Yves here. The post below by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back uses a one-time church, still supervised by a pastor, now a provider of free medical and dental care and other services for the poor, as a hopeful tale of communities banding together to practice the Christian message of care for the disadvantaged. Hopefully accounts like these will inspire others to provide support, whether via labor or funding, to similar efforts.
However, this account interweaves a potentially important development that still seems to be under the radar: how well-heeled Evangelical mega-churches are also stepping up to provide assistance to the poor, and are including political indoctrination in the program.
By Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back. Originally published at TomDispatch
Most days, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Bible Belt, the old sanctuary at Christ Lutheran Church sits empty. Decades ago, it was home to a congregation of 3,000 people. By the late 1990s, that number had dwindled to seven. At the turn of the millennium, Jody Silliker, a young minister fresh out of seminary, was sent to shutter the downtown church, a mile from the state legislature in Harrisburg.
Instead, she immersed herself in the deindustrialized community, meeting unhoused families, the unemployed, migrant workers, sex workers, and other low-wage laborers. Just a few years after welfare reform eviscerated the social safety net and proclaimed the era of “personal responsibility,” Silliker retrofitted the church annex and opened a free medical clinic.
Earlier this spring, we visited Christ Lutheran. We’ve been on the road since April, meeting with leaders from poor and dispossessed communities in this country and sharing notes from our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. As the Trump administration abducts our neighbors off the streets and eviscerates everything from Medicaid to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, we want to better understand what it will take to ignite a democratic awakening in this country. How, in the words of theologian Howard Thurman, the “masses of people, with their backs constantly up against the wall” in Donald Trump’s America, can push back together.
A Battle for the Bible in the Battleground State of Pennsylvania
In small towns, as well as cities like Harrisburg, there is an underreported but epic struggle being waged for the hearts and minds of everyday people, with ripple effects for the entire nation. And the church — its pulpit, pews, and survival programs — is a critical staging ground for that struggle. There are Christians who are preaching and practicing the ministry of Jesus, the son of God, who himself was unhoused and undocumented and sided with the poor, the sick, the indebted, the incarcerated, and the immigrant, while decrying the idolatry of tyrants.
And then there are Christian nationalists, whose religion of empire is more akin to the worship of Caesar than the Jesus of the scriptures.
Today, Christian nationalists are attempting to transform our democracy into their dominion and remake (or simply dismantle) the government in the image of Project 2025. Earlier this spring, even before Trump’s disastrous “Big Beautiful Bill” passed Congress, Paul Dans, the architect of Project 2025, marveled that the new administration’s policies were unfurling on a scale and scope beyond his “wildest dreams.” Now, those same Christian nationalists are gutting access to Medicaid, banning reproductive freedom and gender-affirming healthcare, criminalizing the unhoused, and scapegoating immigrant communities in the courts and Congress, even though the scriptures decry such actions. “Woe to you who deprive the rights of the poor, making women and homeless children your prey,” laments the prophet Isaiah.
Thankfully, there are brave faith leaders standing firmly in the breach, refusing to let the Bible and the church be hijacked by extremists. At Christ Lutheran, Jody Silliker’s successor, Pastor Matthew Best, is now following in her footsteps. Just a few miles from Life Center, an evangelical megachurch that hosted Elon Musk late in the 2024 election season, Pastor Best continues to transform his resplendent church into a community mission. On the second floor, volunteer dentists pull rotten teeth and perform root canals, cost-free. In the basement, nurses treat emergencies, mental health crises, and chronic health issues. More than 50 national flags hang from the ceiling, each representing the nationality of a patient. Since 2018, 100,000 people have walked under those flags to receive medical care. Nobody is asked for payment, documentation, or insurance.
