Can American Churches Lead a Protest Movement Under Trump?

This is the first in a series of columns about the place of the church in modern politics.

On March 24, 1982, four men from El Salvador stood in front of the University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, California, and talked to an assembly of reporters about why they had entered the country illegally and about the violence—sponsored by the United States and the Reagan Administration—that they had fled. On the same day, at Southside Presbyterian Church, in Tucson, Arizona, a similar press conference was held at the prompting of an eccentric goat herder named Jim Corbett, who had been sheltering refugees for the past year and had turned to the church for help. Together, these houses of worship helped form the start of what became the Sanctuary Movement in America, a moment of interfaith civil disobedience that spread across the country. What we now know as sanctuary cities are the direct result of this interfaith organizing.

During the next few weeks, I will be writing about what has happened to the role of the church in politics and dissent. This discussion will be informed by an assumption that I’ll state plainly here: I do not believe that there can be any abiding movement for social change in this country without leadership and support from the church. As I wrote last week, part of the problem with activism today, especially on the left, is that it mostly results in large-scale flareups that quickly die out. What I’ve seen in the past decade of reporting on protests is that activist groups, whether they are purely grassroots or have been assembled by non-governmental organizations and nonprofits, do not have the proper economic, human, and organizational infrastructure to keep a movement going, especially at scale. (In fact, part of the problem with modern protest is that it mostly consists of big marches, which, while stirring, rapidly dissipate after everyone goes home and posts their photos online.) The Sanctuary Movement, in contrast, did not travel through street protest and direct confrontation but through existing, well-populated, and tightly knit faith organizations that believed in a common mission that came from on high.

It’s not hard to figure out why this isn’t happening today. Church membership has declined sharply in the past seventy years. In the nineteen-fifties, at the start of the civil-rights movement, more than seventy per cent of Americans reported attending church regularly. Today, that number is down to less than forty five per cent. Can the church lead in anything when its numbers have been in steady decline?

This question has got stuck in my craw recently. I am not a person of faith, and I am acutely aware of the shallowness and conditional nature of my convictions. This does not mean that I simply float among ideologies; still, at the age of forty-six, I do feel a pang of jealousy for people of faith who seem animated by a higher mission. There is a calm and a humility to their advocacy that I did not always see while reporting on American protests—or when I looked in the mirror.

It’s clear to me that progressive causes would be better served with the church in a leadership role, but it’s also clear that this is a nostalgic vision, out of touch with both the reality of churchgoing today and the torpor of our screen-bound lives. When so much dissent happens online or at big marches under vague political banners—when even some religious services take place within the blurry rectangles of Zoom—how does a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple make itself heard?

University Lutheran Chapel still holds services today, in the sort of odd, asymmetrical building that you sometimes find in college towns filled with architects and ideas. (The best way to describe it would be neo-California Spanish but mid-century modern, too.) In 1969, the church hired a young pastor named Gus Schultz, who had worked in the civil-rights movement in Alabama. In 1971, Schultz and U.L.C. made their first declaration of sanctuary for conscientious objectors from the Vietnam War. The logic of that declaration—that the church would provide shelter for those whose lives were at risk—was applied to the 1982 Sanctuary Movement, and Schultz is widely credited as one of the principal visionaries who spread the idea to faith organizations nationwide. U.L.C. still identifies itself as part of a network of sanctuary faith organizations, and commits itself to a broad range of social-justice issues, but it does so now at a time when young people are either not going to church or, in some instances, are seeking out more traditional and ritualistic forms of spirituality. Congregations like U.L.C. are aging, and, although there are still faith organizations around the country that engage in activist work, the church does not have the same prominence in campaigns of civil disobedience. At the same time, many progressive church leaders, facing dwindling congregations and general public apathy, have become more careful about appearing partisan in any way, which has allowed right-wing Christian nationalism to define the conversation about religion and politics.

Last September, U.L.C. brought in a new pastor, named Kwame Pitts, whom the church’s leaders believed could continue the sanctuary tradition. “One thing the search committee told me very early on was that they were planning to put themselves and their bodies on the line in this push against injustice regarding immigration,” Pitts told me. They asked her, “Are you with us?” She said she was.

Pitts believes in a church that follows in the footsteps of the civil-rights movement and thinks that the turn away from politics might be part of the reason so many young people in subsequent generations have decided to stay home on Sundays. But she also said that there has been a “fracture” along familiar political lines that has led to an uneasy stasis among clergy. Faith communities are not like universities or some workplaces, where it is easier to come together in something close to political conformity. And, because so many churches have fewer and fewer members, it’s hard for any church to turn itself into the vanguard of one cause or another. Perhaps a place of worship in a liberal haven such as Berkeley can do so, but this is harder to pull off in more politically purple parts of the country. Pitts told me that, when she attended seminary, she was taught to talk about what was happening in the country and to push her congregation to stand with the oppressed and to love their neighbor as they love their creator, which she sees as Christ’s two most important teachings. “When we got out into the real world,” she said, “we realized very quickly that there are a lot of churches who are not interested, and just want to be comforted and protect what they have to make sure their church didn’t die out.”

