While religion has far too often been a tool of authoritarianism, faith institutions and communities have also been the life force of so many freedom movements.
( Waging Nonviolence ) – In June, Catholic Bishop Michael Pham of San Diego, who fled Vietnam as a 13-year-old refugee in 1980, was part of an interreligious clergy delegation at a federal building in San Diego. Two immigration hearings were underway and masked ICE agents were in the hallway preparing to detain the immigrants as they left the courtroom. Then something remarkable happened. Pham, who is Pope Leo’s first bishop appointment in the United States, said that when the agents saw the faith leaders, they scattered. “It was like the parting of the Red Sea.”
That is exactly the kind of moral witness and faith in action that is needed now in the U.S., at a time when the very foundations of multi-racial democracy anchored in the respect for human dignity and the common good are under attack. It also speaks to the unique role that religion and religious communities can play in powerful social movements.
While religion has far too often been a tool of authoritarianism globally, including in the U.S. today, faith institutions and communities have also been the life force of so many freedom movements. According to scholars at the U.S. Institute of Peace, religion has played a prominent role in 58 percent of major nonviolent campaigns globally from 1945-2013. Religious beliefs, structures, symbols and frames have expanded participation in movements, fostered mobilization, enhanced unity, strengthened nonviolent discipline and mitigated repression.
Faith actors have many superpowers, from moral protest and persuasion, to organization and training, to mutual aid and sanctuary, to leveraging symbols and rituals, to bridgebuilding and organized noncooperation. Faith communities can tap into spiritual power, and offer a hopeful, divinely inspired vision of what we are fighting for, alongside what we must oppose. What has this looked like?
1. Faith leaders have used their moral authority and prophetic voice to speak truth to power.
I was with a group of faith leaders in Maryland the day after Episcopal Bishop Maryann Budde used the power of the pulpit to call on the president to have mercy on those living in fear, especially immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community. She immediately began to receive death threats. This convening of Christian leaders began planning solidarity actions, including public statements, sermons and pray-ins in support of her action, along with a commitment to continue to accompany vulnerable populations under attack. That’s faith in action. Rev. William Barber, meanwhile, has reminded us that kings are only kings if we bow down before them. It’s a powerful provocation for spiritually grounded noncompliance.
Inter-denominational and interfaith protests are especially important in religiously diverse countries like ours. In Zambia, when then-President Frederick Chiluba attempted to manipulate the country’s Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2001, the three national church bodies for Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals formed a joint front to publicly campaign against the constitutional changes. When the government banned protests, the faith communities organized pray-ins, which the government couldn’t shut down. Chiluba was forced to abandon his anti-democratic plans.
In Brazil, more than 150 Catholic bishops signed a letter in 2020 denouncing the Bolsonaro administration’s actions as “approaching totalitarianism.” Religious groups publicly criticized Bolsonaro’s theocratic messaging and his demonization of women and minority communities. This likely persuaded religious voters to abandon him in the 2022 election, which was won by the opposition leader. When Bolsonaro attempted to stay in power through a coup (backed by MAGA leaders) in 2023, the Conference of Bishops strongly denounced the action and defended democracy.
2. Religious networks have critical infrastructure for organizing, training and communicating with large audiences.
Black churches and Quaker meeting houses were the organizational backbone of the civil rights movement, offering sacred rallying points, training spaces, information networks and spiritual sustenance in the face of white supremacist backlash. Faith networks like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined forces with student groups like SNCC, labor unions like the UAW and Teamsters, and legal groups like the NAACP to dismantle racial authoritarianism in the South.
In the Philippines, churches across the country hosted trainings in nonviolent resistance offered by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Cardinal Jamie Sin used Radio Veritas to prepare the population to nonviolently resist the Marcos regime’s tyranny during the people power campaign.
In the U.S. today, networks like Christians Against Christian Nationalism are mounting a theological, spiritual and organizational opposition to far-right movements. Faiths United to Save Democracy, an interreligious coalition of faith leaders and voting rights organizations, has recruited, trained and deployed thousands of nonpartisan poll chaplains to polling sites across the country to deescalate tensions and help ensure that voters could exercise their sacred right to vote.
Faith networks mobilized people to physically oppose the Muslim ban (1.0 and now 2.0), and to visibly reject a big ugly bill that will strip health care and nutrition assistance away from millions of our brothers and sisters, while making ICE’s budget bigger than every military around the world, except for the U.S. and China.
3. Religious symbols, rituals and music have built a sense of unity, solidarity and hope in the face of fear and division.
Black spirituals and gospel music helped unite and sustain the civil rights movement and played a critical role in demanding justice and inspiring action during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. I love the new songbook published by the Kairos Center, called “Songs to the Key of Resistance,” that collects and celebrates music that is inspiring our movements.
In Hong Kong, during the “Umbrella movement” challenging China’s autocratic encroachment, protesters arrived at demonstrations with Bibles in hand, sang hymns like “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord” at demonstrations, and youth groups held prayer circles calling for peace and redemption of the police.
4. Faith communities have provided resources, mutual aid and sanctuary to mitigate repression targeting vulnerable groups.
In Nicaragua, Catholic bishops, including the exiled Bishop Rolando Jose Alvarez, have offered sanctuary and protection to youth protesting the Ortega regime as armed thugs hunted them down.
In the U.S., interfaith coalitions have organized Know Your Rights campaigns and Emergency Response Networks to resist the violent, abusive tactics of ICE agents. They have organized de-escalation trainings for protesters, and rallies and processions, as Bishop Mark Seitz did in the streets of El Paso, where he was joined by other Catholic leaders.
