As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced a lawsuit against the city of Evanston’s first-in-the-nation municipal reparations program. The DOJ claims that Evanston’s reparations program is “race discrimination, pure and simple.”
Such an act taps into the country’s heritage of discriminating against African Americans. There are surely more constructive ways to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial, but in President Donald Trump’s America, our nation’s abysmal history of discrimination is not a point of embarrassment but a point of pride.
The lawsuit is part of a broader effort to roll back protections for Black Americans. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the last remaining protections under the Voting Rights Act, essentially allowing Southern states to deprive Black voters of political power. Trump has gone on record saying that white Americans were “very badly treated” after the Civil Rights Movement, and his administration has sought to restrict the ability of the National Park Service to tell the truth about racism and its impacts at some of our most important historical sites.
I’m a pastor in Evanston, Ill., so this issue is close to home. Fundamentally, the city’s reparations program was about recognizing Evanston’s complicity in redlining and the systematic plundering of Black wealth in the city from 1919 to 1969. Like those signs at various historical sites that the Trump administration wants to take down, this is about telling the truth about what happened in a city that is sometimes referred to—tongue-in-cheek—as “Heavenston.” As it currently stands, the city has written about $5 million in checks to those affected by redlining or their descendants, allowing them to remain in Evanston and invest in their future here.
What many don’t understand about the program is that the religious community in Evanston played a key role in building support for the initiative. We banded together across religious boundaries to offer education, liturgies, and public commitments to being a part of the program for the long haul. As congregations, we even pooled our resources to give over $1 million to the reparations effort. Now, all of that work is endangered. In challenging the ability of the city to make good on its promises and recognize the harm that it has done, they are not just waging war on Black Evanstonians but restricting our ability to do the ministry that we feel called to.
In challenging the ability of the city to make good on its promises and recognize the harm that it has done, the DOJ is not just waging war on Black Evanstonians but restricting our ability to do the ministry that we feel called to.
The truth is, there are sound theological and scriptural reasons to support the city’s reparations program. Whether it is the story of Zacchaeus (Luke 19), which directly ties salvation to the fruit of making amends, or the story of Exodus in which the enslaved leave with the “plunder” of their captors (Exodus 12:35-36), I have come to believe that an important part of redemption is telling the truth about the complex ways that spiritual communities have variously suffered, benefited from, and supported white supremacy.
I talked to Michael Nabors, the pastor of Second Baptist Church in Evanston, and one of the key early supporters to get the reparations program passed. When I asked him what he thought the lawsuit meant for the city and our religious community, he told me that the administration “knew exactly what they were doing” with this lawsuit.
“It is an attempt to stop the spirit of Evanston from igniting a nationwide movement of justice, a day of reckoning for past crimes and sins committed against Black people,” Nabors wrote via email. “It is an effort to interfere with the movement of an interfaith community led by our understanding of God at work in our lives, congregations, and city.”
One of the fundamental protections afforded by our Constitution is the right to religious freedom, but that phrase has increasingly been weaponized as a way to buttress Christian hegemony. Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, puts it this way: “Beware the invocation of ‘religious freedom’ by an administration that has already shown that it will move to marginalize people and organizations — including Christians — that are critical of its policies.”
READ MORE: A Christian Call for Reparations
This articulation of “religious freedom” isn’t the only or best articulation. One of the theological contributions that I am most proud of from my own Baptist tradition is the way that early Baptists articulated the necessity of the separation of church and state. Many modern commentators focus on secular arguments for the nonestablishment of religion in the United States, but the key arguments put forward by Baptists were theological.
Roger Williams, a one-time Puritan and Baptist minister writing in the 17th century, warned Christians about entangling the church with state power in an era when it was almost impossible to find where one began and the other ended. Instead, he argued for a “wall” that separated the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world. “[W]hen they have opened a gap in the hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, &c. and made his garden a wilderness, as at this day,” he wrote in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience and Mr. Cotton’s Letter Examined and Answered in 1644. So for Williams, God doesn’t defend a breached wall—God completes its destruction as judgment, stripping the church of the very distinctiveness the wall was meant to protect.
He would later be followed by figures like Isaac Backus and John Leland, both Baptist ministers who argued for a vision of a land where people would be free to follow their conscience. Leland in particular argued for something more than religious tolerance: “The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest, to grant indulgence; whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.” Today, some of the most forceful theological arguments for nonestablishment come from outside the Christian tradition.
We need these theological voices—Christian and non-Christian alike—more than ever as we struggle to navigate a political landscape in which truth is treated as a liability and white privilege is coddled. Those voices can help our nation heal and find transformative grace, not through the covering up of old wounds, but by exposing them to light. That is the only way that we might be able to find redemption together as a country.
No one can say how the lawsuit against Evanston’s reparations program will play out, but one thing is certain: The religious community here will keep fighting to make these stories known and to compensate those who have been harmed by our city.
As the United States prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence, we must choose what kind of nation we want to be. We can mark the anniversary by suppressing the truth, dismantling hard-won protections, and insisting that racism doesn’t exist; or, we can embrace a more honest path forward, one that is rooted in religious liberty and repair.
What the Justice Department does not understand is that the work of reparations is not an attack on America’s ideals; it is an attempt to take those ideals seriously. Two hundred and fifty years later, we are still fighting to create a country that lives up to its ideals and tells the truth. That’s not something to suppress through legal challenges, but something to embrace so that we can find collective redemption.
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