Building a Multi-Faith Movement for a Just and Prosperous Future
CREDITS
National Steering Committee: Imam Saffet Catovic, Justice for All; Pablo De Jesus, Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice; Mirele Goldsmith, Jewish Earth Alliance; Rev. Fletcher Harper, GreenFaith; Bee Moorehead, Texas Impact
National Campaign Coordinator: Mia Coward
This document is offered as a resource for clergy and faith leaders seeking to speak with clarity, courage, and moral grounding in a time of deep national crisis.
It is not a work of original research. Rather, it draws on expert analysis, publicly available data, and verified reporting to illuminate the real-world impacts of current federal policies. These impacts are paired with brief sacred text references from diverse faith traditions as a reminder that our moral teachings speak directly to the conditions we face today.
This resource is meant to support preaching, teaching, writing, and public witness. It offers language, stories, and framing that can help faith leaders connect policy decisions to lived experience and to the sacred values that call us to respond.
Behind this resource is the Covenant for Our Future, a national, multi-faith campaign that meets this moment with moral clarity and collective commitment.
United across faith traditions, the Campaign calls for the repeal of H.R.1 (the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) and for a renewal of our federal government’s commitment to compassion and justice, responding to the cries of our communities not with rhetoric but with life-giving action.
Our Moral Mandates
Guided by our sacred teachings, we call for policies that uphold:
We are living through a time of converging crises. Inequality is deepening. The vulnerable are persecuted. The Earth is under threat. Systems that provided care are being weakened, while systems of punishment and extraction are strengthened.
At this moment, neutrality is not an option.
People of faith must reclaim our moral voice, stand with those most impacted by injustice, and help shape a future rooted in dignity, justice, and care for the environment. Acting together, we can renew hope, reclaim power, and reignite a sense of shared possibility.
The Covenant for Our Future calls us to choose a path grounded in compassion over cruelty, justice over inequity, and life over harm. This resource is offered in that spirit, as a tool to help faith leaders speak, act, and lead in this decisive moment.
A society is judged by whether people can live with dignity – whether families can put food on the table, whether workers are paid fairly, and whether illness leads to care or to catastrophe. These are the foundations of a just society. They demand strong federal leadership.
Even before recent policy changes, the warning signs were clear. Nearly 42 million people already relied on SNAP to afford basic groceries. One in five adults – 100 millions Americans – carried medical debt. More than 25 million people lack health insurance at some point each year. For millions, one emergency is enough to trigger financial collapse.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) has moved the country in the wrong direction.
Cuts to nutrition assistance are pushing more families into hunger. Food banks nationwide report rising demand and strain, while policy changes are expected to reduce benefits for millions. Policy analysts estimate that approximately 4 million people could lose SNAP benefits, including over 1 million children, not because they are no longer poor but as stricter work requirements and administrative barriers push families off assistance.
In Ohio, a single mother working full-time in a nursing home saw her SNAP benefits reduced and now runs out of food before the end of the month, a reality echoed in reporting across the country documenting how working families are turning to food pantries as benefits shrink.
At the same time, healthcare coverage is eroding. Due to OBBA, more than 5 million people will lose health coverage in 2028 alone. The Journal of the American Medical Association calls OBBA “the worst piece of healthcare legislation ever.”
At the same time, wealth continues to concentrate at the top. The richest Americans have captured a disproportionate share of new wealth in recent years, while major corporations report sustained high profits. Yet tax structures and subsidies continue to favor those with the most resources—widening the gap between wealth and hardship.
If these policies remain in place, the consequences will deepen. Food insecurity will rise as benefits erode. Coverage losses will grow, increasing the number of uninsured Americans and straining emergency systems. Medical debt will continue to climb, trapping families in cycles of poverty that can last for generations. These are not distant risks—they are predictable outcomes.
Faith traditions speak with one voice on these truths. The Hebrew scriptures command, “If there is among you anyone in need… do not be hard-hearted” (Deuteronomy 15:7), and teach that “you shall open your hand to the poor and needy” (Deuteronomy 15:11). Jesus teaches, “I was hungry and you gave me food… I was sick and you took care of me” (Matthew 25:35–36). The Qur’an reminds believers to “give food, despite love for it, to the needy, the orphan, and the captive” (Qur’an 76:8).
The Hindu tradition calls for generosity and care through dāna (giving), teaching that those who have resources must share them for the well-being of all. The Buddha taught that hunger is one of the greatest forms of suffering and that compassion requires meeting people’s basic needs. And the Unitarian Universalist tradition affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person and calls for justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.
To deny food to the hungry, to deny care to the sick, and to reward excess while millions struggle is to abandon those obligations. It is to normalize suffering.
We reject that vision.
