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    The Rev William Barber’s ‘moral movement’ confronts Trump’s America. Can it work?

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    On 2 June, at St Mark’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor.It was the first Moral Monday of the summer – a tradition of weekly, nonviolent protest that began in North Carolina in 2013 and now serves as the beating heart of the Rev William Barber’s national movement to end poverty and systemic injustice. “I am not afraid,” the congregation sang. They clapped in rhythm. They swayed in place. Their voices, layered and lived in, reverberated through the rafters: “I would die for liberation, because I know why I was made.” It was part worship, part invocation, part warning. They folded into the center of the sanctuary as they sang covenants of nonviolence – pledges to neither resist arrest nor retaliate, to remain disciplined and dignified in the face of confrontation. One organizer stepped forward and asked them to consider the gravity of what they were saying. “In every cell of your body,” he said, “do you believe that?”Barber, the co-chair of the revived Poor People’s campaign, a national movement to challenge inequality in all its forms through moral protest and policy change, has spent years preparing people for moments like this. Barber draws on a tradition that views justice as a covenant rather than charity, as a sacred demand to confront moral rot. Right now, that means challenging the Trump administration’s second-term agenda – and the Republican-controlled Congress advancing legislation that would slash Medicaid, food assistance and public education, while simultaneously giving tax breaks to some of the wealthiest Americans – or what Barber has simply called “policy murder”, a wholesale dismantling of services for the poor and vulnerable.But Barber’s battle is both a moral rebellion against Trump’s America and against the deeper architecture of inequality that has survived every administration. His movement doesn’t simply resist a president. It challenges a political theology that weds nationalism to capitalism and cloaks exploitation in scripture. In Barber’s view, Trump isn’t the disease – he’s the symptom of a nation that never fully confronted its sins. “Jesus was not crucified because he was just talking about private sin,” he told me. “He was crucified because he turned over the money tables. That’s where government and religion had come into an unholy relationship, and were robbing from the poor.”View image in fullscreenIn a sermon the day before, Barber had turned to 2 Kings – to four lepers outside a besieged city, caught between certain death and uncertain deliverance. “Why sit we here until we die?” they ask, before rising to move toward the enemy camp. That movement, Barber reminded his audience, is what made the miracle possible. The lepers rose to risk the unknown and found the enemy had already left, leaving behind food, shelter and silver. Deliverance had already come; it just took the marginalized to move first. The US is in its own such moment, Barber said. “This is murder by policy,” he preached, pointing to the $1.1tn in proposed cuts to healthcare, food aid and climate infrastructure. “We cannot stay here and die.”Organizers passed protest signs around the sanctuary like communion: Fund Life, Not Death. Our Faith Demands Justice, Not Policy Murder. Handouts followed: 13.7 million people are at risk of losing health insurance. Eleven million at risk of losing food assistance. Billions redirected from public programs to tax breaks for corporations, defense contractors and deportation forces. Congress was deliberating over what Barber calls a “big, bad, ugly, disgusting, deadly budget”, and they wanted to take a moral stand.The room was intentionally diverse – it’s what Barber calls a fusion movement, rooted in the idea that poor and working people across race, religion and region have a moral force capable of reshaping the nation. They prayed. They assigned roles. Some would march. Some would risk arrest. All would bear witness. Slowly, deliberately, the congregation began to move. First, those in wheelchairs; then the people along the walls peeled off. Then, one section at a time, released with care – no rush, no clamor. They lined up two by two, like they were boarding an ark. It was a practiced procession, not chaos. The organizers had been clear: move like the black-and-white footage you’ve seen, like those who marched before you – with order, with discipline, with conviction.“When politicians and priests bless policies that hurt the poor,” Barber said, “that’s when the prophets have to rise.” For Barber, this is the prophet’s role: to expose, to indict and to force a moral reckoning in the public square. The structure of his movement’s actions, the insistence on grounding resistance in both scripture and strategy, is shaped by a long religious protest tradition in the US. Now, under a second Trump term, with safety nets unraveling and rights under siege, that witness feels urgent again. As the movement experiments with decentralized leadership, more youth recruitment and a sharper digital presence, it will have to decide: is it a movement to awaken the conscience, or to seize the wheel? Can this movement still meet the scale of today’s coordinated assault on democracy, rights and the poor?‘Silence is not an option’Barber met the demonstrators at the corner of East Capitol Street NE and 1st Street SE, where the procession paused before the slow walk towards the steps of the supreme court. He stood with his cane in hand, a white stole slung over his shoulders that read: “Jesus was a poor man.” He joined the group like a hinge between past and present. No microphone. No grand announcement. Just a nod, a steadying breath, and then a turn toward the supreme court.Passersby smiled and posed for selfies, unaware or unbothered by the stakes. The procession kept moving, members singing as they went. The air filled with hymns and the weight of memory. At the court steps, the crowd swelled; marshals implored folks to move closer. They sang battle hymns through the speaker system, a thread of the sacred pulled taut across the concrete. The day was structured to echo the civil rights movement, orderly, solemn and visually potent.When Barber took the mic, he drew on the movement’s rhetorical authority as well. “We gather here not in protest alone,” Barber said, “but in prophetic power. We stand not just as people of faith, but as stewards of moral memory. Injustice has written itself into the budget lines, and silence is not an option when lives hang in the balance of a ledger.” Barber reminded the crowd that the country’s wounds were not just policy failures; they were moral abscesses. “There can be no healing of the soul of America without healing the body,” he said. Not while people are starving. Not while they’re uninsured. Not while injustice is passed off as fiscal responsibility.View image in fullscreenHe said something similar in 2020, in the days after Biden was elected president and many people across the nation released what felt like four years of held breath. Biden called for unity; Barber pushed back. “There has to be division before there can be healing,” he said. In Barber’s theology, peace doesn’t mean calm. It means justice. False unity, he warned, is not reconciliation – it’s complicity. And that is the deeper challenge beneath Barber’s movement: not just to resist one budget, or even one party, but to confront the country’s underlying sickness: its habit of mistaking cruelty for order, and order for peace.‘What will you do with the breath you have left?’“They say they’re cutting waste, fraud and abuse. But what they’re saying is it’s wasteful to lift people, fraudulent to help them live and abusive to make sure they have healthcare,” he said. For a moment, it felt like the church services I’d grown up in. Come on, Barber! a clergyman shouted. Yessuh! a resonant voice rang from the other side of the crowd. By the time Barber started whooping – stretching his syllables as his voice reached a thunderous crescendo – the crowd had been whipped into a passionate holler.Barber told stories of movement members who died without care – Pam in Alabama, Jade in North Carolina – who called him not for comfort, but for commitment. Don’t quit, they said. “They had the courage to fight even while they were dying,” he said. “We ought to have the courage to fight while we’re living.”Then he slowed and asked a simple question to those gathered: “What will you do with the breath you have left?” The question hung in the air. He didn’t wait for an answer. A few days later, he told me why it sticks with him. “That was George Floyd’s cry. That was my brother’s cry – he died in his 60s, waiting on healthcare. That was the cry of people during Covid: ‘I can’t breathe.’ That’s what I hear when I say that,” he told me. “The breath you have left – that’s what you’ve been given. That’s what you owe.”Breath is a gift and a responsibility. “We’re not gonna sit here and let healthcare die,” he said. “We’re not gonna sit here and let living wages die. We’re not gonna sit here and let democracy die. It’s time to live. It’s time to stand. It’s time to speak. To protest. To live justice.” The line echoed down 1st Street. Whether it reached the halls of power was another question.Fusion organizingBarber has always insisted this movement isn’t built for the news cycle. “Movements are not driven by whether the media covers it,” he told me. “They’re driven by whether it’s right. You don’t build fusion coalitions because it’s sexy, you build it because it’s necessary.”The spotlight matters, though. And as the glare has dimmed since 2020, so too has the movement’s leverage in elite policy spaces. For Obery Hendricks, a professor in the department of religion at Columbia University, the tension is theological and tactical. Barber speaks from the Black prophetic tradition, a tradition that calls out injustice with moral clarity. But clarity alone isn’t always enough. “Too often, prophetic rhetoric is co-opted as performance,” Hendricks told me. “It becomes poetry without praxis.”But even when the national spotlight is not focused on the organization, that hasn’t stopped the Poor People’s campaign from lining up in moral opposition to what it sees as destructive policy across the country. “People say, where’s the movement?” Barber told me. “We say, where are you? The movement is here. Maybe you’re just not paying attention.” Fusion organizing in 2025 isn’t theory – it’s practice. Amazon workers marching with choirs in Alabama. Climate activists linking arms with veterans on Capitol Hill. Disability advocates and union reps shaping policy in North Carolina. Barber’s once-local campaign is now connected with movements across the country, from Georgia’s voting rights drives to Los Angeles’s housing struggles.Sometimes, the actions pay off. Inside of St Mark’s, I met Emma Biggs, a childcare advocate from North Carolina who had made the trip to DC for the rally. She had joined similar protests before. In June of last year, she was among those who were arrested inside the state legislature while protesting a looming childcare shortfall. The state legislature had passed a stopgap funding bill by the time protesters were released.To Vaughn A Booker, a scholar of religion and African American history at the University of Pennsylvania, though, the power of Barber’s model lies more in its moral insurgency than the results it produces. “He has this style that’s like a preacher reading out the names on judgment day. He’s not just naming problems. He’s naming people, policies and outcomes,” Booker said. “It lands differently when it comes from the pulpit.” And maybe that’s the point. In an era of institutional drift, moral confrontation remains a kind of clarity. “Moral discourse may not be a dominant mobilizer anymore,” he said. “But that was always the case. The prophets didn’t expect to win. They expected to witness.”View image in fullscreenBarber echoed the sentiment. Bearing moral witness matters even when it doesn’t automatically produce results, because failing to show up at all cedes ground unnecessarily. “A moral fight is one that you have to engage, because not to engage is to risk damage that might not be reversible,” he said. “If a group of politicians were going to crucify voting rights and crucify healthcare, then every crucifixion needs a witness.”Not everyone will be reachable through scripture, though. Whereas nearly half of Americans attended weekly religious services at the height of the civil rights movement, only about 30% of Americans do so now, according to a recent Gallup poll. Barber sees the rising suspicion of moral language, and the growing distance from the church, but he doesn’t see it as an obstacle; rather, he sees an opportunity. “Young people are not leaving the faith because they don’t want justice,” he told me. “They’re leaving because we’ve too often offered them religion without justice, and theology without truth.” So he remains committed to preaching in public, to claiming a tradition that doesn’t just soothe, but disrupts with the intent of building a kind of moral pressure. Barber believes the system has rotted at its core. It’s why he often refers to a sickness in the country’s body, a deterioration of its heart – but he also believes it has the capacity to be reformed, and is drawing on a prophetic tradition to push it towards change. “He’s operating within the system,” Booker told me. “He’s not outside of it burning it down. He’s trying to get the system to live up to its stated values.”Barber’s strategy mirrors that of Martin Luther King Jr a generation before: not to write legislation personally, but to focus enough attention on a moral crisis that the system has to respond. The marches weren’t meant to replace lawmaking, but to expose it – to show where justice had failed, and to make action unavoidable.The campaign’s futureBarber began a labored walk to the Capitol. A woman caught up to him quietly and asked if he had a moment to speak. His eyes were forward, fixed on the entrance. “If you don’t mind,” he said gently, “I’m trying to focus on what I’m doing.” She apologized and nodded, but had to say her piece.She walked beside him and told him that the A was missing from DEI – the A for accessibility. So many movements, she said, leave out people with disabilities. People who walk with a limp. Barber smirked. “Oh, people like me?” he said. The procession stopped and Barber, alongside a small group, descended down the elevator.View image in fullscreenThis is where conviction met cost. At the Capitol rotunda, the group prayed with the purpose of arrest. Suvya Carroll, a disability rights advocate born with cerebral palsy, clutched a Bible. Carroll told Barber she and her friend were there because “people like us always get left out. But we believe this movement sees us.” As Capitol police moved in, she was arrested along with Barber and five others. Barber later reflected on Carroll’s arrest in particular: “That child looked the Capitol police in the eye and said: ‘I’m ready.’ And we all prayed. Right there, in the middle of that dome. And I thought, Lord, if this doesn’t matter, what does?”The arrest was symbolic – the third time Moral Monday activists had been detained since April – but it also surfaced a deeper truth. The witness came from many, but the weight still fell on one. When Barber turned toward the elevator, others followed. And once inside the rotunda, all eyes returned to him. As questions swirl around the future of his organization, a harder one remains: how long can a movement built on moral clarity lean on a single voice? Barber’s voice remains central, but the campaign’s future may depend on how well it distributes that moral authority across a broader base. If the theology is prophetic, the structure has to be plural.Barber’s protest is grounded not in outcome, but in obligation. He’s asked: what will you do with the breath you have left? For Barber, that’s not just a question. It’s a way to keep moving. “This country gets amnesia,” he told me. “We forget. That’s why prophetic work is not about a moment. It’s about building a memory that resists the lie.” Even though he’s become a brand, he’s trying to build a witness. “I don’t want people to follow me, I want them to follow the truth,” he said.“Prayer,” he likes to say, “is never the end of protest. It’s the beginning of a demand.” That day in the rotunda, his prayer echoed through marble. Maybe it reached no one. Maybe it moved someone. But it was heard.That’s the point of prophecy. Not certainty. Witness. More