In their guide, “A Matter of Survival” the Kairos Center recommends “rethinking church.” The guide shows how religious groups can use their existing resources — such as transportation, physical gathering spaces and institutional legitimacy — to generate creative forms of religious community building and meet unmet needs.
5. Faith communities have played key roles as bridge-builders and mediators.
In the leadup to the 2020 election, the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network played a key role in bringing together the Chamber of Commerce and the American Federation of Labor to demand free and fair elections and counting every vote. That broad front effort played an important role in resisting the Jan. 6 insurrection and coup attempt.
In the U.S., where congregations and parishes can be very ideologically diverse, faith leaders can help shift the focus away from red vs. blue, Republican vs. Democrat. Instead they can focus on shared principles of human dignity, agency and the common good, and speak plainly when those principles are under attack.
Great examples of bridging include the Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which has brought women together across political and partisan divides, including through quilt-ins, to demand that legislators respect the tenents of constitutional democracy. Also, the Undivided initiative has brought racially and politically diverse evangelical communities together to educate about systemic racism and encourage anti-racist action. Hahrie Han, a Johns Hopkins political scientist, has written an excellent book about that experience called “Undivided,” which could be helpful for Catholic anti-racist work.
6. Faith communities have actively refused to cooperate with repressive regimes.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” Noncooperation is about actively disrupting injustice. It involves refusing to cooperate or comply with requests, demands or orders by individuals, institutions or governments. It is typically the most powerful class of nonviolent methods because it involves directly removing a repressive regime’s sources of social, political and economic power.
The Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted 381 days, thanks to a robust system of mutual aid and an alternative carpool system, is one of the best examples of organized noncooperation, making segregation costly for business enablers of Jim Crow. Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on the bus was anything but spontaneous; she and the NAACP had been planning such actions for years.
The Montgomery campaign inspired Lech Walesa, a Polish trade unionist, who led campaigns of organized noncooperation against communist dictatorship, starting with a strike in Gdansk led by shipyard workers and backed powerfully by the Catholic Church, from Pope John Paul II all the way down to parish priests and nuns.
There’s the iconic action by Filipino sisters kneeling in prayer before soldiers on the EDSA, a major road around Manila, which protected activists and led to defections by entire military units to the side of democracy.
In the 1970s, Quakers used canoes and kayaks to disrupt U.S. weapons shipments to the Pakistani government, which was waging a genocidal campaign against Bengali-speakers in East Pakistan. They joined forces with longshoremen unions in cities like Philadelphia who convinced national unions to stop loading weapons shipments to Pakistan, helping end U.S. support for genocide.
More recently in the U.S., Black faith leaders like Rev. Jamal Bryant have encouraged their flocks to boycott Target over the company’s anti-DEI policies. It began with a Lenten fast and expanded in scope. The boycott, which has cost the company billions of dollars, has been coupled with a “buycott” of Black-owned businesses.
Faithful noncooperation with ICE is taking many forms, including lawsuits by religious groups. It has also become physical, as with Bishop Pham’s act of faithful solidarity and religious sisters who are fiercely defending immigrants from illegal ICE roundups. Interfaith delegations in places like Newark, New Jersey have locked arms and blockaded ICE detention facilities.
These are just a few examples of how faith communities have taken action to block tyranny while building what Martin Luther King called “beloved community.”
Halting democratic backsliding
What does all this mean for our current moment in the U.S.? We are in a moment of authoritarian breakthrough, a short window in which a would-be authoritarian regime attempts to rapidly consolidate power, eliminate checks on their power and operate with impunity. Today, most of the institutional guardrails designed to mitigate tyranny — like political parties, Congress and Supreme Court — have been neutralized or are actively supporting the autocrat’s agenda. Media outlets, universities and law firms have capitulated under the executive’s pressure, with Stephen Colbert being one of the latest high-profile targets.
Researchers have found that once backsliding occurs, and democratic norms and institutions are eroded, it’s often fatal to democracy. In 96 episodes of democratic backsliding from 1900 to 2019, 68 percent broke down into authoritarian rule. However, over the last three decades, 54 percent of those democratic breakdown cases resulted in U-turns. The key factor in turning things around: civil resistance from multiple institutions, such as faith actors, labor, businesses and the legal community.
Photo of anti-Bolsonaro Demo (Bolsonaro Out!), Brazil, July 17, 2021, by Maria Fernanda Pissioli on Unsplash
Looking at 35 cases of democratic backsliding from 1991-2021, scholars Jonathan Pinckney and Claire Trilling found that the probability of stopping democratic backsliding was 7.5 percent with no civil resistance movement; with a civil resistance movement, it was 51.7 percent.
We therefore need to do everything in our power to tap into the legacy of nonviolent resistance in this country, and around the world, to build the most powerful movements to stop authoritarianism in its tracks, while reconstructing our democracy.
Preventing authoritarian consolidation and building a more beautiful and abundant alternative will take the broadest democratic front possible. We need to build bridges across divides and welcome new people into our movements (including those who may have voted for Trump). That will require strengthening the kind of relational organizing that allows us to come together across differences, while winning people over with a positive vision for the America that has never been, but must be, to quote Langston Hughes.
We need to actively disrupt the machinery of repression through organized noncooperation, and build alternative systems grounded in community care and a belief in human dignity and the common good. Given their moral authority, resources and powerful organizing capabilities, faith communities could play a decisive role in dismantling dictatorship and putting the country on the path towards freedom and justice.
A version of this article was delivered as a keynote address at Pax Christi USA’s national conference in July.
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