While a broader coalition of supporters is building around the "Moral Mondays" started by the state chapter of the NAACP, the inspiration behind the protests is a throwback to the biblical message of civil rights leaders fighting segregation in the Jim Crow era.
They argue that cutting benefit programs and cutting tax breaks for low- and middle-income families violates Jesus Christ's teaching to care for those with the least. It's running into another school of Christian thought followed by many Southern conservatives: The best way to help the poor is through private charity, providing jobs and promoting self-reliance, rather than government programs.
The NAACP, and other groups that are joining them in larger numbers, oppose a range of Republican policies, from refusing to expand Medicaid to about 500,000 more people to restricting eligibility for the state's pre-kindergarten program. Republicans, who control both chambers of the Legislature for the first time in more than a century, have also cut unemployment benefits and abolished the earned-income tax credit, which serves low to middle-income people.
State bishops and church leaders from five major Christian denominations issued a statement supporting the NAACP's actions ahead of a clergy-led protest on Monday.
Robert Daniels, senior pastor at St. John's Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, said Monday that he chose to get arrested to let legislators know that disproportionately hurting the poor wouldn't go unnoticed by voters or God.
"I want them to know that justice will win," he said. "God will show his hand that he's for the poor. It's only a matter of time."
On Wednesday, eight more people were arrested outside the doors of the Senate chamber after being told to leave. Two were city council members from Durham and Rocky Mount. They were among 100 people who attended a rally to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the killing of national NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers.
Matthew Wilson, a professor at Southern Methodist University who writes about the intersection of religion and politics, said differences in responses to poverty historically come down to denomination. Roman Catholics and black Protestants don't oppose public solutions, but Protestants of evangelical or Baptist leanings often do. And those denominations — heavily clustered in the South — emphasize personal responsibility, an individual relationship with God and work ethic, he said.
"A lot of studies show that evangelicals give more money to private anti-poverty groups than any others, so they do take very seriously the biblical imperatives to help the poor, but they differ in that they see the biblical imperative to help the poor as being an individual imperative as opposed to a collective social imperative," Wilson said.
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said he sees Christians as similarly concerned with prosperity for all, but divided over how to bring it about.
"Obviously there will always be those who have no concern for the poor at all, and that's clearly forbidden by Scripture, but usually the differences we have are over unintended consequences," he said. "And so Democrats and Republicans will disagree on what policy objectives will actually help the poor and what will put into place patterns that will, in the long-term, harm poor people.
Less talk and more actions. Nigerian Pastors and Bishops should learn from this. We talk too much, lets begin to put our fame and titles on the line to defend our beliefs. Jesus did.
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