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      Zohran Mamdani won by being himself – and his victory has revealed the Islamophobic ugliness of others | Nesrine Malik

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      Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win in New York’s mayoral primary has been a tale of two cities, and two Americas. In one, a young man with hopeful, progressive politics went up against the decaying gods of the establishment, with their giant funding and networks and endorsements from Democratic scions, and won. In another, in an appalling paroxysm of racism and Islamophobia, a Muslim antisemite has taken over the most important city in the US, with an aim to impose some socialist/Islamist regime. Like effluent, pungent and smearing, anti-Muslim hate spread unchecked and unchallenged after Mamdani’s win. It takes a lot from the US to shock these days, but Mamdani has managed to stir, or expose, an obscene degree of mainstreamed prejudice.Politicians, public figures, members of Donald Trump’s administration and the cesspit of social media clout-chasers all combined to produce what can only be described as a collective self-induced hallucination; an image of a burqa swathed over the Statue of Liberty; the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, stating that Mamdani’s win is what happens when a country fails to control immigration. Republican congressman Andy Ogles has decided to call Mamdani “little muhammad” and is petitioning to have him denaturalised and deported. He has been called a “Hamas terrorist sympathiser”, and a “jihadist terrorist”.It is a measure of how racist the reaction has been that Donald Trump calling Mamdani a “communist lunatic” seems restrained in comparison. Some of the responses have been so hysterical that I often couldn’t tell what was real and what was parody. Because the idea that Mamdani, whose style is, above anything else, wide-grinned earnestness, was some sinister Islamist sleeper agent is so clearly a joke.But it’s not a joke, and if it is then it’s on me for still, after all these years, underestimating what Muslims in the public sphere do to people’s brains. And how utterly comfortable many are with anti-Muslim hate. And why shouldn’t they be? To date, the most senior figures in Mamdani’s own party, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, have not called out this onslaught, and those politicians and public figures who made them will suffer no censure or consequence. Because, fundamentally, anti-Muslim hate, like all racism when it becomes normalised, thrives when there is a systemic blessing of it through not even registering its offensiveness.But the apathy towards assaults against Mamdani is because he is an outsider in more meaningful ways, not just in his religious background. His crime is not one of daring to be Muslim and a politician – he might have “passed” if he was a conventional Democratic apparatchik – but of having strong opinions about economics and politics that mark him out as a challenger of mainstream orthodoxies regarding capitalism and Israel.Given his leftwing opinions on taxation and rent control, and objections to the slaughter of Palestinians on the US’s dime, a backlash to Mamdani was always likely. But he has done much to counter it. He has made thorough explanations of his abhorrence of antisemitism, of his pledge to combat all hate crime, and of the fact that his economic agenda is based on making the city, from its food to its childcare, more affordable.His offence has been in his unwillingness to water down his principles, not toeing the line on Israel, and not making frankly embarrassing assertions, like those running against him did, that Israel would be his first foreign trip. He has refrained from debasing himself through serial condemnations of phrases that have arbitrarily been erected as litmus tests of a Muslim’s acceptability in the public domain.Mamdani’s refusal to reject the phrase “globalise the intifada”, on the grounds that it expresses “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights” has been seized upon as an indication that he supports some kind of violent jihad – a reading that ignores his frequent assertions that Israel has the right to exist and condemnations of any violence against Jews. What are we doing here?There is no degree to which Mamdani could have become acceptably Muslim while holding these opinions – even though they are clearly universal enough for him to receive emphatic support from New Yorkers, including from Jews who voted for him, and the Jewish candidate Brad Lander, who endorsed him. He cannot be secular enough, American enough, or elite enough, as the son of a film-maker and a professor, to hold politics that will not be reducible to his inherently suspect identity.Even in demeanour, he has spoken of how he constantly has to measure his tone, lest he be smeared as a “beast”. And in this, he mirrors a broader, exasperating reality – one where Muslims and pro-Palestinians are condemned as threatening, while there is a colossal attack on their rights and safety across the world, simply for opposing an incontrovertible crime being perpetrated in Gaza. From detention and deportation proceedings against activists such as Mahmoud Khalil in the US, to the vilification and securitisation of pro-Palestinian speech and activism in the UK and Europe, the messenger is shot, and then framed as the aggressor.But smears and diversions and outrageous extrapolations will not change the facts on the ground, which are that the Israeli state is occupying the West Bank, starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza, and accused of war crimes and genocide, all with the sponsorship of the US and support of western regimes. In that sense, Mamdani’s victory is a threat, because it reveals how finally, all attempts to maintain an indefensible and intolerable situation have lost their grip on the growing number of