By Marcus Hart
Four months out from the 2026 midterms, a coalition of faith leaders representing more than 1,500 congregations across nine states stood up this month and said something the Black church has understood for sixty years and the rest of the country is only now relearning: the sanctuary and the ballot box have never been as separate as people like to pretend.
The initiative is called “Faith in Us.” It started with clergy in Minnesota, the same network that had already been organizing protests against federal immigration enforcement, and it’s spread fast. Minister JaNae Bates Imari, co-executive director of the interfaith group ISAIAH Minnesota, put the vision plainly at a news conference in Saint Paul: “Our churches, our mosques, our synagogues, our places of worship will become democracy hubs.” Organizers say they’ve already collected more than 1,700 signatures on a letter to secretaries of state and election administrators nationwide, demanding protection of the voting process through November 3rd.
I want to sit with that phrase, democracy hub, because it’s doing something specific, and I think it’s worth being precise about what it does and doesn’t mean, especially for readers who’ve watched plenty of well-intentioned civic movements curdle into something more partisan than they started out being.
What the letter is actually asking for
The “Faith in Us” letter isn’t a candidate endorsement operation. Read the substance of what these clergy are raising and it’s process concerns, not policy preferences: an executive order restricting vote-by-mail access, redistricting maps drawn in the wake of the Supreme Court’s rollback of Voting Rights Act protections that civil rights groups and independent redistricting analysts alike have flagged as racially discriminatory, and a general erosion of public confidence in how elections are administered.
Those are not partisan complaints dressed up in religious language. Vote-by-mail restrictions and gerrymandered maps affect turnout mechanics before a single vote is ever cast for a single candidate. A faith leader raising concern about whether their congregation can physically get to a polling place, or whether their community’s votes will be diluted by a map drawn to produce a predetermined outcome, is doing exactly what the Black church has always done at its best: protecting the mechanism of participation, not picking the winner.
That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it’s the one I’d push every congregation embracing this democracy hub language to hold onto with both hands.
Where this has worked before, and where it’s gone sideways
I didn’t grow up needing anyone to explain to me that the church basement was where voter registration drives happened, where rides to the polls got organized, where the deacon who also drove the church van knew exactly which elderly members needed a pickup on Election Day. That tradition built entire chapters of the civil rights movement. It is not new, and it is not radical. It is, if anything, one of the most conservative, in the truest sense of the word, meaning rooted in preserving something foundational, traditions in Black American civic life.
Where it goes wrong is when democracy hub quietly becomes campaign office, when the pastor starts naming names from the pulpit instead of protecting the process everyone gets to participate in regardless of who they’re voting for. That’s not a hypothetical concern, it’s the fastest way for a congregation to lose its tax-exempt status, and more importantly, the fastest way to alienate the members in the pews who lean differently than the leadership does. UNJ’s readers are, by and large, people who’ve already told both parties they don’t have a monopoly on their vote. A faith community that starts functioning as a partisan machine loses exactly those people first.
The good version of this movement stays in its lane: voter registration, know-your-rights education, transportation to polling places, poll-watching for irregularities, and public pressure on election administrators to do their jobs fairly regardless of who benefits. The letter these 1,500-plus congregations signed stays in that lane. That’s worth noting, because it would have been easy for a coalition this size to drift into candidate territory, and it hasn’t.
Why this matters more in a state like Wisconsin
Wisconsin isn’t in the nine states currently organized under this specific coalition, but it should be watching closely, because everything driving this movement nationally, contested maps, mail-ballot access fights, declining trust in the count itself, is live here too. Milwaukee’s Black and brown congregations have the same infrastructure Minnesota’s do: the vans, the phone trees, the Sunday morning window when half the neighborhood is already in one room. If this movement is going to matter in the Midwest, Milwaukee’s faith community doesn’t need to wait for a national coalition to give it permission to start doing what it already knows how to do.
The practical path forward
For congregations weighing whether to step into this role, the ask isn’t complicated: confirm your registration deadline calendar now, not in October. Identify who in your community needs a ride and who’s willing to drive. Train a small group on what an actual voting irregularity looks like versus a rumor, so you’re reporting real problems to real election officials instead of amplifying noise. And keep the pulpit for the gospel, not the ballot, let the civic work happen in the fellowship hall, where it’s always lived best.
Faith, in my experience, works as a lens on public life, not a wall against it, and not a weapon inside it. Democracy hub is the right instinct if congregations hold that line. It’s a dangerous phrase if they don’t.