Today, a mural of Harald and his wife Dorothee covers the side of an eight-story building in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin, celebrating the actions they took to hide Jews and feed prisoners who would be starved during the terrors of the Third Reich. The Poelchau’s were never caught – which is to say, they convinced the Nazis they were obediently serving the Fürher, even as they worked in secret to save lives. But this also meant that Poelchau participated in the execution of some of his own co-conspirators.

The Poelchaus are models of courage in the face of authoritarian extremism. But in their resistance, were they complicit?

The Poelchaus have been on my mind since I got back from two weeks in Germany and Poland with the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), an innovative, inter-professional program that immerses early career professionals in the story of the Nazi regime to ask this question: what can we learn from the decisions professionals made in the processes that led to the Holocaust and mass killings? (If you know or teach young professionals, you should encourage them to apply.)

Along with Rabbi Amy Wallk, I facilitated this year’s cohort of clergy fellows – an exceptional group of young pastors, rabbis, and chaplains from the US, Canada, Ghana, and Nigeria. We made our journey alongside and in dialogue with cohorts of doctors and journalists – good conversation partners for questions about how clergy serve life and shape a public narrative in our work. As it turns out, they’re also important conversation partners for anyone who hopes to offer moral leadership in the midst of an authoritarian crisis.

I should be clear: FASPE is a professional ethics fellowship that aims to make good use of history to fill a gap in so much professional formation. Yes, our journalism schools and medical schools and seminaries require ethics courses. But programs that compete for students in a market-driven education model have been incentivized to make professional ethics about what helps a person do well on the job. Don’t steal from your clients. Don’t sleep with your parishioner. Don’t give up your sources. Don’t cut corners for short term gain. Ask anyone who’s made these mistakes and they will tell you: these are important lessons to learn. But following all the rules of professionalism did nothing to prevent most doctors and journalists and clergy from facilitating mass murder in Nazi Germany. FASPE asks early-career professionals to think about what more their moral and ethical commitments require of them.

But FASPE is not a program to teach professionals how to resist authoritarianism. By design, it aims to expand the horizon of the ethical questions professionals ask by immersing them in a story of authoritarian horrors that everyone can agree was evil. When we consider a context where complicity with evil is a given - not something to be debated - it creates a space to ask what motivated the perpetrators to do the things that they did. “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous,” Primo Levi wrote in his memoir about surviving Auschwitz. “More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” For two weeks, we ask fellows to get to know the functionaries of the Nazi regime – the young professionals without whom Hitler would never have been able to enact the illusions he articulated in Mein Kampf. We asked them not to imagine what they might have done to resist, but to try to understand why people very much like them decided not to resist.

Which is to say, we didn’t study the case of the Poelchaus. Instead, we were immersed in the waters of the world they had to negotiate. We took time to understand what it felt like to be a university student in the 20s and early 30s of the Weimar Republic. We went to the Bebel Platz at the Humbolt University where Goebbels gave his famous speech in front of the pyre of burning books, that same spring when Poelchau started his new job at Tegel prison. We learned that it wasn’t the Nazi propaganda office that planned the book burnings, but rather enthusiastic students who would go on to serve as young professionals in the Reich. These were Poelchau’s peers. Many well-educated young Germans in the early thirties were enthusiastic about the Nazi program, just as the churches saw Hitler’s movement as a sign of revival that could be good for the faith. The cathedral in Berlin held a service of thanksgiving the Sunday after Hitler became chancellor. People who resisted the Nazis weren’t seen as defenders of their neighbors or of human rights; they were dismissed as radicals and silenced in public life.

As a pastor on the Nazi payroll, Poelchau never joined the Confessing Church, which challenged the Nazi Party when its most ardent supporters in the churches began to change traditional church teachings to conform to Nazi ideology. He is not remembered alongside the martyrs Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Alfred Delp. But he and Dorothee are remembered by Yad Vashem as “righteous among the nations” because they took action to save their Jewish neighbors.

Were they complicit in the regime’s evil? Maybe so, but that wasn’t the question that shaped their choices each day. In the face of an authoritarian crisis, the Poelchaus chose to act – not to change what they could not, but to do what they could. FASPE’s insistence that we attend to the decisions that perpetrators made in an authoritarian crisis has helped me clarify the context for their resistance and for ours. Often we don’t have anywhere to stand where we’re not complicit in some evil. This does not absolve us of our moral responsibility.

Each of us makes choices every day. We can choose to act for life, even if we are complicit with death-dealing systems. We do not hold onto our humanity by trying to stand apart from the mess of this world. The Poelchaus are witnesses that we remain human by practicing moral agency amidst death-dealing systems.