people who are thinking for themselves.Mamdani isn’t even mayor yet, and he will probably face an escalating campaign using his identity as a way of discrediting his beliefs, both economic and political. And here is where the response to his win is both alarming and potentially propulsive, like the clammy buildup to the final breaking of a fever. Mamdani is where he is because he is not alone. Not by a long shot. And in drawing out such naked and explicit anti-Muslim hate, Mamdani has inadvertently revealed the ugliness and weakness not just of his opponents, but of the wider political establishment, as well as their anti-democratic impulses.In drawing them out, Mamdani has shown how prejudice is rarely about individuals, but the fear that marginalised minority views could ever become powerful majority ones. In this mayoral race, from Palestine to local policing, anti-Muslim hate is not just a repellent phenomenon confined to Mamdani, it is a barricade against the desires of the voting public. Once people start making that connection, it really is over.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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      ‘It’s very concerning’: conservatives react to Zohran Mamdani’s New York primary showing

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      He is the democratic socialist who has been described as a gift to the Republican party.Zohran Mamdani’s stunning showing in the Democratic primary election for mayor of New York this week was seen by some as perfect fodder to whip up a new “red scare”. Donald Trump called him “a 100% Communist Lunatic”, writing on social media: “We’ve had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous.”But at a gathering of religious conservatives in Washington on Friday, the first attendee interviewed by the Guardian expressed admiration for what Mamdani had pulled off in beating establishment favorite Andrew Cuomo.Kevin Abplanalp, who has worked on political campaigns, said: “He ran a fantastic ground game. I was very impressed with his grassroots work. Cuomo was a terrible candidate so it’s a combination of a repudiation of Cuomo and excitement over a younger guy with energy and different ideas.”Abplanalp, 49, executive director of the group Coalition for Liberty, added: “He’s a bit too socialistic for my taste but it is New York. They’ve had Marxists before. It is what it is.”Mamdani was endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading progressive some believe could now be encouraged to mount a bid for the White House in 2028. But that prospect was met with complacency and ridicule at the Freedom & Faith Coalition’s Road to Majority conference.Abplanalp commented: “That is hilarious. I don’t think she has the requisite experience. We’ve had other presidents who don’t have the requisite experience: Jimmy Carter for one. Do people want to have another train wreck of someone that just talks a good game? There’s nothing on her résumé that screams executive capability.”The annual gathering was addressed by senators from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Oklahoma along with Virginia’a governor, Glenn Youngkin, and Trump’s border “czar”, Tom Homan. In the eyes of many delegates, Mamdani’s surprise victory was evidence of liberal eccentricity in New York that will not fly elsewhere.Andrea Moore, 55, from Virginia, said: “I’m a little surprised but at the same time it is New York.” She told an anecdote about an Uber driver who was upset about New York potentially giving people who illegally crossed the border “$2,000 a month of taxpayer money and the right to vote immediately”.As for Ocasio-Cortez running for president, she remarked: “I don’t think I’d fear it but I’d probably laugh about it.”Steven Perkins, 74, who is retired and from South Dakota, said: “It’s not just that we’re conservatives but we know our communities. You get out of the big core cities and people are pretty conservative and traditional and they aren’t ready for all of this much change to occur. There’s this big reaction. The Democrats better wake up.”Mamdani, 33, combined charisma and social media savvy with a policy agenda focused on New York’s affordability crisis. His plans include freezing rent for many residents, free bus service and universal childcare paid for by new taxes on the wealthy.Some at the Road to Majority conference found this affront to capitalism. Darin Moser, 56, from Mount Airy, North Carolina, said: “It’s very concerning. The United States was built on freedom and free markets and we need to stay on that because that’s what’s made us successful and the most successful nation in the world.”One attendee, who did not wish to be named, blamed the media for making socialism seem like the answer to their problems. He said: “If you repeat anything enough times people are going to believe it but it’s not been proven. Socialism or communism has proven to fail every time it’s been put into play. It comes around newly clothed but it’s the same worn-out policy.”The ascent of Mamdani, who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor, triggered an onslaught of Islamaphobic attacks across social media, including from some Republican members of Congress. Centrist Democrats remained nervous about backing him, fearful that he could damage the party in swing states.But in the view of Ronald Wilcox, 63, from Fairfax county in Virginia, Democrats have already embraced extremism and lost touch with reality. “The left has no limit to what they will vote for,” he said. “I trust no Democrat because there’s no limit to how bad a person can be and they’ll still support him.”Could the US ever elect a socialist president? Wilcox, who works in direct mail, replied: “I won’t say never but the mood of America, the new generation, is embracing Trump. The young generation is moving to conservative, the Asians are moving to conservative, the Latinos are moving to conservative because we share their values.” More

