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Like many conservative evangelical pastors with whom I had worked for almost four decades, Rev. David Corbett is a mild-mannered, white-haired, avuncular 75-year-old who carries a handgun on his belt and quotes liberally from the King James Version of the Bible. A former lobster fisherman, he’s had two key vocations throughout his long ministry career: preaching on Sundays and spending the rest of the week in various law enforcement roles—from serving as a local beat cop to teaching criminal justice at the fundamentalist Pensacola Christian College in Florida.
Corbett has served in several Maine churches, but his current congregation is the Oak Ridge Bible Church in Biddeford, a mostly unknown hamlet only 18 miles from Portland and 11 miles from Kennebunkport. I say “mostly unknown,” because on July 13, 2026, it commanded headlines when ICE agents killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant with a work permit and pending asylum application hearing who was in his car at the corner of Hill and Pool Streets. After mistakenly stopping the 25-year-old food delivery worker, ICE agents shot into his vehicle.
Rev. Corbett has a lot to say about that incident, especially because he is running as the Republican Party candidate for York County sheriff. He’s been critical of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for not sharing details of an internal investigation that was ostensibly conducted by ICE Acting Director David Venturella. “We need to have transparency,” he said. “But if they’re not being transparent, you have to ask the question, why?”
Nevertheless, should he win his election, Corbett intends to work with DHS and have all his officers deputized as ICE agents so that they can help federal agents with arrests and detentions, part of a national program known as 287(g). For him, some blame for Durán’s death rests with his state’s Democratic majorities because of their opposition to local law enforcement helping ICE. In a YouTube video addressing the deadly episode, Corbett argues, “The policies of the Democrats brought us down this path to where a person got killed.” The ultimate responsibility for all the problems around immigration, he says, rests with former President Joe Biden for not adequately defending US borders.
Not all Maine clergy agree with Corbett. About 6 miles from Corbett’s church is the historic Saco & Biddeford Unitarian Universalist Church, a congregation that does not follow a specific creed or doctrine but is a diverse community with shared values and a commitment to spirituality and social justice. Founded in 1827, the church is now led by the Reverend Dr. Lori Whittemore. A clinically trained, board-certified interfaith chaplain specializing in mass-casualty response, she had previously organized and led Spiritual Care Services of Maine, a nonprofit organization for people in crisis, including those affected by a mass shooting in 2023 that left 18 dead and 13 wounded in the city of Lewiston.
As soon as she heard the news of Durán’s death, which occurred only a short distance from her church, Whittemore recruited local volunteer clergy and nearby professional chaplains to provide solace and spiritual care to immigrants, anti-ICE demonstrators, and the scores of people who flocked to the improvised memorial at the spot where Durán was killed.
Rev. Lori Whittemore, minister at the Unitarian Universalist church of Saco & Biddeford.Courtesy of Rob Schenck
I met with Corbett and Whittemore during an unexpected trip to Maine in July. Originally, I planned to go to Houston following the July 7 ICE shooting and killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction business owner who had lived in the United States for 35 years. Traveling with his crew, he was on his way to a job site, when ICE agents shot him in the abdomen. His killing sparked protests in the community, including by clergy, who had staged similar prayer vigils and protests after the increasing numbers of these kinds of tragedies.
One of them was in January in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after Renée Good was killed by immigration agents, and the community rose in protest. I responded to the call for clerics across faith traditions to appear and demonstrate. While I was there, Alex Pretti was gunned down by federal agents as he shielded a woman from their assault. Kneeling in prayer at the site where Alex bled out, I resolved that each time such federally sanctioned violence against immigrants and their allies erupted, I’d join other clergy who were similarly outraged by the unwarranted violence. As I wrote following my time in Minnesota:
I had participated in more than my share of protests, and many of them, over decades, when I helped lead an extreme wing of the conservative religiopolitical movement. I blockaded abortion clinics, demonstrated in pro-life marches, and held press conferences after Supreme Court decisions that cut to the heart of the conservative agenda–gay marriage, for instance. Obviously, this Call to Minneapolis was very different, and I answered because, for the last twelve years, I have been trying to make amends for having played such a significant role as an evangelical Christian minister in the aggressive push to transform the United States into a “Christian nation.” I helped lay the groundwork for Donald Trump’s presidency and the imposition of Christian Nationalism as America’s officially privileged and highly destructive religion. I was dead wrong in doing so.
