One August morning in Los Angeles, 18 Christian clergy members marched onto the street outside the Cameo Beverly Hills to support hotel workers striking for better pay, invoking Jesus Christ as one who taught that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." Police officers detained them all, among them Rev. Denyse Barnes, a Methodist priest who told Salon that risking arrest on behalf of the striking workers was part of her calling as a Christian leader.
"That's what church is, right? It's not just the building with the rituals and traditions, which is still important, but also walking the walk that Jesus taught us," Barnes said. In following Christ, she explained, it is his mercy and advocacy for the downtrodden — for whom he was anointed to bring "glad tidings" — that she and her fellow marchers look to for guidance.
Liberal and left-wing Christians point out that, far from allying himself with moneyed interests, the Jesus found in the Bible championed the liberation of the poor and outcast, upbraided officials and merchants for their greed and was himself a humble shepherd who, as a baby, escaped persecution in the arms of his refugee parents. If religion is a code of personal ethics, they argue, then it is also a calling to put those ethics to use for the common good.
"From the very start, Jesus was engaging with the lowliest of the low, the shepherds, who were out on the literal margins of society, smelly, uncouth folks out there tending smelly animals," Rev. Nathan Empsall, an Episcopal priest and executive director of national Christian organization Faithful America, said in an interview. "Jesus brought them in and Jesus challenged Herod from the very start. Social justice and loving the poor and challenging corrupt rulers is baked into Jesus' teachings and mission and life from his birth as our incarnate God."
To fulfill what they view as their ethical purpose, those pastors have formed organizations such as Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), a network of congregations in Southern California that helped organize support for the striking hotel workers. Another organization, the Catholic charity Annunciation House, provides shelter and hot meals to asylum-seekers who cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Those kinds of efforts often draw the ire of right-wing Christians who see the organizations behind them not as partners in faith, but as threats to the social order. Earlier in 2024, Texas attorney general and megachurch founder Ken Paxton, a Republican, harassed and demanded the surrender of documents from Annunciation House, which responded by seeking a restraining order on Paxton. The attorney general then escalated with his own lawsuit to shut down the organization completely.
A judge ruled against Paxton, writing that his "request to examine documents from Annunciation House was a pretext to justify its harassment of Annunciation House employees and the persons seeking refuge."
Dueling views on Christian duty
Religious conservatives, rejecting the notion of Jesus as the kind of revolutionary described by Barnes and Empsall, have taken great pains to fend off accusations of hypocrisy and siding with the rich and powerful. Paula White, a spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, insisted that if anyone's twisting faith for their own ends, it's Christians invoking Jesus' flight to Egypt as a call to help refugees who are most guilty of the charge. “I think so many people have taken Biblical Scriptures out of context on this, to say stuff like, ‘well, Jesus was a refugee,’” White said in an interview with the Christian Broadcast Network. “Yes, he did live in Egypt for three-and-a-half years. But it was not illegal. If he had broken the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah.”
For most of modern American history, the role of Christian churches in mobilizing congregants — and Christian morality in shaping political beliefs — has been centered on causes and ideas, rather than on the overtly partisan business of electing Republicans or Democrats. But in the 21st century, the unabashed eagerness of the Christian Right to start or wade into political fights has ensured that religious conviction is seen by many as both an exclusive province of Movement Conservatism and an obstacle to social progress.
This strand of Christianity, which embraces conservative insularity and material prosperity as pillars of godly living, has dismayed pastors whose own version of faith stresses the importance of workers' rights, civil liberties and ending poverty as central to their calling.
"This other thing, which many of us are calling white Christian nationalism, claims [Donald Trump] as a messiah and that whiteness is a kind of manifest destiny," Presbyterian Rev. Jacqui Lewis of Middle Church in New York City said in an interview. "I think that there has been a corruption of what it means to be Christian."
That assessment would have been hard to grasp as recently as the 1960s, prior to the emergence of the Christian Right as a dominant political force. Before then, the influence of political Christianity was perhaps strongest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as rapid industrialization, widening economic inequality and mass migration into squalid urban centers impelled Christians to think deeply about poverty and class —and what role their faith had to play in alleviating those problems.
