The meeting began with a prayer. Heads bowed and eyes closed. Then the members of "We Are Church Confessing," a group of liberal faith leaders and activists from greater Des Moines, got to work. It was a midweek morning in May, and the Iowa Democratic caucuses felt at once far off on the calendar and also, somehow, already here.
Several presidential candidates had swept through town in recent days. The primary season was underway, and the group of pastors at Plymouth United Church of Christ had a full agenda. An asylum-seeker needed help at an upcoming appointment with federal immigration officials. Summer meetings needed to be scheduled. There was talk of staging a "die-in" in front of the state capitol to call for more state spending on public education, environmental programs, transgender health care services, an implicit bias training program for police, or preferrably some combination of all of the above.
When the meeting was over, the conversation turned to progressive politics and religion, and how the two fit together.
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