Ex-Trump Air Force chaplain issues eye-popping warning on 'religious tyranny'

Nick Hilden

October 23, 2026 

ALTERNET


On Friday, a chaplain who served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Chaplain Corps during President Donald Trump’s first term warned that Americans must reject the Trump administration’s “religious tyranny.” According to theologian Leigh Larson, Trump and his Christian nationalist allies seek to “illegitimize” any religion but their own.

“I served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Chaplain Corps as a chaplain candidate during Donald Trump’s first term as president,” writes Larson for Baptist News Global. “I was endorsed through the Disciples of Christ denomination and under their faith code, ‘GE.’ That faith code is now gone.” As she elaborates, earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had the number of faith codes recognized by the department cut from more than 200 to 31. These codes, Larson asserts, are about more than mere bureaucracy. As she writes, “Not only do they allow for religious accommodations such as diet and appearance, but the code tells a commander who to call when someone is dying, guidance on holy days, burial and which chaplain gets matched to the soldier for spiritual care. As a chaplain candidate, I understood the faith listed on a dog tag to be the last bit of human freedom a soldier can enjoy in the military. While they are still free to list whatever faith on the dog tag, the bureaucratic paperwork used for advocating for accommodations now will be much narrower.”

The new system now lumps all Christian denominations, for example, under one label, identifying “Catholic,” “Methodist,” or “Lutheran” as the same, regardless of their ideological nuances. Another glaring example: the Southern Baptist Convention and the Progressive National Baptist Convention now both fall under “Baptist,” even though these are two radically divergent denominations, along with the other nearly 30 Baptist-related bodies from the list prior to trimming. The code change also gave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints a code separate from “Christian,” which prompted objections from MAGA Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who told the Pentagon to “not just reconsider it but undo it.” He urged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “tear down that wall. This is not cool. Get rid of it — get rid of it now.” The following day, the code list was revised to include Latter-day Saints as “Christian.”


These changes make it clear, writes Larson, that “the state is serving as a theologian and magistrate, defining who is and who is not Christian. Baptists should buck at this notion.” She points to an essay published just after the code changes – Bill Leonard’s “First They Came for the Mormons” – in which he argued the government shouldn’t define a group’s religious identity. “Baptists once were the unrecognized minority in America, forming their own haven of dissenters in Rhode Island, with the first Baptist church in America coming shortly after,” explains Larson, citing theologian and Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, who argued in 1644 that the state had no business sorting true faiths from false ones, urging that “a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all Nations.” According to Larson, “This is about soul freedom and soul competency. Every individual has the competency of soul and the freedom to develop their own conscience.”

While some have claimed that code eliminations are mere acts of administrative consolidation, Larson notes that the change bureaucratically erased scores of religions. As she warns her Baptist audience, “They folded my code (Christian – Other), and yours (Christian – Baptist). Non-Christians, including Wiccan, Unitarian Universalist and Humanist are folded into ‘Other Religions,' and atheists are now no religion. It is concerning that a government that can erase recognition by memo can illegitimize anyone’s.”


There is, however, a solution. According to Larson, “To ensure that the commonwealth protects everyone’s conscience, not about which theology defines it, it will require congressional oversight of the office through the National Defense Authorization Act, regular and accurate auditing of the chaplaincy and force’s beliefs, and institutional policies that reflect the needs of the force.” After urging her readers to join the fight, she concludes, “Protecting religious liberties from religious tyranny and state theological abstraction is about as American, and as Baptist, as it gets.”

Retired general tears Trump apart for forcing 'Holy War' on the military

Sarah K. Burris

October 14, 2026 

ALTERNET

While Republicans are trying to ban "Sharia Law," President Donald Trump's administration is trying to bring its own version of it to force on the U.S. military.

Sharia is Islamic religious law derived from the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. It guides Muslims’ personal conduct, worship and ethics and, in very few countries, it can control aspects of civil or criminal law. Retired Gen. Mark Hertling can't help but think that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is bringing his own brand of Christianity and forcing it down the throats of every soldier for what he believes is some kind of holy war.

On MS NOW, the conversation turned to Hegseth's recent announcement that he's creating a new Pentagon office to “elevate spiritual readiness." Hegseth has a "menu of options" listing out various religions that military members must identify as.