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      Court strikes down Louisiana law requiring display of Ten Commandments in schools

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      A panel of three federal appellate judges has ruled that a Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in each of the state’s public school classrooms is unconstitutional.The ruling on Friday marked a major win for civil liberties groups who say the mandate violates the separation of church and state – and that the poster-sized displays would isolate students, especially those who are not Christian.The mandate has been touted by Republicans, including Donald Trump, and marks one of the latest pushes by conservatives to incorporate religion into classrooms. Backers of the law argue the Ten Commandments belong in classrooms because they are historical and part of the foundation of US law.Heather L Weaver, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said Friday’s ruling “held Louisiana accountable to a core constitutional promise: public schools are not Sunday schools, and they must welcome all students, regardless of faith”.The plaintiffs’ attorneys and Louisiana disagreed on whether the appeals court’s decision applied to every public school district in the state or only the districts party to the lawsuit.“All school districts in the state are bound to comply with the US constitution,” said Liz Hayes, a spokesperson for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which served as co-counsel for the plaintiffs.The appeals court’s rulings “interpret the law for all of Louisiana”, Hayes added. “Thus, all school districts must abide by this decision and should not post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.”Louisiana’s attorney general, Liz Murrill, said she disagreed and believed the ruling only applied to school districts in the five parishes that were party to the lawsuit. Murrill added that she would appeal the ruling, including taking it to the US supreme court if necessary.The panel of judges reviewing the case was unusually liberal for the fifth US circuit court of appeals. In a court with more than twice as many Republican-appointed judges, two of the three judges involved in the ruling were appointed by Democratic presidents.The court’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana schoolchildren from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates language in the US constitution’s first amendment guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.The ruling also backs an order issued last fall by US district judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.The state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed the mandate into law last June.Landry said in a statement on Friday that he supports the attorney general’s plans to appeal.“The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws – serving both an educational and historical purpose in our classrooms,” Landry said.Law experts have long said they expect the Louisiana case to make its way to the US supreme court, testing the court on the issue of religion and government.Similar laws have been challenged in court.A group of Arkansas families filed a federal lawsuit recently challenging a near-identical law passed in their state. And comparable legislation in Texas currently awaits Governor Greg Abbott’s signature.In 1980, the supreme court ruled that a Kentucky law violated the establishment clause of the US constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. The court found that the law had no secular purpose but served a plainly religious purpose.And in 2005, the supreme court held that such displays in a pair of Kentucky courthouses violated the US constitution. At the same time, the court upheld a Ten Commandments marker on the grounds of the Texas state capitol in Austin. More

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      ‘South Side’ Pope Leo offers video message to Chicagoans at ballpark mass

