At Ebenezer Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. co-pastored with his father, representatives of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty and 20 national and regional religious organizations and advocacy groups launched the Kairos Campaign to Mobilize Faith-Based Opposition to America's Death Penalty. View the conference program (3.7MB PDF).

The next decade is the kairos moment toward repealing the death penalty in the United States. It is the ripe political, social, and cultural moment in history for the movement to abolish the death penalty in the United States. The word kairos describes this time of opportunity for the movement to repeal the death penalty. It's an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment, the supreme moment, and period of time in which something special happens. Theologian Paul Tillich calls Kairos, the “manifestation of the divine dimension of the moment... when the new reality has come, the time of the New Being.”

Now is the time for the religious community to raise its voice to abolish the death penalty. People of Faith Against the Death Penalty intends to facilitate moving the religious community in America to become strategically engaged with the movement to abolish the death penalty. The Kairos Campaign is composed of national, regional, and state clergy and lay leadership in the religious community intent on prayerful action.

Now is the time to become involved. The death penalty will be abolished in the United States. The death penalty is declining in use in our country, and our government's global isolation in retaining the death penalty continues to grow. In November 2010 the U.S. government was forced to oppose 107 countries calling for a moratorium on executions in a vote at the United Nations. We are allowing our government to stand with China, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and others with some of the worst human rights records.

It's time the religious community in America got serious about working to repeal the death penalty. People of faith and good will can and must challenge and lead the religious community in the United States to rise to this kairos occasion.

Join this campaign of hope and challenge to action. Stay involved. Let us help our faith communities to repent of our tacit participation in torture and killings in our names. Let us chose redemptive action.

Let us consult with, coordinate with, and cooperate with those state and national organizations who have long been in this struggle while most in the religious community were silent. We faithful have a moral duty to struggle for justice and do the hard work to bring our faith communities' political, cultural and financial resources to bear to end the death penalty and foster restorative justice.

It's time.

Ten Goals of the Kairos Campaign

You can volunteer to be involved with any of these goals of the Kairos Campaign. Click here to register your interested in the campaign and any of these goals.

1. National Interfaith Task Force on the Death Penalty

   This is coalition of religious leaders and laity focused on (a) heightened attention to the death penalty by religious groups and (b) offering tactical support to short-term projects for state abolition groups.

2. Denominational Task Forces

   Starting at the Kairos Conference, PFADP is creating small task forces within religious traditions. Their mission will be to get more things moving within their faith traditions or denominations. They will act as liaisons between the leadership of the national denominations and PFADP. PFADP can then help tap the leadership into the abolition movement and state groups. Each task force will be composed of a group of clergy and lay leaders from within each tradition. For example, PFADP will create a Presbyterian Task Force on the Death Penalty composed of several clergy and lay Presbyterian leaders from across the country.

3. Religious Repeal Resolution Campaign

   PFADP will seek to build and work through a new network of support pairing religious leaders and organizations with state organizations to generate thousands of resolutions for repeal of the death penalty from congregations, religious communities and organizations. Through the Kairos Campaign each denominational task force will review a draft of each repeal resolution in their tradition, which will be provided by PFADP, and set goals for having them passed. Each member of each task force will be asked to commit to being responsible directly or indirectly for generating a certain number of resolutions passed by congregations and organizations within their tradition. Our overall goal: 1,000 religious resolutions nationwide by the 2012. PFADP will partner with Equal Justice USA and other organizations promoting resolutions.

4. Renew Policy Statements

   PFADP will work with denominational task forces and denominational staff and leaders to renew policy statements against the death penalty from religious denominations throughout the country. Some have not been updated and reaffirmed in decades. Our goal: all new policy statements proposed to national judicatories from within their ranks by 2012. State groups will then be able to access these proposed resolutions and mobilize their members to support them.

5. National Clergy and Religious Leader Letter for Death Penalty Repeal

   By 2015 the Kairos Campaign will have generated 10,000 clergy endorsements of a letter for repeal. We will work throughout the movement and use every medium to promote the letter. Goal for 2011: 3,000 endorsements. As part of this project, PFADP will also seek to gather all known religious and clergy sign-on letters used in state and national campaigns in recent years.

6. Religious Media Outreach

   As a largely untapped resource for our movement, religious media offer a new way to reach millions of potential allies. The Kairos Campaign will seek to engage religious media in movement messaging and ensure that movement events and perspectives are covered by religious media. PFADP will secure a broad religious media database and help act as a conduit for information to religious media, including fostering more and more editorials and columns against the death penalty and news coverage of abolition group's programs in religious media locally and nationally.

7. National Weekend of Faith in Action

   Either PFADP will restart organizing a National Weekend of Faith in Action asking congregations across the country to take some action on the death penalty over one weekend , or we might instead create an alternative program not tied to one weekend.

8. Religious Social Justice Conference Calendar

   PFADP has created and will update a database of all known upcoming social justice conferences in the United States where local, state, or national abolition groups might want to offer a workshop or have a literature table. We will make the database widely accessible to state abolition groups.

9. Religious Social Action Coordinators Database

   PFADP is creating a database of professional religious social action coordinators on staffs of judicatories and national religious organizations nationwide to help our movement better mobilize our natural allies within the religious community.

10. The Kairos Conference 2012 and Regional Meetings

    PFADP will sponsor either another Kairos conference or will hold regional meetings. If we hold a national conference it will not be a repeat of the 2010 Kairos Conference. By 2012 we anticipate the partnerships through the Kairos Campaign to have brought the movement to a new level of involvement and the conference will have new goals.

For information on People of Faith Against the Death Penalty,
please visit www.pfadp.org or call 919.933.7567