Donna Smith is one of the "stars" of SiCKO, whose family became medically bankrupt, even though both she and her husband both always carried health insurance.  Then he had three heart attacks and she had cancer...and the insurance companies bailed out.

Is universal health care the right and moral thing to do?  Are we who reside in faith communities within our churches and our communities called to action on this issue?  Will we cast off all the things we have accumulated and follow what we have been taught to follow, in the face of this battle on behalf of those who cannot join the fray? Or will the vast majority of us remain silent, as we have over the past 30 years, giving our power and our presence over to those who express only the narrowest of Godly intentions?

Many will recognize part of my title for this essay.  I borrowed it from the authors of the Alcoholics Anonymous program’s “bible,” referred to as the “Big Book” by those who are members of its 12-step recovery program.  And in the discussion of providing universal health care for all Americans, we often hear another bible quoted – the Christian Bible, in which we may hear Jesus Christ speak about caring for the hungry, thirsty and sick in the New Testament, in the book of Matthew, verses 41-46, and reminding followers that whatever we have done for the least of God’s children, we did for Christ.

As a Christian, I would assert that those of us who have been so long silent must put together the two teachings quoted and truly rise up to say that half-measures will not do; we want to see every American man, woman and child cared for as if Christ himself is watching us.  Because he is.

Even filmmaker Michael Moore uses the verses from Matthew to remind us that providing health care would be more aptly termed "Christianized medicine” than socialized medicine.  In his latest film, SiCKO, Moore talks about creating more of a “We” than a “Me” society in extending health care to all Americans.

And just to make it clear, Michael Moore is not an America-hating, Satan-loving spoiler.  His courage in standing up to the nastiness dished out by some pretty aggressive, self-proclaimed God-fearing folks should serve as an example to many of what God really calls us to do.

Moore does not, nor do I, exclude those in non-Christian faith communities from this cry for justice.  In no major religion does God want us to abandon those who are sick. And God does not instruct his followers to care for human life only in the womb (ala the anti-abortion movement) and then later on, if on feeding tubes or life-support (as even our U.S. Senate did for Terri Schiavo). 

And yet the right wing, ultra conservative political army in this nation has cornered that selfish angle. They have sold it to a huge number of largely Christian followers who are then led to believe that the political leaders who hold fast to those specific areas of legal protections also hold the corner on what is Godly with every other political issue.

Christianity used to be all-inclusive and loving and forgiving and peaceful toward one's neighbors. Now it has morphed into the gun-toting, Bible thumping, war loving patriots with a hard-lined nastiness that now looks down its noses at millions of us who also love our God and feel banished because we didn’t shift our loyalties from Christ to the rightest (and I think this should be rightist) of the right wing within the Grand Old Party.

Scholars and sociologists with much higher degrees and deeper knowledge than I will trace this diminishment of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood in America for decades to come. 

Love thy neighbor, a basic Christian value, has become love thy neighbor only if he or she measures up.  I don’t remember that phrase being added to Christ’s teachings.  I always thought I was called to love and to help those less fortunate than I, to try to live as Christ would want me to, but in recent years I have been scolded and chastised and mocked right out of the mainstream of my faith.  I have been made to feel an outsider in the house of God.  It can be hard to find a church where love and justice still mean anything.

I want to call my fellow believers to another sort of action. Think back to what brought you to your faith community.  Think about feelings of inclusiveness and of oneness with your fellow human beings on your block and on the planet.  Let’s break this chokehold the right wing has placed on our acts of kindness and our care, in this nation and beyond.

We do love our fellow Americans.  We love children and kids and old folks and soldiers and even Republicans who lie about their own faith.  I think sometimes the reason we have been so lost is because we held too strongly to the “turn the other cheek” teachings and waited for a turn in the tide.

Well, fellow followers, we have to make this tide turn.

When I was just a child, way back when, in the 1960s in a suburb of Chicago, I remember walking on “Hunger Hikes” for which I raised some money for every mile I walked and those funds were given to those who needed food.  My parents sometimes didn’t understand why I wanted to walk 26 miles to benefit the hungry when I could have just given a few more dollars in my church collection plate on Sunday.  There was something about walking along, sometimes hurting and cold in the rain, sometimes sweltering in the heat, and wondering why my friends went shopping instead of walking, that fueled my determination to understand even just a little of what suffering others must endure just to get a little food.

As an adult, I have unfortunately lived through the horrors of our broken health care system and understand, intimately, the pain and suffering our sick in the United States must often endure to get care or to be turned away from care. That’s why my story is in SiCKO and that’s why I testified last month for a sub-committee of the House Judiciary on the financial crisis many families suffer when ill.

So I am called again, and I am called even more loudly and more strongly.  I didn’t get it all those years ago.  I didn’t really understand what Christ meant when he said to throw off all those other things and follow.  Now I do.

And, my sisters and brothers in faith, please stand up with me. Let’s not be silent any longer.  That is not going to help us do what our God asked of us.  This health crisis cannot be prayed away. 

The sick in our midst often cannot join us on the battlefront.  But we can rise up out of our inaction and our complacency, born of the religious persecution of the right wing, and change this nation.  Black, brown, red, yellow, white, Christian, Jew, Muslim, our God is calling. 

And even if the right wing has seen fit to do so, we do not need to tear down any other person’s beliefs or integrity to win this fight for health care for every person in this land. 

We do truly stand at the turning point, half measures will avail us nothing, and, from that Bible verse, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?", then he will answer them, saying: Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.

Are you ready faithful?  Rise up.  Break your silence. Every life is worth our shared struggle.

And I often muse on what Thomas Jefferson wrote many years ago, on what he believed the basic teachings of Jesus Christ were, he wrote in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, on June 26,1822, “The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man. One, that there is only one God, and He is all perfect; two, that there is a future state of rewards and punishment; and, three, that to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion.” And I am with him in the belief that I must love my neighbor – and help them as a consequence of that love.  For me, that is what the struggle for universal health care is all about.

Write your Member of Congress. Ask him/her to become a co-sponsor of H.R. 676:

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Donna Smith is one of the "stars" of Michael Moore's documentary "SiCKO" and Founder of American Patients for Universal Health Care.

Click here to contact Ms. Smith and Healthcare-NOW.

Click here to read any of the articles in this special BC series on Single-Payer Healthcare.

Your comments are always welcome.