October 21, 2026
by Aaron Scott
*This article is Part I of a two part series. Part II will focus on the fundamental challenge Christian liberalism poses to our movement.
We aren’t going to win everyone, but as a people’s movement, we should try to win as many people as we can. To accomplish this, we have to be disciplined, strategic, and clear about reaching mass numbers of ordinary people and effectively bringing them into our cause.
“Disciplined” here means: we prioritize building the power of our class over our individual preferences.
“Strategic” here means: we have a real plan for advancing our struggle, one grounded in facts instead of magical thinking.
“Clear” here means: we deeply understand the country we are living in—from our history, to our political economy, to the mental terrain of the masses, and beyond.
In the U.S., any movement that seeks to be disciplined, strategic, and clear needs a religious strategy. There are three central reasons for this: the numbers, the history, and the power potential.
- The Numbers
65% of Americans over age 18 are Christian. That’s close to 175 million people.
For perspective: that’s roughly 20 million more people than everyone who voted in the 2024 U.S. presidential election (around 155 million people voted).
We would never pretend that it’s possible to change America by ignoring the entire voting population of the country. But to hear most leftists or progressives talk, you would think it’s completely reasonable to imagine changing this country without serious consideration of those 175 million Christians: how they think, where they live, what their day-to-day realities are, how their religious beliefs shape their political understanding.
“That’s just old people, though,” you might think, “young people aren’t religious anymore, and they’re especially not Christian. Christians won’t be a significant population for long.” Wrong! Among 18-29 year olds, 54% still identify as Christian. And while that number will continue to drop, it’s not going to shrink to a negligible amount in this generation, or the next, or even the one after that.
These millions of American Christians span every zip code, county, and state, every race and ethnicity. They are politically all over the map—left, right, middle, revolutionary, and just plain pissed off and checked out. They include women, men, LGBTQ+ people, families, singles, the elderly, the young. A few are filthy rich, and these tend to be the ones driving white Christian nationalism’s ascendancy. But the majority of these 175 million Christians belong to our class: people who need a job in order to survive, and people who have been pushed out of a job altogether.
Even if we personally would prefer to avoid Christians with a ten foot pole, even if we wish those 175 million people were atheists, even if we would rather forget that religious strategy has played a decisive role in every social movement in U.S. history—the numbers alone force us to reckon with the reality that Christians and Christianity must factor into our strategy for building class power in a meaningful way.
- The History
Try to describe the Abolitionist movement while leaving out any mention of religion. You can’t do it. The moral terrain, the Battle for the Bible, the leadership of religious people, the splitting of churches over the question of slavery are all central to this history. On the one hand: religious institutions directly owned plantations, the planter elite pushed a Christianity that justified slavery, and every institution in society grasped for moral cover to explain their participation in the slavery economy. On the other hand: Harriet Tubman moved by night as “Moses,” guided both by her own militant intellect and what she described as nothing less than the voice of God. Frederick Douglass, an ordained minister who self-emancipated, preached in the public square “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” John Brown was informed by his study of the Haitian Revolution just as much as his study of the Book of Judges, after which his first militant formation—the United States League of Gileadites—was named.
Likewise from suffrage, to the labor movement, through the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, the struggle for liberation was inseparable from the struggle for a different moral understanding among mass numbers of people, and this meant: the struggle for a different religious understanding. Even with the rise of the contemporary Christian nationalist right, which first emerged in reaction to school desegregation and then snowballed into attacks on abortion, LGBTQ+ people, public health, public education, democratic elections, immigrants, the earth, the poor, and basically anyone who can’t stand JD Vance (including the Pope himself)—even in this demagoguery, we see a highly effective social movement which has placed religious meaning at the center of its operation. And while their movement will ultimately fail because they have no fundamental answer to the crisis of capitalism, for now at least they are still running circles around us when it comes to reaching and recruiting mass numbers of ordinary people in this country. Why? Because they have leveraged a powerful religious strategy.
III. The Power Potential
“But most people hate them! Most people hate billionaires and hate judgmental Christians. Most people just want decent housing and healthcare and dignity. We can reach enough people by campaigning on those things, we don’t need to bother with religion.”
If you think this, you’re half right.