I am committed now to “put the same level of energy and commitment into causes aligned with the teachings of mercy, tolerance, and love that first drew me to evangelical Christianity.” I saw Minneapolis as such a cause, as was Texas. And, as it turned out, Maine.
As I was firming up my plans to travel to Texas, the news broke of Durán’s fatal shooting, so I went to Portland instead. But this time, with a different sense of my mission. I planned to meet with church leaders from across the ideological spectrum to learn more about what they thought had happened. How did their perspectives differ? How were they, and their congregations, dealing with ICE and its brutality? I also thought that showing up when his death was so recent, especially in my capacity as bishop of the Methodist Evangelical Church, a conservative denomination, might offer support to fellow evangelical leaders needing further reinforcement. It may be difficult to imagine that this reprehensible abuse of power is not contrary to our most cherished beliefs as Christians, but as we have seen for decades, for many, it isn’t.
What I found during my time there and a few weeks later when I attended a gathering of progressive clergy, was that quietly and then more assertively, there are signs of a renewal of progressive religious activism that seemed to have completely disappeared during the Trump years—and even before. Maine, for example, has consistently been rated among the most secular states, with many existing churches declining in membership and even closing. Until recently, any engaged and vibrant church life had generally favored Trump-friendly rural congregations north of Augusta.
But after this killing, I wondered whether what I saw in Portland, Biddeford, and other points in the more populated and politically purple south indicated a kind of spiritual awakening on the left. Could it be that, amid all the horrors of the Trump administration’s cruel policies regarding migrants, theologically liberal and socially progressive faiths may at last have discovered the energy and visibility that they have lacked for many years? An energy and visibility that religious conservatives have long claimed as exclusively their own.
What I became aware of only after my visit was that the glimmerings of a progressive political revival that I saw in Maine are also reflected in this year’s midterm elections. A surprising number of ministers and religious professionals are running as Democrats this year. Religion News Service estimates, “At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year,” in contrast to only seven evangelical pastors who are running as Republicans. Among the Democrats, perhaps the most prominent is Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, who is running a surprisingly strong campaign against Ken Paxton for a Texas Senate seat. But there’s also Methodist minister Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who has paused his preaching as a senior pastor at the Church of the Resurrection, which is the largest United Methodist Congregation in the US.
Of course, in important ways, this is nothing new. Religious progressives have long been engines of positive social change. From the abolitionist Quakers of the 18th century to the social gospel movement in the late 19th century to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the mid- to late-20th century, Christian ethics were applied to pressing social problems such as poverty, labor exploitation, and racial injustice. During these periods of high visibility, strategic organizing, and great orators, progressive religion enjoyed enormous institutional prosperity, cultural popularity, and political influence.
But beginning in the 1970s, as the religious right gained prominence in the public arena and some of the greatest assaults on Christian values of empathy, charity, and tolerance in generations were being perpetrated by a series of administrations that claimed religious primacy, the religious left grew quieter. Aside from a relatively short reaction following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, progressive church leaders nearly disappeared by the end of the first Trump administration, eclipsed by the power of evangelical Christian leaders who had aligned themselves with the Republican Party and, perforce, with Donald Trump.
But I am realizing that powerful as the opinions of a Rev. Corbett have been in defining what it has meant to be a religious conservative leader, their power may be starting to fade. And the gospel of mercy preached by Rev. Whittemore and other progressive religious figures may be experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Religion News Service in March of this year, Reverend Dr. Paul Raushenbush of the Interfaith Alliance observed that the rising voices of progressive Christians reflect actual US religious demographics. “According [to] the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, the majority of Christians actually support LGBTQ+ equality and abortion rights,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, PRRI’s most recent survey shows that only a third of Americans sympathize with Christian nationalism, and two-thirds of Americans are skeptical or outright reject the ideas and goals of Christian Nationalists.”
Raushenbush, a great-grandson of an early progressive theologian and architect of the early 20th-century Social Gospel movement, is among a growing chorus of prominent progressive Christian leaders in the United States. They include Bishop William Barber of the Moral Mondays movement, although others such as Dr. Diana Butler Bass, a public theologian and expert on American Protestantism and spiritual life, and evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt, co-founder of Vote Common Good, which works to move conservative Christians away from Republican fealty represent a new generation. When I went to Maine, what I found appeared to be a microcosm of a tectonic shift, one in which neo-progressivism is gaining prominence in the religious landscape once dominated by the right.
