Religious leaders ask for shutdown’s end, encounter locked doors

About 100 people, wearing robes, clerical collars and habits, gathered on the steps of the State Capitol Tuesday. They’d come to deliver bread, milk and honey — a symbol of the wealth contained in the state — to political leaders embroiled in the second week of a state government shutdown.

“Since the government shutdown, we’ve all been hearing Minnesotans express feelings of anger, and even hopelessness,” Pastor Paul Slack of New Creation Church in Brooklyn Park told the crowd. “We’re asking for a just budget that promotes opportunity for all Minnesotans and expresses a commitment to closing the racial gaps in jobs, education and health in all of our communities.”

The event was organized by ISAIAH, an interdenominational coalition of religious groups. Religious leaders presented a letter, which was signed by 235 congregation heads across the state, to representatives of the governor’s office and Republican legislative leaders — none of whom accepted the letters or symbolic food in person.

The letter stated that Minnesota faces not a budget crisis or revenue crisis, but a “moral crisis.”

“Minnesotans have a choice to make: pass a budget that protects those who have done well in the economy, and deepen suffering. Or find creative ways to ask those who have done well to make small sacrifices so that we can invest in those who’ve been hurt most by the economic downturn,” the letter read.

The group snaked its way down the Capitol steps, towards the State Office Building that houses legislators. As religious leaders and supporters waited at the side entrance of the locked building for staff to come down from Republican leaders offices, the crowd — bottles of milk in hand — broke into a rendition of Dona Nobis Pacem, a traditional Latin canon that translates as “Grant us peace.”

Pastor Keith Olstad, of St. Paul Reformation Lutheran, told the Minnesota Independent that faith groups wanted to reshape the conversation around the shutdown and budget, to focus more on the ways that the state can use its abundant resources to address issues of inequality.

“I’m very concerned that the whole state government shutdown seems to be based on that there’s not enough to go around and we have to fight over what’s left,” Olstad said. “That’s not the state that God gave us. We are in a state that is abundant in resources with good people who can do great work if we can work together.”

Read ISAIAH’s letter and see who signed it:

Clergy