Standing with the Vulnerable Could Reunite People of Faith

To find unity, we must go where Jesus said he would be found.

It was Dorothy Day’s birthday on November 8th. Dorothy, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, began as a secular activist before her faith transformed her call to advocacy. Given our similar journeys, Dorothy became a mentor and teacher for me. When we first met, she didn’t want to talk about policy or ideology behind political issues; instead, she wanted to talk about faith and the crucial moral arguments behind the issues that our country faced.

I remember when I told her I had moved from secular student activism to a new faith, she smiled and asked, “So now you’re a Catholic, right?” My lame answer was, “Well, some of my best friends are Catholic.” She finally agreed that our then-new Sojourners movement could be called “The Protestant Worker.”

Dorothy’s faith was rooted in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells us we will be judged by how we treat “the least of these.” That passage was also my conversion text, and it remains the moral foundation of everything I do. At the Catholic Worker houses that Dorothy helped create, people mirrored the teachings of Jesus and didn’t just serve the less fortunate–they took care of them as if they were Jesus. “It was me,” Jesus said in The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. That realization was more radical than any revolutionary manifesto we had read as young secular activists.

For many of us, the Black Church has carried the spirit of Matthew 25 and acted as a faith anchor in America. Without the Black Church, there never would have been a successful Civil Rights Movement.

In a recent podcast conversation with my friend Justin Giboney, we reflected on how the Black Church, at its prophetic best, was never just a religious version of secular activism. Like Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, it’s always been about applying faith to key social justice issues, with the poor and vulnerable most in mind because Jesus requires it. And because Black people, and congregants in Black churches, were the most targeted, exploited, and discriminated against by white America, including white churches, the message of Matthew 25 has remained alive and urgent in those pews. My own return to faith led me to the Black Church, where I saw the Gospel lived out in real time.

Yet the media keeps trying to divide religion into neat political categories like the “religious right” versus the “religious left.” I still refuse and refute those divisive boxes completely. Faith is not about ideology–it’s about depth. As I often tell my students at Georgetown, “Don’t go left. Don’t go right. Go deeper.” That is what faith can help us do.

Justin and I also talked about many Democrats treating the Black Church like a campaign stop, showing up only around election time to court votes. But Black congregations don’t follow the individualistic ethic of “my truth.” They seek God’s truth for their lives, families, and communities. Many fail to understand that in the Black Church, family is not just nuclear or bourgeois–it’s necessary for survival. It is the community that holds them together through the hard times. And those so-called “cultural issues” which are often dismissed carry deep moral weight. The real question is how to engage them with justice, compassion, and a commitment to the dignity of all God’s children.

This week, I spoke to a group of pastors, activists, congregants, and professionals in the D.C. area about what it means to apply faith to their personal and public lives. I began not with politics but with an altar call to serve the marginal people in our society. I called them, and I call all of us, to stand for, speak up for, and act for the most vulnerable. Whether you are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, our sacred texts all demand it. And for followers of Christ, Matthew 25 makes it explicit that this is the exam question for the final judgment.

In Chicago, clergy are standing and witnessing outside ICE centers, offering community to detained immigrants, even after ICE banned prayer near the facility. They are holding the dignity and faith of our siblings who are being unlawfully and cruelly punished by the current administration and are willing to be arrested for it. And in Baltimore this week, following the urging from Pope Leo, Catholic bishops spoke out strongly against mass deportation being carried out by ICE at the direction of Trump.

I was also deeply moved by Terence Lester, a young minister in Atlanta, who sat for 42 hours on top of an empty refrigerator to highlight the 42 million Americans losing food assistance. His organization, Love Beyond Walls, regularly serves 700 families and has received more than 1000 calls from people needing food. Rev. Lester told Religious News Service in an interview from the top of the refrigerator, “No solution that we’ve ever created has come without being proximate to people. That is at the core of how Jesus showed up.”

If we want to find one another again, we must return to the places where God’s heart still beats strongest. Perhaps our debates about government programs like SNAP should take place at food banks where our help is needed and people are hungry. Maybe unity was never meant to be found in agreement but in compassion. When we stand with those who suffer, we stand closer to God and closer to one another. That is what Dorothy Day understood. That is what the Black Church has always known. And that is what faith, at its best, still calls us to remember. Defending the “least of these” might be the one thing that could bring us together.

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