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The Rev. Jim Conn got the call Tuesday morning. A few hours later, he was leading a small delegation of union activists into Santa Monica's Miramar Sheraton, site of a bitter and protracted labor battle, in search of William Worcester, the hotel's general manager.
Once inside, Conn and his contingent, all adorned with bright orange stickers reading "Where's Worcester?" approached several employees standing behind the cash register in the hotel's cafe. "We're trying to get a fair election for the workers," Conn, an Episcopalian who served 22 years as the pastor at the Church in Ocean Park, said in a friendly voice. "We wanted to talk to him about being fair."
While Worcester was nowhere to be found, Conn's presence at the hotel came as little surprise. As a charter member of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), he is part of an interfaith coalition that is changing the face of social activism in Los Angeles.
Conceived two years ago during the Living Wage campaign, CLUE has evolved into a loosely knit but ambitious organization that already has made its impact felt in several of L.A.'s most important labor struggles. From the fight to win better pay and benefits for hotel workers on the Westside to a dispute with USC over cutting costs by contracting out jobs, CLUE has mobilized a small but vocal segment of the Southland's religious community on behalf of the area's ever-burgeoning population of low-wage employees.
And CLUE is not an isolated phenomenon. Faith-based activism is on the rise around the country, as churches and synagogues form alliances with unions and community groups. This resurgence of progressive religious engagement represents a sharp contrast with the political exertions of the Christian right and harks back to the epic social movements of the 1960s.
"I'm seeing churches again looking at inequities in society and, in light of their historical commitment, saying that this is not right and something has to be done about it," says the Rev. William Campbell, the pastor at Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles and an early member of CLUE.
But CLUE and similar interfaith coalitions face a daunting task. In a post-ideological age dominated by the imperatives of the free market, they find themselves confronting a...