Let me tell you what I hear when a pastor says, "We don't do politics here."

I hear: Some of you don't matter enough to protect.

That's not my interpretation. That's the logical conclusion. When a faith leader chooses silence in the face of children being stripped of gender-affirming care, or migrant families separated at the border, or Black communities poisoned by industrial waste, silence isn’t neutrality.

Silence is a vote. It is cast, counted, and cashed — always against the people with the least power to absorb the loss.

Saying out of politics has become the great theological cop-out of our generation. And beloved, it’s time we call it what it is. It’s not wisdom. It’s not discernment. It’s not prophetic patience. It is sin.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it plainly: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."¹

This wasn’t rhetorical flourish. It was a theological statement rooted in his reading of the Exodus narrative, of the prophets, of the incarnation itself.

God, in the biblical witness, doesn’t operate from the center. God operates from the margins. The Hebrew prophets were not balance-seekers. Amos did not call for a "both sides" conversation about economic exploitation.

Isaiah didn’t ask the ruling class for their perspective on why they were grinding the faces of the poor. They named the harm. They named the guilty. They demanded justice — not dialogue.

When we claim neutrality, we are not imitating God. We are imitating Pilate.

Notice what gets labeled political and what does not.

A sermon on personal purity? Not political. A sermon on tithing? Not political. A sermon on family values — coded as heteronormative and cisgender — not political, even when it shapes votes and policy.

But a sermon on housing justice? Political. A prayer for trans youth? Political. A statement condemning the criminalization of Black protest? Dangerously political.

What’s called "political" is usually "inconvenient to the people in power." Faith leaders who clutch pearls at progressive advocacy will, in the same breath, instruct congregations how to vote, which candidates share "our values," and why the culture war demands their dollars.

The neutrality is selective. And selective neutrality is not a theological position. It’s a political one — wearing a choir robe.

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor." — Luke 4:18²

Jesus didn’t begin his public ministry with a vision statement about spiritual growth and personal flourishing. He began with a policy announcement. Good news to the poor. Release to the captives. Liberty to the oppressed. These are not metaphors. They are a platform.

The incarnation itself — God entering the world as a Jewish peasant, under Roman occupation, born to an unwed mother in an occupied territory — is a political act. As womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas argues in Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, the cross was a state-sanctioned execution, an instrument of imperial terror.³

Understood in the context of empire, she writes, the crucifixion calls us to interpret Jesus' death as political resistance — and resurrection as God's definitive triumph over crucifying powers.⁴ To preach the cross without addressing state violence is to strip the gospel of its scandal.

The Gospel has never been apolitical. It has only ever been inconvenient.

I work as a forensic psychiatric chaplain. I minister to people who have been ground up by every system we politely refuse to name in church: poverty, racism, the criminalization of mental illness, the school-to-prison pipeline, inadequate public defense. I hold people whose suffering has a policy address.

When the church stays silent about those policies, it does not protect those people. It abandons them — and then offers them a pamphlet about peace that passeth understanding.

Womanist theologian Emilie Townes names this the "cultural production of evil" — the way ordinary institutions, including the church, normalize and sustain suffering by decoding memory, history, and myth as received wisdom in service of existing power structures.⁵

As Townes argues in her landmark text, the evil she examines is not loud or sudden. It operates through silence, stereotype, and institutional indifference.⁶ The sin is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. It looks like a neutral, nicely landscaped congregation that hasn't named injustice from the pulpit in fifteen years, and calls it "keeping unity."

That is not unity. That is managed silence. And managed silence has a body count.

The prophetic tradition does not ask us to choose between pastoral care and political engagement. It refuses the binary. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Oscar Romero, Pauli Murray — none of them understood their faith as separate from the struggle for human dignity. Their faith was the struggle.

Fannie Lou Hamer put it in language no seminary could improve upon: "You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap."⁷

Hamer, whose public life was shaped by the conviction that faith is not private and justice is not optional, didn't see her organizing as an extension of her faith.⁸ Her Christianity was her organizing.

We have been sold a privatized Christianity that serves the status quo by keeping the faithful focused on personal salvation while the world burns. It is a theological fraud. And it is costing lives.

→ LEARN: Read Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas (Orbis Books, 2015). Let it reframe what the Gospel demands of your institution.

→ ENGAGE: Find and support one BIPOC-led faith community or organization doing justice work in your region. Show up, give, and follow their lead.

→ ADVOCATE: Contact your denominational leadership — in writing — and ask what public statement your tradition has made on voting rights, trans youth protections, or migrant justice in the last 12 months. The answer will tell you everything.

Beloved, you did not come to faith to be comfortable. You came because something in you knew the world was not what it was supposed to be — and that you were called to help change it. That instinct is not political contamination. It is the Holy Spirit.

Do not let anyone preach it out of you.

We do this together. — JCW

Rev. Jason Carson Wilson is a Black gay UCC minister, Convergent Catholic Communion priest, forensic psychiatric chaplain, and founder of Politically Pastoral. He is available for preaching, consulting, and organizational training at the intersection of faith, justice, and media.

1. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as quoted in Robert McAfee Brown, Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 19. Lib Quotes

2. Luke 4:18, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

3. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), pp. 182–183. Douglas argues that the resurrection constitutes God's nonviolent triumph over the violence of imperial execution. Patheos

4. Ibid. Douglas writes that understanding the cross within the context of empire "calls us as Jesus followers to insurrection ourselves, as we interpret the death of Jesus as political resistance." Patheos

5. Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). The volume deconstructs memory, history, and myth as received wisdom, critically examining racism, sexism, poverty, and stereotypes as mechanisms of systemic evil. PhilPapers

6. Ibid. As Townes argues, "if the evil perpetrated is a product of human hands, its production can be traced backward in history to its genesis. By acts of counter-memory, evil can be named, unraveled and a new way of living can be possible." Goodreads

7. Fannie Lou Hamer, remarks at a mass meeting, Indianola, Mississippi, September 1964. As quoted in Maegan Parker Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), and widely reported by TIME magazine. Time

8. Center for Public Justice, "Enacted Religious Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, the Black Church, and Public Life," April 2025. Hamer's Christianity was rooted in Scripture, song, and the daily life of her faith community — not peripheral to her organizing but its source. Center for Public Justice