A couple of years ago, I met a student while giving a guest lecture who told me about her vocation to become a trauma surgeon. I promised to pray for her, and we’ve stayed in touch. The hospital where she is now doing her residency is close to a private detention center that ICE uses to confine people they snatch from their jobs on the street. When she moved there, this young doctor reached out to me to learn about the community partners who are working to shutter this private detention center. She sees it for the real evil that it is, but she also recognizes that her hospital is the trauma center that cares for people who are suffering in terrible conditions there.

When a young man detained there was recently brought in by the private security guards with chest pains, she diagnosed his cardiac issue and informed the young man that he would need emergency surgery. Acting to save his life was what her most basic professional ethic required. But she also recognized she had a choice to make: would she allow him to go back to the conditions that were killing him, or would she take action to change his situation? She wrote an order stating that her patient would die if he was returned to the detention center. She made clear to the private prison company that they would be responsible for his death, and she secured his release to the care of his family.

That detention center is still full of people. It will not close until enough of us insist that we do not want to be the kind of people who pretend our well-being depends on the caging of our neighbors. In the meantime, we have decisions to make every day about how we will treat the people in front of us. I think the Poelchaus have stayed with me because they offer a more pointed challenge than even the martyrs. They do not ask me what I will do in that rare circumstance where I have to choose between my own life and my moral commitments; they ask me what I will do today, in response to the people in front of me, to serve life and build beloved community in the ways that I can.

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It makes no moral sense to fire off fireworks when millions of Americans are working full-time jobs and still cannot afford a basic living wage.

It makes no moral sense to celebrate “freedom” with expensive explosions when families are choosing between buying groceries and buying life-saving medication because they lack healthcare.

It makes no moral sense to fund a temporary show while our schools are underfunded, our infrastructure is crumbling, and our communities are crying out for real systemic investments.

Fireworks do not pay the rent. Fireworks do not heal the sick. Fireworks do not feed the hungry. That display was a symbol of a leadership that prefers the illusion of greatness over the reality of justice. It is the definition of a moral distraction.

But we have to look deeper than just a fireworks show. We have to look at this obsession with “bigness”—the constant rhetoric of wanting things to be “huge,” “massive,” and “MAGA big.” History warns us that when a leader becomes obsessed with extreme size, grand spectacles, and projecting absolute dominance, it is a psychological and political red flag. Historians call this megalomania—a delusion of grandeur and omnipotence.

We have seen this spirit before, and we know where it leads. I spent a week in Germany to listen to the lessons of history there not because we are up against Nazis today, but because today’s authoritarians have learned from Hitler’s failures. And, like every authoritarian movement, our adversaries are subject to some of the same vulnerabilities. Adolf Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer, were consumed by an obsession with grandiosity. They didn’t build for the well-being of the people; they built to feed an ego and project totalitarian power.

They planned Germania—a grand design to completely flatten Berlin and rebuild it into a supreme global capital to outshine the world. They designed the Volkshalle, or the Great Hall—a monstrous, domed building meant to hold 180,000 people. It was designed to be so unnaturally gigantic that engineers estimated the breath of the crowd would literally create indoor rain clouds. They built the Prachtstraße, the Boulevard of Splendors—a massive, 120-meter-wide avenue designed purely for military parades to showcase raw, unchecked force.

Nazi architecture was explicitly designed to dwarf the individual. Hitler wanted any human being standing in those spaces to feel completely insignificant, powerless, and crushed compared to the absolute power of the State. They built for what they called “Ruin Value” (Ruinenwert). Hitler didn’t care about the living conditions of the citizens of his day. He ordered buildings to be constructed out of stone and granite so that when his empire eventually fell thousands of years later, its ruins would still look majestic. He prioritized the legacy of his name over the lives of his people.

When we look at Donald Trump’s obsession with crowd size, his constant demands for massive military parades, and his rhetoric of absolute power, we are seeing that same dangerous spirit. When a leader cares more about the size of a spectacle than the size of your paycheck, we should be concerned.

When a leader cares more about projecting an image of total dominance than ensuring you have access to a doctor, we should be concerned.

When a leader uses massive spectacles to make the individual citizen feel small, dependent, and powerless, that is not democracy—that is the groundwork for authoritarianism.

The distraction in the sky and the rhetoric of bigness are meant to keep us from seeing what is happening to our rights on the ground.

While they preach “bigness,” they are trying to make our rights smaller. We must look closely at the political agenda being pushed in the voting booth.

They are pushing voting restrictions that seek to restrict, rewrite, and roll back our hard-won progress. They are making it harder to cast a ballot. They are attacking mail-in voting. They are purging voter rolls. They are gerrymandering our districts so our voices are diluted.

We cannot just get angry. We have to get organized. We must form a fusion coalition that rolls up its sleeves and fights back. Right now, we must focus 100% of our energy, our resources, and our time into three critical areas at the state level:

Voter Education
A society is destroyed for lack of knowledge. We must educate our communities and our neighbors. People need to know the new rules. They need to know what ID is required, where their polling places have moved, and who is on the ballot. We must turn our community centers and union halls into classrooms of civic literacy.

