The question before us is whether our faith is worth speaking aloud. (Photo Courtesy of Reclaiming Faith)
Reclaiming Faith | April 29, 2026
The question before us is whether our faith is worth speaking aloud.
Last week, I wrote a piece for Inside Philanthropy arguing that funders are underinvesting in the very faith leadership authoritarian movements fear most.
The piece was written for a philanthropic audience. But I have been thinking about it as a word for us, too — for progressive Christians, mainline Protestants, religious leaders, organizers, and all those who have watched the Christian right distort our faith and wondered how we got here.
For decades, the Christian right invested in religious infrastructure with astonishing discipline. They built media ecosystems, leadership pipelines, legal organizations, political training networks, direct-mail operations, and theological narratives that fused faith with fear, grievance, and power.
Meanwhile, many of us lowered our voices.
Some of this came from humility. Some from a genuine commitment to pluralism. Some from fear that speaking too explicitly from Christian conviction would make us sound coercive, exclusionary, or sectarian. Some were trying hard to unite various factions. Many of us had seen religion weaponized and wanted no part of that.
But over time, caution became retreat.
We allowed our public theology to recede from the public square just as the Christian right was claiming that space as its own. We secularized our language in civic life. We translated our deepest convictions into policy language while the right spoke in stories about God, nation, family, belonging, threat, and destiny.
And stories shape people. People do not live by policy alone. They live by meaning, moral imagination, and answers to the questions: Who are we? Who belongs? What is sacred? What future is worth sacrifice?
The Christian right understood this. Too often, we did not.
The church did not simply vanish
In a longer essay I have been working on about mainline Protestantism and Christian nationalism, I draw on Ryan Burge’s The Vanishing Church, which argues that the steep decline of mainline Protestantism cannot be understood apart from politics.
Mainline churches did not simply fade because people stopped caring about faith. Our decline accelerated as the Moral Majority rose, as conservative political operatives learned to weaponize religious identity, and as public Christianity became increasingly associated with partisan loyalty, anti-feminism, anti-LGBTQ politics, racial backlash, and authoritarian nostalgia.
Many people did not leave because they rejected the gospel. They left because they could no longer find it.
They left churches that had become battlegrounds. They left denominations exhausted by disinformation campaigns. They left because the public face of Christianity increasingly looked like domination rather than liberation, exclusion rather than mercy, cruelty rather than compassion.
And while some of us were busy explaining that “not all Christians” were like that, the Christian right was building power.
That is the painful part.
The Right not only built outside our institutions. It attacked the very denominations and communities that might have offered a more thoughtful, liberating, pluralistic, justice-centered Christianity. It targeted women’s leadership, feminist theology, LGBTQ inclusion, racial justice, and the moral credibility of the church itself.
Too often, moderates and progressives walked away rather than fight for the institutions that had formed us. I understand why. Many people were tired, hurt, or had good reason to distrust church power. But the result is that our public theology became thinner at the very moment the country needed it to become deeper.
We need a faith that can speak
Progressive Christians do not need to mimic the Christian right. That would betray everything we stand for.
Christian nationalism uses religion to claim power over others. Faithful public witness does the opposite: it draws on sacred texts, spiritual practice, and moral tradition to restrain power, defend dignity, broaden belonging, and call communities to courage.
That kind of faith does not threaten democracy. It helps protect it.
But it requires us to speak. It requires pastors who can say clearly that cruelty is not strength; congregations that can teach people why the Bible is a story of liberation, not domination; and seminaries, denominations, religious nonprofits, writers, artists, organizers, and funders who understand that theology is not a side project. It is part of how people make sense of the world.
It also requires us to stop assuming that secular language is always the more strategic option.
The Golden Calf at Occupy Wall Street became a public theological statement about idolatry, inequality, and greed. (Credit: Timothy Krause via Flickr)
We must honor religious diversity and include those with no religious affiliation. And we must never confuse public theology with theocracy. But there is a difference between imposing religion and offering moral witness, between weaponizing faith and reclaiming it, between Christian nationalism and Christianity.
People are hungry for that difference.
This is a call to action
That is why I hope my Inside Philanthropy piece is not only read as a call to funders. I hope it becomes a call to action for all of us.