Residents of Saco and Biddeford attending one of many prayer vigils held in remembrance of Durán and led by the progressive church leaders seen in the other photos. This one is at Mechanics Park, not far from where he was killed. Courtesy of Lori Whittemore
But first, what is happening in Maine requires some context.
While the United States as a whole ranks among the most religious countries compared with others of similar size and wealth, the Pew Research Center’s 2024 Religious Landscape Study indicates 39 percent of Mainers identify as religiously unaffiliated, just 16 percent of adults attend religious services weekly, and under a quarter say religion is very important to them. The Reverend Sara Ewing-Merrill, of the Hope Gateway Church in Portland, calls herself the “instigator” of the Greater Portland Multifaith Organizing Group, a collective of diverse spiritual communities tackling systemic inequities. She explained, “Until recently, most Mainers, who are statistically overwhelmingly nonreligious, were suspicious of religious leaders,” adding that they saw clergy like her “as an irrelevant and even a harmful and judgmental influence in the community.” For many, she said, religion is only a source of divisiveness, exclusion, and manipulation.
“Satan fights for every inch of territory Christ’s people seek to claim.”
Meanwhile, conservative religious leaders also have long complained about a stubborn rejection of their message. Maine-born theologian and former professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary, Owen Strachan, even singled out his home state, declaring it to be a place where “Satan fights for every inch of territory Christ’s people seek to claim.”
On May 15, 2026, one of the larger evangelical churches in the Portland area sponsored a Turning Point USA “Make Heaven Crowded” evangelistic event. Calvary Chapel Greater Portland rented a venue with a capacity of more than 3,000, but only several hundred people showed up, far fewer than the thousands who had attended the same event in other cities across the country.
That is not to say that the religious left fared any better. In Portland, a simultaneous gathering dubbed “Love Is The Point” was designed as a direct, inclusive alternative to the Turning Point USA event. Promotional materials described it as being pro-trans and queer rights, as well as “pro-immigrant, pro-wealth equality, pro-women’s rights, and anti-white christian (sic) nationalism,” among other ideological descriptors. The program featured local musicians, spoken-word blessings, interfaith worship, and fundraising efforts for communities that organizers felt were targeted by right-wing religious ideologies. More than two dozen congregations co-sponsored the event, yet only 350 people participated. Still, Rev. Devin Green, one of the event organizers who helps Rev. Ewing-Merrill with the Multifaith Organizing Group, emphasized that it was a great success because liberal and progressive groups have been very slow to turn out at all for such events in the past.
Liberal church leaders have long worried about the perception that the church and its clergy are irrelevant, and haven’t wanted to exacerbate that tension by being too bold in their words around public controversies. But during our long conversation in the sanctuary of her church, she explained that there has been a significant change: “People are seeing that we have a unique role, which is needed.” Later, in an email, she described hearing from several people in the community who did not consider themselves a part of any faith tradition. “They are grateful for the space I hold along with clergy colleagues on street corners and for what we share at the mic at protests, vigils, and press conferences,” she wrote. “During those times, they departed from whatever tradition they happened to be part of and focused instead on the shared experience of despair and hope that we are all carrying. We speak not just from a Christian understanding of hope, but a universal human perspective on hope.”
Rev. Whittemore of the Unitarian Universalist Church has noticed more people attending worship and anticipates this will continue. When she has been out in the community, during some demonstrations, people have described feeling the need to return to church for some spiritual centering. She assures them that the particular spiritual tradition doesn’t matter; what’s most important is to “find a community because if nothing else, it will be a comfort,” she has advised. “It will be all the things that we need right now for staying hopeful and not being separated, but being together.”
“I’ve had folks say to me some version of ‘If I’d known people of faith actually stood for things like justice and equality and stood against racism, xenophobia, and fascism, maybe I’d go to church once in a while!’”
