Earlier this month, the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. Inc. — one of the oldest and largest historically Black denominations in the country — opened a Center for Social Justice steps from the U.S. Capitol, directly across the street from the Supreme Court. The placement isn’t subtle, and it isn’t supposed to be. NBCUSA President Boise Kimber pointed directly at the erosion of voting rights protections and at redistricting fights in Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana that followed a Supreme Court decision gutting a core section of the Voting Rights Act. Days later, the Progressive National Baptist Convention — the denomination Martin Luther King Jr. called home — sent members to Capitol Hill to lobby directly on ballot access. Outgoing PNBC President David Peoples didn’t mince words: get your congregations to vote, because nobody else is going to guarantee they can.
In Minnesota, faith leaders unveiled a multistate initiative turning houses of worship into what they’re calling “democracy hubs.” In the D.C. metro area, churches are deploying poll chaplains and building “Faith Action Committees” with a stated goal of 100% voting congregations. This is not a handful of pastors making a political statement from the pulpit on a Sunday. This is institutional infrastructure — the kind you build when you’ve concluded that the systems meant to protect your community’s access to the ballot can no longer be trusted to do it alone.
I want to be careful here, because I know exactly how this story gets flattened by people looking to score points. On one side, you’ll get commentators treating this as proof that Black churches are just an arm of the Democratic Party — a talking point that ignores the actual theological and historical roots of civic engagement in Black faith tradition, going back to Reconstruction-era churches that functioned as schools, banks, and political organizing spaces because no one else would let Black communities build those institutions elsewhere. On the other side, you’ll get people wary of any mixing of church and political mobilization, worried about tax-exempt status lines getting blurred, or uncomfortable with pastors telling congregants their salvation is tied to a ballot. Both instincts deserve a hearing. Neither one answers the actual question in front of us: why is a network of churches building midterm voter infrastructure at all?
The honest answer is that redistricting after the Supreme Court’s ruling created real, measurable risk to Black political representation in specific states, and no federal fix arrived to replace what was lost. When Section 5 preclearance was gutted over a decade ago, and further erosions followed, the practical effect wasn’t abstract, it showed up in maps, in polling place closures, in ID requirements that landed unevenly. Into that vacuum stepped the institution that has, historically, been the most trusted messenger in Black communities: the church. That’s not a partisan observation. It’s a structural one. When government retreats from guaranteeing a right, someone else absorbs the work of protecting it, and it’s rarely a coincidence which institutions have the trust and reach to do it.
Here’s where I’ll push back on my own community, though, because solution-first journalism means holding everybody to the same standard, including the people in the pews with me. Voter mobilization infrastructure inside churches is not a permanent substitute for federal voting rights protection, and treating it as sufficient lets elected officials in both parties off the hook. Democrats have controlled the White House and had congressional majorities at various points since Section 5 was gutted and have not passed durable, court-proof federal voting rights legislation. Republicans who talk about election integrity rarely apply the same energy to ballot access as they do to restriction. Neither side gets credit for outsourcing the job to Rev. Kimber’s convention or to a Minneapolis Faith Action Committee. A democracy hub in a Milwaukee church basement is a patch, not a policy.
What I keep coming back to is this: the story isn’t really about churches getting political. Black churches have always been political, in the fullest and most honest sense of that word — concerned with the material conditions of their people’s lives, not just their souls. The story is that the guardrails meant to make that kind of grassroots mobilization unnecessary have been dismantled, and nobody in Washington, in either party, has shown urgency about rebuilding them. Until that changes, don’t be surprised when the sanctuary does the government’s job. It’s done it before.
If you’re in Milwaukee and your congregation is building voter access infrastructure this cycle, I want to hear about it — that’s a story I’ll be following through November.