Can the church bring safety back to Chicago and sanity back to politics?
After the midterms, where do Illinoisans go from here? The Civic Update weighs in on the upcoming municipal and police board elections, and charts a new path forward to heal the partisan divide.
Can the church bring safety back to Chicago?
By Pastor Chris Butler
There will be a new position on the ballot when Chicagoans go to polls in March of next year. Three members of the newly established Police District Councils will be elected from each of the city’s 22 police districts. These Councils will be responsible for building stronger connections between police and the community, holding public meetings with community members to get their input on police department strategies and practices. They will also nominate 14 individuals to serve on a citywide Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. The mayor will select seven of those nominees to serve on the commission.
It is no secret that one of the biggest issues facing the city of Chicago is community safety. Real and perceived threats of crime and violence hang like an albatross around virtually every attempt at economic development, educational investment, or social advancement undertaken in our communities. Businesses are deterred from setting up operations. Families are afraid to move in. Schools face challenges attracting the highest skilled staff and invested families. We need to deal with the safety issue as a city if we’re going to move in a positive direction.
Decades of research suggests that one of the fundamental keys to successful law enforcement is good police and community relations. The relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve is imperative for developing the trust between citizens and police that is central to effective police work and the sense of safety among community residents. Research also consistently shows that transparency, visibility and access to police business are the most effective strategies to cultivate that essential trust.
One of the driving scriptures behind the AND Campaign’s mission is Jeremiah 29:7, “Seek peace and well-being for the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its peace (well-being) you will have peace.” (Amplified Bible). The framework that we lay out in the book “Compassion & Conviction” holds that for the Christian, civic engagement is not simply a means of amassing political power, but it is rather an avenue for demonstrating Christ’s love for our neighbor. It is through this lens that I see these Police District Councils as such a huge ministry opportunity for the church in Chicago. We are called to serve the city in just this manner. And we are organized to have a real impact on the outcome of these elections.
These elections will be hyper-local and probably not as high-profile as the contest for mayor and alderman, which will also be on the ballot. That means that moderately-sized groups of organized people moving in the same direction can have an outsized impact on the races. From gathering the petitions to building local support for candidates, Christians can work together through their congregations to ensure that people driven by the compassion and conviction of Christ are elected to these councils. Reconciliation-minded people will maximize the potential of this new civic role. A handful of churches working together can help get that kind of person elected to their District Council.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably intrigued by this idea. But, you may be asking if this is something that the church can become involved with while preserving its non-profit status. According to the legal experts at the National Center for Life and Liberty, among other religious experts, have reminded churches that they are well within their rights and protected status whenever:
Pastors and leaders speak personally concerning elections and particular candidates. Your 501(c)(3) status cannot be threatened by your right to personal freedom of speech in these areas.
Your church undertakes efforts to educate congregants, helping them understand what individual candidates believe about various issues, including distributing voting guides that score the majority of candidates on the issues.
You invite particular candidates to speak at your church, to give their testimony or present themselves as a candidate, as long as an official endorsement from the church does not follow the appearance.
Pastors or leaders advocate a certain position from the pulpit on relevant issues.
Members of a congregation can also work together in their capacity as private citizens to advance political causes and candidates of their choices. This means that church leaders can encourage members of their congregations to pursue public service, encourage support for these church members (as a matter of personal support), and that members may do things like help circulate nominating petitions, make financial contributions to the campaign, and volunteer to help spread the word and garner support in the community, all without putting church’s non-profit status in jeopardy.
Imagine if at least one member of each of these 22 councils was closely affiliated with a local church and driven by a heart for reconciliation. It would have a major positive impact on our city. As a professional with two and a half decades of organizing and political experience, I know that the scope of this project is one that the church in Chicago can successfully undertake. As the lead pastor of a local church, I believe with all my heart that this is a project that we should undertake.
Any person who is a registered voter and will have lived in their current police district for at least one year prior to the Feb. 28, 2023 election is qualified to seek a spot on their District Council. Pastors can run. Members can run. But the church should be represented.
Nominating petitions are due by Nov. 28, 2022. Here are the minimum number of signatures required by police district (plan to gather one-and-a-half to three times the minimum to avoid challenges, and use this tool to look up your police district number).
If you are ready to respond to this call, AND Campaign Chicago stands ready to serve as a resource to help you and your church organize efforts toward a better Police District Council in your area. Please don’t hesitate to reach out by emailing chicago@andcampaign.org.
The Round Up
Here are the stories that caught our eyes this week and what they mean for the weeks ahead.
Illinois Election Results: Who Won, and Which Races Still Haven't Been Called
Democrats scored decisive victories in Illinois on Election Day, setting the stage for continued Democratic rule in the state.
With 94 percent of ballots counted, Governor J.B. Pritzker defeated Republican challenger Darren Bailey by nearly 11 points, and Democrats retained supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.
