Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 21,is your day to shine.  Vote YES to retore fair elections and remind your friends and family to do the same.  Patriotic Americans are watching this election and hoping to see Virginians set an example for the rest of the country to follow in the fight to preserve our democracy!

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight.

By   Thom Hartmann

On Monday, (August 18, 2025) US President Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the chancellor of Germany and the prime minister of Great Britain—both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting—Trump said:

"Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We’re gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened."

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced over 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.

Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-bite TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.

Third, mail-in ballots—because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election—give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.

Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and underresourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150% longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200% longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself Monday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy,” Trump proclaimed. “If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: It’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress—not the president—overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Vladimir Putin, who reportedly told him that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing US election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans—Republicans, Democrats, independents—exercise their right to vote.

But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: It’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: They will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: That’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy. 

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing LBJ’s peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.

But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act—which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts—teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

We wait Kamala Harris for 2026 in California. 

She can win and we can see (for the moment) 49 senators in the US for the democrats during th middterms. 

Wicem Gidrey is journalist for SFNewsfeed.us and she sings "Voter, vote her" on Youtube , her handle is @gindreyPOD. 

Gindrey will organise a big help for Harris for the other candidates for democracy. 

In March 2025 the congressional polls gives +0.8 points for the democrats. 

We can give the chance to Kamala Harris for a victory in California. 

In Spetember, Harris will decide and Gindrey will create a musical video for the campaign if Harris runs. 

Gindrey hopes to see Baack Obama in 2026 for the 250 years of the US. Wicem Gindrey tries to enter in the Harris team by a future graphic designs. 

If Trump (alreay unpopular) is the more and more hated, we crush all the midterms in the US by a massive democratic ballot. 

A fight over extending provisions of Trump’s tax cuts is at stake in November’s election. Ultimately, the race is about money.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

There are many issues on the line this election year but one that gets little attention is former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform law that cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanently reduced the tax rate for big corporations from an already-low 35 percent to a ridiculously minuscule 21 percent. It also lowered tax rates for the wealthiest people from nearly 40 percent to 37 percent. Several provisions of that law are set to expire in 2025, making this November’s Congressional and Presidential elections particularly critical to issues of economic fairness and justice.

A few months after Trump signed the bill, he boasted, “We have the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. Bigger than any tax cut.” It became a common refrain for him when touting his achievements. But, Trump, who was known for breaking all records on lying to the public while in office, conflated many different facts to come up with a positive-sounding falsehood in a nation already primed by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to view taxation as anathema. Trump’s tax cuts as a whole were the eighth largest in history. But his corporate tax cut was in fact the single largest reduction ever in that category.

Wealthy corporations have for years lobbied for and won so many carve-outs and loopholes to the U.S. tax system, and hidden so much money in offshore tax havens that their pre-2017 effective tax rates were already far lower than the official rates. Then, Trump lowered them even more. Imagine telling the American public that you are responsible specifically for the biggest tax cuts to the biggest corporations in U.S. history. It wasn’t a good look. And so, he lied, saying that he signed history’s biggest tax cut overall.

In the simplest terms, taxes are a way to pool collective resources so we can have the things we all need for safety and security. Progressive taxation is when wealthier individuals (and corporations) are taxed at higher-than-average rates because the richer one is, the less excess money one needs beyond one’s basic necessities. Progressive taxation ensures that wealth inequality doesn’t spiral out of control and helps ensure money that’s being sucked upwards, gets redistributed downward. When wealthy elites pay fewer taxes, they are effectively stealing from the public.

Since the cuts have been in place, many studies have attempted to assess their impact on the U.S. economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded in a March 2024 report that “[t]ogether with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush (most of which were made permanent in 2012), [Trump’s] law has severely eroded our country’s revenue base.”

Trump’s law accelerated the draining of our collective revenues to fund the things we need. Even the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation concluded that, as a result of Trump’s law, “The United States collects fewer revenues from corporations, relative to the size of the economy, than most other advanced countries.”