Voter Mobilization
Moral conviction without action is dead. We cannot just talk about justice on Monday; we have to get people to the polls on election day. We need to organize phone banks, community transport, and block-by-block outreach. We must activate every single eligible voter in our radius.

The March to the Polls
We must take this fight straight to the state level. The laws that affect your daily life—your wages, your healthcare, your voting access—are decided in state legislatures and the US Capitol. We must mobilize a unified, diverse, unstoppable march to the polls. We must show up in numbers so large that no bureaucratic hurdle or authoritarian distraction can stop us.

850,000 fireworks may light up the sky for an hour, and dictators may try to build massive monuments to their own egos, but the ground eventually rejects them. Hitler’s massive structures literally sank into the mud because the earth could not support the weight of his ego.

We know that history is not finished. It is unfolding. And so we have choices to make. We get to decide whether the fires of spectacle will overwhelm us or whether the fire of justice burning in the hearts of a moral movement will light our way. Those who’ve chosen to subvert democracy and abuse power have made their decision. We must make ours - and find the remnant that will stand with us as we trust the power of truth and justice to outlast every lie.

In light of all of this, I wish somebody’s soul would catch fire, burning with the Holy Ghost and with a fire for justice. I pray each of us can let our little light shine until we burn so bright that all flesh can see together the way to a more perfect union.

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It is dangerous for the elderly and the young to breath the air in Washington, DC, but as long as we have breath in our bodies, we must proclaim the truth that can set us free. We have decided to move today’s Moral Monday inside for the sake of everyone’s health, but we cannot be silent. A livestream from today’s public pulpit will be available here at 5pm ET.

Whenever there is an increase in public violence, there must be an increase in public resistance. Our love must be a witness. Our hope must be a witness. Our truth must be a witness. Our protest must be a witness.

I’m grateful for the technology that allows us to share this message from Berlin with you here.

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On this coming Sunday, Bishop Barber will preach at at the Holy Cross Church in Berlin. We will share a recording of that sermon as soon as it is available.

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“What to slave is the fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass asked his hometown of Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. He had been asked to deliver a Fourth of July address by progressive white neighbors who wanted to renew, as Lincoln would put it, their dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. But a dozen years before the events that we remember as Juneteenth, Douglass articulated the reason this day on our calendar is important: not all Americans have experienced the liberty to which the signers of the Declaration pledged their lives, fortune, and sacred honor. In fact, July 5^th had become Emancipation Day in New York State because, when the legislature named July 4^th as the final date of a gradual emancipation process, the threat of retaliatory violence kept Black people from holding public celebrations until the day after. Douglass remembered this, as did Sojourner Truth, who had decided not to wait for gradual emancipation but found her own way to freedom. Douglass asked his neighbors in Rochester to consider what American freedom meant to someone like him – to someone like Sojourner Truth.

Juneteenth in this 250^th year offers us a similar invitation: what does freedom mean when a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is held captive by authoritarian forces that claim to celebrate liberty while they weaponize the justice system against their critics and try to suppress the vote and subvert electoral accountability?

We are spending the season between Juneteenth and July 4 this year in Germany, where we have been invited into several conversations about how this history of the Holocaust informs our struggle against the crisis of authoritarianism today. Jonathan is working for two weeks in Germany and Poland with a group of clergy fellows who are part of the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics – a program that invites early career clergy, doctors, and journalists to explore the role of their professions in supporting the Nazi regime as way of wrestling honestly with the ethical questions they face in their own contexts. At the same time, Bishop Barber has responded to an invitation from Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strom, Moderator of the World Council of Churches, to be in conversation about the role of the churches in response to authoritarian regimes, past and present. Next Sunday, June 28^th, Bishop Barber will preach at the Holy Cross Church in Berlin.

We look forward to sharing both our conversation with Bishop Bedford-Strom and Bishop Barber’s sermon with you here in the days to come.

But as we begin this journey with the question that Juneteenth asks of all of us, we wanted to share one story from Berlin. Any honest assessment of the church’s role in the rise of the Nazi regime must acknowledge that Germans who worshiped together through the Holocaust did very little to stop it. In fact, most German Christians – Protestant and Catholic – saw Hitler and the Nazis as good for Germany when he rose to power. When Hitler was named Chancellor in 1933, a celebratory service was held at the Berlin Cathedral.

When the “German Christian” movement tried to throw out the Old Testament and remove all Hebrew words from hymns to eradicate Jewish influence from church life in Germany, a Confessing Church movement formed to take a stand for traditional Christian teachings. (This was the occasion for the Barmen Declaration.) But the German churches, including the Confessing Churches, never took a stand against the attacks on their Jewish neighbors. While they taught their children, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” the churches did not act to interrupt first the attacks on their Jewish neighbors, then the kidnappings that sent them to killing centers.