In early July, right after Trump signed his Big Beautiful Bill, Pastor Best preached a sermon reminding his multiracial, multilingual, intergenerational, and predominantly poor congregation that they were not alone in feeling like exiles in their own land. As he put it,
“Jeremiah 29 is a letter written to people in exile — or about to be. It’s sent to those who have lost everything: their homes, their land, their freedom, their safety. It’s sent to those who feel like strangers in a strange land, people who are trying to make sense of how everything they depended on has fallen apart. At the time of this letter, some of the people of Judah have already been taken into exile in Babylon. They were the first wave — the leaders, artisans, and young people deported when Babylon invaded. They are trying to build a life in a strange land. But back in Jerusalem, others are still there — living in a fragile illusion of normal. The temple still stands. A king still rules. But it won’t last. More exile is coming.”
To bring his point home, Pastor Best translated the Bible into what he called “Harrisburg English”:
“This is what the Lord says to all of you living in exile — the ones just barely scraping by, the ones pushed to the margins, the ones wondering if God has left.
‘I see you. I haven’t abandoned you. Build your homes — even if they’re one-room apartments. Grow food — even if it’s a tomato plant in a pot. Love your families — whatever they look like. Create beauty in the middle of struggle. Pray for your city — even when it feels broken. Don’t check out. Don’t give up. For in its healing, you will find your own. Don’t listen to those who say things are fine. Don’t trust those who profit off your pain. Because I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘Plans for welfare and not for harm. Plans to give you a future and a hope. When you cry out, I will listen. When you search for me with your whole heart, you will find me. Not in the halls of Congress. Not behind gated communities. But in free clinics. In shared meals. In prayers whispered through tears. In justice rolling down like waters. I will gather you. I will bring you home.’
“That, beloved, is the gospel in exile.”
Pastor Best’s bottom-up ministry is mirrored by others in that area. His friends Tammy Rojas and Matthew Rosing, who have survived homelessness, incarceration, and low wages, are commissioned ministers with the Freedom Church of the Poor, a spiritual home for grassroots organizers founded during the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic. They are also longtime leaders of Put People First PA!, which organizes poor people across the state of Pennsylvania to defend Medicaid and demand universal healthcare.
In 2019, Rojas and Rosing led an effort to stop the corporate capture and closure of St. Joseph Hospital in Lancaster, an hour southwest of Harrisburg. For the couple, the fight couldn’t have been more personal: Rojas had been born at that hospital and Rosing received lifesaving care there on multiple occasions. Ultimately, despite their efforts, St. Joseph was closed.
After that defeat, they redoubled their efforts to organize within the region’s abandoned communities. Today, in the wake of Trump’s historic Medicaid cuts and as Rojas and Rosing anticipate the closure of more hospitals, they continue to recruit new members and allies for their “Healthcare is a Human Right” campaign at feeding programs and free clinics like the one at Christ Lutheran. Around their necks, they all too appropriately wear stoles that read: “Fight Poverty, Not the Poor” and “Jesus Was Homeless.”
Dominionism in the “City on the Hill”
Rojas and Rosing face formidable opposition in the region. In Lancaster, where they live, Christian nationalists are working hard to amass power. In recent years, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) has set up shop in that historically Anabaptist area. Once a fringe movement of the Christian Right, NAR has quietly built a sophisticated and well-funded national operation over the last couple decades. In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as the “greatest threat to American democracy that most people have never heard of.”
NAR churches in Lancaster have proliferated, taking over, or “steeplejacking,” historic and dying churches. On first glance, such local church activity may appear quite benign. NAR leaders provide food and other material and spiritual aid through their ministries, artfully deploying the language of diversity and encouraging people to “come as you are.” Some families attend services just to sing lively renditions of contemporary Christian music. Indeed, many people join those churches, which have become de facto community centers, for the most human of needs: connection and fellowship.
Stick around long enough, though, and you’ll discover an institutional pipeline suffused with toxic theology that funnels people toward Christian nationalism. In their churches, food banks, recovery services, and community meetings, local NAR leaders offer individual and highly spiritualized explanations for this country’s systemic crises of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and addiction. The solution to these and other social problems, they insist, is fidelity to a dominionist God and a theology eager to bring Christian nationalism to, and keep it in, power. Forget science, reasonable public policy, or the separation of church and state. In meetings with more dedicated church activists, these same leaders invoke Biblical imagery to proclaim spiritual warfare against “demonic” influences in our government, schools, and family structures (that is, diverse expressions of religious, political, or gender identity).