Economic dignity means that every person can meet their basic needs without fear. Healthcare for all means that illness never leads to financial ruin. And a fair economy means that those who have benefited the most contribute their just share.
This is a moral mandate. It must become a policy agenda. The path forward is clear: restore and strengthen nutrition assistance so that no one in the US goes to bed hungry, guarantee universal basic healthcare, and reform tax systems so that wealth serves the common good. In this moment, we must choose between a society that abandons the vulnerable, or one that upholds the dignity of all.
The Covenant for Our Future is a commitment to that second path.
A society is measured by how it treats the stranger, the displaced, and the vulnerable. Across traditions, there is a clear moral command: welcome the stranger, protect the refugee, uphold the dignity of every human being. These are sacred obligations.
Even before OBBA, this system was broken. But OBBA has transformed it into something far larger and more dangerous by providing a $75 billion expansion of ICE, including a 400% increase in detention funding alone, enabling the rapid growth of a vast new detention infrastructure.
What we are witnessing now is the normalization of cruelty and intentional evil.
Migrants and refugees across the United States are subjected to detention, surveillance, and enforcement practices that actively and violently degrade migrants’ humanity.
Detention facilities are designed to inflict physical and emotional trauma. People are held for weeks or months in overcrowded conditions, with inadequate medical care, limited legal access, and profound psychological stress. These systems are designed to inflict injury on all levels. They represent a form of hell on earth.
This is not accidental. It is policy.
We have seen this before. Under explicit federal policy, children were separated from their parents at the border, some taken without records sufficient to reunite them. Families were torn apart not as a tragic byproduct, but as a deliberate strategy to send a message of fear.
Human Rights Watch reports: US Border Patrol is holding many children, including some who are much too young to take care of themselves, in jail-like border facilities for weeks at a time without contact with family members, regular access to showers, clean clothes, toothbrushes, or proper beds. Many are sick. Many, including children as young as 2 or 3, have been separated from adult caretakers without any provisions for their care besides the unrelated older children also being held in detention.
Consider the testimony of migrants held in detention facilities who report being denied adequate medical care, held in freezing conditions, and subjected to prolonged isolation. In one widely documented case, detained migrants described being packed into overcrowded cells with insufficient food and sanitation, with some reporting serious illness going untreated for days.
And when people rise up to protest this injustice, the consequences have been deadly.
In Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a mother of three, during an enforcement operation. In the days that followed, federal agents also shot and killed protester Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, during demonstrations calling for accountability.
Alongside these policies, something equally dangerous has taken root. Administration officials have regularly referred to migrants in public discourse as “animals,” as invaders, as less than human. This language intentionally prepares the ground for abuse.
History teaches us that when any group of people is stripped of their humanity in words, it becomes easier to strip them of their rights in practice. Dehumanizing language is not just offensive, it is a warning sign. It signals a moral line being crossed.
Every faith tradition rejects this. No human being is an animal to be hunted. No child is an “illegal.” No family is disposable.
But there is another path rooted in both moral clarity and practical wisdom.
We call for dignity and rights for immigrants. Government policy must
Faith traditions speak with one voice on this:
We can continue down a path that relies on fear, punishment, and the dehumanization of those seeking safety—a path that violates the deepest moral teachings of our faiths.
Or we can choose a different path: one that reflects our shared values, honors the dignity of every person, protects families, and builds a humane and just system of welcome.
The Covenant for Our Future calls us to choose that second path.
A society committed to dignity and justice does not govern through violence and force.
Yet across the United States, we are witnessing the normalization of physical violence as the guiding logic of policy. Public resources are increasingly directed toward policing, incarceration, detention, and militarized enforcement while the root causes of harm or conflict go unaddressed. In the US, communities of color bear the brunt of this approach, facing disproportionate surveillance, criminalization, and state violence.
The scale is staggering. The United States incarcerates 2 million people, far more than any other nation. Black Americans are imprisoned at five times the rate of white Americans. Latino and Indigenous communities are also disproportionately targeted by policing, detention, and deportation systems.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is deepening this injustice in ways that fall along racial lines.
In March 2025, immigration agents detained a woman and her three children in Sackets Harbor, New York, while carrying out an operation aimed at someone else. The family was swept up anyway and held in custody for days before being released after intense public protest.
The federal budget now prioritizes militarization and enforcement over food, health, and care. It is an immoral, racialized cycle: cut care, then fund punishment.
When surveillance, government harassment and detention expand into everyday life, families begin to avoid schools, hospitals, and places of worship out of fear. In 2025, the removal of long-standing limits on immigration enforcement in sensitive locations like schools and churches intensified that fear, making it harder for families to access education, food, and care. These actions continue a pernicious pattern in American life: communities of color subjected to aggressive enforcement, treated as threats rather than neighbors, and denied dignity.