Statistical data have been slow to show any change in church attendance in Maine. Still, the most reliable source, published by the Association of Religion Data Archives, was last updated in 2020—and a lot has happened during those intervening years. Since the 2024 presidential election, two other Portland-based Unitarian congregations have seen significant growth, and it has only accelerated since the ICE surge in January of this year, particularly after the deadly episode in Biddeford. Rev. Jane Field, executive director of the Maine Council of Churches, who connected me to some of the most prominent clergy in the state, told me, “People are pleasantly surprised to see clergy on the front lines, speaking out against authoritarianism, and putting themselves squarely in the corner of our immigrant neighbors.” She noted that until recently, there was the assumption that to be involved with a church community inevitably implied support for the Trump administration, Christian nationalism, and ICE. “I’ve had folks say to me some version of ‘If I’d known people of faith actually stood for things like justice and equality and stood against racism, xenophobia, and fascism, maybe I’d go to church once in a while!’”
Memorial volunteer Michelle’s tattoo of her mother’s rosary.Courtesy of Rob Schenck
Maine is home to a growing foreign-born population of approximately 66,000 residents, accounting for roughly 4.7 percent of the state’s total population. Unlike in many parts of the country, the Hispanic immigrant population is among the smallest, far outpaced by Asians, who account for 25 percent of immigrants, followed by Europeans at approximately 24 percent. There is also a rapidly growing African immigrant community in the state, now about 20 percent of the population.
This past January, as Gregory Bovino, who was then “Commander-at-Large of the US Border Patrol,” launched his grotesquely high-profile and deadly campaign against immigrants and their allies in Minneapolis, its much less visible complement was underway in Maine. Under the cruel moniker “Operation Catch of the Day,” a deliberate play on the state’s iconic seafood and commercial fishing industry, an undisclosed number of agents surged into the predominantly blue southern part of the state, as opposed to the more rural and sparsely populated northern red counties. In the first seven days of this operation, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition’s ICE hotline logged hundreds of sightings of federal agents. Even after the surge ended, with with DHS reporting more than 200 arrests, ICE’s ongoing presence in the state had increased by at least 44 percent.
Maine’s most visible and vibrant churches tend to be evangelical, and, as Rev. Scott Terry of the Maine Gospel Alliance, representing scores of conservative congregations throughout the state, put it to me, they “are conservative with their personal responsibility, with their religious viewpoints, and their political viewpoints.” Those same churches have largely remained silent about ICE operations. As Terry explained, this could be a simple lack of imagination; there just aren’t very many immigrants in the parts of the state where evangelicals tend to live, so the local community has little exposure to them. Still, he went on to concede that nor did those congregations consider the plight of immigrants to be important.
The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, a component of NIH, monitors the percentage of foreign-born residents by county in each state, and shows that these populations range from 1.5 percent to 4.1 percent in northern counties with the highest numbers of evangelical congregations. Many of these immigrants are religious conservatives, and they often form their own congregations. My experience over more than four decades of evangelical leadership, including on the national level, leads me to believe that the majority white congregations likely at least know of these immigrant co-religionists, if not to engage with them in various ways.
In contrast to the evangelical disinterest or apathy around ICE, both the surge and Durán’s killing have sparked formidable, highly visible opposition from progressive church leaders, Islamic clerics, Jewish rabbis, Quaker ministers, and Buddhist practitioners. Groups such as Multifaith Justice Maine, which seeks to unify religious communities across differences to advance social justice causes, and the aforementioned Greater Portland Multifaith Organizing Group, which stages local public events, have mobilized scores of lay and ordained participants to advocate for immigrants in visible and less-visible ways.
Clergy and community volunteers regularly stand watch outside local businesses, such as the American Roots apparel factory in Westbrook, where a significant portion of the staff are asylum seekers or legal green card holders living in fear. Clerics will line up shoulder to shoulder as “human shields” during employee shift changes. Dressed in yarmulkes, prayer shawls, and clergy stoles, they sing hymns and read scripture to block the line of sight and act as a physical buffer between workers and DHS or ICE agents waiting outside.
During January’s ICE surge, the Maine Council of Churches and other groups spearheaded an effort to pressure Republican Senator Susan Collins to vote no on a bill funding ICE’s continued operations. Filling the hallway outside Collins’ office in Portland, several clergy members who refused to obey police orders to disperse were taken into custody. Collins eventually voted for the measure anyway, but her office did not press charges against the protesting clergy, leading to the case being dismissed.