This far-right movement melds its grassroots activity in south-central Pennsylvania with a broader campaign to influence a new generation of county and state politicians, law enforcement officials, businesspeople, and educators. In the years ahead, Christian nationalists like them, who now command power at the highest reaches of the federal government, will only intensify their activities across the country. Indeed, a number of figures within Trump’s cabinet and his coterie of advisers, as well as congressional leaders like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, have close ties to the Christian nationalist ecosystem. These are the same politicians who championed Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, including its historic tax cuts for the wealthy, increased military, detention, and immigration enforcement spending, and death-dealing cuts to the social safety net.
A Moral Resurrection in the Age of Trump?
To fight back, we need to forge new alliances across racial, religious, geographic, and partisan lines. Certainly, today’s ongoing political crisis should remind concerned Christians that they can’t sit out the battle for the Bible and should remind the rest of us that we can’t concede religion to extremists. Christian nationalists weaponize the Good Book because they believe they have a monopoly on morality and can distort the word of God with impunity.
The policy effects of their theological distortions will continue to be devastating. In early June, for example, the Minnesota state legislature voted to strip healthcare from undocumented immigrants, despite majority control by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. To rationalize his vote, Republican Representative Isaac Schultz blithely argued: “The role of the church — the role of people of faith — is to care for our neighbors. Yes…But not in this instance, specifically.”
Clearly, Shultz has not studied the Bible closely enough. If he had, he would have discovered that the Bible’s 2,000 passages about poverty and justice constitute perhaps the most important mass media ever produced that had something good to say about immigrants, the poor, the sick, and otherwise marginalized people. In scripture after scripture, Jesus condemns the violent policies of empire, which enriches itself on the backs of the poor. Instead, he proclaims the Good News of Jubilee: a vision of social and economic emancipation for the entirety of humanity.
In this country, the liberatory heart of Christianity, among other religious traditions, has always been a source of strength for popular social movements. In every previous era, there were people who grounded their freedom struggles in the holy word and spirit of God. Today, the work of Pastors Best, Rojas, and Rosing in Pennsylvania’s Bible Belt underscores the still-vital role of religion in advancing a more just and vibrant democracy in the Trump era. In Harrisburg and Lancaster, these Christians are building a bottom-up and deeply moral movement that recognizes the material, spiritual, and emotional needs of everyday people.
“The church speaks to birth, death, and resurrection,” Pastor Best explained while giving us a tour of Christ Lutheran’s free medical clinic. “This is the resurrection.”
Copyright 2025 Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back
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I cannot believe this is happening in the richest country in the world. How can the U.S. afford to wage war abroad yet fail to provide for its own people?
When Clinton ended welfare all kinds of conservative churches took over many of those functions. Deeply conservative (and anti-abortion) churches in Black communities got a huge boost.
Neoliberalism has eroded the functions of many grassroots orgs in the same way. When I worked in the DR with CONAMUCA, the national women’s peasant organization, they had gone from being a national left group that fought for comprehensive land reform to flying around in their one truck getting food–and succor–to members who were without. We have a growing hunger crisis here in the FL Panhandle, and have been struggling to get food to families, many now afraid to leave their homes, who have lost a breadwinner to ICE.
Thank you for posting this. I plan to print it out & share with others. I am one who didn’t take seriously the threat of Christian nationalism, because I thought the warnings about it were MSNBC or CNN hyperbole, and actually didn’t know about NAR. I note that even traditional, so-called Biblical Christian conservatives are beginning to warn of the lust for power (and actions counter to the Christian tradition) of the New Apostolic Reformation. I suspect the Catholics and Orthodox also should be aware of what NAR is doing (and some even link Peter Thiel to NAR, because he’s using it for his purposes).
