Hundreds gather at YDS conference on the moral and spiritual issues of the 2026 election

The image of William J. Barber II filled the large projection screens on either side of the auditorium stage while a jazz-infused gospel band and women’s choir rocked the darkened hall. Just minutes before, Barber slowly had made his way onstage, bent over two canes under the effects of a congenital arthritic condition that has scourged his spine and legs. If at a glance the labored gait made the Protestant bishop, activist, professor, and public theologian appear debilitated, it was a misconception his oratory and argument instantly dispelled.

Barber directs the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, and on this evening he was at the Omni Hotel to lead a worship service and officially open the center’s biannual national convention, held in New Haven April 12-14. The three-day event, titled “What Are the Moral and Spiritual Issues of the 2026 Elections?” drew more than 400 faith leaders, organizers, theologians, students, and scholars to a gathering that was part academic convocation, part call to action, and part religious revival.

Wearing a multi-colored pulpit robe, Barber blessed the conference and set its theological tone with a sermon built on a metaphor of the United States as a great but incomplete house.

His voice dipped and rose with Pentecostal rhythms and rhetoric. “Consider the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he said. The vision and ideals of America’s founding documents are justly revered, he said, as are the “flawed men” who wrote them. But the “quill and ink” that wrote “freedom” and “justice,” he preached, also reduced enslaved people to three-fifths of a person, dismissed women and indigenous peoples, failed to ensure voting rights and public education. Our founding documents “represent a great political house with empty rooms,” Barber said, rooms that were filled instead with slavery, the Confederacy, Gilded Age corruption, Jim Crow, neoliberal economics.

“Let us be clear,” he continued. “We are not merely in a crisis of democracy. We are in a crisis of civilization. When the house is left empty and unguarded, more and worse spirits return.” He recited a depressing list of American realities: advancements won in the 20th century—voting rights, food aid, health care—eroded in the 21st. Some 140 million people poor or low-wage; 87 million uninsured or underinsured; and more than 800 die daily from the consequences of poverty.

But throughout history, he told the conference, “God has used people like you—public theologians, moral agents—to … sweep out the impure forces of injustice and to fill the house with justice furniture.”

‘All theology is public’

In books, sermons, public addresses, seminars, and activism, Barber holds lawmakers, corporations, and others in positions of power to moral standards grounded in the gospel. Before collaborating with YDS to create the public theology center in in 2023, he founded Repairers of the Breach, a North Carolina nonprofit that organizes and mobilizes activists and faith leaders around a moral policy agenda, and launched the Poor People’s Campaign, with chapters now in more than 30 states. Barber also helped found the “Moral Monday Movement,” which leads nonviolent demonstrations at statehouses and in Washington, D.C. In the past year, Barber has been arrested twice for leading prayer sessions in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

The practice of public theology has been described as “theology talking with society, not just to society.” Public theologians seek to be interdisciplinary, practical, and accessible, shaping morality and policy through both intellectual argument and religious engagement. Barber traces the tradition’s lineage back from Moses and the Hebrew prophets through the abolitionists and leaders of the civil rights movement. 

“All theology is in some ways public,” he said. “But public theology has to have a deep consideration. It’s nothing to tread lightly.” The initiative at Yale Divinity School is meant to address “the serious issues of this moment,” from social justice to the environment to war, Barber said, by combining “activism with academics, theory with praxis.” He calls his methodology “moral fusion,” a four-pronged process of analysis, articulation, agenda, and action to formulate effective critiques and solutions.

“Public theology is never just about cursing the darkness,” Barber said. “It has to be about giving hope, giving answers, saying there’s another way, whether that way is accepted or not.”

To that end, the conference was designed to offer training, resourcing, and networking for current and aspiring public theologians. Attendees came from 20 states, Texas to Maine, Massachusetts to Mississippi. The sessions’ 28 speakers all seemed chosen for their ability both to bear witness and shed light. Among them were a military budget analyst and a disability rights activist, a former Congress member and a religion journalist, a retired federal judge and a CNN anchor. Nine academics spoke, ranging in expertise from the Hebrew Bible to American history, Italian fascism to White Christian nationalism. Nearly that many ordained ministers were also on the stage, representing communities from Birmingham to Brooklyn to unceded native territory in Southern California.

The program included panels on “Moral Opposition to Today’s Authoritarianism,” “Policy Violence of the 119th Congress,” “Religious Nationalisms and Violence,” and “Toward a Third Reconstruction.” YDS Dean Greg Sterling offered the plenary lecture, an examination of how the parables of Luke invert the hierarchy between the powerful and the powerless. “I don’t think anyone can read these texts and tell us the gospel does not speak for the poor,” he observed.

Gospel of the Outcast: Watch Dean Sterling’s address at the public theology conference

The session on “Moral and Ethical Issues of the Midterms” yielded one of the conferences most powerful moments. Panelist Pamela Garrison, the daughter of a miner from the coal camps of West Virginia and leader of the Poor People’s Campaign there, spoke with raw passion on what she has called, “the hard work of being poor.” West Virginia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, and voted for Donald Trump three times. Political “neglect and abuse” of West Virginia goes back much farther than 2016, Garrison said, which explains her state’s support of a man voters there considered their champion. 

But West Virginians now “are feeling betrayed. We’re seeing the opposite of what we were promised,” she reported.  “You cannot tell us that you can take our money and use it to kill and not use it to keep our people alive.”

 “I hear the same old propaganda we’ve always have,” she said, “that giving poor people a living wage will raise inflation. Which rises anyway. I’ve seen people get sepsis from a toothache. They can’t afford to get a tooth pulled.”