The Real Golden Rule

I just got back late last night from a whirlwind trip to Washington DC, where I attended Bread for the World’s annual Advocacy Summit. It was two days devoted to learning about critical issues in the fight against hunger, sketching out a plan for how to handle our interactions with our Senators and Representatives, and then putting it all into practice as we made our visits to Capitol Hill on Lobby Day yesterday.

Few things make me feel more American than making these kinds of visits. There’s voting, of course, and singing patriotic songs, and gorging myself on foods made with high fructose corn syrup and trans fats while not exercising, but I seldom feel more like a true American than when I’m advocating for and with poor and hungry people seeking justice.

There is something beautiful and empowering in a Lobby Day visit. Yesterday our Pennsylvania delegation, twenty-five strong, filled the office of Senator John Fetterman and made up the largest contingent at a “Constituent Coffee” with Senator Dave McCormick in the LBJ room in the Capitol building. We came well-prepared, equipped with facts, economic and national-security arguments, and the moral force of speaking a prophetic word of God in the halls of power.

Power was a subtext in all our conversations the last two days. Who has the power? Which party is out of power? How do we consolidate and exercise our power? And most importantly, what kind of power are we talking about? Hanging like a miasmic cloud over all our activities and meetings was the work of DOGE in gutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the proposed $290 billion cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the administration’s efforts to rescind funds already appropriated, which would render our international aid efforts positively skeletal.

Combined with all this was the news of National Guard and Marine deployments in Los Angeles and the visible preparations being made for the president’s birthday parade this weekend. Everywhere we turned we saw a certain definition of power: power-over. The power to dictate. The power to deploy. The power to harm. The power, frankly, to kill. (Some estimates say that more than 300,000 people around the world may have already died because of the shuttering of USAID.) A “golden rule” derived from this conceptualization of power would go, “Do it to others before they have the chance to do it to you.”

But the real Golden Rule, Jesus’s Golden Rule, is very different, and it points to a very different kind of power. The 500 or so attendees of Bread’s Advocacy Summit this week were trying to exercise that kind of power: power-with. Power to cooperate. Power to show compassion. Power to empathize. Power to heal. We wanted to do to others what we would have them do to us. And that, of course, is the guiding principle of the church—preemptive blessing. Giving instead of taking. Sharing instead of hoarding. Loving instead of hating. Saving lives instead of killing.

We are Christians, followers of Jesus Christ, and we have a moral obligation to exercise this different kind of power on behalf of a world in crisis. May each of us be found faithful in obeying the real Golden Rule in our individual lives and our life together in Community.