As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the Black Church has an opportunity to be a hub for political mobilization and civil rights advocacy. Facing an ever-changing landscape shaped by the second term of the Trump administration, how can the Black Church respond to increasing, escalating threats to democracy, including federal budget cuts to Medicaid and food assistance?
Suggested Reading
According to The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, one of the nation’s foremost progressive Black clerics and social justice advocates, believes that the Black church has a mandate to reclaim its prophetic voice. To help churches organize, the 2026 Public Theology & Public Policy Conference is currently taking place from April 12 to 14, 2026.
Hosted by Repairers of the Breach and the Yale Center for Public Theology & Public Policy, this biennial gathering coincides with the 2026 midterm elections, serving as a critical training ground for clergy, scholars, and moral activists. The theme for the conference is “What Are The Moral and Spiritual Issues of the 2026 Elections?”
Speaking with Tatsha Robertson, the editor of the Root, Barber shared his views on the critical role that the Black Church plays in the upcoming midterms.
“The church must go micro. Roland Martin and I announced our initiative recently: ‘ Give us 1,000 ministers, and we can train how to do massive civic education, civic participation in targeted areas,” Barber said. “I don’t trust anybody who says, ‘I’m just going to go out and register everybody to vote.” “That’s just rhetoric.”
One of the key aspects of the conference is to organize Black Churches around voter turnout and targeted voter engagement on the margins of states and key districts. Barber pointed out that in the state of North Carolina, “Trump won by 185,000 votes” due to Black constituents staying home with their votes. In another predominantly Black district in North Carolina, Trump won by “10,000 votes” because 85,000 people didn’t vote.
“Over 400,000 African Americans didn’t vote,” Barber shared. “So, anybody interested in being competitive must say, ‘Where is it that we need to target?” Not, “I’m just going to get everybody.”
Barber said ministers need to ask themselves: have we organized that community that needs to be targeted: “And if you’ve organized that community, what have you done in the neighborhood, in the city, and in the state?” Barber continued. “We have to engage in micro-level, strategic organizing, and that’s very biblical.
While the conference is focused on empowering Black Churches, Barber insisted that the strategies and the overall movement leading up to the midterms must be multi-racial with like-minded, progressive voices whose faith calls them to fight for equality and justice.
Citing the inter-racial and inter-denominational examples of the Civil Rights Movement, Barber spoke about how the blueprint is still the path forward. The conference includes “Pentecostal, Methodist, Unitarians, Jewish, Muslim, people of all different faith traditions.” The conference centers on coalition-building.
“You know, it was James Reeb, who was a white Unitarian, and Martin Luther King, who went to Selma, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, an Orthodox rabbi, and the head of the Orthodox Church,” Barber said
“Just because you’re Black doesn’t mean you’re prophetic,” he went on. “Just because you have a King Day once a year doesn’t mean you’re engaged in social justice and activism. And just because a church is predominantly white does not mean that it is a white evangelical church.”
Barber also called out the evangelical Christians as a major barrier to social justice for all, a demographic that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024 at 80%. According to the Pew Research Center, currently, “most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump and another 58% say ‘they support all or most of his plans and policies.”
“The white church has to say no to white evangelicalism and anybody that presents a form of religion where white is more important than Jesus, where white is more important than being an Evangelical, which means ‘good news,” he explained.
Barber said that the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is for the “brokenhearted” and the most vulnerable of society. The gospel doesn’t genuflect to the throne of whiteness.
“So any claim of good news that is just another form of extremist policies being wrapped in religion is not good news,” Barber stated.
Barber noted that “systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care/the war economy/militarization of our communities” are interlocking forms of social injustice as foreboding, “interlocking” threats to American democracy. Getting to the core of these issues with a modern lens is the sacred duty of the Black faith community.”
Barber said the conference is bringing everybody to the table to look at what the key moral issues of this moment are; what kind of political violence has been taking place, and what kind of political vision is necessary to overcome that violence. “Trump is a symptom of something much greater that is broken in our society,” he added. “And it’s not the first time we’ve seen it.”
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.