Progressive and mainline liberal church groups are also using the courts to defend immigrants’ human and constitutional rights. Congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America, a progressive denomination, are plaintiffs in a regional New England lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security seeking to stop the administration from carrying out immigration enforcement at houses of worship.
There’s a quieter side to all of this, as well. Rev. Whittemore took me on a tour of her church’s commercial-style kitchen, where parishioners prepare bagged meals and other household necessities to deliver to the homes of vulnerable immigrant families, some of whom—whether or not they have legal status—are afraid to go to a grocery store or pharmacy for fear ICE will take them into custody. When the surge began in January, other congregations organized rides to and from schools and work, medical appointments, and even arranged to accompany immigrants to mandatory immigration court hearings.
All that I had seen and learned during my time in Maine came vividly into focus on my last day there, as I joined Rev. Whittemore at the site of Durán’s brutal slaying, where ICE had rammed his car. Rev. Whittemore offered me a regulation black chaplain cap, and I engaged in quiet, brief pastoral-style conversations with several of a dozen or so members of the community who had come out to refresh the drooping flowers, remove weather-beaten paper signs, and sweep up debris on the sidewalk and roadway.
Rev. Whittemore, in her capacity as chaplain at the improvised memorial where Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero died.Courtesy of Rob Schenck
Progressive clergy stage one of their weekly public prayer vigils in Biddeford’s Mechanics Park to memorialize Guerrero, who was killed nearby, and other victims of ICE violence.Courtesy of Lori Whittemore
At one point, an angry young shirtless white male drove by in a pickup truck, gunned his engine, raised a middle finger, and shouted, “Go home, f*gg*ts! We don’t need his kind here!” At that moment, Rev. Whittemore took charge. With a controlled deep breath and a serene look on her face, she made caring eye contact with each of us and demonstrated what her chaplaincy was all about: setting the frame for inner peace, self-control, and love of neighbor. Later, she led the group in a spiritual exercise that included breathing, silence, and a spoken meditation. It’s what we evangelicals call, “Havin’ church outside of church.”
As I resumed my cleaning tasks along with the others, I noticed a classic steepled white clapboard church building immediately across the street. A colorful banner above the double-entry doors read, “With God…”
All Things Are Possible
EXPECT GREAT THINGS”
Underneath it was the name of the church: Victory Chapel Independent Holiness Pentecostal—just the kind of church I used to make rounds preaching in as an itinerant conservative evangelist for nearly four decades. I asked the volunteers if anyone was familiar with the congregation, as most were from the immediate neighborhood. Nearly all of them shook their heads no. One woman named Michelle said, “Funny, I only live over there,” pointing to a nearby row of modest homes, caddy-corner from where we were standing. “I never even noticed that church there.”
In the distant past, evangelicals were known for their care of the poor, the forgotten, and the despised, but no longer. Today, we are presumed to be callous toward the needy, indifferent toward the marginalized, and contemptuous of the despised.
Now, here I was with a collection of good-hearted, mostly irreligious souls, laboring in the hot sun to afford some dignity to a young man most of them didn’t know. I thought of the many churches like the one across the street that I had kept company with for so long, whose preachers would have classified the people around me as lost, deceived, or maybe even wicked hellbound sinners.
Earlier that day, I had met the conservative Rev. Terry in his library-like church study, arrayed with the dour portraits of evangelical patriarchs Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. I described to him some of Rev. Whittemore’s work in Biddeford. “I think that caring for people, the way the Unitarian Universalist wants to, is noble,” he allowed, before referring to the vast gulf that exists between them. “But it’s not the Gospel. And I believe the church is commissioned to proclaim the Gospel to save people from their sins.”
“I think that caring for people, the way the Unitarian Universalist wants to, is noble. But it’s not the Gospel. And I believe the church is commissioned to proclaim the Gospel to save people from their sins.”
I once agreed with him, believing that my principal task was to convert sinners so they could be assured of spending eternity with God when they died. Too much concern for their earthly needs was a distraction from that paramount mission. I also told believers that their good works would never get them to heaven, so they should concentrate on winning souls rather than practicing charity. Evangelicals do give generously to churches, but the vast majority of those donations go to maintaining their own church buildings, staff, religious programming, evangelistic and missionary work. For many evangelical churches and clergy, this results in our ignoring people’s real felt needs.
