The Black Church Must Rise: ‘Pews must become training grounds for justice,’ after Trump’s spending and tax bill passes
OPINION: The Black Church must refocus after President Donald Trump’s “One, Big Beautiful Bill” becomes law, says Waterloo, Iowa, pastor.
The recently passed Trump-backed bill is an atrocious assault on vulnerable populations, with devastating consequences not only in Iowa but across impoverished communities nationwide. Cloaked in legalese and false promises of reform, this legislation strips courts of the power to enforce contempt citations for violations of temporary restraining orders and injunctions — a move that fundamentally undermines judicial accountability. In practical terms, this means that individuals and communities — especially poor, disabled, undocumented and Black and Brown — will be left defenseless against government overreach, corporate abuse and civil rights violations.
This bill amounts to a green light for lawlessness at the highest levels, with the powerless bearing the greatest cost.
In this moment of crisis, the Black Church must rise with moral clarity and prophetic urgency. We must develop and deploy a theology of liberation justice — rooted in the biblical witness of Exodus, the teachings of Jesus and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement — to equip the faithful for loving political resistance. This is not the time for privatized piety or sanitized sermons. Rev. Albert Cleage said, “You’re not serious about liberation struggle until you adopt a revolutionary theology.” It is time for a Spirit-led uprising grounded in the sacred dignity of every person. Our pews must become training grounds for justice. Our pulpits must thunder with truth. Our love must take to the streets.
Unchecked, the tax and spending bill, signed into law on July 4, will erode the last protections against tyranny. But the Black Church has always stood in the breach. We must again. As Dr. King taught us, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The gospel compels us to act — not merely with words but with organizing, protest, policy engagement and radical compassion. The soul of our nation — and the safety of our most vulnerable — depends on what we do next. Liberation is not a metaphor. It is our mandate.
We must join together as a congregation, for if any one of us is not protected and free, then none of us are.
Rev. Funchess,
Greetings and congratulations for your call to arms. You may remember our meeting in Waterloo ten years ago at the arrangement of the late great Melvina Scott. We discussed the national abandonment of our veterans and the necessity of their political coalescence to stop our immoral wars.
And thank you for your reference to Rev Cleage. I knew him and we shared the same streets referenced in the following comment on “The Church” and its acquiesce to the American war on Palestinians.
THE BLACK FACE Of THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
Since the end of the cold war in 1991, America’s Black communities have suffered incalculable economic and social damage. Through four administrations, Republicans and Democrats, seemingly incapable of agreeing on anything else, have agreed on war as the defining characteristic of American life. Each Party has abdicated its constitutional duty by driving us into endless undeclared wars. Presently, there are nine, few of which the President of the United States can identify on any map with which he is familiar. The staggering costs of these wars exceed $10 trillion—or 50% of our national debt. These imperial disasters have starved our communities, black and white, of the very capacity to survive, robbing them of infrastructure of survival--our schools, hospitals, roads, transportation systems, clean water, and sanitation systems.
And now, it is clear as never before, that our undeclared wars have cost us our will and capacity to prepare for and respond to the violent changes in our climate and environment. Mother nature does not discriminate based on race or economic status. Napa, Puerto Rico, Houston and the Gulf Coast prove the point. But it is the poor, the isolated the marginalized urban and rural, Black and white, communities that suffer the most from our unreadiness and unwillingness to prepare for the environmental catastrophes now upon us. This is a direct result of the waste of our resources abroad in the exercise of immoral war: unconstitutional wars that kill and maim our most sacrificial young people.
Black leadership, particularly our politicians, has remained largely silent about America’s imperial hubris and our Black participation in it. And, It is perhaps that participation, as the apologists and advocates of unconstitutional war that has silenced us. But the Black patriots of the Revolution, of the Civil War, and of World Wars I and II did not join our military to subjugate other people. They did so to preserve and to honor our communities. Our politicians and our secular and religious leaders have forgotten that legacy. But Oberlin, on this corner Mt. Zion corner of Vernon Johns, Howard Thurman and Gardner Taylor, can remind them as few others can, that the pride of the uniform does not extinguish the immorality and illegality of the act.
The moral clarity and bravery that caused Martin Luther King Jr. to proclaim 52 years ago, “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” has now eluded us. If the Black communities of the United States are to survive the climatic threats now impossible to ignore we must reclaim that most important legacy, visible in the humanity of that monument to Dr. King two blocks away.
Dr. King’s charge from the pulpit of the Riverside Church was no mere description of our lawlessness, it is a continuing call to action to all Americans to live and demand rule of law and in so doing vindicate the moral and civic unity Americans imagined for themselves in 1787.
Delbert Spurlock
Comments at Mt Zion Oberlin, Ohio October 20, 2017
Best to you for all you do.
https://delbertspurlock.substack.com/p/burgs-woke