(RNS) — As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the life and witness of the Rev. Pauli Murray come powerfully to mind. “I want to see America be what she says she is in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America, be what you proclaim yourself to be!” said Murray, in a 1976 interview with Genna Rae McNeil for the Southern Oral History Program.
In this moment of unbridled abuse by federal immigration enforcement, framed by the administration without evidence as protecting the public from violent criminals, we are instead seeing federal agents spread fear across entire communities, disrupt families and impose lasting harm on children, parents and essential workers who pose no threat.
The actions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Minneapolis and elsewhere have detained parents and essential workers in the pursuit of enforcement quotas that only benefit private detention contractors, even as the administration’s public messaging asks us to disregard what we see with our own eyes: unnecessary brutality and murder on the streets of American citizens exercising their constitutional rights to protest injustice. Such protest reflects the heart of the Declaration of Independence.
Murray, an Episcopal priest and relentless advocate for civil and human rights, provides a guide to what it means to be American Christians in these unsettling, confusing and frightening times. Murray saw no division between the demands of the gospel and the unfinished work of democracy. She came to understand her struggle as a call — addressed not only to the nation, but to the church itself — to recognize the full breadth of God’s image reflected in humanity. Her life bore witness to a profound theological truth: God is not neutral in the face of injustice.
While the church is not called to partisan politics, it is unmistakably called to be partisan for the values of God: justice, love, dignity, freedom and the sacred worth of every human being. To follow Christ is to align ourselves with these values, not in abstraction, but in lived, embodied ways.
So, when we ask what it means to be a Christian in the United States in times like ours, we must recognize that there is never a time when we are not called to make real the justice of God. This is a justice that frees people to live into the fullness of their sacred humanity and rejects every value or system that diminishes it. The gospel compels us to live out, in the messiness of everyday life, the values that reflect the justice God desires for God’s people.
Faith leaders demonstrate against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics, at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Jan. 23, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)
Murray’s legacy is itself an answer, in the form of a question: Will we have the courage to hold together what she held together — faith and freedom, the gospel and democracy?
We see those values manifest in the people of Minnesota’s response to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past weeks. Singing in the streets. Showing up with candles and holding vigil in subzero temperatures. As Pastor Jodi Houge, one of our Lutheran colleagues who leads Humble Walk Lutheran Church in the Twin Cities, wrote recently, “On every block on my way home, there are candles in windows and people huddled outside to protect their neighbors.”
This is the Christian witness, and our baptismal promise, found in the Book of Common Prayer the binds Episcopalians together: “to renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”
Indeed, the justice of God is grounded in respecting the dignity of every human being. Such is also the case in our Constitution. Before God we are all worthy. Before our Constitution, we all stand before one another with equal rights, responsibilities and hope.
We call on those who live in this land to claim the full force and beauty of the words of our founding, a vision yet unrealized, our collective work, to establish liberty and justice for all.
In the words of Pauli Murray, in her poem “Dark Testament”: “Give me a song of hope/And a world where I can sing it/Give me a song of faith/And a people to believe in it./Give me a song of kindliness/And a country where I can live it.”
(The Most. Rev. Matthew Heyd is the Episcopal bishop of New York. The Very Rev. Winnie Varghese is dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The Rev. Kelly Brown-Douglas, the former dean and interim president of the Episcopal Divinity School, is a visiting professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