The movement that emerged under those conditions came to be known as the "Social Gospel" for Protestants, which joined like-minded Protestant antecedents and the existing tradition of Catholic social teaching to uphold the ideals of human dignity and the common good. In the 1960s, a similar current swept through impoverished Latin America in the form of Catholic liberation theology, which called for Christians to defy the "sinful" socioeconomic structures that oppressed the poor and put their faith in the framework of worldwide class struggle. This appeal to revolutionary social justice unsettled church leaders like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), who tried to silence its leading proponents and himself authored a document rejecting liberation theology, which he called "a singular heresy."
Advocates in the United States and Latin America alike saw vindication in scripture that urged the faithful to "let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke ... to share your bread with the hungry, and to bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him with clothing, and not to [hide yourself] from your own flesh and blood." True faith was not simply the worship of God in heaven, but also the "exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world," as leaders of the Presbyterian Church put it in reference to the Lord's Prayer ("Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven").
Passages that inspired Christians to open settlement houses to shelter poor city dwellers and join union picket lines to fight against decrepit working conditions also formed the core of Martin Luther King Jr.'s argument that pastors cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring the earthly hell of racialized oppression. Though King helped infuse the Civil Rights Movement with Christian imagery and exhortation, and many Black churches took a leading role in rallying support, other church leaders, especially in the American South, were reluctant to weigh in, not wanting to alienate the white community and the dominant white power structures. King himself was thrown out of the National Baptist Convention's leadership committee and faced criticism from a council of white ministers that labeled him "an outsider and an extremist."
It was this council to which King addressed his 1961 Letter from Birmingham Jail, part of a long mission to portray himself not just as a racial dissident but a Christian advocate for the unity and equality of all brothers and sisters in Christ. "The broad universalism standing at the center of the Gospel makes brotherhood morally inescapable," he said at a conference on Christian faith.
Schism in America
Even though King and other Civil Rights leaders managed to rally Christian pastors to their side, the acrimony between Christians over racial segregation and the movement to destroy it underscored political tensions that were already creating schisms within American congregations. Feminism, gay rights and the Vietnam War fueled additional discord, with more traditionalist congregants opposing the ordination of female priests and reacting furiously to mainline Protestant leaders who advocated from the pulpit. Many chose to leave and either form their own religious communities or join evangelical congregations where, according to Matthew Hedstrom, a professor at the University of Virginia's Department of Religious Studies, "people could avoid churches that were making them uncomfortable on those issues and challenging them as Christians to think about how they might practice their faith in a changing society."
The schisms are still taking place. In 2019, the United Methodist Church voted to tighten its prohibitions on LGBTQ clergy, prompting a wave of public backlash led by around half of the UMC's congregations across the country. Acknowledging the inevitability of change, conservative Methodists left in droves to start a splinter congregation called the Global Methodist Church, while the remaining three-quarters of the original UMC voted in 2024 to reverse the anti-LGBTQ measures.
If religious polarization is a function of political polarization, the widening chasm is in part reflected by the media's labeling of Christians on the right as "Biblical conservatives," "White Evangelicals" or other such names. While most surveys indicate that self-described White Evangelicals form a plurality, if not a majority, of Christians who vote Republican, their outsized influence has grafted them into the the popular imagination of a Christian conservative in general. Among left-leaning Americans, there's no dominant religious categorization, at least in the manner that the media categorizes them. A 2022 survey by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute found that the largest group of religious Democrats is "Black Protestants" (16% of Democrats), which includes adherents from both mainline and evangelical traditions. "White Evangelicals," by contrast, make up 30% of Republicans.
