Jeff Brumley

A group of Baptist pastors announced formation of The Baptist Network to foster collaboration and encouragement between minsters and congregations in a time of intense social and political conflict in the American church.

A federal court granted a preliminary injunction preventing the Trump administration from establishing a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund for the president's political allies as a lawsuit against the account moves ahead.

Religious freedom is a radical invention that allows all Americans to believe or not believe as they choose, but on the condition that others are not harmed, said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

An average of 25 children age 3 or younger are in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody daily while no fewer than 500 infants and toddlers have been detained since President Donald Trump took office last year, according to a study by The Marshall Project and MS NOW.

The Washington, D.C.-area offices of nonprofit groups that provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children were recently visited by federal agents in what some of the organizations described as a campaign of intimidation.

Opposing American authoritarianism will require dedicated action and avoiding the temptation to fall into “grim despair” over its advances, said Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

Christians who vilify the poor, LGBTQ people and women practice a version of the faith that is heavy on the Bible but light on words of Jesus, said Howard-John Wesley, senior pastor of the historic Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va.

Fighting authoritarianism doesn't require being violently forced to the ground and handcuffed by police outside an immigration detention center, said Michael Woolf, a Chicago-area Baptist pastor, author and activist who experienced that very thing.

Women have served in ministry throughout the history of the church even as their courage and tenacity have been mostly overlooked and forgotten, said theologian Yolanda Pierce, dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

The rise of American authoritarianism frees people of faith from having to question how they would have responded during the Civil Rights Movement, Democracy Forward President Sky Perryman said.