Pitts is of the opinion that dwindling attendance and the rise of Christian nationalism have effectively silenced much of the clergy who might otherwise have expressed political or humanitarian thoughts about ICE. She does not think that we are returning to a time when there were “over forty kids in Sunday School” per church, as she put it; nor does she see converting people into churchgoers as a central part of her mission. “Literally, my job is to ask, ‘Do you need some food? Do you want lunch? Do you need a place to vent?’ ” She said that this approach encourages the type of interfaith community-building that informed the original Sanctuary Movement.

Not every church in America follows Pitts’s philosophies, of course—and, in the fifties and sixties, not every church was willing to provide manpower, housing, and moral leadership to the civil-rights movement. The difference is that there were a lot more churches back then, which provided a ready-made infrastructure for a wide range of causes on both the left and the right. Much of the opposition to the civil-rights movement was organized through segregated churches. Cesar Chavez used religious imagery and relied, in part, on the Protestant California Migrant Ministry to help organize the United Farm Workers.

These traditions still exist, but the church’s role in modern, social-media-based activism has been relegated, like nearly everything these days, to spectacle. Within that economy of surveillance, outrage, and emotion, images of the clergy mostly exist to show the brutality of the state. Even men and women of faith can be tear-gassed, wrestled to the ground, and handcuffed by ICE agents. For the past three months, videos of clergy around the country being arrested, intimidated, and castigated by federal agents have circulated widely, and each one, it seems, adds moral urgency to the moment.

Of course, the clergy and the church can and do serve as more than sympathetic victims of state overreach. It’s just that, in the age of virality, we’re all reduced to such roles. When I reported on protests in Minneapolis nearly a decade ago, I was struck by how many clergy members I saw on the streets or during highway shutdowns, and by how many of the Black Lives Matter activists I met had organized at churches in the Twin Cities. I’m sure that many if not most of those same clergy are in the streets today. (This past week, more than a hundred members of the clergy went into Target’s corporate headquarters in the city and asked for a meeting with the company’s C.E.O. They sang the folk song “We Shall Not be Moved” in the lobby and demanded Target abide by the fourth amendment and not let in ICE officers without a judicial warrant.) But, as was true during Black Lives Matter and is true again today—as a committed, more localized reaction builds once again in Minnesota—the church is not the vanguard of the movement.

Back in 1971, when Schultz made his first declaration of sanctuary, Bennett Falk was a theological student. He has now been a member of the U.L.C. congregation for fifty-five years. I asked him whether a place like U.L.C. could ever have the impact that it did forty or fifty years ago. The general role of the church throughout society had probably been too diminished for that to happen, Falk said. Most of those who were involved in the sanctuary part of the church were old, like him. They continued their work because this was what they knew.

“Lutherans recognize two sacraments, Holy Communion and baptism,” Falk said. “And those things shape how we think of ourselves, and also how we think of other people.” It had always been important for him to live that basic idea and not let it be an abstraction, he told me. “The bottom line is that every person is a child of God and deserves that respect.”

One of the fears I have about our secularizing society is that such simple, human beliefs get taken for granted as so many of us scratch out personal edifices of moral superiority. When we are young, it’s easier, perhaps, to remind ourselves of that basic humanitarian principle because our discovery of it is still new—maybe we just met someone from a country we didn’t even know existed, or had a drink with someone from circumstances very different from our own—but, as I’ve grown into middle age, I’ve found that I should remind myself of these things more often than I do. I may be full of ideas about human dignity, but I no longer feel the firmament underneath it all. There is no clarity afforded by this unmooring outside the ability to see the same wobbliness in others, especially those who pretend to be filled with passionate intensity.

One of the more viral bits of footage to emerge in the past two weeks showed Bishop Robert Hirschfeld, of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire, speaking at a vigil for Renee Nicole Good. After talking about others who sacrificed their lives to protect the oppressed—including Jonathan Daniels, a member of the diocese who was killed during the civil-rights movement—Hirschfeld said, “I have told the clergy of the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness. And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” In a follow-up interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, Hirschfeld said he felt “rather uncomfortable” with all the attention he had received and that he was “not a politician.” But he also said that he believed that part of his mission was to “place yourself with your body in front of people who might react violently and with rage, and it may mean that you stand in front of someone who’s in imminent danger.” Hirschfeld also struck a decidedly nonpartisan tone, at least relative to our current degree of polarization, mentioning the murder of Charlie Kirk as another example of escalating violence in America, which, he said, had led to a “sensitivity and vulnerability” among “regular people.”

“How do I make meaning of this?” Hirschfeld asked. “And where is the source of my hope? And how do I be brave now?”

When I asked Falk if he was scared of what was happening in the country and if he worried about what might happen if ICE showed up at U.L.C.’s door, he said, “I’m very scared right now. It’s one of those things that sort of makes you consider what is my capacity for continuing to do this. But, right now, I’m not doubtful in my convictions.” ♦