Trump’s tax cuts were quite literally regressive, rewarding the already rich. A 2021 ProPublica report found that just one last-minute provision to the bill demanded by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for so-called pass-through corporations benefited a handful of the wealthiest people in the nation: “just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings, an analysis of confidential tax records shows.” It only cost about $20 million in bribes to Johnson (i.e., donations to the Senator’s reelection campaign) to enact this windfall.

It’s no wonder that the rich were thrilled with Trump’s presidency and that his virulent white supremacy and fascist leanings were not deal breakers.

It’s also unsurprising that wealthy elites are backing a second term for Trump. They want an extension of those tax bill provisions that are expiring in 2025, and perhaps an even bigger tax cut, if they can get it. If those provisions are left to expire, people making more than $400,000 a year—the top 2 percent of earners—will see an increase in taxation in 2025.

This is a demographic that is already prone to tax cheating given the IRS’s recent announcement that 125,000 Americans making between $400,000 and $1 million a year have simply refused to file taxes since 2017.

If the GOP wins control of the Senate and the House of Representatives this fall, and if Trump beats President Joe Biden, those cuts will become permanent. A GOP sweep in November will also usher in a new wave of threats to people of color, LGBTQ people, especially transgender communities, labor rights, and reproductive justice, as well as an escalation to the already-dire Israeli genocide in Gaza that Biden is fueling. It’s hard to believe but many Americans seem to have forgotten the horrors of 2016 to 2020.

But, at its heart, this election will be about money, for it will take a lot of money to fund the GOP’s reelection campaigns in order for moneyed forces to ensure they retain control of more money—democracy, justice, and equity be damned.

For Trump, this is even more important given his legal challenges. He’s relying on small-dollar donations from his base to cover his mounting legal fees and has had to post a $91 million bond to cover the fines he faces from a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll. The more desperate Trump gets in his bid to secure the White House, the more willing he and his party will be to sell the nation to the highest bidder. And, he will lie to the public by conflating tax cuts for the rich with tax cuts for all.

We ought to think of tax cuts in terms of public revenue theft. When the wealthy win lowered taxes, they are stealing money from the American public as a whole. As per the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, permanently extending Trump’s tax cuts will result in a loss of $3.5 trillion in revenues through the year 2033. That’s highway robbery.

There are many issues on the line this election year but one that gets little attention is former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform law that cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanently reduced the tax rate for big corporations from an already-low 35 percent to a ridiculously minuscule 21 percent. It also lowered tax rates for the wealthiest people from nearly 40 percent to 37 percent. Several provisions of that law are set to expire in 2025, making this November’s Congressional and Presidential elections particularly critical to issues of economic fairness and justice.

A few months after Trump signed the bill, he boasted, “We have the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. Bigger than any tax cut.” It became a common refrain for him when touting his achievements. But, Trump, who was known for breaking all records on lying to the public while in office, conflated many different facts to come up with a positive-sounding falsehood in a nation already primed by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to view taxation as anathema. Trump’s tax cuts as a whole were the eighth largest in history. But his corporate tax cut was in fact the single largest reduction ever in that category.

Wealthy corporations have for years lobbied for and won so many carve-outs and loopholes to the U.S. tax system, and hidden so much money in offshore tax havens that their pre-2017 effective tax rates were already far lower than the official rates. Then, Trump lowered them even more. Imagine telling the American public that you are responsible specifically for the biggest tax cuts to the biggest corporations in U.S. history. It wasn’t a good look. And so, he lied, saying that he signed history’s biggest tax cut overall.

In the simplest terms, taxes are a way to pool collective resources so we can have the things we all need for safety and security. Progressive taxation is when wealthier individuals (and corporations) are taxed at higher-than-average rates because the richer one is, the less excess money one needs beyond one’s basic necessities. Progressive taxation ensures that wealth inequality doesn’t spiral out of control and helps ensure money that’s being sucked upwards, gets redistributed downward. When wealthy elites pay fewer taxes, they are effectively stealing from the public.

Since the cuts have been in place, many studies have attempted to assess their impact on the U.S. economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded in a March 2024 report that “[t]ogether with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush (most of which were made permanent in 2012), [Trump’s] law has severely eroded our country’s revenue base.”