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      Pope Leo XIV, born in Dolton, Illinois, and a White Sox baseball fan, has been anointed by Chicagoans as the “South Side Pope”, appearing via video on Saturday at the White Sox ballpark to offer a message to young people.At a mass organized by the archdiocese of Chicago in honor of the new pope, attendees wore baseball jerseys while nuns in habits congregated near the entrance. Others dressed up in slacks and ties, and the sound of “Pope parking!” echoed through a megaphone from a nearby parking lot.There were Pope Leo jerseys, fans wearing head-to-toe papal outfits, and even a mural painted at the stadium. Fans made pilgrimages to seat two in row 19 of section 140, where he sat at the playoff game.Last year, the team set the record for most losses in a single season. Some are hoping for a little holy intervention in this year’s season.View image in fullscreenSaturday’s event kicked off at 2.30pm with an introduction from Chuck Swirsky, the play-by-play voice of the Chicago Bulls, music from the Leo high school choir and Luis Galvez, and a panel discussion with Pope Leo’s former teacher and a high school classmate.The first American pope, although unable to attend the mass in person, shared a video message addressing the youth of the world displayed on the jumbotron at the stadium.In his video, Pope Leo said that young people, having lived through times of isolation and great difficulty in the pandemic, may have missed out on the opportunity to live as a part of a faith community. He encouraged young people to look into their hearts, “to recognize God is present”, in a seven-minute video message.The pontiff informed those watching that they are giving hope to many people in the world and that they are a source of “promoting peace [and] promoting harmony among all peoples”.Sandra Alders, from the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood, brought her two children to the event to experience this unique moment.“I just wanted my children to hear a message of inspiration,” she said.Alders hopes Pope Leo will appeal to young people who don’t feel connected to any church or any religion.“I want my children to feel like they belong, and I think him being someone we can connect to in our community is a great start,” she said.Jenn Wilson, a South Side transplant living in Evanston, said: “I don’t know if a ballpark mass will make mainstream Catholicism cool for the kids. My own kids thought it was cool to have a Chicago Pope, but they’re also not rushing to mass.”Before the mass, Wilson said she was hopeful that there would be remarks that defy the current political state of America, as “they are in direct conflict with the philosophy of the Catholicism I was taught.”Starting at 4pm ET, an extravagant mass began at the stadium when the smell of incense wafted in the air as the entrance procession began. Like most masses, priests, bishops and altar servers walked with crosses and candles – except this time it was on a baseball field that holds 40,000 spectators.Underneath the Miller Time and Caesars Sportsbook signs, the Chicago cardinal, Blase Cupich, led the mass by saying: “I think I’m going to remember this moment as a sermon on the mound.”While Pope Leo didn’t directly touch on politics, Cupich said in his homily that while countries have a duty to secure their borders, “it is wrong to scapegoat those who are here without documents, for indeed they are here due to a broken immigration system.” Cupich has long been an advocate of respecting human rights and has spoken out against deportations.He went on to say that immigrants are here not by invasion but by invitation.“An invitation to harvest the fruits of the Earth to feed our families, an invitation to clean our tables, hotels and motel rooms. An invitation to landscape our lawns and, yes, even an invitation to take care of our children and our elderly,” he said.Ray Pingoy, the senior coordinator for Respect Life and Chastity Education for the Archdiocese of Chicago, asked world leaders in the Tagalog language to “respect in both word and deed the dignity of human person, especially immigrants and refugees.”The mass notably coincided with the thousands of “No Kings” protests around the country, and right before Donald Trump’s military parade.Words of pro-immigration were met with cheers and applause.Andrew DiMaggio drove from the suburbs and said he “couldn’t miss out on this opportunity as a White Sox fan. He’s our South Side Pope!”Wilson said she “never expected an American Pope, much less a Chicago Pope”.“At this moment, it feels like we have some acknowledgment as American Catholics to bring important things to the faith as a whole,” she said. “We bring a different sensibility that is based on basic kindness and pragmatism.” More

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      Outrage after Republican representative disparages Sikh prayer in the US House

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      A Republican congresswoman is facing widespread backlash after saying that a Sikh should not have conducted a prayer in the US House.Mary Miller, an Illinois representative, on Friday published – then deleted – a post on X saying that Giani Singh, a Sikh Granthi from southern New Jersey, should not have delivered the House’s morning prayer.Miller at first mistakenly identified Singh as a Muslim and said that it was “deeply troubling” someone of that faith had been allowed to lead prayer in the House and it “should never have been allowed”, Miller posted on X.“America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it,” Miller continued. “May God have mercy.”Miller first edited her post to change Muslim to Sikh – then opted to delete it.Her comments triggered swift outrage, with the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, saying: “It’s deeply troubling that such an ignorant and hateful extremist is serving in the United States Congress. That would be you, Mary.”Similarly, David Valadao, a Republican congressman of California, said on Friday: “I’m troubled by my colleague’s remarks about this morning’s Sikh prayer, which have since been deleted. Throughout the country – and in the Central Valley – Sikh-Americans are valued and respected members of our communities, yet they continue to face harassment and discrimination.”Jared Huffman, another Democratic US House member from California, wrote on X: “I often say that I serve in Congress with some of the greatest minds of the 18th century. With [representative] Miller I may need to take it back a few more centuries.”Meanwhile, the Democratic congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey said on X: “It’s deeply troubling that someone with such contempt for religious freedom is allowed to serve in this body. This should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as free nation, and I believe the conduct of its legislators should reflect that truth, not drift further from it.”Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, also weighed in on Miller’s tweets, saying: “What’s deeply disturbing is the blatant ignorance and anti-Sikh, anti-Muslim xenophobia coming from my colleague across the aisle. There is no place in our country, and especially the halls of Congress, for this hate and intolerance.”Meng went on to add: “The tweet may have been deleted, but we still have the receipts.”The Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus (Capac) also condemned Miller, saying she had engaged in “anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim bigotry”.“Sikhs and Muslims practice two separate and distinct religions, and conflating the two based on how someone looks is not only ignorant, but also racist,” Capac said in a statement.The Sikh Coalition also responded on X, saying: “To be clear, deleting the tweet is not enough. Congresswoman Miller should apologize for her remarks – to both the Sikh and Muslim communities, because no one should be targeted on the basis of their identity.”Similarly, the Hindu American Foundation said: “Whichever version of the tweet [Miller] was going with, it is racist, xenophobic and plainly un-American to lash out over a Sikh prayer. When you took your oath of office [congresswoman] Miller, you swore to uphold our constitution, whose first amendment prohibits your establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.”Miller’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. More

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      Maga Catholics are on a collision course with Leo XIV. They have good reason to fear him | Julian Coman

