True religion always moves us to serve others and to give our lives to see those oppressed find freedom.” Pastor Erwin McManus
Backyard barbeques. Hammock time. Hiking a new trail. Watching those wondrous fireflies after dark. All gifts of summer. Still, this particular summer, just below the surface, verberates a not-to-be-ignored pulse. It reminds me to pause and look at the faces and to hear the voices arising from the escalating injustice happening all around me. These are the cries of my brothers, my sisters, and they call me to act, speak, love.
They call me to stand where I am afraid and rattle loud on the bars of the cell closing around us. Still, I take heart in those who have called us to love, first and foremost, when tyranny and suppression threaten the human spirit. I’m reminded of the great Apostle of Peace, Mahatma Gandhi, who reminded us that, “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.” Informed jointly by the Bhagavad Gita and the Sermon on the Mount, Gandhi used his daily spiritual practice to get his feet dirty on the road to liberty for all. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., greatly influenced by Gandhi, did the same. Both were true examples of choosing the love found in the messy, pit-stained, trenches where they could hear the cries of their brothers and sisters over the gunshots.
Today, it is the cries of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, John Sebastian Duran Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They echo now over the silent ones, the estimated 52 brothers and sisters who’ve died in ICE custody in the first 500 hundred days of the second Trump administration, according to the 6/25/2026 Human Watch and Physicians for Human Rights report. And they remind us to not forget the ones shut away who have no voice, the over 71,000 being held in detention. Our brothers. Our sisters.
If you’d told me just three years ago that one day, in this country, government officials, some masked in unmarked vehicles, would be rounding up suspected immigrants off the streets, without a warrant, taking them to undisclosed locations for undetermined amounts of time, I would have never believed it! “No way! Not here!” ICE, of course, reports that all arrests are accompanied by due process, that is unless you try to escape, say drive away, and then killing you is totally acceptable with little to no resulting ramifications for the shooting ICE agent. Think about that.
We have crossed the line into authoritarianism. The Trump administration is rapidly checking off all the benchmarks to implement Project 2025, installing a White Christian Nationalist State as quickly as possible. For a thorough explanation of what is happening, not just in this country but around the world, please see GPAHE (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism), “Project 2025 Goes Global.”
But in order to implement Project 2025, our secular American Republic must be replaced by an authoritarian regime capable of integrating the new Christian Nationalist State. And the Trump administration is wasting no time laying the foundation using the classic authoritarian playbook: divide and rule; spread lies and conspiracies; destroy checks and balances; demonize opponents; undermine civil and political rights of the unaligned; suppress free speech, the right to assembly and protest, the rights of women and minority groups; blame minorities, immigrants and outsiders for the country’s problems; reward loyalists and punish defectors; encourage or condone violence to achieve political goals; use fear mongering and hate speech to consolidate in-group solidarity.
Sound familiar? Now we know why DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion programs were the first to go. Christian Nationalists are busy whitewashing history (no pun intended) so the long struggles of all but wealthy white males to achieve equality are redacted. Women’s equality, cited as the root cause of the breakdown of the family, will be turned back to pre-suffrage days and the 19th Amendment likely rescinded. Statues of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson will be celebrated without mentioning he and others were slave owners. The early pioneers will be championed without acknowledging they settled land called home by Native Americans for thousands of years. If talking about people like Sally Ride, Oscar Wilde or James Baldwin they’ll conveniently ignore their status as LGBT icons. And by all means, books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will be tossed in the fire pit.
No, it’s not easy answering the cries of our brothers and sisters. It challenges us to get our feet dirty so we can all hear freedom ring. It asks that courage overcome fear to find us standing with those who are being marginalized and oppressed. Yet, as we do, we too just may discover that love known only to those in the trenches.
