Dozens of white evangelical pastors and pundits commemorated Martin Luther King on the national holiday Monday by perfectly imitating the role played by most white clergy and commentators during the Civil Rights Movement.
But first, before you click over to read that “Evangelical Roundup” from John Fea, please ignore this photo.
Don’t just passively ignore it, but look at it closely and then ignore it. Actively ignore it. Pretend it doesn’t matter.
Can you do that? Because you’ll have to do that if you want to have any hope of understanding what all of those white alleged preachers and teachers were saying this year on MLK Day.
These folks weren’t thinking of Dr. King, but of another Black pastor whose more recent nonviolent activism they rushed to condemn and criticize. Yet even while they all seemed to forget what holiday it was on Monday, they still managed to express this criticism and condemnation in a way that perfectly imitated their own predecessors from 60 years ago.
Back then, places like Selma and Birmingham were the epicenters of violent white supremacy and nonviolent resistance to it. At the moment, Ground Zero in that exact same struggle is Minnesota, where the MAGA regime has sent more than 3,000 armed and armored goons to detain, harass, and intimidate anybody who isn’t white.
This federal campaign of violent ethnic cleansing is explicitly just that. No decent person capable of tying their own shoes can pretend that’s not what it is or pretend that’s not all that it is.
And that — violent ethnic cleansing with the explicit goal of white supremacy and white hegemony — is the context for the responses of all of these white pastors and pundits and perfessers. Those responses range from those at one end of the spectrum celebrating violent ethnic cleansing to those at, alas, the other end of the short spectrum who are saying, “Well, yesofcourseweallagreethat violent ethnic cleansing is perhaps bad, BUT …”
The specific thing that set these folks off on MLK Day was this story from the day before, “Activists call for Cities Church pastor to resign over ICE leadership conflict.”
That’s the headline from the local FOX affiiliate, which offers this as a bullet-point summary of the story:
- Community activists are calling for the pastor at a St. Paul church to resign over a possible conflict with being in ICE leadership enforcement.
- Activists say David Easterwood, a pastor at Cities Church, is also the acting field director for ICE in Minnesota.
- The group Racial Justice Network held a protest Sunday, marching into the church and disrupting services.
The evangelical round-up John Fea collects of White Pastors and Pundits clutching their pearls and wringing their hands is entirely focused on that last bullet point in the Fox news report.
That bit where it says “disrupting services”? They see this as more like “ZOMG!!!1! tHEyRe dIsrUPtiNg sERViceS!!!”
And those other bullet points? The ones about this church having a pastor who “is also the acting field director” for the federal occupation of their community in the name of white supremacy and ethnic cleansing?
That is of little or no concern for these white men of the pulpit and the podcast. Their response to those first two bullet-points in that local new report is, again, either to celebrate that a good white pastor is in charge of such important government work Making America White Again, or else to say, dismissively, that yesofcourseit’sunfortunate that this pastor is the acting field director for violent ethnic cleansing, BUT …
The harrumphing and hyperventilating performance of indignation here — THEY’RE INTERRUPTING SERVICES! — is almost a perfect imitation of the way these guys parents all responded back in the 1980s when ACT UP protesters were literally fighting for their lives against clergy in New York City.
I’d need a trip to the library and an afternoon scanning microfiche articles to put together an “Evangelical Round Up” from that time,* but suffice it to say the response from every white evangelical not named C. Everett Koop, Ed Dobson,** or Peggy Campolo was disgraceful. Just exactly as disgraceful in just exactly the same way that so many of the responses collected by Dr. Fea are — high on their own indignation, morally obtuse, deliberately disregarding the urgent reality, and yet somehow fiercely proud of all of that.
It was gross.
If you’re too young to remember the lethal callousness of that rejection of ACT UP, perhaps you’ll recall the somewhat more recent iteration of this same performance of indignation that followed Sinead O’Connor’s denunciation of clergy sex abuse during her appearance on Saturday Night Live. The same voices then recited the same script. They sang the same shameful song and danced the same shameful dance in service of the same shameful cause. (I did too at the time, shamefully following the lead of the Very Serious People who then, as now, assured me that following their script without thinking or looking or listening was how I might also join them and become a Very Serious Person myself. The link in this paragraph includes a part of my apology for that. This post is a part of my attempt to make partial amends for that, which is not optional.)
Almost all of us now are too young to remember the template-setting performance that wrote the script recited by so many of these white fleecers of the flock this week. That would be the original “Call to Unity” — the ur-text of the Very Serious Person and the paradigm for the tone and the substance and the insubstance of the ersatz “outrage” performed by all of these 1960s White Moderate re-enactors this week. That document — a self-important, indignant “open letter” signed by eight prominent Alabama clergy also asked its readers to actively ignore what was happening, dismissing it by saying yesofcoursethatseemsbad BUT … the most important thing is not the violent injustice and the violent imposition of white supremacy, the most important thing is that protesters go about protesting in the right way.
Which is to say that the protesters always be supplicants — humble, groveling, obsequious, and inconsequential. They should raise their hands and not speak until called on by the Very Serious People, at which point their remarks must be polite, ineffectual, and marked by their overwhelming gratitude that we have allowed them to participate in our discourse.
