The Rev. Dwain Lee still doesn’t know why he was asked to speak at an April 8, 2022, Louisville rally in support of Heine Brothers Coffee Co. workers who wanted a union.
“I must be on a ‘rent a collar’ list somewhere,” chuckled the pastor at Louisville’s Springdale Presbyterian Church. “But somebody knew where I stood on unions.”
Lee, state Rep. Keturah Herron (D-Louisville), NCFO-SEIU representatives, and workers spoke at the rally. In September, 2022, the workers voted overwhelmingly to affiliate with the National Conference of Firemen and Oilers 32J Service Employees International Union.
Springdale Presbyterian is part of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Headquartered in Louisville, the denomination has issued several official statements in support of unions.
In 1959, the denomination’s General Assembly voiced “its confidence in collective bargaining as the most responsible and democratic way of resolving issues in labor-management relations” and called “upon individual Presbyterian union members to take a responsible part in the activities of their unions.” In 1995, the church declared that “Justice demands that social institutions guarantee all persons the opportunity to participate actively in economic decision-making that affects them. All workers — including undocumented, migrant, and farm workers — have the right to choose to organize for the purposes of collective bargaining.”
Since the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s, many conservative evangelical leaders have become outspoken critics of organized labor, allying themselves with conservative, anti-union Republicans.
“Labor unions should study and read the Bible instead of asking for more money. When people get right with God, they are better workers,” said the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, a rightwing televangelist who founded the Moral Majority in 1979. “Christians have a responsibility to submit to the authority of their employers since they are designated as part of God’s plan for the exercise of the authority on the earth by man,” said the late Rev. Pat Robertson. Also a conservative televangelist, he started the Christian Coalition in 1989.
Both pastors are quoted in “Politics in America: The American Right.” Authored by Joanne Ricca, retired legislative and policy research director for the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, the report, revised in July, 2012, summarized the rightwing campaign against unions to date.
With the Religious Right as its new partner, the corporate right “could use scripture to mask Right Wing ideology,” Ricca wrote. “Now they could convince sincere middle- and working class people to vote against their own economic interests by manipulating their religious faith.”
Christian conservative–GOP unity is still strong, maybe stronger than ever with Donald Trump, the religious right’s hero, in the White House. “Right-wing evangelicals continue to play a huge role in the perpetuation of the vast chasm between the rich and the poor by their fallacious conflation of Christianity with selfish libertarianism and their cult-like support for a Republican Party, which unflinchingly privileges corporate profits and the interests of the wealthy over the welfare of the masses whose labor generates their immense wealth,” wrote theologian and author Obery M. Hendricks Jr. in The Bias.
Lee, who grew up in the largely unionized southwestern Pennsylvania coal fields, said he never understood the notion that “you can’t be a good Christian and a good American and belong to a union.”
Lee cited Genesis 4:9, where Cain murders Abel. God asks Cain, ‘Where is Abel, your brother?’ Abel answers, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’”
He added, “The totality of scripture points to the categorical answer. ‘Yes, unions are their brother’s keeper.’ That’s where the rubber of the Gospel meets the road. You care for one another. You try to lift one another up. To me, that is the very heart and core of the Gospel, and it’s the heart and core of what unions are all about.”
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