Two years ago, Quincy Worthington wasn't thinking of himself as an activist. He was a Presbyterian minister in Highland Park, Illinois — outspoken on racial justice, yes, but his public advocacy mostly meant signing statements and showing up to an occasional protest. Then ICE showed up in his community, and something shifted.
That shift, as reported by The Christian Century, is not unique to Worthington. Across the country, progressive faith leaders who once operated in the background of social movements are stepping into direct action — placing their bodies between federal agents and the people in their congregations, linking arms outside detention facilities, and invoking the language of sanctuary with a seriousness that had largely gone dormant since the 1980s. Something real is happening. The question worth sitting with is whether it can hold.
What Actually Changed
The sanctuary movement of the 1980s offers the most natural comparison point. During that period, an estimated 500 congregations formally declared themselves sanctuaries for Central American refugees fleeing U.S.-backed conflicts. Churches became literal shelters — people lived in basements, pastors were arrested, and the movement produced a genuine legal and political confrontation with federal immigration policy. It also, eventually, faded.
What's different now is the character of the activation. The 1980s movement emerged from a relatively tight ideological consensus among mainline Protestant and Catholic social justice communities. What we're seeing today is broader and, in some ways, messier. Faith leaders from traditions that rarely coordinate are finding themselves in the same parking lots outside the same detention centers. According to a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 67 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans and 54 percent of white mainline Protestants said they believed the government should do more to protect undocumented immigrants already living in the country. That underlying sympathy is the water this movement is swimming in.
But sympathy and sustained institutional action are very different things, and the gap between them is where most religious movements eventually stall.
The Institutional Problem Faith Activism Has Always Had
Here is what I think is worth naming honestly: religious institutions are not built for sustained confrontation with state power. They are built for continuity, for pastoral care, for the weekly rhythms of worship and community. When a movement asks them to become something more — a political actor, a site of resistance, an organization willing to absorb legal and financial risk — it is asking the institution to operate outside its own formation.
This is not a criticism. It is a structural observation. A congregation's first obligation is to the people inside it. That obligation tends to pull inward precisely when external crises demand outward action. And the leaders who feel that pull most acutely are usually the ones doing the most courageous work — because they are holding both things at once.
Research on religious social movements bears this out. A 2019 study published in Sociology of Religion found that faith-based organizing groups that sustained political engagement over a decade or more shared two characteristics that episodic protest movements generally lacked: a developed internal leadership pipeline and a theology of presence that was taught, not just assumed. In other words, the ones that lasted had done the formation work before the crisis arrived, and they kept doing it after the cameras left.
The question for this current wave of faith-led immigration activism is whether those conditions exist or whether the energy is primarily crisis-driven — which is powerful, but not durable.
Three Patterns Worth Watching
When Prophetic Witness Becomes Institution
There is a pattern in American religious history that repeats often enough to deserve a name. A group of faith leaders, activated by a genuine moral emergency, steps into prophetic witness. The witness gains visibility. It attracts institutional support — denominations, seminaries, national organizations begin to align. And slowly, over years, the sharp edge of the witness gets smoothed into programming, position papers, and annual statements.
The Civil Rights Movement was, in significant part, a faith movement. So was the abolitionist movement before it. Both produced institutional religious formations that absorbed their energy — some of those formations did lasting good, and some of them are essentially museums now, still using the vocabulary of 1965 to address conditions that have changed considerably.
I am not saying that institutionalization is automatically bad. What I am saying is that it tends to trade momentum for stability, and stability is not the same as impact. The people being detained right now do not need a position paper. They need a room in the basement and a lawyer on call.
The Formation Question No One Is Asking
The ministers I find most interesting in this current moment are not the ones who have been activists all along. They are the Quincy Worthingtons — the people for whom this crisis broke open something that years of committee meetings and social statements had not. That kind of awakening is real, and it matters.
But awakening is not formation. What happens when the immediate crisis cools, when the ICE operations slow down or shift to different communities, when the congregation that was once galvanized goes back to worrying about the budget and the building roof? Does the minister have a community of practice to sustain the work? Does the congregation have a theological frame for understanding why they do this not just when it feels urgent but when it feels routine?
In my view, this is the hinge question. The movements that answer it — that do the slow work of building formation around a sustained practice of solidarity — are the ones that produce lasting change. The ones that don't tend to produce a very meaningful two years followed by a gradual return to the status quo.