But just blocks from the Cathedral where Hitler’s rise to power was celebrated, there is a memorial to the roughly 600 women who led the only recorded public protest against the Nazis in Germany. For years, Germans had watched as any one accused of even “friendliness” to a Jewish neighbor was arrested and jailed for three months. By the end of February in 1943, the SS and Gestapo decided to make one final push to round up the remaining 8,000 Jews in Berlin. About a quarter of the group – some 2,000 Jewish men who were married to Christian women – were taken to a building on Rosenstraße, across from the oldest synagogue in the city. The building had been a Jewish social service center. The Nazis turned it into a detention center.

But the wives of the men taken and detained there refused to be silent. They went to the street en masse and demanded, “Give us our husbands back!” When they were threatened by SS men with guns, they scattered to find others and returned. “If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn’t have gone,” one of them, Elsa Holzer, later said, “But we acted from the heart. We wanted to show that we weren’t willing to let them go.”

The Nazi authorities calculated that mass public resistance was more dangerous to them than 2,000 Jewish men. Within a week, they released every one of them to their families. In a small park on Rosenstraße today, you can visit a monument to the women who demonstrated the power of collective nonviolent action in the face of authoritarian violence.

What does freedom mean when your government is held captive by authoritarian forces that claim to celebrate liberty while they weaponize the justice system against their critics and try to suppress the vote and subvert electoral accountability? The women of Rosenstraße are a reminder that freedom in the face of authoritarianism means remembering that, even when our institutions fail, the bonds of love can lead us to faithful moral resistance.

None of us can be free until we recognize how our lives are knit together by bonds of love across lines of race, class, and geography that the powerful try to use to divide us. Juneteenth is important for every American because the denial of Black people’s freedom has kept all Americans from realizing our full potential. Emancipation wasn’t an act of charity; it was an act of justice that led to Reconstruction amendments, without which we would have never had a women’s movement, a civil rights movement, a disability rights movement, or an LGBTQ movement.

When we remember the bonds of love that tie us together, we find the courage to fight for one another. To stand up together like the women of Rosenstraße and demand, “Give us our country back.” This Juneteenth, we pray for enough love in our hearts that we’ll refuse to accept anything else.

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Bisop Barber was at the pulpit on H Street north of the White House. We both joined ’s show afterwards to talk about what’s required of all of us and why we’re headed to Germany later this week. You can watch the full program from DC below. Glad to share our conversation with Joy you.

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As we teach moral fusion movements and work with organizations across the nation to build one today, we are always asking, “What makes the kind of person who knows this work is part of who they are?” We’ve listened closely to research that suggests Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have a higher percentage of faculty who understand character formation to be part of their job and students who understand public service and activism to be part of the life they are preparing for. Dr. Emily Hunt-Hinjosa, who has led some of this research in her role at Wake Forrest University’s Educating Character Initiative, shared at event we hosted at North Carolina Central University last year. “There’s an embedded commitment to [moral formation] that shows up in the teaching,” she said. Given that there is ample data to establish this, she and her colleagues have wondered why HBCUs have not been more central in the character education conversation.

Dr. Jelani Favors, an historian at the United Negro College Fund, wrote the important book Shelter In A Time Of Storm about how HBCU’s have consistently produced moral leaders in America’s social movements. A careful study of history, he argues, leads one to the same conclusion that the survey data point toward. Together with Hunt-Hinojosa, he has made the case that HBCUs have always been effective institutions for the formation of moral leaders.

When recalling her formative years as a student at Shaw University, an HBCU in Raleigh, North Carolina, legendary civil rights activist and organizer Ella Baker proudly asserted, “Where I went to school…you went there to give…the best of yourself to other people, rather than to extract from other people for your own benefit.” Baker was not the only civil rights leader with an HBCU alma mater. Many of the most significant civil rights organizations were overwhelmingly composed of students from southern HBCUs. These young idealists had been trained to give the best of themselves to other people, and later attributed this, in large part, to the character education that they received in college.

At Yale over the past several years, an effort to explore the role that slavery and race has played in the history of this university revealed that the first HBCU in the United States was proposed in New Haven, Connecticut in 1831. It never came to be because the city fathers of New Haven - including board members and professors from Yale - squashed it. But part of telling the truth about this historic injustice has included a commitment by Yale’s leadership today to partner with HBCUs. As we work to train moral leaders, we see this as an opportunity for the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy to highlight the important role HBCUs play in forming young people for the kind of movements we hope to serve.

This is why we have been working since we came to Yale to establish partnerships with Howard University, Lincoln University, North Carolina Central University, and Tougaloo College to host Moral Fusion Scholars from their campuses for a summer intensive week at Yale Divinity School and a year-long fellowship with us at the Center. The last week of May this spring, we worked with our team members Tony Lin, Elliot Smith, and Ebony Gains, as well as colleagues and partners across the Yale campus and the New Haven community, to welcome our inaugural cohort.

