To fulfill Jesus’ mandate to minister to “the least of these,” he is leading a revival of the Poor People’s Campaign, which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. founded in the late 1960s and Bishop Barber restarted in 2018: a national multiracial coalition of Americans working to address the challenges of those struggling to make ends meet.
Historically, poorer Americans have had much lower voting rates than other groups. The Poor People’s Campaign is mobilizing an estimated 15 million voters to cast ballots for candidates who address issues they care about, which has less to do with who uses what bathroom and more to do with a living wage and universal health care.
“Poor people are the new swing voters,” Bishop Barber said. “And every real evangelical knows that the first issue that Jesus talked about was poverty.” Bishop Barber called out the failures of the federal government and politicians who write “oppressive decrees,” ignore the needy and rob the poor.
To organize Christian voters against Trumpism, Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor, founded the nonprofit Vote Common Good, which aims to engage Christian voters. He’s driving across the country in a bus to swing states to rally these voters against Mr. Trump.
“We’re specifically targeting those who want to detach their voting habits from the MAGA movement,” Mr. Pagitt told me. It seemed to work in 2020, he noted, citing heavily white evangelical West Michigan, where Mr. Trump’s support dropped to 62 percent from 80 percent in two critical counties, delivering Democrats their win.
Evangelicals like these hew more closely to the original identity of evangelicals in America, which emerged from the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, during which many Christians committed themselves to personal piety and a duty to address the ills of the world, as Jesus called his followers to do. Among other things, they campaigned for the abolition of slavery, ministered to the poor and aided immigrants — all informed by their reading of Scripture.
This strain of Christianity is closer to the mainline Protestant tradition that I grew up in, which saw the Bible as poetry, metaphor and history. I was not brought up to read Scripture literally, as many evangelicals do. As an adult, I am not a regular churchgoer. Yet I find that the convictions of these ardent evangelicals who stand against Mr. Trump — even as a vast majority of white evangelicals have rallied to him — cast a rare and hopeful vision of America’s moral heart.
“We refuse to cede Scripture to the right,” Jonah Overton, a 37-year-old pastor from Milwaukee, told me.
Instead of casting Mr. Trump as a holy martyr, these Christians offer an alternative vision of him as an Antichrist, who abuses his power and in many ways resembles the emperors of Rome. (The Antichrist is sometimes likened to Nero, who persecuted Christians and sometimes crucified them.)
These other evangelicals also commit to following word for word Jesus’ moral teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, in which he commands people to “give to the needy,” as well as “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” among other practical but difficult tasks. This provides a blueprint for the Christian ethic. “There is no following Jesus without following his teachings on helping the poor and oppressed,” Lisa Sharon Harper, an evangelical theologian, told me.
Some American evangelicals justify Mr. Trump’s decidedly unchristian acts like cheating on his wife with a porn star, in service of advancing abortion restrictions. But adherents’ beliefs about how to follow Jesus’ teachings vary. And evangelicals who have found the weaponization of Scripture distasteful are showing us that their vote is very much up for grabs.
These evangelicals, who’ve long stood at the edge of their tradition, are eager to show fellow believers an authentically biblical way to oppose Mr. Trump. It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party is willing to take these believers, who are also persuadable voters, seriously.