There’s nothing new under the sun, a biblical point recorded in Ecclesiastes 1:9, was emphasized Sept. 15 by Bishop William J. Barber II in a broadcast across social platforms. The date carried special weight: it was not only a regularly scheduled Moral Monday but also the 62nd anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four girls — Addie Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley — ages 11 to 14.

Moral Mondays, led by multiracial clergy and community leaders, is a sustained movement to sound the alarm against laws and policies that deny justice to the “least of these,” as the scriptures say. On this anniversary, participants tied their weekly call for justice to the memory of racial violence in Birmingham and to today’s struggles against poverty, health care cuts, and political violence.

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“This Moral Monday carries special resonance in light of the political violence we are witnessing. We are gathering virtually so that as many people as possible can join us at this moment — seeking to find their way, to use their gifts to make a difference, and to speak out against unjust policies,” said Rev. Dr. Hanna Broome with Repairers of the Breach.

Rev. Joel Simpson, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Taylorsville, North Carolina, shared how his congregation has participated in past Moral Mondays. “We’ve been hosting Moral Mondays, and on Good Friday, the day Christians remember the execution of Jesus, we took a walk through our community,” he said.

Simpson continued:

“We learned how this federal budget was a death sentence and would execute people in our community. We stopped at places like the health department, and we learned that 28% of our rural community is on Medicaid and that the federal budget was going to cut Medicaid. We learned that 9% of our community didn’t have health insurance at all. So Medicaid already wasn’t supporting all of our community. We stopped at the local food pantry and learned that 14% of the county was on SNAP benefits, but at that food pantry, one of five in our community, they had given out three times the usual amount of food, and yet Congress wanted to pass a budget that would cut SNAP benefits.”

Similar stories came from Rev. Karen Roberts, a United Methodist Church elder who feared for the health of her parents now that the nearest hospital’s existence is in jeopardy. “They and seniors like them fear they’ll have to uproot and move somewhere else just to stay alive,” she said.

And from Rev. Dr. Alexis Carter Thomas, a community chaplain in Greenville, South Carolina, whose constituents regularly protest outside Sen. Lindsey Graham’s office against cuts to social programs. “I was raised in a Black Baptist Church in a small town in Tennessee where people taught me the importance of caring for our neighbors,” she said. “It wasn’t just someone’s medication that was needed. It was not just someone without a meal or could not pay their utility bills. I come from a community where people spoke up, took up collections, and sought to help their neighbors.”

Confronting Violence in All Its Forms

With all that Moral Mondays had already been addressing — loss of jobs, health care cuts, and poverty — Barber said he never imagined they’d also face an assassination on camera.

“We must all despise the murder of Charlie Kirk that left his family without a husband and without a father; all of us should be bothered and denounce it and pray for the family and stand against the viciousness,” Barber said. “But if you didn’t get bothered by the political death until the other day, this must be challenged too. We must cry out against the people who are dying every day because of lack of health care. America’s got to decide that death is no longer an option, that destroying one another is no longer an option.”

Barber noted his own life story is bound to Birmingham’s history. He was born 17 days after the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing in “Bombingham.” His father was a pastor, and his mother was a church musician.

“And in the same year, Medgar Evers was killed, a student at South Carolina State, and by the end of the year, the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. And George Wallace was saying, ‘Segregation now. Segregation forever,’” Barber said.

A Call to Conscience, a Call to Action

He quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy for the four girls, which demanded to know not so much who killed them, but what. “That church had been a central place of the movement, and they were actually studying that morning how to love and forgive their enemies when the bomb went off; when a man decided he had the right to destroy children because he disagreed with the public policies that were coming to end racism. You can’t ignore this,” Barber said.

“Moral Monday is saying cry aloud and make it clear. We have to speak out loud and wonder whether or not our action produces justice. Does it line up with establishing justice? Does it promote the general welfare of all people? Does it deliver equal protection under the law?”

This day, leaders said, was a call to conscience. Tomorrow is a call to action. Participants were asked to mobilize for National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 16, connecting the struggle for democracy to the survival of poor and low-wealth people across the South. The broadcast also previewed the Sept. 29 in-person Moral Monday across 12 states, with the flagship action in Montgomery, Alabama, where Southerners will confront lawmakers face-to-face.