In different locations around the country, ICE agents have arrested people in church parking lots and during preschool pickup, and even attempted arrests while pastors were preaching. These actions have caused church attendance to decrease, forced congregations to lock their doors, and silenced the ministries that make worship communities safe for all people, regardless of their immigration status.
We see this same logic reflected beyond our borders. Instead of investing in diplomacy and peacebuilding, the United States continues to channel enormous resources into military force. Violence is treated as a first resort rather than a last. The scale of these choices is staggering: the FY2026 increases in Pentagon spending and mass deportation funding alone would be more than enough to provide Medicaid coverage to every person projected to lose their health insurance
Every faith calls us to heal the sick. OBBA funded military violence and deportation instead.
Faith traditions around the world reject this logic:
Even now, communities are building another way—violence interruption programs, restorative justice practices, and community-based mental health services. International diplomacy, though difficult, has proven its power time and again in the past decade. These approaches work. But they are starved of resources, while policing, detention, and the military are abundantly funded.
The United States faces a clear moral choice between a future defined by policies that criminalize poverty, deepen racial inequity, and expand militarized enforcement at home and abroad, or a future marked by community safety built on education, healthcare, food aid and approaches to safety that reduce harm without relying on force.
The Covenant for Our Future calls us to choose that second path.
A livable climate is not a luxury. It is the foundation of life, health, and economic stability. The role of the federal government is to protect people from harm, steward shared resources responsibly, and lead the transition to a safer and more just energy system.
The science is unequivocal and urgent. The last decade has been the hottest in recorded human history. “Once-in-a-century” climate disasters now occur every few years. In March 2026 alone, the United States experienced its most abnormally hot March in over a century, with temperatures more than 11°F above average. Across the country and the world, crops are lost to drought and heat, homes destroyed by fire and flood, communities displaced, and lives cut short .
At precisely the moment when science demands rapid action, federal policy has moved in the opposite direction.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) and related administrative actions have weakened or dismantled core climate and air pollution protections, slowed the implementation of historic clean energy investments, expanded fossil fuel production, and withdrawn the United States from global climate cooperation . These decisions are often framed as economic or strategic. In reality, they increase pollution, delay solutions, and deepen risk.
The human cost is immediate and visible.
Prior clean air protections helped prevent up to 230,000 premature deaths each year. Rolling them back risks sacrificing lives on a staggering scale—equivalent to losing a city the size of Orlando annually . Globally, fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for one in five deaths. Children are especially vulnerable: exposure to polluted air can cause lasting lung damage and increased rates of asthma.
In California, during recent wildfire seasons intensified by climate change, families have watched the sky turn orange and the air become unsafe to breathe for days at a time. Parents keep children indoors, schools close, and emergency rooms fill with patients struggling to breathe.Doctors report spikes in asthma attacks during heavy smoke periods, with some children requiring hospitalization.
Pollution is concentrated in communities with the least political and economic power, low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and those living closest to highways, refineries, and power plants. Those who contributed least to the climate crisis are paying the highest price.
At the same time, the clean energy transition, the greatest economic opportunity of our time, is being deliberately slowed.
Clean energy industries were projected to create 9 million new jobs over the next decade (DOE). Every $1 million invested in clean energy generates two to three times more jobs than fossil fuels. And clean energy investment had surged to more than $300 billion per year, fueling growth in manufacturing, construction, and rural development .
In Georgia and across the Southeast, clean energy investments have begun creating new pathways into stable, well-paying work. Workers have moved from low-wage jobs into solar installation and manufacturing roles that offer higher pay, benefits, and opportunities for advancement. For many, it has meant the first real chance at economic stability.
As clean energy projects have been canceled, opportunities like his are becoming less certain. Contracts are delayed, hiring freezes spread, and workers who had begun to build new careers face layoffs or instability. A pathway out of poverty is being disrupted.
At the same time, fossil fuel companies continue to profit. The industry has earned approximately $3 billion per day in profits over the past 50 years, while receiving new subsidies worth tens of billions of dollars.
At the same time, the erosion of truth about climate change compounds the crisis. When leaders dismiss science or distort evidence, they weaken the public will to act. Yet the scientific consensus is overwhelming: more than 99% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused. Renewable energy is now among the cheapest sources of power available. The barrier is no longer technology. It is political will.
Faith traditions speak clearly to this moment. The Hebrew scriptures teach, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1). The Qur’an warns, “Do not cause corruption on the earth after it has been set right” (Qur’an 7:56). Jesus calls us to protect “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). Hindu teachings call us to act for the welfare of the world (Bhagavad Gita 3:20). The Buddha teaches that right action avoids harm and promotes well-being. Unitarian Universalism’s 7th principle is Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
To knowingly expand systems that damage the climate, harm the vulnerable, and endanger future generations is a violation of these shared moral teachings. We reject that path.
