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

The Guardian

18 hours ago

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.'
In 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?
Barber met the demonstrators at the corner of East Capitol St NE and 1st St 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, 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.
He 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.
'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 was 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.
Barber 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.'
Barber 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.
Barber 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.
This 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.