While most regular-ass people really do hate the rich, and hate judgmental Christians, and just want to live with dignity, we are not reaching those people at scale through our current strategies and efforts. Especially when we compare movement numbers to church numbers.
Take, for example, the legitimately groundbreaking numbers that Democratic Socialists of America have grown to recently: more than 100,000 members as of February 2026. This is a huge benchmark and deserves serious study and consideration on its own. On the other hand: taken altogether, the largest churches in the country (those with congregations of 2,000 people or more) are drawing in around 7 million members every single week. While the average size of an American congregation is 60 people and shrinking, the biggest churches are growing. Shadow Mountain Community Church in San Diego County averages 10,000 people every single Sunday. Lives Changed By Christ (formerly Lancaster County Bible Church) in Manheim PA sees roughly 19,000. North Point Community Church in Alpharetta GA gets 50,000 a week. Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria AZ averages over 56,000 people across multiple campuses each Sunday. Church of the Highlands in Birmingham AL sees 60,000 weekly. Life Church in Edmond OK sees, on average, 85,000 worshippers every single Sunday. And most of these churches are reaching millions more around the world through their online, radio, and television programs.
What are these millions of ordinary people getting at these churches that they aren’t getting in our movements? Especially when we know there are often so many serious problems in these megachurches: incidents of abuse and exploitation, toxic cults of personality, deeply embedded patriarchy, not even mentioning all the oppressive things that people are being taught? Those stories aren’t secret—ask even the most devoted attendees and they’ll probably agree that yes, far too many churches have hurt people in severe ways. And yet: people keep taking the risk of showing up to these places, looking for something they aren’t finding elsewhere.
What’s the hook?
- First off: even the most politically fringe, extremist church leaders tend to lead with invitations of community and care (and they don’t just mean “care” in a spiritual way, although this is also key). In concrete terms, these churches feed millions of meals and run countless other outreach programs. They operate daycares, preschools, K-12s, ministry training for adults of all ages. In short, they’re offering education and leadership development at every stage of life. Politically suspect as these programs may be, they are an onramp for millions of ordinary people to connect with their communities and develop their own sense of moral authority and leadership skills.
- Second: music is central in these churches’ efforts to draw people in, and we know in our own movements just how transformative arts and culture are in the work of deepening relationships, orienting our minds, and strengthening our spirits.
- Third: through preaching and teaching, people don’t only receive an analysis of the difficult, often painful world around them—they get instruction on what role they can play in making that world a better place.
- Fourth: there’s just a lot of fun, free programming happening all the time—movie nights, barbecues, summer camps, youth nights.
- Fifth: under capitalism, so many people are simply drowning in a sense of self-blame, shame, failure, and isolation due to the conditions of their lives and structure of our society. While these churches are actively justifying the ravages capitalism through contemporary prosperity gospel, and can be highly predatory in their fundraising off their congregants’ backs, they are still pumping out part of a message that millions are desperate to hear in this unjust world: “You are loved, you are valuable, you are not alone, we all make mistakes and you are forgiven for yours, don’t give up, we’re in this together.”
The community building, the spiritual care, the outreach programs, the education, the leadership development, the arts and culture, and the moral framing: these are the hooks. The politicization is what follows. And, while that politicization may not work on everyone, when you’re pulling in ten thousand people at a single congregation each week, you don’t need everyone to go all in—you just need enough to regularly pipeline a core of committed cadre into deeper development. You see this all the time with Christian nationalist politicians who regularly cycle from campaign work and elected office back to pastoring churches, doubling down on propagandizing fairly apolitical people with a highly politicized worldview—and then raising up new leaders. “God moving generals around,” as they say.
Our movements could do this, too. We could plant our own churches, leading with community and care and following up with a politicization rooted in liberation, dignity, class consciousness, and revolutionary development.
- How Do I Know We Could Do This?