We could tell you stories all day long about how these scholars demonstrate the validity of the sociological and historical research we cited above. But rather than just tell you about what gives us hope, we asked them to spend some time talking about who they understand themselves to be and then make a video to introduce themselves to you.

We hope you’ll take a moment to hear from them and renew your hope.

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In this moment, we have everything we need if we will just fight for what is right. We don’t have to fight with violence. We don’t have to fight with hate. We don’t have to become like the forces that are fighting us.

We can stand in truth and love and nonviolence and win - not just to go back to what was, but to achieve a new future for this nation.

That’s what prophetic imagination offers America in its 250th year. That’s why we’ve set up a pulpit outside the White House.

We hope you’ll listen to the messages from Moral Monday DC tonight, and help us spread the word that there’s a space in the nation’s capitol where anyone can come on Mondays to hear the truth that can set us free.

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I’m glad to be able to share this message with our Substack family here, and I look forward to seeing some of you outside the White House tomorrow.

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In the 22nd chapter of Jeremiah, God gives the prophet instructions about why he should go to the seat of political power that is being abused and proclaim the truth:

For Jeremiah, the geography mattered. He needed to be by the gates, where the officials come in and out, to name the consequences of their actions and make clear their moral agency. In any government where power is abused, vulnerable people will suffer. But policy violence cannot happen without professionals who show up every day to do their job. Wars are not funded without accountants who make spreadsheets. SNAP benefits and healthcare subsidies cannot be cut without administrators who are willing to cut them. Concentration camps cannot be built without architects who design them and, in the context of the private prison industry, corporate board members who are willing to invest in the caging of neighbors who are being kidnapped from their communities for no criminal offense.

In our present moral crisis, we need a pulpit by the gates of the White House to tell the truth about who we have become as a nation and remind those who come in and out of those gates that another America is possible. God did not tell Jeremiah to whisper his concerns in the safety of a sanctuary. He commanded him to march to the center of government. In this 250th anniversary year, when public funds are being used to tell a storybook version of American history that discourages protest, we have a moral obligation and a patriotic duty to remember the prophetic voices that have loved this nation by calling us to higher ground.

Sojourner Truth was not hired to preach in any congregation’s pulpit, but she accepted the call to be a sojourner for the cause of abolition and criss-crossed the Northeast and Midwest, preaching in the public square to invite people who understood that slavery was wrong to stop cooperating with a system that treated some people like property. Prompted by the Spirit and working tirelessly with allies in local communities, she established a pulpit in the public square.

Like the abolitionists before him, A.J. Muste left the pulpits where he was trained to preach as a Reformed pastor and joined the labor movement of the early 20th century, standing firmly for a nonviolent movement that refused to cooperate with the exploitation of working people. He worked with A. Philip Randolph, who would conceive of the idea of a March on Washington, and ultimately set up the pulpit decades later where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous sermon. We often recall that speech as “I Have A Dream,” but Dr. King titled it, “Normalcy Never Again.” It was a prophetic Word in the public square, delivered in earshot of the White House.

To remember the best of American history is to remember that we have needed a pulpit in the public square to right our course in every era.

Together with our colleagues at Repairers of the Breach and partners from more than a dozen other organizations, we have discerned a call to establish a pulpit outside the White House this summer. We are inviting people who have been faithful in proclaiming the truth in this moral moment to bring their message in person to the gates of the People’s House. While our tax dollars are being used to stage religious nationalist rallies and cage matches on the White House lawn, we will try to be faithful to the call to tell the truth about those who are hurting and the possibility of a better way.

If you can be in Washington, D.C. on a Monday, we invite you to join us. Wherever you are, we invite you to tune in and help us spread the word.

This movement is not about left or right, conservative or liberal. It’s about right and wrong — about the moral obligation to protect life, dignity, and democracy. Every conscience is welcome in this witness. And every voice is needed as we call America to be true to what she put on paper 250 years ago.

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On the first day of every month, Shane Claiborne and I gather with faith leaders and moral activists for morning prayer. Today we were joined by Pastor Erich Kussman, who has helped lead the moral resistance to violence in Newark since ICE worked with the private GEO Group to illegally re-open Delaney Hall last year. 31 people from Pastor Erich’s community have been kidnapped and held at Delaney Hall. I wanted to share his update from the ground and our prayer with him here as an invitation to see what’s happening there from his community’s perspective.

If you are able, please support Pastor Erich and the ministry at St Bart Lutheran Church as they care for neighbors whose loved ones have been taken, for others who are detained, for those who are maintaining a nonviolent resistance, and even for law enforcement officers. I’ve not been able to forget this image of Pastor Erich praying for the ICE agents outside Delaney Hall.

