Can American Churches Lead a Protest Movement Under Trump?

It is clear to me that progressive causes would be better served if the Church took a leadership role, but it is also clear that this is a nostalgic view, disconnected from both the reality of church attendance today and the torpor of our screen-bound lives. When so much dissent occurs online or in large demonstrations under vague political banners – when even some religious services take place in the blurry rectangles of Zoom – how can a church, synagogue, mosque or temple make itself heard?

The university’s Lutheran chapel still holds services today, in the kind of strange, asymmetrical building you sometimes find in college towns filled with architects and ideas. (The best way to describe it would be California Revival Spanish, but also Mid-Century Modern.) 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 the ULC made their first declaration of refuge for conscientious objectors from the Vietnam War. The logic of this statement – ​​that the Church would provide refuge to those whose lives were in danger – was applied to the Sanctuary movement of 1982, and Schultz is widely recognized as one of the leading visionaries who spread the idea to religious organizations across the country. The ULC still identifies as part of a network of sanctuary religious organizations and engages on a wide range of social justice issues, but it does so now in an era when young people are either not attending church or, in some cases, seeking more traditional and ritualistic forms of spirituality. Congregations like the ULC are aging, and while there are still religious organizations across the country engaging in activist work, the Church does not have the same prominence in civil disobedience campaigns. At the same time, many progressive church leaders, faced with declining congregations and general public apathy, have become more cautious about appearing partisan in any way, which has allowed right-wing Christian nationalism to define the debate over religion and politics.

Last September, the ULC hired a new pastor, named Kwame Pitts, who church leaders said could carry on the sanctuary tradition. “One thing the search committee told me early on was that they planned to put themselves and their bodies at risk in this fight against immigration injustice,” Pitts told me. They asked him: “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 turning away from politics may be part of the reason why so many young people in later generations decided to stay home on Sundays. But she also said there had been a “fracture” along familiar political lines that had led to a worrying stagnation among the clergy. Religious communities are not like universities or some workplaces, where it is easier to come together in something close to political conformity. And with many churches having fewer and fewer members, it is difficult for a church to transform itself into the vanguard of one cause or another. Maybe a house of worship in a liberal haven like Berkeley can do that, but that’s harder to achieve in more politically purple parts of the country. Pitts told me that when she attended seminary, she was taught to speak out about what was happening in the country and to push her congregation to stand with the oppressed and love their neighbor as they love their creator, which she considers the two most important teachings of Christ. “When we got into the real world,” she said, “we realized very quickly that there are a lot of churches that are not interested and just want to be comforted and protect what they have to make sure their church doesn’t die out.”

Pitts believes that declining attendance and the rise of Christian nationalism have effectively silenced much of the clergy who might otherwise have expressed political or humanitarian thoughts on ICE. She doesn’t think we’re going back to a time when there were “more than forty kids in Sunday school” per church, as she puts it; nor does it consider converting people into churchgoers as a central part of its mission. “Literally, my job is to ask, ‘Do you need food? Do you want lunch? Do you need a place to blow off some steam?’ » She said this approach encourages the type of interfaith community development that inspired the original Sanctuary movement.