When the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that voters have a right to decide in November whether to repeal the state's casino law, it was due in no small part to the religious groups that helped gather the signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot.
Now comes the hard part: Getting the repeal passed.
"It's an historic moment," said Kris Mineau, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Family Institute, a nonprofit that plans to mobilize some 500 evangelical churches. "The next four months will be very dynamic. Massachusetts will be a key battleground on the future of casinos."
The Rev. Tim Bogertman, pastor of First Congregational Church in Revere, said it's been a David-and-Goliath fight, but with mixed results. Local residents twice voted in favor of a casino at Suffolk Downs, where Mohegan Sun is competing for the sole Boston-area license. But when Revere's houses of worship joined forces with others across the state and the citizen group Repeal the Casino Deal, the ballot initiative succeeded, even though they were blocked by Attorney General Martha Coakley and outspent by the casinos.
"We may disagree about some faith issues, but we all agree casinos would hurt this state," Bogertman said. "And we have quite a coalition we've been building, having had multiple casino fights across the state."
Earlier this month, at the New England Synod Assembly of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, the Rev. Donald Nanstad, pastor of Our Saviour's Lutheran Church in East Boston, introduced a resolution urging all 180 or so congregations to actively support the casino law's repeal. It passed overwhelmingly.
"We'll do the same kind of mobilizing we did," Nanstad said, "when the fight was right in front of our faces in East Boston. It's just talking to your network of family, friends, co-workers, neighbors."
One of the volunteers in the East Boston campaign was Sunha Kim, a 22-year-old Harvard Divinity School masters student.
"I think it's clear the casino industry has a very predatory strategy, and as a theology student, I saw it as an opportunity to right a social wrong," he said.
So Kim and about a dozen other volunteers hit the road, stopping at churches, mosques and synagogues from Springfield to Martha's Vineyard to collect signatures for the casino ballot initiative.
To get out the vote in November, they've assembled a team of Harvard advisers, including Marshall Ganz, one of the strategists behind President Obama's 2008 campaign.
"We're going to apply the same strategy as we did in East Boston," Kim said. "People saw the way churches were organized there. People should expect to see the same happen all across the state."
At Central Assembly of God in East Boston, that meant posting get-out-the-vote reminders in the church bulletin, circulating fliers about the negative impacts of casinos and holding a signature drive for the ballot initiative.
"But it's also something that's happening around kitchen tables, in supermarkets and across neighbor's fences," the Rev. David Searles said. "You look at what we're up against, and there's no way it appears we could win. But we've done it before, and we can do it again."
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