Yet, as I saw it in Maine and in Minneapolis, Rev. Whittemore and the crew of volunteers were doing just what I believe Jesus would have been doing at a memorial for a young father unjustly killed by imperial guards: honoring the victim, consoling those in trauma and grief, and seeking ways to care for their temporal needs.
Progressive clergy stage one of their weekly public prayer vigils in Biddeford’s Mechanics Park to memorialize Durán, who was killed nearby, as well as other victims of ICE violence.Courtesy of Lori Whittemore
Why did it take so long, and demand this measure of human suffering, for progressive church leaders to be seen and heard, and for their churches to start growing again? I put that question to several liberal colleagues at the recent annual Wild Goose Festival, an outdoor camping event that’s been described as a Christian Woodstock meets South by Southwest. It drew about 2000 clergy, artists, musicians, community organizers, and social justice activists over the Labor Day weekend in Harmony, North Carolina.
The Reverend Jennifer Butler is executive director of Faith in Democracy, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that builds coalitions of faith and faith-adjacent communities to resist the religious right, confront nationalism, and defend democracy. A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, she is a Presbyterian minister who has been a progressive since joining the Peace Corps in 1989. She later lobbied for women’s rights and against the Iraq war at the UN, worked for the Presbyterian Peacemaking Office in New York, and wrote a book warning of the new right’s global reach.
Butler believes the recent emergence of progressive church leaders, like those in Maine, is inextricably connected to politics. She offered a brief history lesson, explaining how, in the 1970s, Democratic party split from progressive religion as part of its commitment to its separation of church and state, interpreting this to mean that religious voices did not belong in the conversation about public policy. Meanwhile the Moral Majority was ascendant and as “the Christian right began to dominate the public square, the Party and the Progressive Movement grew wary of religion. Rather than seeing good religion as the answer to bad religion, they insisted on legal strategies and messaging around the separation of church and state.” The result? Those who were part of a progressive religious, social gospel movement “lost the ability to speak to highly religious Americans that we needed to get behind our policy issues.”
It was Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, John Podesta, that Rev. Butler credits with reversing this trend. An observant Catholic, he founded the Center for American Progress in 2003, which in turn funded Faith in Public Life, a project aimed at building a coordinated voice for the religious left. Before this liberal religious resurgence, Butler said even her own clergy colleagues warned her not to bring theology into her public advocacy, “but some of my secular, feminist colleagues came to me, and were like, ‘We never knew what to make of you, but thank God you’re saying what you’re saying!’”
The Reverend Dr. Russell Meyer, a Lutheran pastor and head of the Florida Council of Churches, told me that, beginning more than ten years ago, he and other ecumenical leaders were active in calling for school boards to direct customized resources for students who face the biggest barriers—such as those with disabilities, facing language learning challenges, and those from low-income families. “We’d go to school board meetings with lots of speakers. We were controlling the agenda. And we were successful.” In comparison to the amount of attention groups like the conservative Moms for Liberty, religiously progressive public advocates received very little attention. “I would have conversations with reporters, and I’d say, ‘Look, you got a whole section devoted to sports. There are more people in churches on Sundays than there are in stadiums. And there’s more money being put into offering plates than there are in beer sales at games, but you’re not reporting on that.”
“I call it the great reshuffling. They were able to choose a congregation or faith community that better aligned with their values.”
The Reverend Dr. Lori Walke, who is 42 and describes herself as an “elder millennial,” is pastor of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, which has grown by at least 40 new members each year since 2021. Walke said that she and her congregation are unapologetically progressive. “We are working for abortion access, immigration justice, and are practicing full affirmation and inclusion of LGBTQ plus folks,” she said. “If you Google ‘gay church, Oklahoma,’ Mayflower will come up.’”
As far back as 2014, when a lower court ruling legalized same-sex marriage in Oklahoma, a year before the US Supreme Court declared it a constitutional right, Walke’s church became what she refers to as “a marriage equality mecca for the Midwest. Texas, Arkansas, everyone was coming to Oklahoma because it was legal.” She said she performed 14 weddings on the first day the County Clerk issued licenses for same-sex couples. By the time the Supreme Court issued its Obergefell v. Hodges opinion, guaranteeing the right for gay couples throughout the country to marry, on June 26, 2015, Walke said she had solemnized more than 100 such marriages.