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After Pastor Erich’s update this morning, we were joined by Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa, who worked alongside Bishop Desmond Tutu and so many others to defeat apartheid in South African through nonviolent resistance. It was powerful to hear his reflection on what’s required of us after the update from Newark. You can listen to the full recording of our monthly morning prayer at Red Letter Christians.

By April of 1865, Lincoln joined the nearly three quarter million Americans who had died in the Civil War. Black people who understood the cost of the war knew that Union soldiers who’d died as prisoners of war in Charleston were buried in a mass grave at the Washington Race Course. (This history was largely forgotten by most Americans until our Yale colleague, David Blight, wrote about it in his Race and Reunion.) In the spring of 1865, as Black people and Union soldiers had begun to rebuild Charleston, Black workmen had taken it upon themselves to honor the Union dead by exhuming some 260 bodies from a hole behind the grandstand of the race track and reinterring them in marked graves. They put a fence around the grave site, whitewashed it, and erected an entryway inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course.” On May 1, 1865, a parade of 10,000 people marched around this new memorial to honor the Union dead.

Though it was first called “Decoration Day,” this tradition of honoring those who’ve died in battle became the Memorial Day that Americans mark today. Often co-opted by the heirs of Charleston’s planter class who sent poor men to war to defend their property rights, Memorial Day truly belongs to those who understand the true cost of freedom - not to the greedy who are willing to sacrifice other people’s children so they can protect their money and power.

Since Monday of Holy Week this year, we have been outside the White House and Congressional offices across the country holding Moral Monday protests against Trump’s illegal and immoral war in Iran and all of the policy violence advanced by this administration. Last week, the Senate voted to proceed to debate on a war powers resolution, signaling that Republican leadership had lost their majority willing to rubber stamp the President. Likewise in the House, Mike Johnson has lost his majority willing to abdicate the incredible responsibility to wage war that belongs to Congress alone under the US Constitution. To avoid a vote, Johnson sent the House home early for the Memorial Day weekend.

In an effort to honor the spirit of the first Decoration Day, we are releasing this video of a testimony from a veteran who shared at a Moral Monday outside Sen. Thom Tillis’ office this spring. Recalling the death of a fellow solider in Vietnam, he said, “It is for you that I work to end all war.”

As you pause to remember loved ones who’ve died in service to this country, we invite you to honor them by sharing this video and calling on your member of Congress to cut off funding for the illegal and immoral war that Trump is waging.

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If you would like to screen BAD FAITH in your community, you can learn how at https://www.badfaithdocumentary.com

Our friends Lisa Sharon Harper and Robert P. Jones joined us for a conversation about how the film explains what happened in DC yesterday and, more importantly, how faith is also inspiring moral movements that point us toward something better as a nation. We’re glad to share this conversation along with the movie here. You can also find the full day of counter-programing yesterday’s White House-sponsored event at Redirect250.org.

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PS - For anyone who chooses a faith that stands for love and justice in the public square, Moral Monday will be back outside the White House today, where we’ve rallied for the past eight weeks to challenge Trump’s illegal and immoral war, along with all of the connected policy violence that our faith refuses to accept. You can watch live via Repairers of the Breach at 5pm today.

How does an unpopular regime that is actively working to subvert democracy try to shore up its legitimacy?

They bow their heads in prayer.

This coming Sunday, May 17th, Trump and his MAGA faithful are holding an all-day event on the National Mall claiming to “rededicate” America to God. They’re calling it “Rededicate 250,” and they are using our tax dollars to market it to every American as a nonpartisan event that is about faith, family, and our most basic values.

As pastors, we know the power of faith in people’s lives - not just the people who show up at mosque on Friday, synagogue on Shabbat, or church on Sunday. We know the stories of people who stop us getting off an airplane or going into a courthouse or coming out of a hospital to ask for prayer. To petition the Maker of the Universe for assistance when we face life’s most difficult challenges is a powerful thing. Religious nationalists understand this. It’s why they are trying to use a prayer festival to shore up Trump’s unpopular agenda.

But their distortion of faith doesn’t represent the vast majority of Americans, nor does it represent the best of our faith and moral traditions. Every stride toward a more perfect union in American history has been pushed by moral movements. The abolitionists, the women’s suffragists, labor and civil rights leaders, disability rights and LGBTQ rights activists, and environmental activists have been inspired by and sustained by their faith.

Because we know the power of faith, we recognize the real and present danger of religious nationalism. But we also know that the best way to overcome this misuse of faith is to proclaim and practice the faith traditions that are more powerful than the distortion.

This is why we’re glad to be part of a coalition of faith organizations that has come together this weekend to counter-message the religious nationalist festival on the National Mall with Redirect 250 - a unified, faith-rooted effort to redirect the country towards what is loving, just, and good. You can learn more at www.redirect250.org

On this 250th year of America, we must offer a vision that redirects the country toward what is loving, just, and good for all. All day Sunday, Redirect 250 will be streaming sermons, meditations, and prayers from faith leaders all around the country that point the direction we must go as a nation. For everyone who knows we’re going the wrong way, we will proclaim the hope of a real and practical alternative that many people are already practicing with their neighbors in beautiful communities across a diverse landscape.