In a memo in May, Military.com reported that 180 faiths were cut from the list of "recognized religions" in the military. Things like Humanism, Deists, Spiritualists and Unitarian Universalists were cut. While there were once 211 acceptable religions to identify as, there are now 31.

“The Department of War protects the constitutional right of every service member and civilian employee to practice their faith without coercion or discrimination,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told MS NOW. “Despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation, Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it.”


Hertling said the whole thing made him confused.

"I've commanded soldiers of every religious background, including those with no religious beliefs at all. And one of the most important things a leader has responsibilities to do was to make sure every single soldier, sailor, airman, marine feels respected and valued as members of the team," said Hertling.

"Faith is important to soldiers, and so is if they don't have any faith at all. And it's particularly true in combat," the retired general explained. "The military has always protected their right to practice the faith of their choosing. But there's a profound difference between religious freedom and religious favoritism. And that's what the secretary of defense seems to be doing right now. He has a way of worshiping, and god bless him for it. You know, I'm a Christian, and I don't know of anyone who's trying to get Christianity out of the military."


He said that every member of the U.S. armed forces deserves to practice whatever faith they want.

"And I think that we're seeing a real lien by the secretary of defense, one individuals who is trying to persuade people to do a certain kind of faith, which he agrees with. And that's really unfortunate," Hertling continued.

Host and reporter Ayman Mohyeldin sees it as an extension of the Trump administration's agenda to invoke Christian nationalism into government strategy and philosophy.


"They have invoked this kind of white nationalist imagery in the way they recruited people to the Department of Homeland Security," he recalled. "They've tried to characterize and evoke this imagery with the immigration operations that they're using here domestically. We've all seen the pictures of the president with the prayer services and the various evangelical pastors with their hands on him. He's tried to anoint himself as a messenger of God, acting on behalf of Christianity in this country, which I think is very dangerous to the larger issue."

Hertling added that the whole thing plays right into the hands of Islamic extremists who believe they are in a holy war against the Christian West. When Trump and Hegseth try to craft the military into some kind of soldier for Jesus it is quickly used by the extremists to recruit into terrorist groups.

"And it also makes the job of our allies in the region who are predominantly Muslim that much harder," he added.

Evangelicals revolt against Trump's 'culture of death'

REUTERS /Umit Bektas

Matthew Rozsa

October 09, 2026
ALTERNET

A prominent group of conservative Christians are denouncing President Donald Trump's top military official, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for ordering that convicted terrorist and mass murder Nidal Malik Hasan — who committed the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that led to 13 deaths and 32 injuries — be executed publicly by firing squad. It is the first public execution in modern American history.

"The National Association of Evangelicals (along with several other religious groups) are now joining the USCCB in condemning Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth’s plans to publicly execute Nidal Malik Hasan, also saying doing so promotes a 'culture of death,'" reported journalist Jack Jenkins of the religious news outlet RNS on Friday.

In an excerpt from his report, Jenkins wrote that "Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told RNS that while he affirms the 'need for justice' regarding Hasan’s crime, 'at the same time, a live-streamed execution by firing squad risks turning one of the state’s most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle, promoting a culture of death, rather than a culture that upholds the dignity of every human being.'"


Evangelical Christian organizations are not alone in slamming Trump and Hegseth for choosing to publicly execute Hasan. On the social media platform X, prominent commentators from all sides of the political spectrum expressed disgust with the decision.

Billy Binion, reporter for the libertarian magazine Reason Magazine, posted, “This is sick. You can support justice for Nidal Hasan’s victims without making his execution a source of entertainment. This administration so often governs for the online mob. It’s depraved.”


Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept and ideologically heterodox, argued, “There are a very small number of countries that still carry out public executions. Those are the countries we are constantly told are uniquely primitive, barbaric, sick and evil. It’s revealing that Pete Hegseth wants the US to join that group but also entirely unsurprising.”

Wajahat Ali of the liberal Substack The Left Hook stated, “Public lynchings will be next.”

Trump and Hegseth are also under fire for terminating the employment of dozens of top staff at the Pentagon, amounting to more than 900 years of combined experience, and replacing them with partisan loyalists.


"Since January 2025," Michael N. Schmitt, a law professor at New York University, wrote for Just Security in June, "the Defense Department has removed, replaced, or forced the early retirement of a remarkable concentration of operationally experienced senior officers. Among them are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Army, and the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, who concurrently serves as director of the National Security Agency. Most recently, Gen. Christopher Donahue, one of the most decorated and combat-experienced officers of his generation, has been forced out as commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and, in his NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) role, as commander of Allied Land Command. Public explanations have been sparse and, to the extent they have been offered, largely general."

