The SUGRR ("Sugar") Protocols
Five Principles of Spiritual Resistance
I. Right now, we are a nation that’s facing an existential threat. But because that threat, instead of Hitler threatening to invade us, or the USSR placing missiles in Cuba, is coming from within, we’re largely unaware. That’s usually the case with internal threats, which is why, of all the ones human societies face, they’re most likely to be what ends them.
II. The same faction that’s used everything from slave ownership via the three-fifths compromise to white-race mythology, from the infiltration and co-option of social institutions to the weaponizing and toxification of religion, all to wrest power from the people that no subset of the people should have.
III. We are a clock. We could vote in force in 2026 and 2028, and this assault on democracy would be over. Right now, no amount of disenfranchisement or redistricting could stop that. But the operative phrase in that sentence is “right now”. This is a closing window.
IV. For the first time in our nation’s history, the vote is a “use it or lose it” proposition. We either use it now, while we still have it, or we lose it, and with it, the portion of equal ruling power each citizen is meant to have. Right now, the people still have the power. But we won’t for much longer. Five-year-old Anthony Quinn’s mother commanded him, “Don’t you let that man take your flag.” It’s up to us to not let anyone take our vote.
V. It’s up to us to decide how much pain we’re willing to bear. It’s what Martin was speaking to when he said, “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now...” These are those difficult days. And whether or not we opt to use the power we still have while we still have it will determine how long those difficult days last.
Three reasons why religious humanitarians are integral to this fight:
1. Because, at every juncture thus far, it is people of faith, compelled by conscience, who have repeatedly saved us from ourselves.
2. American religion has been co-opted, turned into its own opposite, an engine of oppression instead of benevolence, harm instead of humanity, subjugation instead of emancipation. Just as the Republican Party was. Those of us who are (or were) part of these institutions share a special responsibility to restore them to their original purpose. To make them good again.
3. Today, the faith space is the deciding battleground, our Normandy. It’s the key social territory in this fight. Everything from their political paradigm to their sway over how church members vote, from the on-the-ground workers who power their campaigns to their ability to raise funds is tied to their reframing of religion, polluting and perverting it. They’re doing everything they can to turn the same institution that drove the end of slavery into an ideology that treats diversity and democracy as mortal threats. But they don’t get to write that narrative or turn faith into a caricature of itself unless we allow them to.
What Your Faith Group Can Do:
If your congregation is considering engaging in this work, below are several steps to take.
Shore up your congregation’s defenses. Recognize that taking up this fight puts your group squarely at odds with policies being enacted by our current government, so do what you can to make yourselves less of an easy target. Purposefully make your people hard to track. The original UGRR understood this. This means paying close attention to places where your own information and communication vehicles can be used against you. For instance, what kind of information can be discovered about your group’s activities via your website, phone directory, physical addresses, links to online meetings, and social media? Metropolitan Community Church, San Francisco, had non-members posting anti-gay notices during their online Sunday services. Other churches have reported that their member rolls have been hacked.
If you want your congregation to be a safe place for both our migrant members and activists on the front lines, do your best to make any and all information that might be used to identify or track people engaged in any humanitarian activity that this administration might declare illegal, as difficult to access as possible. Across the board, remove personal identity information from websites, newsletters, updates, and the like. Shift to encrypted community networks and use only anonymized names for discussion groups on those platforms. Limit data collection to only what’s absolutely required by law. Your group can’t be compelled to disclose information you don’t have. Nor can that information be hacked if you never had it in the first place. Instead of congregational newsletters, shift communication to denominational-level publications, on the one hand, and personal publications from individuals affiliated with your group on the other.
Develop a theology of democracy to replace the virulent theology of empire that invariably crops up when faith institutions are co-opted, becoming vehicles of state-level control. Regardless of faith expression, the focus remains the same: bringing people committed to fostering humanitarian spirituality in the world together as a beloved community devoid of vertical authority.
Become a consciousness-driven group, one that believes that the voice of conscience, the still, small voice of God in our hearts, can never be overruled, whether by religious texts or people claiming to be God’s mouthpieces, God’s emissaries. Across the nation, we need to prepare ourselves to live up to what Martin called the true purpose of faith – not to make us great, but to make us good, again. To be neither the servant of the State nor its master. To be the conscience of the State.
Accept that taking up this work means being the counterforce to militant Christianity. The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment together read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” The Establishment Clause acts as a double security, prohibiting both control of the government by religion and political control of religion by the government.
Exercise your religious freedom. The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which ostensibly protects individuals’ rights to freely exercise their religion, has been used almost exclusively to allow people of faith to deprive others of rights they don’t believe they should have, even as society has sought to extend equal protections to those same Americans. In the wake of Brown v. Board, segregationists and supremacists started claiming that all kinds of things were acts of religious freedom, from denials of admission of African Americans to religious schools, to denying women managerial positions in their companies, to refusing to rent apartments to LGBTQ+ people.
Today, however, the situation is reversed. It’s our own government that’s curtailing the rights of all kinds of people in ways that are almost unimaginable. We therefore need humanitarian faith groups to become adept at using those same religious freedom provisions to protect their right to refuse to abide by laws that infringe upon their sacred right to serve humanity, including offering sanctuary to migrants, recognizing and validating the gender spectrum, and charging congregants to stand up for DEI in their companies.
Your group has a say in the fate of organized faith in our country, whether adherents will seek to reign over society (as is the case in many Islamic states), and, in doing so, trigger the kinds of backlashes that lead nations to prohibit faith altogether (like the USSR and others did), whether our faith institutions will become vassals, serving one dictator or another (which was the role of State Shinto in Japan, and that led to their actions in WW2), or whether they will do the thing we most need them to do today – not govern or create laws, not dictate business practices or lead military campaigns, but to foster consciousness among us and conscience within us.
Foster collaborations with the growing number of faith-based activists rising to do today what hundreds of ministers did by heeding Martin Luther King’s call to “come to Selma”. That includes everyone from Sojourners and TFAM to the Friends Committee on Legislation and the Alliance of Baptists – our core affiliation. This involves everything from activist training & support groups to social justice initiatives through our partner organizations, to member participation in the unprecedented No Kings movement, efforts that are to Christian nationalism what the Lincoln administration was to slavery.
Gear up for a much more visible cultural presence. For instance, MAGA Christians and their allies are increasingly third-railing terms like “DEI” and “woke”. But there’s no reason we can’t reclaim terms like these, in the same way everyone from African Americans to the LGBTQ+ community has done. For instance, “woke” is simply a variation of “awake”, or in the religious sense, “awakening”, meaning “to be conscious”. It’s the essence of both social and spiritual consciousness.
Give to support this kind of spiritual activism nationwide. Because if we don’t, no one will. The government is busy shifting funds away from benevolence organizations and into the ICE budget. Likewise, foundations are quietly withdrawing support, partly out of fear of being targeted by this government for supporting organizations that are doing things like aiding migrants. But just as importantly, they don’t get that faith-based humanitarian activism is the only thing that’s ever withstood religious empire, let alone defeated it. It’s therefore up to us to do what they won’t, especially since religious empire’s pockets are so deep.
These times we’re facing are daunting. But they’re also exciting. The very reason we exist is for this fight, right here, right now.