I doubt they will.

Anything gors in order to expectorate the orange turd, definitelly the worst optionbfor America.

How about leaving churches and religion out of things completely?

Religion has always stolen from the poor, enslaved them, treated women as nothing but breeding fodder for their coffers!

Corey Booker was not going to get my vote in the primary anyway; but if I had been on the fence about him, the following quote alone would disqualify him. He will only get my vote if he should be on the ticket in the general election.

“I get very frustrated when people want to try to separate this idea of the role of the church and the role of the civic space,” Booker said. “That is just not true. You could no more divide your own body. The church is not four walls. The church is the body of Christ.”

I am a citizen of the United States of America and a member of the human race. I am not in any way a part of any “body of Christ.” My values concerning the poor, that are much higher than many Christians, are not faith based—they are based in basic human decency and compassion.

Our founders wanted a separation of Church and State. This does not mean that people cannot vote according to their religious beliefs, but DO NOT make it out that we are all part of this Jesus person/church. I can agree with some of the teachings attributed to this person but there are others that I find abhorrent.

As for Buttigieg, I don’t really like the religious talk; but, I think it is important for him to call out those who think they own Christianity.

As long as we have religions and churches, and they will be around for a while to come, I want to see better versions of them.

I can agree with these statements:

“Church leaders, like politicians, have a responsibility to shift the dominant narrative people hold on poverty…”
“The church has a responsibility to educate and help change the narrative of individuals who are struggling with this issue…”
“The church must be clear to assign worth and value to members of society who are economically disadvantaged and share the good news about those who are impoverished. As we get closer to the general election, persons of the Christian faith and the church must hold political figures accountable, helping to rewrite the false narratives concerning the poor and marginalized in our country so we can love those on the margins as Jesus would.”

This said, one does not need Jesus, or a god, to have love and compassion for others. And, I want to see an absolute SEPARATION of Church and State. I want to see the day when I do not know a candidate’s religious beliefs--I want us to reach the point when the name of Jesus, or any version of a god, is never invoked in public discourse. We are a nation "of, by and for the people.” We are not a nation under the laws of any god.

The Poor will cease being poor, when the last Capitalist is hung with the guts of the last Priest!

When the poor fully realize that they have been used and abused by Republicans for the last half a century, the Republican pary will crumble. Johnson's "war on poverty" had a good intent, but the wrong approaches. We will never eliminate all poverty in the USA, but we can and should act to reduce it greatly.

I see that often the 'liberal' churches follow 'liberal ideology. I disagree with both sides “We’ve got to be honest about the fact that (poverty) is a moral issue.” It is a narrow ethical issue which is based on the primary moral issue which is the survivability of species including our own and future generations. Poverty comes from a lack of resources and the planet has a fixed resource base. As we continue to add more demands on that limited resource base we will experience more poverty. Another, duh, idea is that when we import millions of desperate and poor people our poverty levels will rise. There is not some god who will reward us for our anthropocentric virtues and deeds but that force which is really in control, nature, will act according to her rules. Understanding and acting to those rules is the ultimate morality.

I read about half of this before getting tourougly pissed. This whole article seeks to undermine the separation of church and state by invoking similarities between religious leaders and politicians.

It ignores the reality that poverty has been steadily decreasing globally, and that decrease can be attributed to technological development.