Schmitt added, "The question regarding these departures is not whether the president and secretary of defense have broad lawful authority to reshape the senior officer corps. They unequivocally do. Nor is it a question of whether personnel decisions of this kind are ever warranted. Sometimes, they certainly are. Instead, at its core, a central question is their impact on the combat effectiveness, indeed the lethality, of our armed forces."

Even Gen. Christopher LaNeve, Hegseth’s senior military aide, indirectly admitted the mass firings could become a problem.


“Every shortcut in training and lapse in discipline will be paid for in blood,” LaNeve wrote.

THE MORMON CULT

Church leaders not bound to report sexual abuse confessions, Arizona Supreme Court rules

(RNS) — Arizona justices unanimously ruled on Thursday (July 30) that trial courts couldn’t interfere in church leaders’ decision to report sexual abuse cases disclosed in confession, according to their own interpretation of religious doctrine.

The Arizona Supreme Court building in Phoenix. (Photo by David Pinter/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Fiona André

August 4, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — The Arizona State Supreme Court ruled that church leaders do not need to report cases of sexual abuse, disclosed during confessions, to authorities, in a lawsuit brought against a man who confessed to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bishops to sexually abusing his daughter. 

Arizona justices unanimously ruled on Thursday (July 30) that trial courts couldn’t interfere in church leaders’ decision to report sexual abuse cases disclosed in confession, according to their own interpretation of religious doctrine.

“We hold that the First Amendment generally prohibits fact finders from inquiring into a clergy member’s application of his particular religious doctrine — absent fraud or collusion for secular purposes — in determining whether reporting should be withheld if ‘reasonable and necessary,’” wrote Vice Chief Justice John Lopez in the court’s opinion.

The Mormon Church praised the ruling, saying it affirmed the confidential nature of religious confession.

“Arizona law also recognizes the confidential nature of religious confession. The decision affirms that these religious protections are to be respected alongside society’s shared commitment to protect the vulnerable,” it wrote in a statement. “The abuse at the center of this case was reprehensible, and the Church has always condemned it.”

Angela Walker, the executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests advocacy group, expressed concern that predators would be able to use a “confessional loophole to escape justice.”

“While we respect the court’s decision, we believe that the safety of these children must be protected,” Walker wrote in a statement. “Especially since this predator videoed these images and put them online.”

The ruling sends the case back to lower courts and reverses a July 2025 decision of the state’s Court of Appeals. Arizona’s reporting statute compels anyone who reasonably believes a minor has been the victim of abuse to immediately report it. But the statute exempts clergy who deem it necessary to not report it for religious reasons. The Court of Appeals found the admissions of guilt in the case didn’t invoke clergy-penitent privilege and that church leaders could have reported the abuse.

In 2020, three of Paul Adams’ children sued the LDS church for violating the state’s reporting statute by not reporting Adams’ sexual abuse after he admitted it in multiple meetings with church leaders. 

In late 2011, Adams told Bishop John Herrod of Bisbee Ward Mormon Church in southern Arizona during a confession that he had sexually abused his 5-year-old daughter, who is one of the plaintiffs, according to the lawsuit. Herrod convened counseling meetings with Adams and his wife, Leizza, in 2012, during which Adams confirmed the abuse.

In 2013, Paul Adams was brought before a church council and admitted to the abuse and was excommunicated.

Herrod and his successor, Bishop Robert Mauzy, both considered his admission to be made in the context of “confidential communications” or confessions.

In 2017, the couple was indicted following an Interpol investigation that traced a child pornography video downloaded by a New Zealand man back to Paul Adams. The U.S. State Department found thousands of videos of child abuse on Paul Adams’ devices, including of his daughters. He also admitted to abusing multiple of his children around that time. 

Leizza Adams pleaded no contest to two felony counts of child abuse and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison. Paul Adams admitted to abusing two of his daughters and posting about it online to law enforcement but died by suicide in jail before trial.

In November 2023, the Cochise County Superior Court ruled church leaders learned about the abuse in confidential communications and had no duty to report it because clergy-penitent privilege applied. The Superior Court granted defendants a motion for summary judgment. 