Meanwhile, the Dems picked up a congressional seat, with Nikki Budzinski besting Regan Deering in the 13th district.
Appellate court Justice Mary K. O'Brien (D) holds a narrow lead over Supreme Court Justice Michael Burke and is projected to win.
The Workers’ Rights Amendment, which would codify the right of workers to unionize into the state’s constitution, appears to be on track to pass, with nearly 60 percent support among voters.
On the positive side, the easy passage of the Workers’ Rights Amendment should provide any activists seeking further moves toward economic justice with plenty of evidence of public sentiment when lobbying corporate Democrats at the statehouse to move in that direction.
That said, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, Pritzker and the supermajority Democratic state legislature will likely make good on their promises to make Illinois the abortion capital of the country. It’s a fair bet this will mean even more extreme pro-abortion laws in a state that already has some of the most egregious laws on the books. Voters across the political spectrum who want to take a better path forward on abortion will have an uphill climb in Illinois.
Chuy’s in: Garcia makes another run for mayor of Chicago
Congressman Chuy Garcia (D - IL-4) has entered the Chicago mayoral race. Garcia’s 2015 race against Rahm Emanuel resulted in the city’s first-ever mayoral runoff.
Garcia will have to forgo, at least for now, the support of the Chicago Teachers Union, which endorsed him for mayor in 2015 but has backed County Board Commissioner and CTU organizer Brandon Johnson. The union said it has no plans to change its endorsement.
Garcia endorsed Lori Lightfoot’s 2019 mayoral bid, but says she has not lived up to her promises to champion progressive causes, citing her combative leadership style as one of the primary impediments to positive change in the city.
We at the Civic Update plan to reach out to all the mayoral candidates to get their views on issues of concern to Chicago’s Christian community. We’ll have continuing, in-depth coverage of the mayoral race in the weeks to come.
Election Day for the city’s municipal races will be held Feb. 28, 2023.
Illinois state Supreme Court keeps Democratic majority
Illinois voters had a unique opportunity this year to flip the balance of the state’s Supreme Court, but Democrats maintained the majority the party has held for decades.
The results of the race will actually extend Democrats’ lead over Republicans on the Court, which will now stand at 5-2, rather than the 4-3 split the Dems had heading into the race.
The Illinois Supreme Court plays a major role in state politics, ruling on controversial and important topics like abortion access, gun regulations and civil rights.
Pro-life and pro-choice activists interact at a “Stop Brett Kavanaugh” rally in downtown Chicago in 2018. Pro-life groups had pinned hopes of enacting abortion restrictions in Illinois on the 2022 Illinois Supreme Court elections.
Many pro-life activists had hoped that flipping the Court’s majority to GOP Supreme Court justices would lead to abortion restrictions in the state, but the Election Day results have blocked that path of creating a culture of life in Illinois for now.
Newsclips
Chicago City Council Approves Lightfoot’s $16.4B Budget After Tense Debate
Amendment 1, the Workers' Rights Amendment, 'yes' votes ahead in Illinois election count
Can the church declare its political independence once and for all?
By Mike Vick
In the wake of yet another campaign season billed as the “most important election of our lifetimes,” Christians of all political stripes, whether firmly Democrat, firmly Republican or politically homeless, have no choice but to assess our strategy for changing the culture.
We have two parties that an increasing number of committed Christians see as dangerously unreflective of biblical values. Increased political polarization has escalated into violence that has reached the very halls of the U.S. Capitol itself. And perhaps most troubling of all for believers, hyper-partisanship has compromised our public witness, leading the world to ask whether we are members of a political party first and Christians a distant second.
This state of affairs and concern for solutions to these problems will be no stranger to regular readers of the Civic Update, nor to those within earshot of the AND Campaign and other groups like it. We have long sounded the alarm over the willingness of some in the church to abandon one aspect or another of the biblical witness in order to conform to a partisan metanarrative.
That said, I’ve found in our circles an increasing willingness among many who feel poorly represented by both major parties to take that unease to the point of abandoning both parties to chart an independent path. I hope the personal journey I’ve taken along those lines, which I outline below, will resonate with you and cause you to think about where your own political journey might lead you.
My declaration of political independence came in 2021 after five years of increasing disillusionment with the Democratic Party. Having been a pro-life leftist for decades, I never felt very comfortable in either major party. That said, I grew up in the Democratic Party and had more easy overlap with that party – at least the idealistic version of the party I had in my head for so many years.
That idealism started with a vote for long-shot Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, my first vote for president at 18 years old. I had hoped that Nader could get the critical 5 percent nationally that would lead to public matching funds for the Green Party, which in turn might lead to a greater voice for progressives and ultimately, a chance to push the Democratic Party to the left. My father, a left-leaning but “vote blue no matter who” Democrat, whose own love for politics led me to make political advocacy my life’s work, was none too pleased when he found out about my vote. He and many others in the Democratic Party blamed Nader for the election of George W. Bush, a feeling that has certainly not diminished in many people’s minds, even after more than two decades have passed.
