faith-based mobilizing

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.