UPDATE (May 5, 2025 5:20 p.m. E.T.): According to a Monday afternoon press release from Repairers of the Breach, five “moral leaders” were arrested at the U.S. Capitol for praying Monday.
A week ago Monday, Congress returned to Washington to begin work on the federal budget and, by week’s end, the White House had released its “skinny budget” that is its outline to make permanent the cuts attempted by Elon Musk’s DOGE effort. These disastrous proposals, which come out of the same Project 2025 playbook that Trump disavowed during his campaign, would devastate the most vulnerable people in our communities.
As pastors who preach Jesus’ good news to the poor, we joined moral leaders from religious denominations and civic organizations to launch “Moral Mondays” at the U.S. Capitol.
As pastors who preach Jesus’ good news to the poor, on April 28, we joined moral leaders from religious denominations and civic organizations to launch “Moral Mondays” at the U.S. Capitol. We spent the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency studying his administration’s proposals to dismantle the federal government, and we issued a report with the Institute for Policy Studies to help the public understand what the consequences of a Trump budget would be.
Lifting the cries of people whose lives could be destroyed, we bowed our heads in prayer in the Capitol Rotunda. After several minutes, officers were dispatched to ask us to stop praying. But our conscience would not allow us to stop. Though we were arrested and carried away, we have not stopped praying. Moral Monday is back at the Capitol today to continue to lift a collective prayer that we all might be saved from this immoral budget.
Ironically, three days later, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was in the Rose Garden observing the National Day of Prayer with religious leaders who have chosen to whitewash over Trump’s policy violence. Johnson bowed his head and asked God’s blessings not only for the nation, but also for the immoral agenda that he has agreed to champion as “one big, beautiful bill.” Earlier in the week, Johnson could not help smirking as he used Trump’s moniker for the monstrous budget at a “Pro-Life America” banquet in Washington. “Don’t judge me if I have to name it that,” Johnson chuckled, “it’s what we, uh, it’s what he, wants to do.”
True prayer is always an invitation to humble ourselves before God and acknowledge our human limitations. Yet, Christian nationalist leaders like Speaker Johnson want to appropriate prayer as divine blessing for the things God hates. They claim to celebrate the role of public prayer in U.S. history, noting that the Continental Congress called for a day of “Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer” during the American Revolution. But it’s not right for leaders such as Johnson to try to claim the moral authority of patriots who cried out to God while they risked life and liberty to challenge a tyrant — not when they’re cowering obediently to billionaires, abdicating their responsibility and bowing to the will of an American president acting like a dictator.
Theirs is the hypocritical form of prayer that Amos confronted in the Bible and led him to prophesy in the voice of God, “I hate your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me.” When political leaders use religion to try to justify policies that hurt women, children, immigrants and the vulnerable, Amos declares that their prayers become an offense to God. “Woe unto you,” Jesus says to the religious leaders of his own day who used their office to prop up a Roman regime that exploited the poor. “You have neglected,” he said, “the weightier matters of the law.”
We’ve brought Moral Mondays to the U.S. Capitol because the “weightier matters” of our religious and moral traditions, which call us to protect the poor and the most vulnerable in our communities, are being neglected as an agenda backed by a narrow set of billionaires aims to dismantle our nation’s social safety net. A dozen years ago, we witnessed a similar effort to deconstruct state government programs in North Carolina. Though extremists who controlled all three branches of state government at the time had the power to pursue this agenda, we knew the struggle wasn’t Democrats versus Republicans. It was a moral struggle that could unite all of us. When we began with a small number of religious and moral leaders in April 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory’s approval rating was 65%. By the end of that summer, in which we’d held Moral Mondays every week, he was polling at 30%, and he never recovered. McCrory was the only incumbent Republican governor to lose a re-election bid in 2016. Twelve House Republicans have already written to Johnson to say they cannot support proposed cuts to Medicaid. Trump and Johnson want to pass this immoral budget before Memorial Day, but the truth is that only 35% of Americans support their trial run of these cuts through DOGE in Trump’s first 100 days. Twelve House Republicans have already written to Johnson to say they cannot support proposed cuts to Medicaid. Whether we care for the poor, the sick and the vulnerable is not a question of partisan loyalty, but of moral commitment. We are bringing the prayers of millions to our nation’s Capitol because we continue to believe that the values of love, mercy and justice are moral values that go deeper than partisan loyalty. We have written to congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle and asked them to pray with us and with members of our communities who would be impacted by these proposed cuts. We know the power of prayer to change hearts. But whether they change or not, we will continue to pray that one more powerful than our elected leaders will save us from the destruction they have planned.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. With Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an Assistant Director at the Center, he is the author of “White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.”
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a preacher and spiritual writer in Durham, North Carolina, and assistant director at the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. With the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, he is author of the forthcoming book "White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy" (Liveright). 
