Cover Story
IT’S JULY 2017. I’m watching The Rachel Maddow Show while on a visit to my parents in Las Vegas. Maddow gives a long monologue detailing the background of a Trump administration official. She’s 15 minutes in before she explains why listeners should care. I don’t remember the details. I do remember yelling at the TV that Maddow needed to stop burying the lead. I would definitely fail her in introductory newswriting.
I also remember marveling at how my hippie libertarian father had transformed from a George W. Bush voter into a Maddow devotee. My dad started watching MSNBC after he became disillusioned with the second Iraq War, first religiously watching political commentator Keith Olbermann, then Maddow. Like many cable news viewers, he relished their emotional delivery, particularly their outrage and “can you believe this” shtick. Stuck at home due to a prolonged, terminal illness, he watched for hours and came to share their outrage. He voted Democrat for the first time in 2004, at age 50. Over time, even my father’s most strongly held views shifted.
Fast forward to May 2025. As part of my academic research on Christian nationalism, I’m in Phoenix attending Freedom Night with Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk. The event is held in the massive auditorium of Dream City Church. The woman sitting behind me sings joyously off key during the 15 minutes of worship music. Now she’s chirping along to Kirk’s commentary with amens and Fox News-isms, such as “Sleepy Joe.”
“DO YOU WANT to go on a walk?”
I was 16, on a youth group trip near Los Angeles. The specifics of why our Lincoln, Neb., youth group went to a Christian camp halfway across the country have blurred over the intervening years. But I remember when a girl about my age asked if we could go on a walk. I didn’t know her well, but she clearly had something she needed to get off her chest and must have figured my ears were as good as anyone’s.
We walked a trail on the outskirts of the camp, cheap buildings sprinkled across the desert, pockmarked with firepits, a basketball court, and a swimming pool with a handwritten “T-shirts must be worn at all times” sign duct-taped near the entrance. As we walked, she unloaded her raw feelings about youth group: In brief, where exactly did all these hypocrites get off?
We were already old enough to have seen plenty of youth ministers fall prey to scandal. And as for the youth group kids, were we really any better off than our non-youth group peers? Didn’t we have the same social hierarchies, and all the bullies, outcasts, and smutty gossip that comes along with them? The girl was having a crisis of faith, but it wasn’t about whether she believed Christianity was true; she doubted if anyone else really believed it. Gesturing dramatically to the entirety of our ramshackle camp she cried, “What’s the point of any of this?”
AS A FEDERAL WORKER, Peter Goering was never told he couldn’t participate in social activism, but the message was clear: “We didn’t have any explicit prohibitions from participating in civil disobedience actions,” Goering said. “But an arrest here or there may have caught up with me.”
Things changed for Goering with his December 2023 retirement from the Food and Drug Administration, where he worked on medical product safety. Two weeks after he left his job, he was arrested in a civil disobedience action—his first ever—protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza. Since his retirement, Goering has played a leadership role in his local Mennonite Action chapter, helping to organize protests around Gaza, ICE abuses, and at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible. In February, Goering joined a delegation that planted olive trees in the Palestinian West Bank.
Goering isn’t alone in his post-retirement activism. The wave of demonstrations against the authoritarian excesses of the second Trump regime has been marked by an abundance of gray hair. “In America, we associate activism with youth,” Deana Rohlinger, a sociologist at Florida State University, told Forbes magazine. “We often don’t see older Americans as engaged—but they are.”
NEXT DOOR TO the West Wing, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, you’ll find portraits of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Visitors to the exhibit—part of the White House’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding—scan QR codes to watch AI-generated videos of these figures come to life.
But the history this gallery presents is carefully curated and conveniently cleansed. Take Thomas Jefferson: His talking portrait makes no mention of the hundreds of people he enslaved, including Sally Hemmings, whom he forced to bear multiple of his children. Instead, the animated Jefferson praises the “empire of liberty” created by the Louisiana Purchase—ignoring the First Nations already living there and the forced removals that followed. John Adams repeats the anachronistic quip much beloved by today’s Far Right: “Facts do not care about our feelings.” Benjamin Franklin fails to mention that he had once been an enslaver but by the 1780s had become a vocal abolitionist. None of the signers mention that they cut a section where Jefferson lambasted King George for “captivating and carrying [Africans] into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” History weeps.
