When 12 religious leaders in collars and vestments were arrested last week in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, they were reading Bible verses about caring for the poor, and doing it so loudly that their voices could be heard at the doors of senators' office suites nine stories above.
It was to little avail: The Senate went ahead and passed a tax bill early on Saturday, promoted as relief for the middle class, that mainly benefits corporations and the rich — and that many economists say offers little or nothing for the poor.
The middle class and its discontents have occupied so much political and media attention lately that poverty has been crowded out. But some prominent religious leaders are gearing up for a campaign to try to put it back on the nation's agenda in a way that it hasn't been in decades.
On Monday, exactly 50 years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his Poor People's Campaign, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a black minister and civil rights leader from North Carolina, and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a white theologian originally from Milwaukee, will announce a revival of Dr. King's campaign, which stalled when he was assassinated in 1968. Organizers now hope to mount large protests on 40 consecutive days next year, in at least 25 state capitals and other locations, with crowds in the tens of thousands courting arrest.
"Nothing is going to change until we put a face on it, until we drive the public discourse, until we restart the moral narrative," Dr. Barber said in an interview.
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Dr. Barber has had some recent success using a sustained campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience at the state level. The Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina that began in 2013 challenged limitations on voting rights and helped to unseat a governor. The new campaign will test whether organizers can take that model nationwide, and whether a multi-faith, multiracial movement can break through the nation's polarized politics.
The two ministers have spent the last year visiting churches and union halls to mobilize thousands of activists, including homeless people, veterans, clergy members and students.
They are aiming to redefine what constitutes a "moral agenda" in politics. Many on the right frame it in narrow terms of opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. By contrast, the poor people's campaign's sprawling agenda includes issues like wages, health care, immigrant rights, gay and transgender rights, criminal justice reform, and clean water and air.
Valerie Jean Blakely, a mother of five in Detroit, became a local organizer after protesting shut-offs of water service in her neighborhood in 2014. Her husband lost a factory job after the 2008 crash, she said, and now the couple make less than $20,000 a year, she said.
"This is what we've been waiting for, this kind of mass mobilization," Ms. Blakely said in a telephone interview. "I don't have any faith in Democrats or Republicans."
The campaign, which falls in an especially charged midterm election year, includes plans to converge in a march in Washington in June. Drs. Barber and Theoharis say that the campaign is not a partisan undertaking, and that they will not allow candidates for office to piggyback on its events.
But in a broader sense, "politics is everything," Dr. Theoharis said. "We're making it impossible in the next election cycle for them to get away without talking about poverty."
The two ministers have not stayed entirely aloof from electoral politics. They joined last month with clergy members in Alabama to denounce Roy S. Moore, the Republican Senate candidate there, and what Dr. Barber called "the unbearable hypocrisy of Roy Moore's Christian rhetoric."
Organizers of the poor people's campaign say they have already received support from several religious denominations, including the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); the United Church of Christ; the Union of Reform Judaism; and Dr. Barber's denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Dr. Theoharis, a Presbyterian minister, is co-director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice, based at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
It remains to be seen whether the campaign can catch fire as the organizers hope. Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, a minister, longtime civil rights advocate and co-leader of the National African American Clergy Network, says most churches have remained on the sidelines in the Trump era, and too few have spoken out against the tax bills in Congress, which are expected to lead to significant cuts in the nation's social safety net.
Although more than 2,400 leaders of many faiths signed a letter to senators calling the tax bills "fundamentally unjust," and the nation's Catholic bishops requested multiple changes to benefit the working poor, their objections have barely registered.
"You don't see the outrage of the civil rights movement, or the antiwar movement," Dr. Williams-Skinner said. "You don't see that kind of outrageous indignation."
"We're at a very sad state in this country, of almost a shameless disregard for the poor," she continued. "We're taking money away from struggling people shamelessly."
Dr. Williams-Skinner was one of the religious leaders protesting in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building last week, as part of the evangelical social justice group Sojourners. She read from the Gospel of Matthew: "I was hungry, but you did not give me anything to eat."
After Capitol Police officers warned the protesters three times by bullhorn to stop, Dr. Williams-Skinner, who is 73, and the others were taken away in plastic handcuffs. She was booked on a charge of disturbing the peace — the first time, she said, that she had ever been arrested at a protest.
"I decided it's time to put up or shut up," she said afterward. "There are not enough people of faith angry about this as a violation of the word of God."
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