What it means to be "evangelical" or "mainline" is not always clear-cut in practice. The pairing of "White Evangelicals" with "Biblical Conservatives," however, provides a hint: According to the standard definition of "Evangelical" in the Bebbington Quadrilateral, adherents believe in "a particular regard for the Bible," or the belief that all essential truth can be found in scripture, among other key tenets such as their namesake mission to evangelize the Christian faith. While this kind of theological conservatism might shape some evangelicals' minds towards political conservatism, many prominent evangelical leaders argue that those two concepts are not, and should not, always be aligned.
"I won't concede 'evangelical' to the religious right. I'm still evangelical, which means you want to be rooted as a follower of Jesus, and you want to take the Bible very seriously. And that means taking to heart Jesus' teachings about people on the margins and that we're all one in Christ, no matter our race and class and gender," said Rev. Jim Wallis, an evangelical theologian and author who has pushed for anti-poverty, pro-worker policies in Washington.
And yet, the association between evangelical Christianity and right-wing causes is as strong as ever, while liberal or leftist Christians are hardly described as a political or electoral force at all. In some places, like northeastern Pennsylvania, activist churches now find themselves sapped of influence because of declining rates of worship, including among those who identify as Christian only as matter of ancestral tradition. According to a Politico report, the Catholic Diocese of Scranton lost 39% of its physical churches since 2009 — a contraction in a predominantly white, working class region that, combined with a perceived turn by the Democratic Party towards cultural issues, has alienated much of the population from Catholic churches that once mobilized a Democratic Party-aligned labor movement.
The challenge of politics
Liberal pastors also acknowledge the modern dilemma of framing progressive values with Christian morality in a country where atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and other non-Christian religious and spiritual identities encompass an increasing share of the population. That difficulty is much more pronounced in liberal spaces, where plurality, some pastors say, is considered a positive value and not something to be feared or reversed.
"When [liberal Christians] are thinking about questions of public life, they tend to search for secular ways to frame the matter, because making theological claims in public can be seen as as violating that commitment to pluralism, or as exclusionary when you're trying to build an inclusive, multi-religious democracy," Hedstrom explained.
Naturally, the reluctance to combine faith with politics is largely absent in Black church communities — both mainline and evangelical — that arose from formal and informal congregations of free and enslaved Blacks seeking Christian solace in the face of injustice and suffering. While a majority of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2019 said that religion should be kept out of politics, most Black Protestants think that religion should actually have a bigger role in public life.
"There is a legacy of inequality and discrimination that is seared into the Black church and has led to dramatic interpretations for the role of faith in modern society, with an emphasis on social justice, and greater attention to wrongs in society, and greater attention to how we fix these wrongs in society," Jason E. Shelton, professor of sociology and director of the Center for African American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, said in an interview. He noted that religious divisions among Black Americans, and their associated political leanings, do not always correspond neatly with those of white America.
The Black Baptist tradition, he said, hews more closely to mainline traditions than its white counterpart, with the literal immersion of conscious believers only (as opposed to infants baptized soon after birth) remaining the main common denominator. While Black evangelicals (and to a similar degree, Asian-American evangelicals) are committed to a literal reading of the Bible and tend to hold many socially conservative views, their interpretation of what is "literal" sometimes differs from that of many white evangelicals. Moreover, they still vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.
Asian-American evangelicals, originally active in the Black Civil Rights Movement and supportive of anti-colonial revolutions across Asia, became more apolitical after the 1960s.
"We've seen a more conservative or apolitical orientation among our congregants, something shaped by their immigrant status and relatively limited engagement with politics or civic and community events. That sense of being out of place reinforced a focus on one's personal relationship with God, rather than building the Kingdom in their communities," Russell Jeung, an Asian-American Studies professor at San Francisco State University, told Salon. That, he suggested, could change again as a surge in hate crimes against Asians has galvanized pastors and congregants into speaking more forcefully about political issues from the pulpit and working more closely with civic organizations to improve public life.
If progressive-minded Christians are divided about combining religion and politics, those on the Christian Right have far less compunction over imposing their beliefs on others as a matter of public policy, claiming that America is and should be a Christian nation-state. And with this faith in America as a Christian nation-state often comes an embrace of values that have long been associated with American aspirations like the home-owning nuclear family and material prosperity as a sign of divine grace, without any serious appraisal of their problems.