If we believe our faith has something to offer this moment, we have to invest in it. We have to fund our own public voice: religious writers, theologians, organizers, clergy networks, leadership development programs, narrative strategy, rapid response, spiritual formation, and public education.
We have to help people understand how authoritarianism uses religion — and how faith can resist it.
We have to teach again that Scripture was written by people living under empire, exile, occupation, and tyranny. We have to remind our communities that Exodus is not just an ancient story, but a freedom story; that the prophets were not polite commentators, but truth-tellers confronting corrupt power; and that Jesus was not crucified for being vague, but for proclaiming a kingdom that threatened the powers of his time.
We have to give people language for the faith they still carry but may no longer know how to speak, because the Christian right has not only distorted Christianity in politics. It has distorted Christianity in the public imagination.
And that is a spiritual crisis.
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The resources are already here
Progressive faith communities often feel constrained by shrinking budgets, aging buildings, and declining membership. Those realities are real, but they are not the whole story.
We still steward immense resources: moral credibility, educated and committed leaders, land, endowments, institutions, relationships, pension funds, communications platforms, and deep reservoirs of spiritual wisdom.
The question is whether we will mobilize those resources for this moment.
Who is in our pews? Lawyers, teachers, nurses, nonprofit leaders, business owners, grandparents, students, artists, public servants — people who know something is wrong and are searching for courage.
What do they need from us? More than reassurance. They need formation, language, community, and moral clarity. They need to know that resisting cruelty is not a partisan act, but a faithful one. They need to know that defending migrants, LGBTQ youth, religious minorities, women, workers, and all those targeted by authoritarian politics is not a distraction from the gospel. It is one way the gospel becomes visible.
We cannot cede the sacred
Authoritarian movements understand the power of religion. That is why they fight so hard to control it. They know that morally grounded communities can interrupt fear, that faith can sustain courage over time, and that sacred stories can expose false gods — nationalism, domination, greed, violence, and the worship of strongmen.
That is why public theology matters, why progressive faith leadership matters, and why we cannot cede the sacred to those who would use it to bless cruelty.
This is not a moment for nostalgia. We cannot simply rebuild the church as it was. Too many people were harmed or excluded by that church. Too many communities were ignored. Too many injustices were tolerated. But neither can we abandon the field.
Something new is trying to be born: a faith rooted in dignity, democracy, pluralism, courage, and love. A faith that does not seek control, but liberation. A faith that does not erase difference, but builds solidarity across it.
That work will not happen by accident. It will require investment, imagination, courage, and those of us who still believe in a liberating gospel to stop whispering.
We are not powerless. We are not irrelevant.
But we do have to decide, again, whether our faith is worth speaking aloud.
What we can do now
The Christian right did not build power by accident. It invested in media, leadership, theology, organizing, and narrative. Those of us committed to a liberating faith must do the same.
All of us have a contribution to make.
So here is my invitation.
If you are a pastor, preach and teach it.If you are a funder, fund it.If you are a denominational leader, build it.If you are a layperson, ask for it.If you are a writer, artist, organizer, or theologian, help us give people language for the faith they still carry but may no longer know how to speak.
Share this essay with a pastor, funder, seminary professor, denominational leader, or organizer. Start a conversation in your congregation about what it would mean to rebuild public theology in this moment. Ask where your community’s moral voice is being formed, funded, and made visible.
And support organizations, networks, and leaders working to reclaim faith as a force for dignity, democracy, pluralism, and love.
The Christian right funded its voice. Now it is time to fund ours.
Gabriele Stonyte
The Rev. Jennifer Butler, founder of Faith in Democracy (Courtesy Photo)
Rev. Jennifer Butler founded Faith in Democracy (FiD) in December 2023. Before that, she was the founding executive director of Faith in Public Life (FPL) where she served from 2005 to 2023. She chaired President Obama’s third White House Council on Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships from 2015-2016. Before founding FPL, Butler spent ten years organizing globally to address gender equality, the AIDS pandemic, children’s rights, and peace in the Middle East as the Presbyterian Church (USA) representative to the UN.
This article is republished with permission from her Substack blog, Reclaiming Faith.