While Redirect 250 represents the faith and moral traditions that inform the vast majority of Americans, we don’t have the resources of the government to promote it. What we do have is our voices, our faith communities, our families and social networks to spread the word. Roger Williams, an early American who argued for the separation of church and state, said this is all any of us need to promote true faith. Any faith sponsored and imposed by the state becomes propaganda. For faith to be real, it has to be something important enough for each of us to commit ourselves to it and share with others in ways that honor their freedom and dignity as neighbors.

So it’s a joy to get to invite you become a partner in spreading the word about Redirect 250.

Our friends at have partnered with us to produce the last two-hours of Sunday’s all-day event. It will stream here on Our Moral Moment and across a network of Substacks that are linking up to cross-promote this. Beginning at 4pm ET, you can watch “Bad Faith 2026,” a documentary that exposes the network of organizations using religious nationalism to fuel a political movement and highlights the moral movement that is growing to reconstruct democracy in America.

Immediately following the film, we will be live with , who is in Alabama this weekend with faith leaders as part of the “All Roads Lead South” National Day of Voting Action, and , who will will bring a live report from the National Mall.

The biblical prophets remind us how genuine faith that challenges injustice and lifts the lowly must be consistent and embodied. We have moments for mass gatherings and events that bring us together to expereince the breadth of the beloved community. But a moral movement requires a consistent witness to what is true and right. The Civil Rights Movement had its March on Washington, but that’s not what built and sustained it. The faith at the heart of that movement moved people in their communities to show up at the seats of power over and over again - often in small groups - to use every tool of nonviolent soul force to demand change.

This is why Moral Mondays will be back outside the White House and Congressional offices across the country this coming Monday. We hope you’ll take a couple of minutes to watch and share this short video. As always, be sure to follow Repairers of the Breach for the latest on how you can be involved in Moral Mondays.

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Even though she believed the cause of the Civil War to be just and supported it until the formerly enslaved people of the South were free, Howe was horrified by the destruction of the Civil War. She saw what it did to bodies, she saw what it did to the body politic, and she saw what it was doing to the world. She knew that a tyrant could ask the people to sing her “Battle Hymn” to make the people feel righteous about unnecessary sacrifice.

So Howe wrote another piece. It was the original call for a Mother’s Day in this country. And it was a moral cry for an end to all war:

Arise, then... women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, Disarm!

I’m grateful to Roland Martin and the Black Star Network for covering our rally and the direct action that followed outside the White House, where people were willing to put their bodies on the line in a nonviolent public witness for peace.

As Dr. Broome said tonight, “We ain’t going anywhere.” We will be back. You can register here if you’d like to get information about how to join Moral Monday in DC or at a Congressional office near you.

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Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Governor Bill Lee called a special session of the Tennessee legislature to redraw their Congressional map in a way that splits Black voters in Memphis across three Congressional districts, diluting their impact in any one district and denying them the right to elect a representative of their choice - or, at least, clearly intending to. In this case of racial gerrymandering, the representative whose seat they aim to steal is a white man, Steve Cohen (TN-9). The map that Republicans passed draws Cohen out of the new 9th Congressional district, but goes out of its way to include the home of Brent Taylor, the Republican state legislator who has already filed to run for the seat.

US Senator Marcia Blackburn, who is running to follow Bill Lee as governor next year, claims in the language that the Supreme Court majority has endorsed that the point of this is to “keep Tennessee a red state.” In plain Southern English, that translates as “keep Tennessee in the trusted hands of good white people.”

State representative Justin Jones met protestors in the gallery of the Tennessee Capitol and burned a Confederate flag to demonstrate how the majority’s move harkened back to worst of the state’s secessionist past.

But this reminder that the racist gerrymander is a Confederate tactic should also prompt us to recall that white rule has never been good for most Americans - especially for poor white citizens of the South. When the Confederacy was defeated and formerly enslaved people became US citizens following the ratification of the 13^th amendment in 1865, they joined hands with white people in the North and South who were willing to see one another as allies. Within four years after the end of the Civil War, white and Black alliances controlled every state house in the South. Together, they elected new leaders—some white, many formerly enslaved African-Americans. Almost all of the Southern legislatures were controlled by either a predominantly Black alliance or a strong interracial Fusion coalition by the end of the 1860s.

These new fusion coalitions enacted new constitutions that promised a better identity for all Americans. They also built the first public schools and gave all persons a constitutional right to public education—something that to this day has not been done in the federal constitution. In our home state of North Carolina, the new constitution stated that “beneficent provision to the poor, the orphan, and the widow is the first duty of a civilized and Christian state.” It also guaranteed labor rights and a right for all workers to the “enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor.” When Black and white people came together as fellow citizens for the first time in American public life, they understood that labor without living wages is another form of slavery—not just for Black people, but for all people. They expanded access to the ballot and wrote a new fairness into the criminal justice system.