A tip of the hat to pastors Silliker and Best and Christ Lutheran. That congregation is walking the walk.
As for the New Apostolic Reformation, this church body closely parallels what Octavia Butler foresaw in the Parable series: a highly politicized, right-wing church that provides help in a dissolving country, but with a little extra “icing” on the cake.
This article provides a good preview of what lies ahead as the State fails: competing worldviews battle over the future.
Lurking in the margins of this is the recent court ruling on the endorsement of political candidates by churches. While it’s been mis-reported as major change in tax law (e.g., NY Times: “I.R.S. Says Churches Can Endorse Candidates From the Pulpit“), the ruling was narrower and limited (see this First Things article). Still, it’s an opening, and a dangerous one. On the other hand, I’d be fine with churches endorsing political candidates, if their tax-free status were revoked, and they were forced to operate like any other for-profit business.
Careful what you wish for. Remove the tax-free status and it’ll be the small, community oriented churches that go under… the big mega-churches and groups like NAR will just shrug it off as a cost of doing business.
The thing to watch out for is if Christian nationalism seeks to amalgamate with militarism and becomes a sort of Christian militarism with the church providing the goals and the military providing the muscle. many years ago I read how entrenched Christian fundamentalists were at the US Air Force Academy and how atheists came in for rough treatment by their superiors for being so. You could say that it would be a match made in heaven because of the similarities with both groups and woe any political leader that opposed this happening. Come to think of it, I remember a Robert Heinlein story postulating this happening-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22If_This_Goes_On%E2%80%94%22
And he wrote of this way back in 1940.
“The thing to watch out for is if Christian nationalism seeks to amalgamate with militarism and becomes a sort of Christian militarism…”
Things that make you go hmmm.
Funny but thinking back on my churchly upbringing I don’t recall “gender affirming care” as being among the Bible’s concerns. Could it be that DEI is also hijacking traditional Christianity for poltical purposes as more right wing forces have always done?
The truth is that a new populism based on Christianity is as unlikely to be welcome by the Democrats as by the Republicans since both are devotees of the church of money. It may also mean embracing the socialist ideas that were once common among many religious believers since the debate highlighted above is not new at all.
So if a new party of Christian Democrats wants to organize in the US then more power to them. But one suspects this will go down poorly with the secular left who regard all believers as a threat.
I would argue that DEI has always been rooted in Christianity.
Diversity – Jesus taught and welcomed all, regardless of ethnicity, culture or background.
Equity – All are children of God, all Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ. The concept of equity is very Christian.
Inclusion – All are welcome and included, especially outcasts and lower castes, a sharp contrast to Judaism, also very Christian.
I don’t think DEI is being co-opted by Christianity, I think DEI is and always was an expression of Christianity and Christian values.
Also “gender affirming care” is not DEI. DEI to my mind is specifically about the workplace, the corporation, not healthcare. Healthcare for all, regardless, is going to reflect a core Christian value, right? The reason so many hospitals worldwide are named after saints. And Christians are theoretically not supposed to judge.
If it’s not part of the above argument then why bring it up in the article?
As for mixing religion and current political disputes my long ago Baptists would quote “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” This is how the more conservative religious justify political actions that the above considers hypocritical.
Meanwhile if some churches are filling the social service gap that’s great.
Healthcare for all, regardless, is going to reflect a core Christian value, right?
No, unless Saudi Arabia and Quatar have had a sudden conversions. /sarc.
It may well reflect some Christian value but just as likely also reflects an Islamic value.
When there are flooding and wildfires and hurricanes and tornados, I’m guessing many of these churches making a bigger show of helping than actually helping, like Samaritan’s Purse and some of the other groups who are always underfoot. (They typically do have earnest volunteers who are willing to do the work, after being photographed next to pallets of bottled water that are for their own volunteers, and stacks if useless newborn diapers.)
