Political pundits are already hailing the demise of President Obama’s plan to extend insurance coverage to 37 million uninsured Americans as the collapse of a dream. The era in which cynicism about government can be mistaken for sound policy on governing should be over.

During Katrina, we saw what the commitment to small government meant for people stuck on rooftops and in the Superdome. Underfunded, unprepared and under-utilized, the first responders’ valiant, if insufficient, efforts proved that America was capable of neglect and deep indifference towards the poor. The recession has wreaked a similar devastation upon American families, who are losing jobs, homes and their savings.

Voices of faith in the larger community must understand that, with the health care reform debate as a proxy, we are choosing among possible futures for our country. We have all seen the high costs of the lack of a social safety net for poor families. We are often the community that people in trouble turn to for help when government fails them. Will we live in a society that provides care for the sick and the injured, or one that continues on this path of callousness despite a widening gulf between the haves and have-nots?

Religious voices—those who should understand more than others what is being decided and what it means for poor and working families—are choosing to put a narrow agenda item like abortion before the goal of expanding coverage. These same voices are willing to threaten collapse of reform if their particular demands go unmet.

Religious leaders should stand up against this hijacking of the health care reform agenda, which has been about expanding, rather than restricting, coverage. Regardless of views on the issue of abortion, it is currently a constitutional and legal choice for women. Moreover, there were proposals assuring that no federal funding would cover abortions, and that millions of women who will be added to the Medicare and Medicaid rolls will be subjected to highly restrictive policies on coverage for abortion (limited to rape, incest and the life of the mother).

It would be tragic if a handful of religious leaders in the U.S., however heart-felt their objections, ended up blocking health care reform passage. The margins for enactment are already thin from disagreements over how to make insurance affordable for more people and how to pay for the plan. Picking a fight over abortion services coverage, and ultimately, choosing to put such restrictions before the protections that millions of American families need most in these troubled times, would be an intolerable abdication of religious leadership. Such a spectacle might cause many people of faith to think twice about the religious leaders that claim to speak for them, and about the role of the church in the fate and future of our country.

Instead of blocking reform, religious leaders and people of faith must stand up for a larger vision: a more powerful role for government in protecting families and addressing the causes and problems of poverty. The stakes are too high, and the dream too important, to let mere politics get in the way.

Rev. Anthony Butler is pastor of  Gethsemane Missionary Baptist Church, Omaha, Nebraska. Copyright, American Forum.