During March, Sojourners and the Washington Interfaith Staff Community have hosted “Faithful Witness Wednesdays” to speak against the Trump administration’s executive overreach and call on Congress to exercise moral courage. The vigils, held on the Capitol lawn, began on Ash Wednesday and have highlighted the freeze of U.S. foreign aid, tariff policies that endanger the economy, and the elimination of programs of social uplift.
Last week’s event featured remarks from Jeanné Lewis and Maggie Siddiqi, among others. Lewis is CEO of Faith in Public Life, a Washington, D.C. area nonprofit whose mission is to advance the moral imperative for a just, inclusive and equitable country. Siddiqi is a senior fellow at Interfaith Alliance.
Lewis shared a traditional greeting from the Maasai warrior in Kenya that comes in the form of a question: “And how are the children?” According to Lewis, when all is well in a society, the response to the greeting is, “All the children are well.”
“So I ask all the members of Congress,” Lewis continued, “How are the children?” She told attendees that the greeting speaks to the reality that “the children are our collective responsibility.”
Lewis drew inspiration from the Christian story of a young Jesus who, when his parents couldn’t locate him, “the child Jesus survived because members of his community and strangers offered their resources, their space, their time and their safety to care for him when he needed it.”
“The adults in his midst,” Lewis went on to say, “understood the question, ‘And how are the children?’”
According to Lewis, one of the ways we take care of the children among us is by paying taxes and entrusting those resources to members of Congress to “steward them for the common good.” She highlighted how cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program boil down to the belief of some in Congress that the health of the nation’s children is not an element of the common good.
Siddiqi reminded attendees of the sacred month of Ramadan, which isn’t just a time of fasting and heightened prayer but also of “increased gathering in community.”
“Families break their fast each night. Small children stay out late and run in circles as the adults are engaged in prayer,” she said. “But this year is different, as many in our communities are afraid of the draconian policies coming from this administration. Federal agents are showing up at our children’s schools and houses of worship, invoking fear in our children’s hearts wherever they go. Fathers and mothers are being disappeared from our midst, while this administration slanders my own community with words like ‘terrorists,’ refers to our immigrant neighbors as ‘aliens,’ and spreads hate about trans children.”
Siddiqi called on members of Congress to “bear witness to these horrors and to take action.”
Faithful Witness Wednesdays will continue through April. This week’s event will feature Rev. Jim Wallis, Professor of the Practice and Chair in Faith and Justice at Georgetown’s Center for Faith and Justice. More information and a link to join the event virtually can be found here.
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