Numbers and Momentum
It is worth being precise about the scale of what we are seeing. According to data from the Interfaith Immigration Coalition, more than 400 faith organizations had formally engaged in immigration-related advocacy or direct action by early 2025 — a figure that represents roughly a 40 percent increase from 2022. That is a real number. It suggests the movement has more institutional breadth than it did three years ago.
At the same time, breadth and depth are not the same thing. A congregation that signed a statement is not the same as a congregation that has trained sanctuary coordinators, legal partnerships, and a practiced theology of risk. Counting signatories can give a flattering picture of a movement's actual capacity.
What the Historical Record Suggests
| Movement | Peak Activation | Sustained After 5 Years? | Key Factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1980s Sanctuary Movement | ~500 congregations | Partial — morphed into New Sanctuary Movement in 2007 | Policy change (amnesty) reduced urgency |
| Civil Rights faith coalition | 1955–1968 | Institutional absorption | Denominations co-opted the energy |
| Faith-based anti-apartheid movement | 1984–1990 | Largely dissolved post-apartheid | External victory removed the organizing logic |
| Post-9/11 interfaith initiatives | 2001–2004 | Mostly faded | No sustained theological formation |
| Current ICE protest wave | 2023–present | Unknown | Formation and leadership pipeline TBD |
The pattern that emerges from this table is uncomfortable but clear: religious movements tend to dissolve when the immediate crisis resolves, when a policy victory reduces the apparent urgency, or when denominations absorb the energy into institutional programming. The ones that sustain are the ones that shifted from protesting a condition to forming a community around a practice.
What Gives Me Some Genuine Hope
I want to be honest about where I think the news is actually good, because I think it is.
The leaders coming into activism now are, in many cases, doing so through relational networks that did not exist in the same form in the 1980s. Interfaith organizing infrastructure — groups like Faith in Action, the New Sanctuary Movement, and various regional coalitions — is more developed than it was during the last sanctuary wave. There are more trained community organizers embedded in faith communities. There is more cross-tradition collaboration.
And there is something else. The theological vocabulary being used in this moment is, in many cases, more honest about cost than the language of earlier eras. The 1980s sanctuary movement often framed itself in humanitarian terms that somewhat obscured the explicitly political confrontation at its core. Many current faith leaders are being clearer — not just about suffering they want to alleviate, but about power they want to contest. That kind of clarity tends to produce more durable formation because it is harder to absorb into a newsletter.
The Harder Question Underneath All of This
Here is what I keep coming back to when I think about this movement.
There is a version of faith-led activism that is fundamentally about identity — about who progressive Christians understand themselves to be, about what story they want to tell about their tradition's role in American public life. That version is real, and it does some real good, but it is ultimately more about the activists than about the people they are trying to protect.
And there is another version that is about the people in the room — the undocumented family that found its way to a church basement, the child whose parent was detained, the person who needed a phone and a lawyer and a safe place to sleep. That version does not always generate a news story. It does not always produce a visible confrontation with federal agents. It is not always photogenic. But it is the version that actually changes lives, and it tends to produce a different kind of activist — one who keeps showing up not because the cameras are rolling but because the people in their care need them to.
The question of whether this movement can survive is, in the end, a question about which of those two versions is doing the organizing. I think both are present right now, in roughly equal measure. What happens over the next three years will probably sort them out.
What This Means for Faith Communities Watching From a Distance
If you are a pastor or congregant watching this movement and wondering what it means for your community, here is how I would frame it.
The choice is not between activism and non-activism. The choice is between a faith community that has thought carefully about what it owes the people in its neighborhood and one that hasn't. That thinking can lead to direct ICE confrontation. It can also lead to quieter, longer work — legal aid partnerships, asylum case accompaniment, language access ministry. The form is less important than the formation.
What tends to produce genuine transformation, both in individuals and in institutions, is the decision to be present to a specific need over a sustained period of time — not as a statement about who you are, but as a practice of who you are becoming. The ministers who will still be doing this work in ten years are probably the ones who have already stopped thinking of it as activism and started thinking of it as the job.
That is blunt, but I think it is accurate.
Source: "Progressive faith leaders found new power protesting ICE. Can the movement survive?", The Christian Century.
For more analysis of religious institutions and the patterns that shape them, see other essays at christiancounterpoint.com.
Last updated: 2026-04-28
Jared Clark
Writer, Christian Counterpoint
Jared Clark is the creator of Christian Counterpoint, where he examines institutional patterns in religious communities through the lens of critical analysis and honest inquiry.