At the time, I did not have the intellectual wherewithal to fend off emotionally-charged attacks on my electoral decision, especially those coming from my father, whom I obviously still hold in high regard. For many years after that, I decided to come back into the Democratic Party fold, voting for the most progressive Democrat I could find in the primary, then knuckling under in the general and voting for whatever candidate won the Democratic nomination. I’ve since come to be largely proud of my vote for Nader. In retrospect, that vote foreshadowed my abandonment of the Democratic Party, even though it took another 20 years to come to full fruition.
My idealism came into conflict with reality during the presidential election cycle of 2015 and 2016, when my support for the progressive candidacy of Bernie Sanders led me back to my independent roots. I’m still astonished by the sheer number of people I admired politically going into that campaign whom I could not stand by its conclusion. After that bruising race, I could not in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton, and I had no intention of ever voting for Donald Trump. I settled on the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who was decidedly pro-choice but whose views mirrored my own even more so than those I came to embrace while campaigning for Bernie.
In 2018, while working for the Indiana Democratic Party, I witnessed firsthand the ways in which the party stifles progressive voices even as it pays lip service to or wholly disdains voters of faith within its ranks who feel uneasy with or downright disgusted by the ways the party and its candidates have embraced socially liberal extremism on the issue of abortion.
For me, these issues came to a head in 2020, in the midst of my own campaign for state representative in Indiana. Once Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign for the presidential nomination, I faced yet another Hobson’s choice between neoliberal, technocratic half measures and right wing, Christian ultra-nationalism. I could not stomach either option. I wrote at the time that a politics of love offered the only sane way forward, knowing then that neither party really represented that at the national level, and that few candidates in either party represented that at any level up or down the ballot.
By midsummer of 2020, I realized I couldn’t vote for either major party candidate for president, even knowing that, as a nominee of the Democratic Party engaged in a race for office, my lack of support for Joe Biden would cause friction with the local and state political establishment.
In early August, I recorded a video in front of my church that detailed how I felt neither political party represented my faith, and I posted it to my campaign’s YouTube page. Little more than a week later, I posted a meme on my official campaign Facebook page that would land me in hot water with several local Dem activists and even the chair of my county Democratic Party. The meme declared in no uncertain terms that I had no intention of voting for Joe Biden.
By that point, I had decided against voting for the Green Party’s nominee for president, Howie Hawkins. Although his platform resonated with me, the more I dug into his campaign and its conduct in that party’s primary in 2020, the more I felt he and other activists within the Green Party had rigged their primary in his favor, deciding as far back as 2016 that he was the preferred choice and arranging to handicap any alternative candidate. I wasn’t about to jump from what I perceived to be an unfair Democratic Party primary to a smaller but still unfair Green Party primary.
So, for the first time in my life, I had no idea for whom I would vote in the presidential election. By the end of that month, I had found not only my candidate for president, but a political party that I could call my home.
That candidate was Brian Carroll of California. That party was the American Solidarity Party, a party based on the Christian Democratic principles found in Catholic Social Teaching and in Protestant political theology.
Since that time, I’ve discovered thousands of people, mostly Christians, who felt the same as I do. Some had abandoned the Democratic Party over abortion. Some, like me, found the Democratic Party to be too far to the left on social issues and too far to the right on every other issue. Some had abandoned the Republican Party over Trump. Some had even deeper issues with Republican indifference over or outright hostility toward issues of economic, racial and environmental justice, and felt Trump was simply the last straw.
I knew the thousands who had jumped ship to ASP were merely the tip of the spear. I later found even more Christians whose post-partisan mindset might not yet have caused them to abandon their partisan affiliation, but who felt that they could not help but speak out against that partisanship from within their parties. The most inspiring of these groups to me was the AND Campaign.
So, imagine my joy upon getting the opportunity this year to come on board the electoral campaign of one of AND’s executive leaders, Pastor Chris Butler. I finally had the chance to work for a candidate for whom I did not have to hold my nose. At last, I had found not just a political home, but a ride-or-die political friend with whom I could co-labor for the Kingdom.
I’m not going back to unthinking political partisanship. At the Civic Update, we’re embarking with you on a journey that might make you question your partisan assumptions, if indeed your presence here isn’t indication enough that you have done so already.
You may not make the same choices I have to leave whatever major party to which you pledge your votes on Election Day. But I, for one, hope you do. I hope the whole church realizes that our political strength lies not in attempting to force secular political institutions to look more like us, but in being called out of the culture and prophetically speaking truth to power.
I encourage you with the words of Justin Giboney, who opens the AND Campaign’s Church Politics podcast with the words, “Grab your Bible, get your mind right, and prepare to think not like a Republican, not like a Democrat, but like a Christian.”
Declare your political independence. Let’s show America what a church independent of either political party can do in the culture and for the Kingdom of God.