Clergy from across the faith spectrum are re-inventing what it means to be a Church in America, particularly during election season. And perhaps nowhere is that re-invention more apparent now than it is in Minnesota where, standing outside the state capitol, ministers, rabbis, and imams pledged their sanctuaries as what one organizer called "democracy hubs" – places for voter registration, civic education, and monitoring for suppression.
The timing is pointed: President Trump reportedly plans to address the nation on television tonight to again allege that there was fraud in the 2020 election, a speech election-security experts warn is less about new evidence than it is about seeding doubt about the integrity of elections ahead of the midterms.
The announcement raises a question American faith traditions have argued over since before the country held its very first election: is casting a ballot a sacred act, or simply a legal one?
On July 7, faith leaders gathered at the Minneapolis State Capitol to launch "Faith in Us," a multistate campaign built around ballot access ahead of the November midterms. The interfaith group ISAIAH Minnesota led the event, joined by clergy representing dozens of congregations. Organizers say more than 1,700 clergy members have signed a letter urging election officials to reject federal pressure that could restrict voting.
Similar events unfolded across nine states, representing more than 1,500 congregations altogether. The letter names specific concerns: an executive order curbing vote-by-mail, and new district maps drawn after the Supreme Court narrowed the Voting Rights Act's preclearance protections. "Our churches, our mosques, our synagogues, our places of worship will become democracy hubs," said Minister JaNaé Bates Imari of ISAIAH, framing the effort as accountability rather than partisanship.
Is Voting a Sacred Duty, or Just a Civil One?
Many faith traditions treat voting as more than procedure. The National Council of Churches teaches that ballots let believers "bear witness" to Scripture's call to protect the vulnerable. Civil rights leader and longtime Congressman John Lewis, an ordained deacon, went further: "The vote is precious, it is almost sacred." That framing still echoes in today's organizing, where clergy describe voter protection as ministry, not politics.
Not every Christian voice agrees that voting rises to sacred duty. An editorial in The Christian Century, a mainline Protestant magazine, warned that "sacred" language inflates a single vote's moral weight. Evangelical commentators at The Gospel Coalition argue Scripture never mandates voting, since it isn't legally required in the United States the way it is in nations with compulsory turnout. Both camps raise the same underlying question: what does faithful citizenship actually require?
How Has Religion Shaped Who Gets to Vote?
That question has a long history, and religion hasn't always expanded access. Colonial governments barred Catholics from voting in five colonies and Jews in four, while several states required officeholders to swear belief in Protestant Christianity well into the 1800s. Pennsylvania kept a religious test on its books until the twentieth century. The same faith traditions organizing today's "democracy hubs" once justified the opposite: using religious identity to decide who counted as a citizen.
The reversal came through the Black church. After the Civil War, congregations became hubs for political organizing among newly enfranchised freedmen, a role that deepened during the twentieth century. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. viewed Black churches as central to voter registration, and the "Souls to the Polls" tradition, born from Jim Crow-era suppression, still sends congregants from Sunday service directly to early voting sites. Minnesota's "democracy hubs" sit squarely in that lineage.
Is the Wall Between Church and State Still Standing?
The current moment adds a twist. In 2013, the Supreme Court's Shelby County ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act's preclearance requirement, and more than a dozen states passed new voting restrictions within a few years. Meanwhile, in July 2025, the IRS agreed in a court settlement that churches could endorse political candidates from the pulpit without losing tax-exempt status, effectively ending seven decades of Johnson Amendment enforcement against houses of worship specifically.
That carve-out applies only to churches, not secular nonprofits, handing faith institutions a political privilege no other charity holds. Our recent piece on the administration's push to dismantle church-state separation traces that shift in more detail, and the claims driving it echo a pattern our look at America's recurring "Christian nation" argument documents across centuries. The line between pulpit and politics keeps moving. It has never been fixed.
Is voting a sacred act, a civic duty, or a right like any other, and does the label change how seriously we treat it? Where should the line sit between clergy encouraging civic participation and churches endorsing candidates outright?
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