Wealth, power and the mega-church
The moral and intellectual gymnastics that liberal pastors say define the convictions of right-wing Christians have only hardened with emerging models of worship that orient its congregants in a more consumerist, less politically reflective direction. Megachurches, often multi-denominational and classified as drawing more than 2,000 people on a single weekend, are an especially notable culprit, according to Hedstrom, in large part due to a perverse incentive structure centered on charismatic founders who, after completing their flagship church, then begin setting up satellite campuses.
"There's that old line about what a preacher's job is, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. And there are a lot of American churches that have zero interest in afflicting the comfortable," he said. "If you're a megachurch pastor, your whole life depends on selling your product to customers, right? You want as many butts in the pews as possible, because that's the only way the bills get paid, and that's the only way your institution grows." By acting as a "de-politicizing" force, Hedstrom explained, they have entrenched congregants' acceptance and comfort with the unequal, capitalistic status quo of American life.
Whatever criticism can be leveled at the Christian Right, pastors across the political spectrum recognize that its leaders have largely succeeded in creating a network of institutions that has persuaded millions of Christians to consistently support Republican candidates for office. But if Christianity is supposed to be about imitating Christ's virtues, then their political power may have come at the cost of moral authority, especially now as many of its leaders transact business with a presidential nominee sullied by credible accusations of rape and a conviction over hush-money payments to a porn star. The upside, of course, is that Trump gives them the federal judges they want, though whether or not their rulings are actually in the Christian spirit is, like the refugee status of Jesus Christ, up for debate.
It's exactly this kind of perceived spiritual corruption that leaves many pastors outside the Christian Right ecosystem wary of imitating them. And the prospect of church and state in union is hardly a cause for celebration, according to Wallis, no matter what kind of policies come forth. "Our faith should shape our politics, not the other way around. Republicans are using the using religion for their political purposes, and Democrats are often afraid to refer to it, partly because they rightly believe that we live in a pluralistic society," he said, adding that he believed in the separation himself. But, he continued, the separation of church and state does not and should not mean a segregation of moral values from public life.
"Dr. King said that the church should not be the master of the state, which is what the right of the right wants, nor the servant of the state of bad policies, but should be the conscience of the state," Wallis said.
The question of how to act as the conscience of the state without contradicting the spirit of inclusion or wading too deeply into partisan politics still bedevils liberal pastors defying the influence of right-wing Christianity. Some of them, like Wallis, Barnes and Lewis, have written and spoken in support of Vice President Kamala Harris, whose policies steer closer to their beliefs than do those of Trump. According to Wallis, it is possible to take political stands "without becoming just another arm of the Democratic or Republican Party" (Jesus himself was political in his exhortations to liberate the poor and outcast from the oppression of empire). But Christians must not to let the expediency of a partisan alliance and a desire to win compromise their independence and cloud their moral judgment, he warned. And that means being prepared to hold anyone accountable for their words and deeds.
Lewis told Salon that, as a self-described universalist who believes that all human beings will be restored to a right relationship with God, Christian exhortation need not come at the expense of pluralism. "There are core values that I think are deeply Christian, are deeply Jewish and deeply Muslim. This lesson, this message, love your neighbor as yourself, is across all these major religions and the moral logic of many, many others," she said.
Barnes suggested that Jesus himself could provide an example for Christians who are timid about reaching out to others with their convictions. In Luke 19:1-10, he spots Zacchaeus, the hated tax farmer, climbing a tree to watch one of his sermons, and singles him out. "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today," the Christian messiah tells him, to the disapproval of the crowd.
Despite Zacchaeus' allegiance to a corrupt and exploitative state, Jesus recognized "someone ready to be saved, and he was willing to save him not just by visiting his house, but also his heart," said Barnes. Zacchaeus then returned what he had stolen from the people and gave half of his remaining possessions to the poor, Barnes recalled. The lesson — that anyone, whatever their station in life, can still find a new perspective — is surely one that has relevance today.
