Clergy Push Activism on Social Issues

Three years after the Los Angeles riots and a year before a likely ballot initiative to repeal affirmative action laws, clergy and lay leaders from several faiths said Tuesday that they must step up political activism on socially divisive issues.

Political success, they said, will require surmounting religious and cultural differences in order to present a united front.

“Our diversity need not be our adversity, and it dare not be our perversity,” said the Rev. Cecil (Chip) Murray of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. “We have to learn to get along with each other.”

The 25 Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Bahai leaders attending a daylong religious summit sponsored by the Interfaith Coalition to Heal Los Angeles, offered mixed reviews of their responses to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and their record in affirming religious and cultural diversity in Southern California.

After the deadly terrorist bombing last week in Oklahoma City, religious communities did little to deflect an initial wave of speculation blaming the blast on Muslims, said Los Angeles Muslim leader Maher Hathout.

“We (religious leaders) have not offered a model of civil exchange,” he said. “We . . . have to look each other in the eye and say it seems we didn’t do much.”

Yet, most of those present also found reason for hope in the multi-faith response to the riots. Programs were established to provide housing, food, legal aid, credit unions and economic development. Interfaith dialogue increased, the leaders said.

But faced with new political issues such as the upcoming California “civil rights initiative,” they said it is time for religious officials outside of the Christian right to assert their leadership.

“This offers a good potential for the building of a new movement, of a resurgence of the religious community fighting for a role in society, if it chooses to take back that role,” said Xandra Kayden of the UCLA School of Public Policy and Research.

The initiative, if approved by voters, would outlaw preferences based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public hiring, admission to colleges and the awarding of government contracts.

Last fall, religious leaders from many faiths publicly expressed opposition to the anti-illegal immigrant Proposition 187, and although the measure was approved by voters, Kayden said the stand by religious leaders may have been a turning point in the resurgence of political activism.

She said that although the measure was approved, many voters lied to pollsters and said they had voted against it. “(Voters) still knew it was morally wrong,” she said. “That could only have come from the moral leadership of religion leaders who finally stood up late in the game.”

But although religious leaders opposed the measure, most of their followers voted for it. “The negative side is that religious leadership was not able to deliver the vote,” USC religion professor John Orr told the group.

Other speakers included Rabbi Harvey J. Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Gloria Haithman-Ali of the Los Angeles Bahai Center, Dean Lawrence Soum of Loyola Law School, the Rev. Michael Mata, Southern California School of Theology professor of urban ministry, and Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas.