On the coldest day of the winter in Minnesota, I stood in a crowd of witnesses at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport and watched as about 100 clergy members got arrested while praying.
The clergy, who represented a variety of religious traditions, had gathered at the airport to block traffic in protest of the Department of Homeland Security’s siege of the Twin Cities during Operation Metro Surge. Specifically, they protested the use of MSP Airport for deportation flights, the detention of immigrants who worked at the airport, and the cooperation of airlines with ICE.
The clergy marched and sang together in a crowd before kneeling in a long line in front of the Terminal 1 Departures gates. Many spoke prayers out loud, their voices overlapping as the crowd of hundreds of onlookers cheered, raised signs, and called out protest chants. Some of the clergy joined in reciting the Lord’s Prayer together. Many of those praying held hands, while others held signs bearing the names of airport workers detained by ICE. Some knelt with their eyes closed, their lips moving silently as their breath froze against their scarves or the hoods of their coats. Ice clung to the beard of the man praying in front of me.
Police officers ultimately arrested the line of protesters one by one, leading them onto buses with their wrists zip-tied. By the time the last clergy members were arrested, they had been kneeling on the pavement and praying, in -20 F weather, for over two hours.
This protest was part of a wider “Day of Truth and Freedom,” a general strike and resistance against the ICE siege in Minnesota. Later that afternoon, over 50,000 people gathered to protest in downtown Minneapolis.
The clergy’s protest is just one example of the wide range of religious responses to ICE enforcement – and to crisis and political conflict more broadly. The variety of expressions of religion amid the Twin Cities ICE surge stands as a microcosm of the wider culture of American religion and politics in public life, which is multifaceted, fraught, and contested. One important element of these dynamics, illustrated in part by the airport protest, is progressive religious activism: the place of religion in movements for progressive social change.
Religion in Social Movements
Progressive activism and social movements seek to push society to become more politically, socially, or economically just. While many may think of religion as a conservative social force in the U.S. and around the world, there is also a long history of religious involvement in progressive social movements. In the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, members of different Christian denominations played major roles in movements to abolish slavery in Great Britain and the United States. Liberation theology emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s as a widely influential movement that grounded political action in an ethic of solidarity with the poor and most marginalized. During the same time, the Black Church in the United States was a crucial source of community organizing, mobilization, and moral authority in the Civil Rights Movement.
- Williams, Rhys, and Todd Fuist. 2025. “Progressive Religious Movements.” Contemporary Social Movements: Historic and Descriptive Accounts, edited by David A. Snow, Doug McAdam, and Dana M. Moss.
- Levine, Daniel H. 1988. “Assessing the Impacts of Liberation Theology in Latin America.” The Review of Politics 50(2).
- Morris, Aldon. 1986. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. Free Press.
Interfaith Religious Activism
Religious involvement in progressive social movements is often interfaith in character, with different religious communities joining together to work towards common goals. In the 2010s, for example, the New Sanctuary Movement brought together different religious groups who sought to care for undocumented immigrants and work for progressive immigration policies. Today much of this social movement work occurs through organizations, some of which explicitly identify as interfaith and seek to mobilize across diverse religious communities. This includes many faith-based community organizations (FBCOs), groups that work to bridge differences between faith traditions by creating a unified moral voice around a common issue. Their work often entails portraying social issues in moral terms, connecting individual experiences to political concerns, and nurturing the belief that people have personal stakes in a given problem or goal.
- Delehanty, Jack. 2023. Making Moral Citizens: How Faith-Based Organizers Use Vocation for Public Action. University of North Carolina Press.
- Braunstein, Ruth, and Amy Lawton. 2019. “Interfaith Political Activism in the United States.” The Interfaith Movement: Mobilizing Religious Diversity in the 21st Century, edited by John Fahy and Jan-Jonathan Bock, Routledge.
- Yukich, Grace. 2013. One Family Under God: Immigration Politics and Progressive Religion in America. New York University Press.
- Oyakawa, Michelle. 2015. “‘Turning Private Pain into Public Action’: The Cultivation of Identity Narratives by a Faith-Based Community Organization.” Qualitative Sociology 38(4).
The place of religion in U.S. politics and culture is evolving and contested. An increasing share of the population identifies as nonreligious, more people are turning to alternative forms of religion and spirituality, and conservative and extremist expressions of religion have grown more visible and powerful in U.S. politics. Today, as historically, progressive religious activism is part of this story, and continues to impact what it means to be religious – and political – in modern life.
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Anastasia Dulle (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests revolve around religion, culture, politics, and rhetorical/narrative studies.
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