WASHINGTON (RNS) As Capitol Hill appears politically paralyzed over health care reform, the prescription from many faith leaders is firm: don’t abandon ship.

“The faith community has worked for decades for comprehensive health care reform and this last year … many of them have put aside other policy priorities to take this over the finish line,” said the Rev. Linda Walling, executive director of Faithful Reform in Health Care, an interfaith coalition of more than 70 groups. “We would be very, very sad if we can’t finish it.”

So, her Cleveland-based organization has kept up its grass-roots advocacy in recent days, with members of the California Council of Churches preaching sermons, Quakers sending letters to newspaper editors and Reform Jewish teens lobbying on the Hill.

“Turning back now could mean justice delayed for another generation and an unprecedented opportunity lost,” reads a letter the coalition sent Monday (Jan. 25) to members of Congress.

President Obama heard from another group of religious leaders, including a third of his Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, on the day he delivered the State of the Union, during which he urged congressional Democrats to not “run for the hills.”

A letter organized by Faith in Public Life used similarly urgent language: “Letting this lifeline lapse for so many Americans now would be a failure of historic proportions,” wrote the signers.

Kristin Williams, spokeswoman for the Washington-based group, said the religious leaders were trying to curtail the despair that rose on Capitol Hill as Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in Congress with Republican Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts.

“There’s certainly been a lot of uncertainty on Capitol Hill this week and I think this letter was really intended to cut through the uncertainty and to make it clear that this isn’t about politics,” she said. “This is about real Americans.”

Many of the messages from faith leaders landing in Capitol Hill mailboxes preach a politically pragmatic message — some health care reform is better than no health care reform at all.

“The implication here is that there’s a wide range of policy that …the liberal and moderate faith-based community would find acceptable and that the big fear is that it will just collapse and nothing will get done,” said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.

But the influence of these groups is uncertain “because it’s unclear what form the bill might take,” he said.

Religious conservatives, meanwhile, are clearer about their desire to restart the process.

“It is time for the president and the Congress to start over on health care and to address real and serious needs for true health care reform in a broad-based, bipartisan, issue-by-issue strategy instead of trying to cram down the throats of the American people a one-size-fits-all, government takeover of one-sixth of the economy,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, in Baptist Press.

A Jan. 20 USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 55 percent of Americans think the president and fellow Democrats should suspend work on the current bill and weigh alternatives.

Even faith leaders who are calling for immediate action have issues they consider deal breakers.

“We want health care, but we want it to be done the right way,” said Richard Doerflinger, the chief spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on its anti-abortion public policy.

In a Tuesday letter to the House of Representatives, the bishops conference wrote that Congress should not “abandon this task” but also cited their “moral criteria” for health care — including affordability for all, a ban on federal funding of elective abortions, protection of conscience rights of Catholic employers and health care workers, and access to health care for immigrants.

“Although political contexts have changed, the moral and policy failure that leaves tens of millions of our sisters and brothers without access to health care still remains,” wrote the three bishops who chair committees on domestic justice, anti-abortion activities and migration.

Likewise, Walling said members of her coalition who worked especially hard on specific issues such as the public option might pull their support if it fails to make the final bill.

“We’re not willing to settle for just anything,” she said.