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW turned 82 last fall. Like more than 6 million people in the U.S. and around 40 million people worldwide, she has dementia. And like many people living with this debilitating progressive brain disease, she doesn’t know she has it.
On her birthday, I asked her how old she was, and she said, “62, right?” She will not remember Easter or Mother’s Day, and she probably won’t be able to read this article. When she became a grandmother 23 years ago with the birth of our son, she asked to be called Nana. Since she cannot fully consent to being mentioned in this article, I will call her Nana, and pray that the blessing she gave me years ago to write and keep on writing holds even now. She broke her hip and wrist this January and has transitioned to a nursing home. Yet her “walk with the Lord,” as she calls it, continues, even as she struggles to put one foot in front of the other.
LAST SUMMER, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat conducted an interview on his podcast with billionaire Palantir Technologies and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In what has now become an infamous exchange, Douthat asked Thiel point-blank, “Should the human race survive?” Reading the transcript of Thiel’s response is the only way to grasp how baffling it was.
SHAFTS OF SUNLIGHT streamed through the clouds on an early November morning when I set out with three older women for a two-hour drive from Los Angeles to the ICE detention center in Adelanto, Calif. I was traveling with Rev. Betty Stapleford, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister, and her affable, wise-cracking friends, Maureen Kimberling and Ellen Deeb. While this was Kimberling and Deeb’s second visit, this was my first time visiting a detention center.
Rev. Betty—as she is affectionately called—began making these monthly trips in 2014, taking seriously Jesus’ command to visit the sick and imprisoned. Her outreach is supported by Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, a nonprofit coalition of inter-faith congregations that advocate for the rights of low-wage workers and immigrants.
She was dressed in vibrant purple, a color she wears every day, partly inspired by Jenny Joseph’s poem “Warning,” with its famous opening lines: “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple.” Recalling her final day as a minister in a church, she said she delivered a sermon about “finding what you love that brings you joy”—even something as simple as your favorite color. Joy would be challenging to find at the place we were headed.
AFTER COLLEGE, I served as the musical arranger and pianist for a play based on the life of Amanda Berry Smith, a 19th-century Black woman evangelist who traveled the country and world preaching and singing. Born enslaved, she sang church hymns and spirituals. In the play, as in life, the spirituals contextualized Smith’s faith while subverting the power structures that undermined everything she was and was called to be. Fatigued by rejection from all sides but not hopeless, Smith, at the demand of a group of white clergymen, sang:
I got shoes, you got shoes
All of God’s children got shoes
When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes
I’m gonna dance all over God’s heaven
Heaven, heaven
Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t going there
Gonna dance all over God’s heaven.
We rendered the spiritual lively and upbeat, as if Smith were putting it on for the clergymen, merriment in the face of subjection. The audience, however, was to understand the thinly veiled critique: Blending judgment and hope, the song affirmed that all God’s children have shoes, but in heaven, some of these children will put them on and dance. More pointedly, the song indicates that talking about God’s heaven isn’t the same as being a part of it. Over and against those who deny shoes while talking about heaven, the lyrics affirm God’s inclusivity, God’s resistance to scarcity, and God’s abundance. The spiritual posits that God’s heaven runs by a different calculus than this world and its dominant religious logic.
CHUCK COLLINS WAS “born on third base.” As a scion of the Oscar Mayer meat processor fortune, Collins was firmly in America’s top 1%. However, at age 16, he began reading The Catholic Worker newspaper, co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Within two years he was living with the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker community in Worcester, Mass., serving soup to homeless men. Day’s philosophy of “nonviolent economics” exposed Collins to the violence caused by economic systems. Day believed that there is a “social mortgage on capital” and that society has a claim on private wealth, since it comes from the commons. At age 26, Collins made what he called “the first real adult decision of my life.” He gave away the half-a-million-dollar trust fund his parents had set up for him to local and national groups working for social change.
For 40 years, Collins has organized for a more moral economy. “The prophets, then and now,” he’s written, “call us to a discipleship of equality, working for a society that leaves no one behind, and where all can thrive.” Author of a dozen books, Collins’ newest is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and co-edits inequality.org. He lives in Vermont. Sojourners editor Julie Polter interviewed Collins in September via Zoom. —The Editors
LYNN, A WHITE woman in her 40s, sank into a porch chair beside me. I’d come to interview her neighbor, but when Lynn heard I was conducting research on the ways white Christians develop long-term commitments to racial justice, she asked to talk.