The trial court ruled that defendants learned about the abuse as church leaders and could determine whether it was “reasonable” and “necessary” within their religious doctrine not to report it. However, the appellate court held that a reasonable fact finder could conclude Herrod had, in some situations, “observed” Paul Adams speak about the abuse to another bishop, rather than during their one-on-one confession, which could lead a trial court to conclude clergy-penitent privilege didn’t apply.

In 2022, an Associated Press investigation reported LDS church lawyers told bishops not to report the abuse to police or child welfare officials, complying with the church’s help line advice on such situations arising from confessions.

The church argued the AP investigation misrepresented the church’s efforts and denied covering up the abuse. It said clergy members advised Paul Adams to repent and seek professional help, asked him to report the abuse and encouraged his wife to report it. The church also said it only learned about the extent of the abuse in 2017. The Church’s Handbook requires leaders to report abuse disclosed in confessions when they could cause serious injury.

 Flunking Sainthood

Why are so many young women leaving Mormonism?

(RNS) — More than half of young adult women who grew up LDS have now left. Many are reacting against politics, purity culture and powerlessness.

Members attending general conference raise their hands to sustain the general authorities and officers of the Church during the Saturday morning session of General Conference at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 4, 2025. (© 2025 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Jana Riess

August 4, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — A recent article in BYU Studies called attention to two clear trends in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States. The first is that Mormons are succeeding in many ways — we pray more, attend church more and report being happier than most other Americans.

The other trend is that markedly fewer people are staying in the church. We’re keeping about half, which is a big drop from what it used to be. We kept about 8 in 10 childhood members back in the 1980s.

And the biggest bombshell? Women are now more likely to leave than men, especially if they’re younger.

Consider Ryan Burge’s 2025 Spiritual Seismology Survey, with an overall sample size of 100,741 U.S. adults, including 1,177 who were raised LDS. It found that only about 4 in 10 Gen Z women who grew up LDS are still in the church. For the very youngest 18-year-old Mormon women, the retention rate was just 37.5%.

The 2025 Spiritual Seismology Study found that only about 4 in 10 Gen Z women who grew up LDS are still in the church. Graph: Ryan Burge.

 

Pew’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study shows a similar general trend, though it’s less dire. Two-thirds of women over age 50 have stayed members, compared to just under half of younger ones. That’s a retention difference of 17 points.

 

Among people who were raised as Latter-day Saints, % who identify as Latter-day Saint (Mormon) in adulthood

	%	Confidence interval range
Men, ages 18–49	54	43.8 – 63.4
Women, 18–49	49	40.7 – 56.9
Men, 50+	57	46.9 – 67.3
Women, 50+	66	55.9 – 74.0

Source: Pew 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study

Why is this happening? Based on Benjamin Knoll’s and my research for the forthcoming book “Leaving Mormonism: Who Is Exiting the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and Why,” I have some ideas. Let’s boil them down to “three Ps”: young women are reacting against politics, purity culture and powerlessness.

Young women are more liberal, and liberals are more likely to leave religion:

Recent U.S. surveys have shown that young women are growing more liberal than men their age. Gallup helpfully breaks this out over time: 20 years ago, there was only a three-point gap in young women who leaned left (28%) compared to young men (25%). That has now widened to 15 points (40% vs 25%). PRRI and Change Research have also found Gen Z women to be one of the most liberal demographic groups in America.

Why does this matter for LDS retention?  

It matters because politics is now driving religious affiliation and disaffiliation in America. In the last 50 years, religious conservatives have aligned with the Republican Party, and religious “nones” have gravitated toward the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, our political identities have become more important over time in how we define ourselves — for many people, more so than religion.

Taking these developments together, it can be lonely and painful to be liberal in a conservative church, including the LDS Church.

This discomfort is especially acute for young women, because some of the political issues the LDS Church has publicly combatted are the same ones young women are likely to support.

Gen Z women lead all demographic groups in wanting full equality for LGBTQ+ people under the law, whereas the church mounted a massive political effort to defeat same-sex marriage when these women were kids.

Gen Z women want equal rights for women, whereas the church publicly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment not only in the 1970s but as recently as 2019-2020.

They want legal access to abortion, which the church opposes except in rare instances.

Young women are reacting against the extreme “purity culture” of the early 2000s:

Related to their generally liberal views on gender and sexuality, today’s disaffiliation may be a backlash against the extreme sexual “purity culture” that was taught when many young LDS women were teens.