This is the Southern history that today’s advocates of white rule want us to forget.

By playing to racial fears through lies about immigrants, “woke culture,” and DEI, the MAGA movement has worked to consolidate power for the billionaires who are the heirs of the South’s plantation owners. They have called the South’s majority minority districts “racist” in an appeal to white people who have been told that they are “losing their country.” Their last great hope is to try to hold onto a Republican majority in Congress by getting rid of every Representative that the Voting Rights Act made possible for Black and Brown communities in the South. But they don’t want people to know that this will hurt most of us.

With the help of our friends at the Institute for Policy Studies, we asked after the Callais decision what the policy impact would have been for poor and low-income people if the Voting Rights Act had not been there to shield against actions like those of the Tennessee legislature for the past four decades. It’s important to note that, until a revision to the VRA in 1982 that made Black-majority districts possible, Black voters from the South were not able to elect representatives of their choice. So we’ve really only experienced about four decades of Black voters in the South having representation in the US Congress. In every case, those districts elected Democrats to represent them.

Since those members came to Congress, there have only been three two-year periods when Democrats controlled the White House, Senate, and House: 1993-1994 under Clinton; 2009-2010 under Obama; and 2021-2022 under Biden. In the first two, the Democratic majority in the House was enormous - 258 Democrats to 176 Republicans in the 103rd Congress under Clinton; and 257 Democrats to 178 Republicans in the 111th Congress under Obama. Most of the legislation that passed both of those Congresses passed by a margin greater than the number of seats that Southern legislatures plan to restore to white rule. But the single largest legislative achievement of the 111th Congress - the Affordable Care Act, which expanded access to healthcare to more than 45 million Americans - passed by a vote of 219 to 212 in the House of Representatives. Without representatives of Black voters from the South, there would be no ACA.

The 117th Congress, elected during the COVID crisis along with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, passed more legislation to benefit poor and working people than any Congress since the 1970s. None of those bills could have passed without the Representatives Black voters sent to the 117th Congress from the South. They helped pass the American Rescue Plan that provided $1.9 trillion in economic relief, including direct cash payments to poor and working people. They cast decisive votes for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which put $1.2 trillion into infrastructure improvements, including roads, bridges, and broadband, and added stipulations that workers get paid living wages and contractors have fair access to bidding. Without them, the 117th Congress could not have passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which further expanded access to healthcare and focused on reducing healthcare costs and addressing climate change, with significant investments in clean energy.

We protested and even when to jail during the 117th Congress because its leadership, particularly in the Senate, was not willing to do nearly enough with the power they had at that time - including taking action to defend voting rights when it was clear to anyone paying attention what the Supreme Court and Southern legislatures intended to do. But it is also true that the good they did with the votes of members elected by Black voters in the South made a real difference for tens of millions of Americans. Those people have felt over the past year what it means for the social safety net to be ripped out from under them. We know the difference that representation makes, and we know it impacts all of us.

This is why our response to the assertion of white rule in the South must be a movement of Black, white, brown, Asian, and Native people from all walks of life coming together to build a new electorate that will overwhelm MAGA’s efforts to subvert the will of the people. They would not be fighting this hard to gerrymander every last district they think they possibly can if they did not know that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose them. They only have power now because, for far too long, more than a third of the electorate hasn’t even been engaged in what we call “historic turnout” elections.

We’ve talked to poor and marginalized voters across America, and they have told us why they don’t participate: no one speaks to them. They are not wrong. Both parties have ignored poor people for far too long. But our faith teaches us that the stones that have been rejected must be the chief cornerstone of a reconstruction effort. We must build a movement that lifts the voices of everyone who’s hurting because of the policies that white rule enables - policies that take from the poor, extract from the land, wage wars of choice to benefit billionaires, and harm immigrants and vulnerable neighbors. If everyone who’s been harmed by the policies of the 119th Congress can join hands with a moral resistance and push together for representatives who will stand up to the abuse of power, then real accountability is coming in 2027. And a Third Reconstruction is in reach when the 121st Congress convenes in 2029.

It won’t happen because heroes ride in to save us. It will happen when we build a movement to demand it. That’s work that each of us can do today, wherever we are - and every day until we win the government we want for every child of God.

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I was glad to be able to pause midday today here on Substack and talk with brother about the moral issues at stake not only in the breaking news of the day, but the deep struggles of our moral moment. I’m glad to be able to share our conversation with you here on “Our Moral Moment.”

We concluded our conversation by talking about the Moral Monday Peace Rallies we have planned for this coming Monday, May 11th. Learn more and make plans to join us: https://breachrepairers.org/get-involved/events/national-moral-monday-coordinated-peace-rallies/

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