Lynn said she grew up in a Christian family in a white neighborhood where people didn’t talk about race. At a Christian college, professors taught about social injustices in a way she’d never encountered, inspiring her to join a summerlong internship designed to train young Christians to pursue justice. As she met people who had been doing this work longer than her lifetime, she began to wonder how they persevered. “I was working with people who had been in it for the long haul, and I’d ask them, ‘How do you keep it up? How have you been doing this so long? You burned your draft card in, like, 1969? And you’re still going? And you still somehow believe that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice? Like, how?’” She worried she didn’t have the tenacity they had.
Her story sounded like the buildup to a punchy life lesson, so when she paused for a drink of water I asked, “What would you tell your former self now?”
IN THE MIDDLE East, water is more than a resource. Water is a source of power, and in many cases, a weapon of war. The Gaza Strip is the most urgent and devastating example.
The survival of Ahmad (whose last name we have withheld for security reasons), like hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza, depends on gaining access to basic humanitarian resources, especially water.
“Sometimes a water truck comes to our area, so we fill some gallons. When it doesn’t, we’re forced to drink regular water,” Ahmad told us and our colleagues at Churches for Middle East Peace over WhatsApp in July. The “regular water” he refers to is untreated groundwater pulled from local wells, risky to consume even before the most recent war. “My body didn’t take it. I got very sick,” he told us. “But we had no other option.”
MORE THAN FIVE decades ago, two young Brits with dreams of writing musicals came up with the audacious idea of a rock opera about the Passion of Jesus Christ, told from the point of view of Jesus’ betrayer, Judas Iscariot. From the very moment composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and songwriter Tim Rice proposed it, Jesus Christ Superstar provoked both adulation and condemnation. And five decades have done nothing to diminish either the show’s fire or the intensity of audience reactions.
In August, the Hollywood Bowl will host the musical with another innovative twist: Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo plays Jesus and rock star Adam Lambert takes on Judas, in a one-weekend-only production directed by Tony and Emmy Award winner Sergio Trujillo. Some have already condemned the production for giving a queer Black woman the role of Jesus, decrying it as “intentionally blasphemous” — a complaint that has been made about various aspects of the show (including its casting) from the beginning. But the show’s actual history reveals that Superstar has been anything but a blight upon Christianity. Generations of artists have found within it fertile ground to reflect on faith and justice, sacrifice and society.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, in July of 1925, a trial — the Scopes trial — captivated the nation. It was, in a sense, a shot heard round the world, for it too was delivered in defense of freedom. In this case, though, the freedom to worship and to learn was at stake.
A few months earlier, the Tennessee state legislature had passed the Butler Act, a law forbidding public schools to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
The five-year-old American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) considered the Tennessee law to be a flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which stipulates the separation of church and state. It announced that it would defend a Tennessee public school teacher who would test the law in the courts by breaking it.
In Dayton, a town of no more than 2,000 in the eastern part of the state, a young substitute biology instructor named John Scopes stepped up. You can’t teach biology without teaching evolution, Scopes said, and he’d used the existing state-sponsored biology textbook in his class. This textbook included a short discussion of evolution, which by 1925 was considered settled and foundational scientific theory in both the scientific and academic communities.
Soon an international sensation, the Scopes trial — its implications — cut to the heart of democracy, for it asked who should determine what people should know or read or learn or worship and how that determination would be made. And the questions raised are as pertinent today as they were one hundred years ago.
WE KNEW THIS would be hard. But as the litany of harms rolling out of the White House grows, so has the creeping sense that our efforts to help are inadequate. Sure, we may know the drill to counter these assaults on people and our civic norms: Contact elected officials, offer support to those most impacted, donate, pray, take breaks, and jump back in. But in the face of an administration increasingly comfortable with authoritarian tactics — spreading disinformation, expanding executive power, silencing critics, scapegoating minority communities, detaining and deporting immigrants with no due process, and hamstringing independent institutions — is any of it really enough?
