Reverend Resistance

After a rousing speech at last summer's Democratic National Convention, Rev. William Barber II might have become the president's pastor. Instead, he's now the face of a progressive Christian protest movement that's taking its fight from North Carolina to the White House.


BY TOMMY TOMLINSON
APR 25, 2017
19.4K

The believers are having a hard time standing tall.

There are a couple dozen of them and they've been on their feet for more than an hour, holding up sheets of paper that say things like WE STAND TO ESTABLISH JUSTICE AS A MORAL ISSUE or PREACH GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR. Now they're bracing their elbows against their sides. The message is getting heavy.

It's midmorning on New Year's Eve—not quite eight weeks since Donald Trump was elected president, not quite three weeks before he takes office—and the believers have come from all over the country to resist. They've gathered here in Washington at National City Christian Church, where Lyndon Johnson worshipped; his favorite spot, six rows back, was named the president's pew. Today the church is hosting a teach-in so activists can learn the best ways to protest back home. Part of the price of entry, it turns out, is participating in a well-crafted photo op, holding up the signs at the press conference that kicks off the event. The believers and their signs create a frame around the man in the middle, a preacher from North Carolina named the Reverend William Barber II. He is the main reason they came.

During the press conference, while others take their turns at the pulpit, Barber leans back on a wooden barstool. At fifty-three, he has a severe arthritic condition in his spine and bursitis in his left knee. It hurts to sit and it hurts to stand. When he's bent over in the background and propped against his stool, it's hard to see the man Cornel West described as "the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst." But now he rises up toward the microphone, and the believers stand straighter.

Barber's ecumenical activist group, Repairers of the Breach, has crafted a letter to Trump asking to talk to him about voting rights and poverty and justice and health care. They're not going to Mar-a-Lago. They want him to come to church.

"We know by scriptural tradition that even Moses talked to Pharaoh," Barber tells the believers. "That Elijah talked to Ahab. That Jesus challenged the powers of their day. Dr. King met with Johnson, who had been a former segregationist. And he didn't always get what he wanted. But he served notice."

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