Susannah Tuttle is a realist: whatever North Carolina faith activist groups have been doing hasn’t been working.
Tuttle, North Carolina Council of Churches eco-justice connection director, never thought it would get this bad. Christian nationalists in the top circles of power. A conservative overhaul of the federal government guided by Project 2025. Minnesota ICE protests turning violent.
Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a celebration of a faith activist who helped lead the modern civil rights movement with nonviolent resistance. The state’s faith activist groups are marking this anniversary by considering how to build a similar movement in a different age, one where social media, near-unlimited campaign money and political polarization may obscure their message.
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It’s a long game, Tuttle said. Almost everything needs to change. However, a few starting blocks may coalesce around another holiday, Valentine’s Day.
Locally, the NC Council of Churches is helping voters send Valentines to state lawmakers, with the hopes of forming a relationship built upon mutual respect. From Feb. 11 to 14, a group led by Repairers of the Breach President Rev. William J. Barber II will walk from Wilson to Raleigh in the “This is Our Selma” march, culminating in a Raleigh rally. Nationally, a group of Buddhists travelling 2,300 miles from Texas to Washington D.C. on a Walk for Peace will complete their journey around the holiday.
“Just knowing that that’s happening feels magical,” Tuttle said. “It’s a different way of doing something.”
Faith helping build moral courage
In the 2012 elections, Republicans won both chambers of the North Carolina legislature and the governor’s office. Not long after, the united government began passing a wave of conservative legislation including abortion restrictions, social program cuts and a voter ID law.
Then-NAACP leader Barber launched a statewide Moral Monday movement in response. Each week, masses of North Carolinians entered the legislative building to pray, sing and chant during sessions. Many were arrested for trespassing after refusing to leave.
Overall, the movement drew hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters. Ever since, Barber’s faith group, Repairers of the Breach, has been a visible force in North Carolina politics.
On a different, much more recent Monday, about a dozen clergy and faith leaders sang “This Little Light of Mine” outside the North Carolina General Assembly. In between speeches about the impact of legislative inaction on healthcare, education and voting rights, they prayed and sang.
They were led by Rev. Floyd Wicker, founder of the People’s Fellowship of North Carolina. The group launched in 2021 with a vigil for peace and nonviolence in light of the pandemic and recent police shootings of Black Americans.
Wicker said organizing the event was exhausting. It took six meetings. Nobody showed up to the first one. One person came to the second. Five people made it to the third meeting.
“I feel like I’m having to persuade you to advocate for people in your community when I’m thinking, this is a part of the Bible,” Wicker said. “This is a part of faith.”
Not everyone understands why it’s so important for people of faith to protest, to hold public prayer or write to lawmakers, Wicker said. Some people don’t factor that into their faith experience. But it’s “theological,” he said. It’s the outward expression of an internal faith.
“I come from a more prophetic tradition where the spiritual and the political, the social, the economic, all of those are integrated, and they’re not compartmentalized,” he said.
Wicker wants to return to the energy of 2013. It will require more public action, but above all else, moral courage.
“I think people of faith have to come out of their silos; they have to come out of their temples and churches,” he said. “To follow in the footsteps of Jesus and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is going to require courage.”
“To follow in the footsteps of Jesus and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is going to require courage.”
the Rev. Floyd Wicker, founder of the People’s Fellowship of North Carolina
Tuttle wholeheartedly agrees. People of faith might volunteer to pack backpacks every week so kids have something to eat at lunch, for example, but there’s a need for a greater level of advocacy in the places where decisions are made.
“That’s very charitable,” she said. “But is that creating transformational change in the community, is that solving the hunger issue?”
Building relationships
State legislators are no stranger to protests and marches. But they mostly look the other way. After all, nobody wants to listen to someone who’s yelling at them.
“I have spent the majority of my life protesting, and I stand firm that whatever we’ve been doing isn’t working,” Tuttle said.
But not all hope is lost. Tuttle is working on a new approach: building mutually respectful, genuine relationships with lawmakers. They already have an in: many lawmakers are people of faith.
While groups like the NC Council of Churches tend to align with secular progressive groups, they come at it from a different angle, Tuttle said. Their values are grounded in Scripture.
Recently, she hosted a webinar on advocacy. About 80 people showed up. She advised attendees to invite their representatives to their congregations’ events and ask for meetings during the short session to get to know them on a human level.
“If we just go in and talk about the policies with elected officials and decision makers, we’re not getting to the source of the core values of why they’re making the decisions that they are,” she said.
Voters who build relationships with their lawmakers are more likely to be heard, or at the very least, get an explanation when a lawmaker votes against their preference.
Wicker doesn’t believe lawmakers are fully following their faiths, particularly the commandment to love their neighbor. If they were, he said they wouldn’t pass legislation cutting SNAP or Medicaid, for example.
“The disconnect is power, greed, racism and capitalism,” he said. “Those are hard things to fight.”
Wicker sees his job as less about influencing politicians and more about building a broader social consciousness that will eventually infiltrate politics.
But for now, both Tuttle and Wicker are thinking about the Buddhist monks. Tuttle watches their progress every day; while they aren’t calling it faith-based advocacy, she said walking that far in the cold and rain for peace is a political statement in itself.
It’s also proof of concept for Wicker. The monks aren’t saying much. They’re not protesting or calling for any policy in particular. But still, they’ve drawn people’s interest and attention with their presence alone, he said.
“If we build capacity, we’re building truth and unity and solidarity, and our presence will speak, because we can’t match lawlessness,” Wicker said. “We can’t match artillery or weaponry. We can’t fight racism and poverty with those weapons — we’ve got to have a much stronger weapon, and that weapon is nonviolence.”
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