My experience – granted this was about 15 years ago – with churches and flood relief was actually the opposite. After the immediate drama had past and the press had gone home, it was mostly retired Presbyterians and Lutherans volunteering for their respective disaster relief orgs who were still on-site, mapping out who remained homeless, which properties had been abandoned, and what services were needed by the people who were able to move back in. The area that I volunteered on was rural enough that the county was already stretched thin and local government was obviously leaving the church groups to do the boots-on-the-ground work with what seemed like pretty minimal supervision. Considering the households in the area who seemed eager not to draw the attention of the authorities, it seemed like a good partnership.
That said, the people I saw involved in these church orgs were of a generation/mentality in which active civic/party participation, church attendance, Rotary Club membership, etc. all went hand-in-hand. They were “classically liberal” in the sense that they understood themselves to be citizens of a somewhat pluralistic society and that required them to work across parties, denominations, organizations, etc. to get practical help to people. My concern is that as that idea of social participation fades what we will be left with is a lack of organizing skill, leaving the good-hearted but overwhelmed to acquiesce to organizations that do seem to have it together, like NAR.
How sad you think people do this for a false photo op.
How very sad.
Offering meaningful material care, fictive kinship networks, and spaces where one’s identity is not only affirmed but celebrated, to abandoned (White) youth and impoverished (White) folks, is a long-standing recruiting technique used by neo-Nazis and other White Supremacist groups. It seems to come and go in waves (depending on how much White people are feeling the pinch–thus, for example, the big neo-Nazi explosion during Reaganomics), so it’s not surprising to see it popping up more explicitly, regularly, and forcefully these days. Much of this, in our current manifestation, is interwoven with Evangelical Christianity and conservative Catholicism or various forms of Christian orthodoxy. Thus, what we see in Ontario is less of a return to the “charitas” practised by the early Jesus movement and more of a savvy recruiting method used by increasingly militant and emboldened White supremacists.
The BarnaIbus Center in Fernandina Beach, Florida, was a Catholic Church project in the late 1980s but lots of other faith-based and secular sources of funds and volunteers have joined over the years. It has counseling, health, and dental services largely funded by thrift shops and donations. It is an important part of the community’s response to challenges nobody else is funding.
IIRC, there is a passage in the Bible that says something to the effect of “Satan can quote quote the bible when it serves his purpose…”
tax the churches
“I cannot believe this is happening in the (soon to formerly be) richest country in the world.”
Not all churches would get taxed. Just those endorsing political candidates.
It’s always been a right-wing truism that government should not be helping the poor, that those who cannot help themselves should be taken care of by private charities instead. And private charities = churches and other sources of moral and political indoctrination most of the time. The job of government should be restricted to policing that protects the wealthy and their property from internal “enemies” (thieves, socialists, labor unions, upstart competitors, etc.) and a strong military to deter external ones from invading and taking the wealth of “our” rich away from them. At least that’s what I’ve been hearing for 50 years or more from the right side of the aisle. So we’re just accelerating down the path toward making that our reality. And the takeover of American Christianity by advocates of the Darbyite heresy has made it more adoring of the rich (who funded many of the fundamentalist projects), in contradiction to the actual words of Jesus.
Since they are on a rapturous bent, they can be raptured right now by traveling to Gaza and joining the christian Palestinians waiting to starve to death so Trump can build his golden calf monument to to his god – $$.
This fight for hearts and minds article about political organizing through Churches at a local level seems to raise an even more important strategic issue.
Neal Meyer, in his recent article “Typology of Socialisms in the 21st century,” ended his analysis with the following:
“Socialist governments have come to power by democratic and insurrectionary means and in many (maybe most) cases that has led to the demobilization and disempowerment of popular movements. That’s a challenge for the “smartest advocates of both roads that I mention. If the coming to power of socialist governments consistently leads to a decline in popular power, maybe there’s a serious flaw in either the theory of using state power to build socialism or the theory that popular power can sustain a new socialist government once it’s in power–or both.”