The Senate leadership hasn’t swayed Sen. Joe Lieberman to call off his threat to filibuster the health care bill. Neither has the 58 percent of Lieberman’s constituency that supports the public option. So maybe it’s time for God to step in — or, fail that, Allah or Elohim.

That was part of the thinking of the Interfaith Fellowship for Universal Health Care (a division of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy) when it held a prayer vigil on Lieberman’s lawn last Sunday.

500 people showed up to follow Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy and 16 clergy — of the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Unitarian varieties — from Stamford High School to the senator’s residence on Strawberry Hill Avenue. There they prayed for the creator of the universe to guide the junior senator from Connecticut.

“If I based my assessment of the power of prayer on realistic, rational evidence, I would have gone into another line of work years ago,” explained Rabbi Stephen Fuchs of the Congregation Beth Israel in West Hartford.

Fuchs had some tough words for Lieberman, comparing him to the “racist senators who read the phone bill on the Senate floor to delay a vote on civil rights legislation.” Harsh — but Fuchs says the fact that Lieberman is a “religious person” “gives [him] some kind of hope.”

He also justified an Abrahamic rush to save health care reform on Leviticus 19:16: “Thou [shall not] stand against the blood of thy neighbor.”  

Rev. Tommie Jackson of Stamford’s Faith Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church (which, under different ownership, was once the synagogue where Leiberman was bar mitzvahed) said he would like to “awaken Sen. Lieberman’s sense of conscience, his concern for all.”

Rev. Abraham Hernandez of the Grace Fellowship in Branford said he acts with the “hope that God touches Sen. Lieberman.”

As of press time, Lieberman, apparently unmoved by any deity, hasn’t changed his position on health care reform.

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