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In the first weeks of March 1965, as the campaign for voting rights reached its most decisive hour, two very different understandings of what it means to be a pastor collided in the streets of Selma and in churches across the nation.
This is the history we seldom hear and these are the narratives we must remember as we fight for voting rights today.
After the state violence of Bloody Sunday, Dr. King did not only send out a general appeal. He sent messages to church leaders across the country, summoning them to what he called a “minister’s march.”
Hundreds of ministers, priests, rabbis, and nuns answered by traveling to Alabama to stand with people they had never met. They understood the gospel to require their bodies in a particular place at a particular time, and that conviction carried a cost.
James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, was beaten on a Selma street the night he arrived and died three days later, on March 11.
He was not the first person of faith to give his life for the ballot that season. Only weeks earlier an Alabama state trooper had shot and killed Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old father, an Army veteran, and the youngest deacon at his church in Marion. His killing sparked the call for the march from Selma to Montgomery.
A deacon and a minister, one Black and one white, were killed within a month of each other because they believed demonstrating for the right to vote was part of their Christian witness and, ultimately, worth their lives.
Not every prominent pastor read the moment as a call to faith-fueled justice.
That same March, from a large and growing white congregation in Virginia, Jerry Falwell Sr. preached a sermon titled “Ministers and Marches.”
The argument in the sermon ran directly against King’s message.
Falwell insisted that “Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.”
He went on to preach,
“As Christians, we detest discrimination. But we do need to see that we can never stop it through any other means than that weapon which was given to the church 2,000 years ago—the preaching of the gospel of Christ. Education, medicine, social reform, and all the other external ministries cannot meet the needs of the human soul and spirit. If money and education could raise the moral standards of a nation, America would be pure indeed.”
The claim sounded pious, yet it came from a man who had founded a segregated school, and it carried a dangerous message.
If the pulpit has no business in politics, then pastors ought to stay silent about the issues that drew others to risk their lives in marches and protests.
Withdrawal disguised as piety was itself a political act, and it happened to serve the very power structure that voting rights activists were risking their lives to change.
Falwell’s admonition for ministers to stay out of politics changed as soon as he saw a route to right-wing power.
A little more than a decade later, Falwell repudiated his sermon as “false prophecy,” and then he built the Moral Majority, mobilizing pastors into exactly the kind of political force he had once warned them against.
The issue of whether faith and politics should intermingle is beside the point. They do. Concede the fact.
The better question is whether your faith will fuel the politics of democracy or disenfranchisement.
We have about 90 days until the 2026 midterm elections.
The ministers who came to Selma believed that showing up was part of their Christian witness.
Where will the church today stand when voting rights are again under attack?
This response of ministers was just one segment in this episode. Listen to the rest for everything you never learned about the Voting Rights Act.
The 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965
A detailed history of events leading to the Voting Rights Act
King’s call for a “minister’s march” after Bloody Sunday
Jerry Falwell’s 1965 sermon “Ministers and Marches”
Shelby County v. Holder and the end of preclearance
Louisiana v. Callais and the gutting of Section 2
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