Trump’s law accelerated the draining of our collective revenues to fund the things we need. Even the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation concluded that, as a result of Trump’s law, “The United States collects fewer revenues from corporations, relative to the size of the economy, than most other advanced countries.”

Trump’s tax cuts were quite literally regressive, rewarding the already rich. A 2021 ProPublica report found that just one last-minute provision to the bill demanded by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for so-called pass-through corporations benefited a handful of the wealthiest people in the nation: “just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings, an analysis of confidential tax records shows.” It only cost about $20 million in bribes to Johnson (i.e., donations to the Senator’s reelection campaign) to enact this windfall.

It’s no wonder that the rich were thrilled with Trump’s presidency and that his virulent white supremacy and fascist leanings were not deal breakers.

It’s also unsurprising that wealthy elites are backing a second term for Trump. They want an extension of those tax bill provisions that are expiring in 2025, and perhaps an even bigger tax cut, if they can get it. If those provisions are left to expire, people making more than $400,000 a year—the top 2 percent of earners—will see an increase in taxation in 2025.

This is a demographic that is already prone to tax cheating given the IRS’s recent announcement that 125,000 Americans making between $400,000 and $1 million a year have simply refused to file taxes since 2017.

If the GOP wins control of the Senate and the House of Representatives this fall, and if Trump beats President Joe Biden, those cuts will become permanent. A GOP sweep in November will also usher in a new wave of threats to people of color, LGBTQ people, especially transgender communities, labor rights, and reproductive justice, as well as an escalation to the already-dire Israeli genocide in Gaza that Biden is fueling. It’s hard to believe but many Americans seem to have forgotten the horrors of 2016 to 2020.

But, at its heart, this election will be about money, for it will take a lot of money to fund the GOP’s reelection campaigns in order for moneyed forces to ensure they retain control of more money—democracy, justice, and equity be damned.

For Trump, this is even more important given his legal challenges. He’s relying on small-dollar donations from his base to cover his mounting legal fees and has had to post a $91 million bond to cover the fines he faces from a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll. The more desperate Trump gets in his bid to secure the White House, the more willing he and his party will be to sell the nation to the highest bidder. And, he will lie to the public by conflating tax cuts for the rich with tax cuts for all.

We ought to think of tax cuts in terms of public revenue theft. When the wealthy win lowered taxes, they are stealing money from the American public as a whole. As per the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, permanently extending Trump’s tax cuts will result in a loss of $3.5 trillion in revenues through the year 2033. That’s highway robbery.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Will Americans of faith choose progressive values of compassion over the gospel of prosperity and power?

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Pastor Eligio Regalado in Denver, Colorado, is being charged with multiple counts of fraud and other illegal activity after convincing members of his congregation to buy millions of dollars of worthless cryptocurrency. Regalado and his wife pocketed nearly half of the $3.2 million they raised and used several hundred thousand dollars to remodel their home.

Justifying his actions, the pastor claimed that “the Lord” told him to do it, and that, “We took God at his word and sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit.” In attempting to explain the charges he now faces, Regalado said, “Either I misheard God,” or “God is still not done with this project and he’s going to do a new thing.”

Compare this story with that of another pastor in trouble. Chris Avell, who leads a church named Dad's Place in Bryan, Ohio, was charged with violating zoning laws for using his church, which is classified as a business, for residential purposes.

But Avell wasn’t engaged in some nefarious scheme to trick his congregants or the city. Instead, he too was adhering to what he thought was God’s word by opening up his church to unhoused people in the dead of winter in order to help protect them against the cold. “This is what the word of God teaches,” said Avell.

According to Commondreams’s Julia Conley, “Dad's Place is located next to a homeless shelter, but overcrowding at the facility led Avell to begin offering space to unhoused people.” The church is in the habit of welcoming unhoused people into its space to keep warm in the winter. Ohio’s winters are so cold that the state’s health department has an entire page on its website offering advice on how to survive the potentially deadly weather. And no, there is no guidance for those who have no homes.