Climate justice means protecting communities from harm, accelerating the transition to clean energy, and ensuring that the benefits of that transition are shared equitably. This is a moral mandate. It must become a policy agenda.
At this moment, we must choose between a future defined by extraction, pollution, and delay, or one grounded in justice, truth, and life.
The Covenant for Our Future is a commitment to that second path.
Amid climate disruption, conflict, displacement, and economic instability, at precisely the moment when global cooperation is most needed, the United States is retreating from its commitments to the world’s most vulnerable people.
While not all of these changes originate in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA), they are part of a policy direction that OBBA reinforces: shifting resources away from care, development, and cooperation and toward militarization and domestic enforcement.
The consequences are immediate and devastating.
However, public understanding of this aid is deeply distorted:
Even at its strongest, and while large in absolute dollar terms, U.S. global assistance has been modest compared to its wealth. Of the ten countries that gave the most foreign aid in raw figures, the US gave the smallest share of its national income.
Now, that commitment is being reduced further.
The impacts are not abstract. They are counted in missed meals, untreated illnesses, lost livelihoods, and preventable deaths.
Reduced food assistance means families across Africa, Asia and elsewhere skipping meals or going without food for days. Interruptions in funding mean health clinics without medicine and patients without care. Farmers lose access to seeds and support. Children are pulled from school. Fragile systems begin to break.
Resources that could feed the hungry, heal the sick and prevent conflict are instead directed toward weapons, war and deportation. In one of the wealthiest nations in human history and thanks to OBBA, we spend over $900 billion each year on the military and over $100 billion more on deportation and enforcement while spending roughly $50–60 billion on all foreign aid combined. In other words, for every dollar spent on foreign aid, the US spent more than $20 on the military and deportation.
The human consequences of these decisions are already visible.
Hellen, a rural Kenyan mother, believed her severely malnourished son would recover after starting a course of life-saving specialised food. Instead, 4-year-old Peter relapsed last July when the health facility treating him ran out of supplies. By late October, he weighed only 25 pounds. His 20-month-old sister, Melvine, was nearly as tall as he was. The US decision to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development severed a lifeline for children like Peter.
10.3 million children in sub-Saharan Africa have lost a parent to HIV-related causes, making up 75% of such orphans in the world. Cuts to HIV/AIDS programs by the US government could lead another 2.8 million children to lose their parents to the virus.
Refugees have been hard hit by cuts in US aid. In Uganda, malnutrition rates are soaring in refugee centers. 230,000 Rohingya child refugees in Bangladesh are at risk of losing education. In South Sudan, 80,000 refugee women and girls, including survivors of sexual violence, have lost access to medical care, psychosocial support, legal aid, material support or income-generating activities.
These are the predictable consequences of policy choices.
Faith traditions speak with one voice: we are bound to one another.
We face a clear choice.
We can continue down a path of withdrawal, militarization, and neglect that will cost millions of lives in the next five years alone. Or we can choose a path of solidarity: investing in life, strengthening communities, and building a more just and peaceful world.
The Covenant for Our Future calls us to choose that second path.
This is a moment that demands more than concern. It demands commitment.
At a time when federal policies are undermining human dignity, weakening care for the vulnerable, and placing profit over people and the planet, our faith traditions call us to speak and to act. The Covenant for Our Future is a national, multi-faith response grounded in moral clarity and collective courage.
Together, we are calling for the repeal of H.R.1 and for a renewed federal commitment to a just and prosperous future for all, a future that reflects our moral mandates: economic dignity and healthcare for all, racial equity and peace over violence, migrant dignity and rights, climate justice and clean energy, and global solidarity for the common good.
Faith in the United States is far greater than the narrow, exclusionary vision of white Christian nationalism that has become so influential. Our traditions are richer, deeper, and more expansive than any ideology that seeks to divide or dominate. Religion is meant to soften the human heart, not harden it. It is meant to widen the circle of compassion, not shrink it. It is meant to remind us that every human being is sacred. So when faith is invoked to justify cruelty or exclusion, people of faith have a responsibility not to abandon religion, but to reclaim it.
Neutrality is not an option. The crises we face demand a faithful response.
We invite religious leaders, people of faith, and faith institutions across the country to affirm the Covenant for Our Future. Preach it. Teach it. Organize around it. Help your community understand what is at stake. Inspire them to believe that a better future is possible.
And we invite you to take part in the Covenant for Our Future Week of Action, August 23–30, 2026, a coordinated national witness through sermons, public actions, and advocacy that will call our nation back to its highest values.
This is our moment to choose justice. This is our moment to act.