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      In the outer reaches of the Magasphere, it would be fair to say the advent of the first pope from the US has not been greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. Take Laura Loomer, the thirtysomething influencer and conspiracy theorist, whose verdict on Leo XIV was as instant as it was theologically uninformed: “Anti-Trump, anti-Maga, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” Also doing the rounds on X was a short summary of Leo’s supposed transgressions before ascending to St Peter’s chair: “Trashed Trump, trashed Vance, trashed border enforcement, endorsed DREAMer-style illegal immigration, repeatedly praised and honored George Floyd, and endorsed a Democrat senator’s call for more gun control.”So far, so tedious. The comic-book casting of the new pope as a globalist villain in the US culture wars is traceable back to his predecessor’s impact on liberal opinion a decade ago. Pope Francis’s sometimes lonely championing of progressive causes, such as the rights of migrants, gave him a kind of liberal celebrity and led Time magazine to name him “person of the year” in 2013. Pope Leo, born in Chicago, has been pre-emptively caricatured by much of the Maga right as a continuity pontiff who will, in effect, front up the religious wing of the Democratic party.Leaving the simplistic conflation of religious perspective and political positioning aside, the truth is far more interesting than that. It may also be more challenging for Catholic Maga luminaries such as the vice-president, JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump’s sometime adviser Steve Bannon if they are serious about their faith.Bannon and Vance – a Catholic convert – are representatives of a traditionalist movement in the church, which sought to undermine Francis’s papacy at every turn and has become a kind of theological vanguard for the “America first” era. In January, Vance notoriously invoked St Augustine to justify the Trump administration’s decision to cut international aid and impose a brutal immigration crackdown. One of Francis’s last acts was to refute the vice-president’s reduction of the Augustinian concept of neighbourly love to a version of “charity begins at home” (though delivering a papal rebuke was not enough to spare him from a visit from Vance the day before he died).But it would be too easy (and too reminiscent of their own performatively aggressive approach) to simply dismiss the Maga Catholics as theologically beyond the pale. Many Catholics might, for example, legitimately sympathise with Bannon’s analysis of the neglect of working-class interests in 21st-century western liberal democracies. The deepening inequality and corrosive individualism of our times is seriously at odds with Catholic social teaching, which has historically promoted the dignity of labour, social solidarity and a just wage.The problem is that, in the absence of a leftwing economic populism to challenge the injustices of the globalised era, a rightwing version has filled the gap in the US and beyond. Its form of solidarity is nationalistic and insular, its cultural outlook is xenophobic and its political style is authoritarian and deliberately confrontational. The Maga critique of “globalism” is not limited to the neoliberal economic world order, also condemned by the last three popes; it extends to a repudiation of the foundational Catholic commitment to universality, expressed through compassion for the stranger and a sense of the world as a shared common home.Enter Pope Leo. The most geographically diverse conclave in church history was surely aware that in choosing an American to succeed Francis, it was setting up a potential showdown between the Vatican and Trumpian nationalism. The new pope’s choice of name is a sign that he recognises the scale and the novelty of the challenge that the rightwing populist turn represents.The last Leo, a patrician Italian elected to the papacy in 1878, made it his mission to confront the ruthless laissez-faire economics unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the emerging Marxist response to its cruelties. In Rerum Novarum, his groundbreaking 1891 papal encyclical, Leo XIII laid out swingeing criticisms of the greed that placed profit before people and allowed extreme divides in wealth to undermine the common good. At the same time, in terms that were to prove tragically prescient, he identified in early communist movements a dangerous idolatry of the state and a lack of respect for individual autonomy and rights.Last weekend, before his first mass in St Peter’s Square, Leo XIV explicitly set himself the task of following in his 19th-century predecessor’s footsteps. That would mean, he told a Rome conference, addressing “the dramatic nature of our own age, marked by wars, climate change, growing inequalities, forced and contested migration, stigmatised poverty, disruptive technological innovations, job insecurity and precarious labour rights”.The daunting length of that list, and the interlocking, global nature of its crises, should be viewed as an early critique of the Maga worldview. In Leo XIII’s day, the burgeoning Marxist movement incubated a totalitarian strain that would go viral in the 20th century. The success of Trumpian nationalism is also in part a response to the depredations of capitalism, this time in the context of globalisation. But its authoritarian evangelists have hijacked the working-class cause to inflict new injustices on migrant “invaders” and have lost sight of the need for global cooperation to prevent an environmental catastrophe that threatens the poor most of all. The strategy has proved electorally astute. But as Leo will surely make clear, it has nothing to do with Catholicism.In a column published at the weekend, the American Catholic commentator Sohrab Ahmari referenced a sermon by Leo from last year, in which the future pope acknowledged that the issue of migration “is a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide” that needed to be solved. This recognition, Ahmari suggested, could at least open up the possibility of fruitful future dialogue with the Maga Catholics in and around the White House.He failed, however, to quote the sermon’s next passage: “Every one of us, whether we were born in the United States of America or on the North Pole, we are all given the gift of being created in the image and likeness of God, and the day we forget that is the day we forget who we are.” Words for Vance and Rubio, who met Leo after Sunday’s inaugural mass in Rome, to ponder.

      Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor More

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      Episcopal church says it won’t help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status

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      The Episcopal church’s migration service is refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status, citing the church’s longstanding “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.Presiding bishop Sean Rowe announced the step on Monday, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC on a private charter plane and were greeted by a government delegation.Episcopal Migration Ministries instead will halt its decades-long partnership with the government, Rowe said.Donald Trump opened a fast-tracked refugee status to white South Africans, accusing their government of discrimination, even as his administration abruptly shut down the overall US refugee program. The South Africans jumped ahead of thousands of would-be refugees overseas who had been undergoing years of vetting and processing.Episcopal Migration Ministries has long resettled refugees under federal grants. Rowe said that about two weeks ago, the government contacted it and said it expected the ministry to resettle some of the South Africans under terms of its grant.“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step,” Rowe said. “Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the US federal government.”South Africa’s government has vehemently denied allegations of discriminatory treatment of its white minority residents.“It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” Rowe said. “I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country.”He also said many refugees, including Christians, are victims of religious persecution and are now denied entry.He said the church would find other ways to serve immigrants, such as those already in this country and those stranded overseas.The move marks the end of a ministry-government partnership that, for nearly four decades, has served nearly 110,000 refugees from countries, including Ukraine, Myanmar and Congo, Rowe said.It’s not the first high-profile friction between the Episcopal church and the Trump administration. Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington DC drew Trump’s anger in January at an inaugural prayer service in which she urged “mercy” on those fearing his actions, including migrants and LGBTQ+ children.The Anglican church of Southern Africa includes churches in South Africa and neighboring countries. It was a potent force in the campaign against apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s, an effort for which the late archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel peace prize in 1984.Another faith-based refugee agency, Church World Service, says it is open to serving the South African arrivals.“We are concerned that the U.S. Government has chosen to fast-track the admission of Afrikaners, while actively fighting court orders to provide life-saving resettlement to other refugee populations who are in desperate need of resettlement,” Rick Santos, CWS president and CEO, said in a statement.He added that the action proves the government knows how to screen and process refugees quickly.“Despite the Administration’s actions, CWS remains committed to serving all eligible refugee populations seeking safety in the United States, including Afrikaners who are eligible for services,” he said. “Our faith compels us to serve each person in our care with dignity and compassion.”The Episcopal ministry and CWS are among 10 national groups, most of them faith-based, that have partnered with the government for refugee resettlement. More

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      Quakers march 300 miles to protest Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      A group of Quakers were marching more than 300 miles from New York City to Washington DC to demonstrate against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.The march extends a long tradition of Quaker activism. Historically, Quakers have been involved in peaceful protests to end wars and slavery, and support women’s voting rights in line with their commitment to justice and peace. Far more recently, Quakers sued the federal government earlier this year over immigration agents’ ability to make arrests at houses of worship.Organizers of the march say their protest seeks to show solidarity with migrants and other groups that are being targeted by Donald Trump’s second presidency.“It feels really daunting to be up against such critical and large and in some ways existential threats,” said Jess Hobbs Pifer, a 25-year-old Quaker and march organizer, who said she felt “a connection” to the faith’s long history of activism.“I just have to put one foot in front of the other to move towards something better, something more true to what Quakers before us saw for this country and what people saw for the American Experiment, the American dream,” she said.Their goal was to walk south from the Flushing Quaker Meeting House – across New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania – to the US Capitol to deliver a copy of the Flushing Remonstrance, a 17th-century document that called for religious freedom and opposed a ban on Quaker worship.Quakers say it remains relevant in 2025 as a reminder to “uphold the guiding principle that all are welcome”.“We really saw a common thread between the ways that the administration is sort of flying against the norms and ideals of constitutional law and equality before the law,” said Max Goodman, 28, a Quaker, who joined the march.“Even when they aren’t breaking rules explicitly, they’re really engaging in bad faith with the spirit of pluralism, tolerance and respect for human dignity that undergirds our founding documents as Americans and also shows up in this document that’s really important in New York Quaker history.”The Quakers, whose formal name is the Religious Society of Friends, originated in 17th-century England.The Christian group was founded by George Fox, an Englishman who objected to Anglican emphasis on ceremony. In the 1640s, he said he heard a voice that led him to develop a personal relationship with Christ, described as the Inner Light.Fox taught that the Inner Light emancipates a person from adherence to any creed, ecclesiastical authority or ritual forms.Brought to court for opposing the established church, Fox tangled with a judge who derided him as a “quaker” in reference to his agitation over religious matters.Following the faith’s core beliefs in nonviolence and justice, Quakers have demonstrated for the abolition of slavery, in favor of the suffrage movement, against both world wars, and the US role in the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, said Ross Brubeck, 38, one of the Quaker march organizers.They also joined protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the Black Lives Matter protests after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.“Quakers have had a central role in opposition to repression within the United States since its founding,” said Brubeck, who was marching along a trail in New Jersey with companions waving an upside-down American flag, intended to serve as a signal of distress.One the most well-known Quakers was William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania following the faith’s emphasis on religious tolerance. The group became influential in cities like Philadelphia.But members of the group have also faced scorn for refusing to join wars due to their belief in pacifism and nonviolence. Some were persecuted and even killed for trying to spread their religious beliefs.Earlier this year, five Quaker congregations filed a lawsuit challenging a Trump administration move giving immigration agents more leeway to make arrests at houses of worship.Trump has insisted that immigrants are an existential threat to the US. Immigration into the US, both legal and illegal, surged during Joe Biden’s presidency, and Trump assailed that influx before winning November’s election.Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has launched a campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him.“Immigrants are the ones experiencing the most acute persecution in the United States,” Brubeck said. “The message to Trump is that the power is not his to make.” More