I would go on more here about how shamefully ugly and proud and [Benoit Blanc voice] just dumb that original “Call to Unity” document was, but I don’t really need to contribute to its refutation because we already have the words of the prophets. “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” And in 1963 the Holy Ghost moved a holy man of God to write an epistle of prophecy and scripture, a Letter From a Birmingham Jail dissecting and denouncing and damning the unholy writ of the “Call to Unity.”
And, again, can we just pause for a moment to sit with the disgusting and distressing fact that all these white clergy, today, in 2026, chose the Martin Luther King holiday as the day to recite and rehash and repeat all the soulless, callous, disdainful wickedness of the very document that King’s prison epistle was written to condemn? It’s really something to behold.
The wildest part of this is that these folks’ uncannily accurate — sometimes almost verbatim — recitation of the “Call to Unity” was not deliberate. They didn’t set out like a group of Civil War re-enactors with a fastidious concern to get all of the period details just exactly right. None of these guys were intending to replicate the shameful words and deeds of their predecessors, sitting down thinking “how can I best recapture the timidity and moral obtuseness of an Earl Stallings or a Holan B. Harmon.”
And yet they did so, perfectly, with an almost uncanny precision.
The other very strange aspect of the echo-chamber-orchestra of feigned “outrage” collected in those links above is that none of these white pastor/professor/pundits reciting this litany of disgraced White Moderate talking points understands how their performance is perceived by anyone outside of that echo chamber. They dimly perceive opposition to their performance as ideological disagreement rather than what it actually is — moral horror. This horror is felt and expressed not because people are “progressives” or “liberals” or “radicals,” but because people cannot accept their premise that we should ignore that photo up at the top of the page and pretend it doesn’t matter.
That photo shows an American citizen, a grandfather and a neighbor and a member of his American community. He is being dragged out of his home by armed thugs, wearing just his underwear and a blanket in Minnesota in January. This was similar to a “Kavanaugh stop” — the anti-constitutional but Supreme Court-majority blessed new policy stating that citizens can be detained and interrogated by the Papers Please Police based on skin color, accent, or apparent non-whiteness. Non-white citizens — grandfathers and grandmothers, mothers and children — may be detained for days without charge, without access to a lawyer, without adequate food and sanitation.
Kavanaugh stops are a constant, brutal part of daily life in the occupied Twin Cities. This is more important — far, far more important — than any fretting about whether those protesting this disgraceful injustice are going about their protests in exactly the way we’d prefer them to.
But that photo above wasn’t just a Kavanaugh stop, this was a Kavanaugh Home Invasion — the ICE goons went into this man’s house without a valid warrant and dragged a U.S. citizen out of his home and into the snow, nearly naked.
This too is happening all day, every day, all across the Twin Cities. Humiliation and intimidation and white supremacy are the whole point of this ICE tactic.
And that tactic, like all of the brutality and ethnic intimidation and attempted ethnic cleansing going on right now all across the Twin Cities, is in part orchestrated and organized by ICE’s acting field director there. That apparatchik is apparently a man named David Easterwood, who also serves as a pastor at the Southern Baptist Cities Church in St. Paul.
“Community activists” are calling for Easterwood to resign from that church and/or from ICE.
And what you have to understand about that is “community activists” right now refers to almost every resident of the Twin Cities. David Easterwood is acting as the enemy of those cities and of everyone who lives in them who does not share his active, violent hatred of their neighbors. That “everyone” includes most of the white evangelical residents of the Twin Cities — people who are out there with all of their other decent neighbors guarding school children, blowing whistles, and grocery shopping for everyone who can’t safely go outside because they don’t pass ICE’s paper-bag test.
They’re good neighbors, and so they share the moral horror that all good neighbors share when witnessing what ICE is doing in their city.
And also, as a lesser matter, far down the list and far below the urgent moral horrors that demand their action and attention and devotion, they share the moral horror that all good neighbors feel when witnessing the Call-to-Unity posturing of the Very Serious People who seem intent on forfeiting any right to be taken seriously.
* While there at the library I could also, perhaps, research the language used by the Very Serious People back in the early 1700s when Benjamin Lay was regularly “interrupting services” to protest his fellow Quakers’ human trafficking. I know that Lay was bodily carried and hurled out of at least one church after he interrupted services there with his “bleeding Bible” stunt, but I can’t document what I would bet is also the case — that the ridiculously Very Serious People responded to his protests by saying, “I too have concerns about slavery, but the Most Important Thing is that thou shouldst go about expressing those concerns in the Right Way, through the Proper Channels, and …” blah blah blah, yada yada, Call to Unity, etc.
I’m also 99% sure that this was how the Very Serious People of the 8th Century BCE responded to the unseemly rudeness of Isaiah chapter 1, in which the prophet asserts that Almighty God Godself is the one interrupting services.
** THEY INTERRUPTED SERVICES!!!1! at Ed Dobson’s church too. So he invited them back, into the pews and into the pulpit. Ed Dobson loved his neighbors.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In