We believe that the ultimate test of our discipleship to Jesus Christ is how we treat the most vulnerable in society, or as Jesus refers to them in Matthew 25, “the least of these” among us. Amid this COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing more than ever who is most vulnerable to contracting and dying from this new disease — and it’s a function of deeply embedded societal structures that create and perpetuate grotesque racial and economic inequity. As we’ve been saying in recent weeks, both as the data has made horrifyingly clear and as we’ve seen whose friends and relatives have disproportionately gotten sick or died of COVID-19, poverty and racism have become pre-existing conditions that increase the chances of contracting or dying from this lethal disease.

Make no mistake: While each of us has borne a variety of new burdens and dangers during this pandemic, those burdens are by no means distributed equally. On the one hand, Congress should be commended for acting to pass a number of large relief packages with broad bipartisan support. But the shameful truth of the situation is that many of society’s most at risk, both before and now in the context of the pandemic, are helped very little or not at all by recent congressional actions, despite trillions of dollars of new spending. In this moment, incarcerated individuals, people in detention, Native Americans, and people experiencing homelessness, as well as all those affected by the deeply intertwined scourges of racism and/or poverty, urgently need additional help from Congress in the next relief package. This help needs to last beyond the immediate short- and medium-term public health crisis and extend through the economic crisis, which is likely to persist for significantly longer.

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