Religious Resistance to Trump: Progressive Faith and the Women's March on Chicago

Progressive faith communities joined the hundreds of thousands of others who took to the streets in downtown Chicago on January 21, 2017 to protest the Trump regime. The Women's March on Chicago (WMC) provides an opportunity to shed new light on religious resistance given its unique features. Unlike protests in prior studies of progressive faith-based activism, the WMC was a secular event, involving little costs and risks, and for which religious communities did not have to cultivate grievances. Drawing on and analyzing in-depth interviews with clergy and laity who participated in the WMC, our study complicates the established scholarly view of progressive religious activism in three main ways. First, for the Trump resistance, faith was a secondary rather than a primary motivation for progressive religious marchers. Second, clergy did not mainly drive mobilizing efforts in that laity played a key role. Last, while many progressive faith communities self-identified at the event to show the world they were there in solidarity, they eschewed strong, distinctively religious expressions during the WMC.