Thirteen years ago, Cedar Monroe and I planted a congregation in rural Grays Harbor County, Washington State–an outpost of what many folks in our network refer to as “the Freedom Church of the Poor,” a phrase coined by MLK. Chaplains on the Harbor started as a non-traditional church plant with $5,000 of seed money from The Episcopal Church. We had no building and no staff, and in our first season simply met people on the streets by hosting regular lunches with free sandwiches and coffee at an underpass in downtown Aberdeen. We built a core of regulars this way—both volunteers and lunch-goers. People came to eat but just as importantly, they came to talk, to be listened to, to ask for prayers, to request that one of the pastors visit their loved one in the hospital or in jail. While none of this is particularly revolutionary, it was a clear intervention in the life of this small town, because the people we were gathering for care and community were poor. In particular, many were unhoused, had criminal records, and a history of struggle with substance use—which are widespread conditions of life across all poor communities. Other churches in town, while still having an extremely working-class and even poor base, defined their morality on the basis of scapegoating and shaming people who were too poor to hide their poverty. In contrast, we defined our morality on the basis of God’s desire for justice and love for everyone at the bottom of society.
For such a non-traditional operation in a small community, we grew quickly. Our numbers made it impossible for our sponsoring church and funders to ignore, though we had to fight and hustle for every dollar we fundraised. Within three to four years, we were regularly gathering over 500 people a month across our community meal programs, street outreach, supportive employment, and jail/prison support. Our newsletter circulated through every prison in Washington State. Building off our successful street ministry, our bishop allowed us to use a tiny Episcopal church building in Westport, WA that had closed a year prior to our launch—we used this as a community center, meal hub, worship space, and emergency shelter in the winter time. We also borrowed space at a larger church in Aberdeen for our Sunday community meals, rented a downtown office, and then borrowed office space at another church in Montesano when we began to hire base leaders in recovery from addiction onto our staff. Our staff peaked at 16 members—nearly all formerly unhoused, formerly incarcerated, and in recovery. At this point we negotiated with our local Episcopal diocese to buy us a farmhouse with sixteen acres of land, and extend us a line of credit. These opportunities all allowed us to scale up our projects of survival, which consistently grew our base and our ability to develop new leaders.
Our growth ran in tandem with the growth of the Poor People’s Campaign, and we leveraged campaign activity to provide political education and leadership development for our base. We sent our local leaders to learn and lead at campaign-adjacent events across the country: in California, in D.C., in New York, in Mississippi. We also hosted delegations in Grays Harbor County: leaders from the PPC, the Kairos Center, Put People First! PA, National Union of the Homeless, the Nonviolent Medicaid Army, and others all came to connect, study, and strategize with us. With the backing of our diocese, who connected us to a pro bono constitutional lawyer, we supported unhoused members of our community successfully suing our city in federal court for human rights abuses. This kind of organizing, political education, leadership development, and building class solidarity across region, race, and religion wasn’t happening anywhere else in our local community, and it drew many more people to us. It also drew repressive responses from local elected officials, law enforcement, and vigilantes. Ultimately—between this repression, the strain of the daily work, and most of all the lack of a broader network of Freedom Churches to fall back on for capacity, guidance, and support—we could not sustain Chaplains on the Harbor for another decade of work.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be replicated. In fact, our main lesson was that the Freedom Church of the Poor model needs to be replicated: it needs to be a network of on-the-ground base communities that can materially, politically, spiritually, and strategically aid each other. What we are leaving on the table if we don’t organize this way is a critical way to grow our movements and our power. While the strategy of Freedom Church planting needs to be honed to fit the context of each local community, it can work across huge divides: red states, blue states, diverse demographics and geographies, and it is a particularly effective way to organize in communities that are presently unorganized or have even been written off as “unorganizable.”
As we look to the escalating crises of our time—particularly around worsening poverty, the climate crisis, mass displacement, intensifying authoritarianism, and the scapegoating that seeks to divide our class against itself (by inciting gender-based violence, white supremacist and xenophobic violence, and anti-poor violence)—we can’t afford to pass up mass numbers of ordinary people. We have to make a play for them. We can make a play for them. And to me, as a Christian, our movement of the poor and dispossessed is the only formation that has a morally and spiritually legitimate claim to them. Jesus led a poor people’s movement (and that’s an article for another day).
For further reading:
These articles do not necessarily reflect our line, but they speak to the way other forces and formations see strategic value in the work of church planting as well:
God’s Army Is Hiring – The Stranger
What Megachurches Can Teach Us About Organizing: Undivided Review | The Forge
Hahrie Han: learning from megachurches to build mega-movements
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