In early April, Sojourners editor in chief Betsy Shirley took these questions to Jarvis Williams, a pastor-turned-pro-democracy-organizer who shifted careers after recognizing that many of the prayer requests his congregants whispered to him were rooted in pain stemming from public policy decisions. His desire to respond eventually led him to join the Horizons Project, a nonprofit that aims to strengthen the ecosystem of different groups working for social change, including veterans, Indigenous organizations, faith communities, racial justice activists, union members, and business leaders. In their conversation, Williams shared his strategies to avoid feeling overwhelmed, insight about where Christians can make the most impact, and some pastoral tough love for those of us prone to forget that America’s problems didn’t start with a particular politician or election cycle. — The Editors
Betsy Shirley, Sojourners: As a pro-democracy organizer, how would you describe what’s happened in the U.S. in the past few months?
Jarvis Williams: If I’m talking with Christians, I would talk about the inability of us as a political community to demonstrate equal concern for all people. We have forgotten how powerful sharing is. We have created a political demonstration of the refusal to keep striving to share what we have.
FOR A FEW months last winter, I did something that still feels too rare in my Christian life: I attended a local Bible study group in American Sign Language.
Every month or so, a half-dozen of us gathered in someone’s apartment, caught up over dinner, and then hashed out theology together. We often stayed late into the night.
Unlike other Bible studies, no one spoke. Half of the people there were deaf, the other half were hearing — but everyone knew how to sign. This Bible study in Boston was highly informal. It wasn’t attached to any particular ministry — especially since none of the deaf people there, including me, attended a local church regularly. Sitting together, far removed from any institutional church, we planted the seeds of community.
Each time I drove home, I felt vital glimmers of encouragement. I’d lived in Boston for more than three years and still hadn’t found a church of my own. I only attended Sunday services sporadically. None of this was by choice. Though my faith is important to me, most churches are not accessible to deaf worshippers.
During my time in Boston, I wound up “church-hopping,” attending one service here, another there, depending on when ASL interpreting was available. Denominational preference is a luxury deaf churchgoers don’t have: Over the years, I’ve visited everything from evangelical and nondenominational to Presbyterian, Anglican, Episcopal, and Catholic churches. My years in Boston felt similarly fragmented, even though I learned a lot about how different Christian traditions approach worship.
Even when I found Sunday services to attend, deeper church participation felt impossible for me. Church events are rarely ASL-interpreted, and I’d given up on trying to show up at speaking-and-hearing Bible studies, potlucks, and weekend retreats. (I occasionally went to local church gatherings when my signing hearing friend Tim Loh could “friendterpret.”) I’d grown up in the church, watching my hearing parents attend weeknight church events, then later watching many hearing Christian friends share about their “church families” in adulthood. But I couldn’t figure out how to grasp such a life for myself.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR was supposed to be a poet or a short story writer. She accrued a respectable stack of rejection letters to show she tried. Instead, she became an Episcopal priest. One day, someone asked for a transcript of her sermon, and Taylor realized she had published her first story.
She went on to publish several collections of sermons or what she likes to call “spiritual meditations.” Ranked by Baylor University as “one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world,” Taylor left parish ministry in 1997 and taught religion from 1998 until her retirement in 2017. She is the author of 15 books, including Leaving Church, An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Holy Envy, and Always a Guest. She now devotes most of her attention to the farm she shares with her husband, Ed Taylor, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in north Georgia, where they have lived since 1992. But she still writes. She is working on Coming Down to Earth, a book about reverence, and she shares short reflections on the beauty of life on her email newsletter with the same title.
Sojourners associate editor Josina Guess lives on a small farm in Georgia, not far from Taylor, and the two spoke in January over Zoom about caring for animals, finding balance, loving neighbors, and the power of resurrection.
Many of us have made homes in religious traditions where we have found collective love, care, community-building, and resilience. But so much of what passes as spiritual in the United States — churches who only see their work as therapeutic, prosperity gospel proponents, white evangelical nationalists, New Age movements — is commodification by other means. John warns us against false prophets who, through quick fixes and distorted spiritual comforts, foster division and confusion in the service of lucrative self-aggrandizement.
