most need—is a moral movement.”

So like King, Barber doesn’t use the language of religion and morality simply because he is a Christian minister, but because he is fighting to deny the monopolization of that language by people whose primary interests are in the secular conservative values of what Barber calls “Plantation Capitalism.”

Another distinctive trait of the King tradition that Barber reflects is an acute sense of the historical context of daily political struggles. For King and his associates at the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the civil-rights movement challenged America to live up to the values articulated by the country’s founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence . Barber constantly evokes a the “Third Reconstruction” frame to explain the significance of today’s fight against the right. The first Reconstruction occurred after the Civil War and concluded with the establishment of Jim Crow; the second was represented by what we think of as the civil-rights movement and was met by the racial realignment of politics by the GOP’s Southern Strategy. The Moral Movement Barber helped found is, then, the Third Reconstruction, intended to achieve equal rights once and for all....

Not long ago I was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher , with one of America’s most prominent atheists. Wearing my clerical collar, I realized that I stood out among his guests. So I decided to announce to Bill that I, too, am an atheist. He seemed taken aback, so I explained that if we were talking about the God who hates poor people, immigrants, and gay folks, I don’t believe in that God either. Sometimes it helps to clarify our language.

Recapturing the language of morality from conservatives remains one of Barber’s chief preoccupations. It is often jarring to progressives accustomed to a less fraught rhetoric of gradual social and economic progress to hear someone describe contemporary conservatives as deeply immoral people who are motivated by greed and who are making a mockery of their professed religious convictions. But while the Moral Movement was fully underway before Donald Trump executed his takeover of the GOP and the conservative movement, it now seems even more appropriate to describe the right as seized by a frenzy of immoral greed when it’s headed by the great narcissist and business pirate whose campaign was fueled by cultural resentments and hatred of “losers.” But Barber won’t let Republicans hide behind Trump:

Trump is a symptom of a deeper moral malady. And if he was gone tomorrow or impeached tomorrow, the senators and the House of Representatives and Ryan and McConnell and Graham and all them would still be there. And what we have found, Amy, when we look at them, no matter how crazy they call him or names they call him or anger they get with him, it’s all a front, because at the end of the day, they might disagree with his antics, but they support his agenda.

Even as Democrats fight to thwart Trump and his party in the 2018 midterms, the Poor People’s Campaign will be seeking to set a higher standard for what comes after Trump and how voters measure both parties. Barber calls the organization that will be running that campaign Repairers of the Breach, which aims at nothing less than “to redeem the heart and soul of our country.” That means convincing people used to thinking of “morality” as about enforcing sexual codes and keeping women under control to instead think first about how Americans treat the poor and oppressed. It’s hardly the first such effort, as we will recall during commemorations of Martin Luther King’s life and legacy. But it’s a psychological tonic for all those who read sacred texts and long for prophetic voices seeking justice for the afflicted rather than comfort for the powerful.