6th Street Baptist gave me the side eye.
It stood right there on the corner of the eerily quiet downtown district in the breathtaking heat of an August afternoon in Birmingham, side eyeing me.
The side eye was not entirely unexpected. A busy weekend of Sunday School, business meetings, and a morning worship where the ancestors and congregation worshipped and praised together, looking like a piece Archibald Motley had painted, had exhausted its desire to access its full emotional responses.
What’s more, I didn’t help the situation. I was standing in the exact place where four young Black women became martyrs in 1963, and dozens more were injured. I wondered to myself and cried out to the Creator and asked how we were going to make it through this current political and most recent political oppression.
16th Street Baptist looked at me offended, sighed, and said, “It’s the Black church. It’s always been the Black church.”
And then it gave me a side eye.
We have built a habit of treating secularity as the prerequisite for progressive enlightenment. When the modern left looks at the religious right, we see an apparatus of exclusionary power, a weaponization of doctrine against the marginalized.
And so, in our pursuit of a more equitable society, we have often quietly concluded that to be purely progressive is to be unchurched. In doing so, we commit a profound act of historical amnesia, forgetting that the progressive project in America — the very concept of a morally expanding democracy — was not born in the secular halls of the academy, but at the altar of the Black church.
To understand the Black church is to understand an institution born in the crucible of absolute theft. When enslaved Africans were stripped of their names, their families, and their humanity, they were force-fed a sanitized, master’s version of Christianity designed to induce compliance. But something miraculous happened. Our ancestors took the promise of the Imago Dei — the belief that every human bears the divine stamp — and turned it into a weapon of radical subversion. They read the Exodus story and saw a blueprint for liberation. They built an institution that functioned as a church, a school, a bank, and an embassy of freedom all at once.
Fast forward to the 21st century. The modern American progressive movement finds itself in a state of ideological exhaustion, paralyzed by incrementalism and terrified by the rapid resurgence of the right. The white progressive establishment often relies on the cold, sterile language of policy papers, demographic spreadsheets, and institutional reform. But policy cannot alone cure the nihilism born from systemic violence, nor can it fully articulate the intrinsic worth of a historically plundered caste. Policy does not move the spirit; it does not mobilize a community to lay its body on the line for the long arc of justice.
The Black church offers the salvation that the progressive left desperately needs: a theology of collective redemption and unyielding moral authority. Progressivism today often stumbles over the seductive trap of individualism, operating under the assumption that liberation is merely a matter of personal autonomy or localized privilege. The Black church rejects this. It understands that no one is truly free until the entire collective is liberated.
The pews of historically Black congregations like Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston or Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta do not preach a doctrine of abstract optimism. They preach a stark, brutal hope that looks the terror of white supremacy directly in the eye, yet demands the continued investment in the human project. When the left leans on the Black church, it borrows from a tradition that knows how to survive the apocalypse. It taps into a radical prophetic voice that historically condemned both the physical subjugation of Black bodies and the spiritual rot of the American empire.
The Black church’s tradition of political organizing is not a side effect of its faith; it is the very essence of its gospel. From the Freedom Rides to the modern movements organizing against state violence, the sanctuary has always been the staging ground for the resistance. If modern progressive politics is to survive its own ideological paralysis, it must reckon with this truth.
We cannot defeat a deeply entrenched, mythology-driven right-wing apparatus using only the lexicon of bureaucracy and political calculus. We need the moral cadence of the pulpit. We need the capacity for radical grace alongside righteous rage. The salvation of the progressive movement does not lie in abandoning faith, but in learning from a people who took a religion designed to subjugate them, and used it to teach America what it means to be free.