While these pastors are claiming to have heard two wholly contradictory messages from God, most individuals of faith might conclude that Avell’s version of Christianity is the one that is true to religious ideals grounded in compassion and care for one’s fellow human beings.

But Pastor Regalado’s version of Christianity is tragically far more consistent with what many Christian leaders in the U.S. have embraced: the idea that God wants people of faith to be wealthy at all costs. Regalado is convinced that “God is going to work a miracle in the financial sector.” His only misstep appears to be that he didn’t know what he was doing when he sold his congregants a cryptocurrency that wasn’t solvent.

But for those Christian leaders who are financially savvy, the Church is akin to a bank. Eight of the top 10 wealthiest pastors on the planet are based in the U.S. and are worth anywhere from $20 million to $300 million. There is no contradiction between scripture and the pursuit of wealth for those who see Christianity as a capitalist enterprise. As per Rodney Stark, who was a Distinguished Professor at Baylor University, Western dominance of the Americas and other colonies was enabled by capitalism, a set of ideals that stemmed from Christianity. “The rise of capitalism… was a victory for church-inspired reason,” he wrote in 2005, in apparent praise of capitalism, colonialism, and Christianity.

Indeed, Biblical scripture was not only used to promote capitalism but to justify slavery and settler colonialism, both of which undergirded American capitalism.

Misuses of Christianity aren’t merely a thing of the past. Today, Christianity, especially under the euphemism of “religious freedom” is used to justify all manner of injustices: abortion bans, attacks on LGBTQ children and especially transgender youth, and even Israeli settler colonization of Palestine. The Catholic church, in particular, has offered sanctuary to pedophilic priests.

Evangelicals helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential race in spite of Trump’s moral character being so obviously at odds with the basic tenets of Christianity. Far from the election resulting in a weakening of conservative Christianity, many white Trump supporters who weren’t initially church-goers were drawn to the church during his presidency. Now, evangelical conservatives are once again supporting Donald Trump in full force, threatening to return this nation on a path toward fascism through the 2024 race.

Within such a national context, it’s no wonder that Ohio Pastor Avell is facing criminal charges for being so out of step with the American version of Christianity. Kindness, compassion, sacrifice, and love are at odds with a capitalist Christianity that prefers individual wealth accumulation and the control of vulnerable humans.

The only silver lining is that Americans as a whole appear to be ending their love affair with Christianity, according to several recent Pew Research findings. A 2019 update found that fewer Americans were identifying as Protestant or Catholic and that those who identified as “nothing in particular” rose to 26 percent, more than a quarter of all Americans. That number is now peaking at 28 percent of all Americans.

Moreover, more Americans are embracing an identity of “spiritual” rather than “religious,” a seeming rejection of organized religion. The U.S. also appears to be enjoying greater religious diversity, perhaps in line with a demographic shift in the U.S. as 61 percent of Americans say they have friends who are of a different faith than themselves.

The 2020 U.S. Religion Census showed a shifting religious landscape tied to politics. Political scientist Ryan Burge summarized the results of the census saying, “Democrats are making gains in areas where religion is fading.” While Republicans are increasing their hold over some states like Texas and Florida via surges in conservative Christian populations, Burge predicts that “Democrats will continue to gain ground in suburban counties that are predominantly white and where religion is fading in size and importance.”

Although there has always been a strong progressive tradition among some sects of Christianity, the progressive church has been traditionally less successful in rallying voters to the polls based on faith compared to their conservative counterparts. But that may be changing. For example, a coalition called Faithful Democracy is organizing around the idea that “only a healthy, well-functioning democracy has the capacity to attend to any of the issues our faith calls us to address: systemic racism, climate change, hunger, violence, poverty, healthcare and more.” And a decade ago, Reverend William Barber in North Carolina began leading “Moral Mondays,” which are political faith-based protests seeking economic justice.

Regardless of how one identifies when it comes to religion and spirituality (or lack thereof), the core question is: Will Americans choose the ideals of collective well-being that drive Pastor Avell, or the individual selfishness that motivates Pastor Regalado?

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.