By Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – I woke up Wednesday morning the way many Americans did: tired, hopeful and a little afraid to trust the hope.
I am a pastor, so I met the morning the way I meet most things, with a prayer and a question. The prayer was gratitude. The question was harder: What does last night mean for a nation this divided, and what does it ask of people of faith?
Start with the gratitude. In Georgia, voters elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman ever elected governor of an American state, 250 years into our story. In New Mexico, Deb Haaland became the first Native American woman elected governor. Abdul El-Sayed will be the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate. Ohio elected its first woman governor, Amy Acton, after a campaign remembered as much for its mudslinging as its message. People who have long been told to wait at the edge of the room were invited to the head of the table.
As a Christian who believes God speaks more than one language and that all loving paths lead to God, I see something holy in that. Scripture keeps telling the same story: The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone. The overlooked are lifted up. Last night, in some places, that story came true.
But I am not naive, and I will not pretend last night healed us. It did not.
Control of Congress shifted, and within hours leaders were already fighting over what it meant. Millions of Americans woke up relieved. Millions woke up angry or afraid. Every one of them is somebody’s neighbor, and every one of them is a child of God.
Elections tell us who won. They do not tell us who we are. That is a moral question, and it gets answered in what we do between elections.
Our divisions are not an accident. The color line in this country was drawn on purpose, in colonial Virginia, after poor Black and white servants rose up together in 1676. The people in power learned a lesson they never forgot: keep the neighbors afraid of each other, and they will never stand together again. Every campaign that wins by teaching us to fear each other is running that same old playbook. I saw it this cycle in ugly ads, in rhetoric that treated whole communities as threats, and in leaders who wielded faith like a weapon instead of living it like a calling.
So let me speak plainly to my fellow Christians. Too much of American Christianity has been bent into a tool for power: a gospel of who gets in and who stays out. That is not the Jesus I follow. He ate with outcasts, touched the untouchable and told us that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him. White Christians in particular: your silence has been loud for too long. The morning after an election is a good time to break it.
Here is what I believe faith asks of us now:
Measure our politics by the least of these. Not by which party won, but by whether children are fed, the sick are cared for, workers can live on their wages and the stranger is welcomed. A nation is moral when everyone matters and everyone has enough.
Protect every voice. The ballot is how the least of these are heard. Any effort to make voting harder for some Americans than others is not a political tactic. It is a moral failure.
Tell the truth about our history. We cannot heal wounds we refuse to name. Teach the whole story, including the parts that make us uncomfortable.
Practice ubuntu. I am because we are. At the dinner table this Thanksgiving, sit next to the relative who voted differently. Listen first. Ask, “Tell me how you experienced this election?” and mean it. Loving your enemy does not mean agreeing with them. It means refusing to stop seeing them as human.
Show up together. No single election dismantles what centuries built. Join a multiracial, multifaith community committed to justice, and stay in it when the headlines move on.
I call this fierce love. It is not soft. It does not look away from injustice, and it does not give up on people. It holds the line and holds out a hand at the same time.
Tuesday night opened a door. Whether we walk through it together is up to us. That is not a victory lap. It is an altar call.
The only way we heal this nation is together.
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is senior minister, and public theologian at Middle Church and the author of Fierce Love.