I am an ordained minister in the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and I work as a movement chaplain in Los Angeles. I was trained as a spiritual director, and I have been doing ministry with faith-rooted activists since 2016. My work is informed by my primary training as a medical anthropologist and community researcher. I know that Jesus said that we humans are of more value than many sparrows, but I’ve found that we are a lot like them. We need refuge and sustenance. We need shelter. We need to nest somewhere. But with whom shall we do this for the short and long haul? And where shall we build our nests?
IN NOVEMBER, THE United States joined Argentina (Javier Milei), India (Narendra Modi), and Hungary (Viktor Orbán), among other countries, when it elected an authoritarian as its chief executive. In the case of Donald J. Trump, examples of these far-right tendencies include plans for mass deportations, promises to replace nonpartisan government employees with loyalists, and threats to put political critics on trial.
How did we get here? And what do we need to know to mitigate harm, save what and who we can, and work toward a more free and equitable future? Some of us may feel weary and defeated, but journalist Katherine Stewart, who has investigated the authoritarian movement for more than 15 years, encourages curiosity: “We can’t address our problems unless we know what they are.” Those problems include “decades of investment in a larger anti-democratic movement that would not have dissolved even if they had been defeated at the ballot box in this election cycle.”
In her forthcoming book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, Stewart explores a network of strange bedfellows who drive a broad authoritarian movement both in the United States and abroad. The players in this network have different motivations: Ultra-rich funders aim to destroy the regulatory state to gain even more wealth, funneling resources to groups that further their aims. “New Right” academics and proto-academics pursue the ascendance of their pet ideologies. Veteran political operatives find new partners in the hunt for power.
Though many of the funders and power players within this movement are not Christian or even religious, Christian symbols, pastors, and churches have played a key role. Christian leaders — white evangelicals, but also conservative Catholics, Pentecostals, and others — and the warped theologies they peddle have helped convince voters that we are in a state of emergency. As evidence, these Christians baptize anxieties about sexuality and gender, the economy, and shifting demographics as evidence that America has lost its way and needs to be saved by a strongman.
Stewart’s other books include The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (2012) and The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2020), which was the basis for the 2024 documentary God & Country. Stewart spoke with Sojourners editor Julie Polter before and after the November 2024 U.S. election. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A LOT OF BEGGING happens at Christmas. There are pleas in the toy aisle and hints left open on laptops. But no one begs to be in labor. Not even a woman who is pregnant. Unless, of course, she is at the bitter end of her pregnancy.
In the language of King James, Luke tells us that Mary is not just pregnant, but she is “great with child” (Luke 2:5). She is on the cusp of birthing, of being the first one to slide her hands up under the armpits of the warm, slippery flesh of God. No one before or after will have God in quite this way.
In Mary, the Word became flesh and was born in the most mundane, most primal human act. This flesh must count for something. The extremely pregnant body of Mary — great with child — reveals the nature of our waiting for Christ and what it might mean to cry out for Jesus’ coming.
IT'S A GRAY, mid-May morning in Panteón Municipal #1, a city cemetery in Tijuana’s Zona Norte neighborhood. Alberto, the gatekeeper, saunters down a rocky pathway lined with palms, jacaranda, and gravestones to a prominent, red brick chapel, built over the tomb of one Juan Castillo Morales.
The shrine is covered wall-to-wall with candles, flowers, and plaques with names and messages of thanks to “Juan Soldado” (Juan the Soldier), as Castillo is known. Amid the array sits a stylized bust of a young soldier, resplendent in military attire, this morning bearing a black rosary and a blue-and-white Los Angeles Dodgers snapback hat.
The shrine is one of many unofficial memorials where loved ones remember lives of immigrants lost along the U.S.-Mexico border. From chapels erected around the graves of unofficial saints such as Castillo to digital memorials people carry with them into the desert to the crosses, flowers, and other mementos left along the border boundary itself, these monuments not only pay tribute to the individuals lost but bear witness to the ubiquity of death — and faith — in America’s southwestern borderlands.
Rosalba Ruiz-Hernández, a 46-year-old mother of five, stands in the shrine. Ruiz-Hernández, originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was deported back to Tijuana after her own failed attempt to start a new life in the U.S. Two of her grown children still live in Long Beach, Calif., near her former husband. They are undocumented, she said, but they make a living. Two others are in Tijuana with her. Matías, her middle son, died in the desert on his way north to join his siblings in Southern California.