Black church leaders are determined to take back the narrative from white Christian nationalists, contending they have wrongfully used faith to justify policies that attack Black, brown, and LGBTQ communities and women. These leaders also see Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as the consummate political figure to help them push back against the Christian right’s agenda.
“She is the perfect warrior at this moment,” said Bishop Joseph Tolton, a pro-LGBTQ, Pan-African faith activist who recently convened Black faith leaders, including Dr. Rev. William Barber II and Bishop Yvette Flunder, to publicly condemn the pro-Donald Trump and Republican playbook known as Project 2025.
“The fact that she is African-American, but also a person of color, more broadly, and the fact that she is a woman, she [can] ignite a fire on the left,” Tolton told theGrio.
Democrats and liberal activists have united in their outrage against Project 2025 and its connections to Trump and his presidential campaign, even as the Republican nominee has attempted to distance himself from the 922-page document experts warn will roll back freedoms for Black Americans and other minorities.
Black Christian leaders say they have a responsibility to enter the political arena and call out Trump and Republicans who use faith to justify policies like restricting abortion care and censoring LGBTQ identity in public spaces while also simultaneously attacking racial equity programs and suppressing voting rights.
“Pastors, both those who are in the LGBTQI community and other Black pastors, have to with precision take on the issues surrounding white nationalism and Project 2025,” Barber said during last week’s convening of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), a network of pro-LGBTQ faith leaders.
“We have to have a retooling,” added the minister and longtime activist, who leads the Poor People’s Campaign. “The church has to become deeply offended by someone representing us as people of faith and claiming to have a monopoly on Christian faith.”
Last Monday, Black church leaders also convened for a “Win with the Black Church” virtual kick-off organizing call in support of Harris’ presidential campaign, hosted by the Black Church PAC.
Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, a board member of Black Church PAC, told theGrio that 16,000 attendees joined the call and raised $500,000 toward “voter outreach efforts” to safeguard Black voters from voter suppression this election cycle.
Moss — who, along with other pastors, joined Black Church PAC as individuals, not leaders of their congregations — said it is “imperative” that Black church leaders speak out against “the destructive nature of Christian nationalism,” which he described as “white supremacy in ecclesiastical garments.”
“Let’s be clear that this kind of religious hijacking is as old as slave master religion,” Barber told theGrio, “It always pops up.”
Tolton — who has organized and advocated against Christian nationalism for years in the United States and on the African continent — says the policies supported by Christian conservatives and powered by Republican lawmakers are alarmingly similar to other periods in history when religion was used to subjugate and disenfranchise Black Americans and women.
“We should not be surprised that conservative Christians have adopted Trump. It is very much so in keeping with the legacy of Christianity, where you had lynchings in the 1950s — not that long ago — that were held on the grounds of church properties and often done after worship services,” he explained. “That relationship between Christianity, colonization, slavery, the subjugation of Black bodies, the superiority of whiteness, all of all of this, historically, are elements that are a part of Christianity.”
Tolton noted that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s reminded us of how Black faith leaders challenged the status quo of religion and “taught us something very different about what Christianity should produce.”
Faith leaders see this moment, as Trump continues to ride a wave of support from Christian conservatism, to reclaim their political power. What’s more, they believe Harris may be just the candidate to help them do it.
Barber pointed out that Harris’ campaign launch focused on key policies aligned with the teachings of Jesus Christ.
“When she made her opening comment as to why she was running for president, she named what ought to be one of America’s greatest moral failures that anybody seeking to lead this country should say upfront, I’m not going to have it, deal with it – and that’s child poverty,” Barber told theGrio.
He added, “She said, I believe in the world where first you [should] be able to work one job. And so that means she believes in living wages.”
Moss said Harris has the “skill set” to combat Christian nationalism and the radical right, expressing his confidence in her ability to “articulate the challenges of white supremacist rhetoric.”
“But she cannot do it alone,” he continued. “It is important that voices within the faith community … speak up about the dangers of the ideologies that we are seeing.”
Moss added, “Christian nationalism, along with the radical right, seeks to remove the rights of people who are quote, unquote, different, who do not fit within a particular mythology of whiteness.”
“In the words of Vice President Harris, we’re not going back,” Moss declared, “But we also want to be able to frame what we believe will be the yet-to-United States of America that everybody brings a brush to paint on the canvas of our democracy.”