Walke said her church has seen spikes in attendance, involvement, and membership after they responded with special programs to the SCOTUS decisions in Obergefell and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe. v. Wade, or state and federal elections. The church has even hosted Planned Parenthood trainings for clinic defense and escort accompaniment.
Attracting newcomer during times of social upheaval and tension is less challenging than retaining them after the crisis has passed. “For a while there,” she said, “it seemed our back door was as wide open as our front door.” She examined the problem as part of her doctoral research project at Emory University in 2020. “For Gen Xers, millennials, and younger generations, there is no obligation to join a group or organization that does not share your values,” Walke explained. While older Americans, such as Boomers, may have at one time felt obligated to stick with their family’s church, without reference to if they were comfortable with its principles and practices, after the COVID pandemic, when some churches suspended meeting in person, or streamed their services online, it allowed even the most dedicated members to explore both their faith and other churches that may more closely reflect those beliefs. “I call it the great reshuffling,” she told me, “they were able to choose a congregation or faith community that better aligned with their values.”
Walke tried to help people anchor their social and political commitments to their religious convictions. Disconnecting enduring Christian values from partisanship requires that progressives must become more visible since, she noted, conservatives enjoy “a smorgasbord of options, but for folks who are more progressive, do those places even exist?”
“Our focus is not on an afterlife, but on the only world we know. We are partnering with God and God’s salvific work in the here and now.”
One factor that has acted as a dividing line between churches that are thriving and those that are fading is the difference between those that are “performative”—in which members of the congregation are effectively a relatively passive audience—and those that are participatory, like hers and the ones that I saw in Maine. “Our focus is not on an afterlife, but on the only world we know,” she told me. “We are partnering with God and God’s salvific work in the here and now.”
The practical expression of religious life is what first drew me to evangelicalism more than 50 years ago. An early influence was The Cross and the Switchblade, which recounted how David Wilkerson left his comfortable church to minister to gang members and addicts in Brooklyn. Inspired, I joined his network of residential treatment centers and later launched mobile homeless shelters in my home city of Buffalo, New York, and mobile medical clinics in Mexico City and Cairo.
My focus on meeting “real felt needs” was eventually eclipsed by my becoming fully engaged in culture war combat, with the same Moral Majority so disparaged by the people I have gotten to know. Evangelical orthodoxy was weaponized, replacing compassion for the poor with rigid loyalty tests on abortion, sexuality, gender, and political affiliation. This shift has proved catastrophic, driving young people and longtime congregants away in droves due to intense politicization. While preparing for ministry, a popular adage was, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” I view this not as Rev. Terry of Maine Gospel Alliance does, a contradiction to the gospel, but as the fulfillment of the Christian mandate to love our neighbors by actively ensuring their basic needs are met.
The Pentecostal church across the street from the memorial site.Courtesy of Rob Schenck
Back in Maine, my last conversation at Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero’s memorial was with Michelle, the woman I had asked about the evangelical church across the street. I remarked on the beautiful, tattooed image of a blue-and-pink rosary, a stringed loop of beads used in Catholic prayer rituals, on the inside of her left forearm. “Oh, that was my mom’s rosary,” she said, stroking it with great affection. “I just loved her so deeply, and she loved her rosary. So, after she passed, I gave it to my tattooist and said, ‘Put it right there, so I can lay it across my heart and remember her.’” Then, her face hardened and her voice became angry. “But I’ve had it with religion. I left the church. Do you know that during Covid, I couldn’t even get a priest to come and give my dying mother last rites? They just wouldn’t do it.”
At that moment, I was no longer part of the crew who was working with her, but a minister with whom she shared her pain and anger. The first person I knew of who died of Covid, I told her, was a Franciscan Friar. Brother John Sebastian Laird-Hammond lived in a monastery near my home in Washington, DC, where he ministered to the poor and marginalized. She picked up on his middle name, Sebastian, and his hyphenated last name, “like Johan,” she said, surprised at what felt like an important coincidence. I shared my impressions of all the good work I had seen the clergy doing for immigrants like Johan over the last several days, and she interrupted me, smiling, “And there’s this one,” pointing enthusiastically to Rev. Whittemore.
“You know, Chaplain,” Michelle said, planting the broom she had been using to make her point. “I should get my ass back into church. This has gotten me thinking differently about it.” Smiling back, I gave her my card and offered to make some recommendations.