One study tracked the church’s guidance on modest dress through its official magazines. Up through the 1990s, the church taught teens and adults of both genders to dress modestly and take care of their bodies. In the early 21st century, though, the targeted warnings to teenage girls went through the roof. Girls 20 years ago were hearing about the dangers of immodest dress about six times as often as boys in church magazines. Paradigmatic of this era, then-apostle Dallin Oaks warned girls specifically in 2005 that if they dressed immodestly, they were “becoming pornography” to men.

This focus caused anxiety for young LDS women I’ve interviewed. For Nicole, a 23-year-old woman, the church’s constant policing of her body and her thoughts meant that she “learned how to avoid feeling sexual” as a teen. She just shut it down. At the time of our interview, she’d been out of the church for two years but was still deeply uncomfortable with her own sexuality. She identified purity culture as one of the most damaging aspects of growing up Mormon and part of why she left the church. She is not alone in this.

Young women now have equal power in almost every arena of their lives — except at church:

Finally, there’s a growing disconnect between the power young women experience now in most aspects of their lives compared to the powerlessness many report feeling at church. In the church, women cannot hold the priesthood, bless or pass the sacrament, baptize a convert or make policy decisions. (And no, please don’t try to tell me that because teen girls get to plan some of their weeknight activities, this makes them “equal.”)

In earlier generations, barring women from leadership was par for the course in larger society, so the LDS Church was hardly an outlier. Gender inequality was the norm in America. But for the rising generation — schooled in the girl power movement and promised they could do anything — it feels like a slap.

The church has made some strides in recent years. In 2025, it finally began allowing women to serve missions at the same age men can and debuted sleeveless temple garments for women. I suspect both changes are quiet attempts to stem the loss of so many female members. Time will tell whether such changes are helping.

Because in a church that does not permit women to help create the policy decisions that affect them, some feel there’s only one way to be heard: voting with their feet.

---

Related:

US Gen Zers and Millennials are leaving the LDS Church, data confirms

Gen Z Women are dropping out of religion, but ramping up in politics

“Secret Lives” shows Mormon women working out the damage of purity culture in real time

 

The Contradictions of America 250

A socialist perspective on the semiquincentennial

By Peter Shapiro

July 3, 2026

Source: The New Liberator

Black Lives Matter protest, Chicago, 2020. Photo: Joshua Mellin, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Major anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence have a way of coming at inconvenient times. When the bicentennial took place, the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, Congressional investigations had revealed massive FBI spying on US citizens, and Richard Nixon had just resigned in disgrace. Public confidence in the government was at a low ebb.

The centennial in 1876 was even worse. The federal government was about to abandon its commitment to Reconstruction, pulling troops out of the South to bribe Florida electors into voting for a Republican presidential candidate who had, in fact, lost at the polls. Nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, lynchings, and Klan terror would follow. In the South, a brief experiment in biracial democracy abruptly ended; in the North, robber baron capitalism was in full swing. Within a year, a largely spontaneous railroad strike prompted pitched battles across the country between federal troops and street protesters enraged by the depredations of the railroad barons.

The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration is a few days away. For many, the current occupant of the White House bears a striking resemblance to the sniveling monarch in the hip-hop musical Hamilton. The real King George was supposed to be ruling by Divine Right; Donald Trump seems to think he is as well, turning his ICE brownshirts loose on city streets, using his office to enrich himself and his family, flouting laws, and starting wars on a whim only to become bored with them weeks later. Despised by much of the population, he clings to his diminishing mass base with naked appeals to white racism and male supremacy. He plasters his name on every public venue he can think of and honors the nation’s founding with a cage match on the White House lawn.

So what are we supposed to celebrate? The men who signed the Declaration were hardly heroes. Most were wealthy merchants and/or slaveholders. They had an agenda that reflected their class interests. The revolution they led left slavery intact, accelerated the dispossession and outright murder of Native peoples, and reserved political power for a narrow slice of the population. After 250 years, we are still dealing with these contradictions.

But revolutions, even conservative ones, have a way of taking on a life of their own. The American Revolution could not have succeeded without the support of ordinary people whose interests did not neatly align with those of the Founding Fathers. And once the revolution was over, the Declaration’s afterlife exceeded the intentions of its authors. Its promise that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” and its assertion that “all men are created equal” would be taken up, again and again, by people the founders would never have imagined as political equals: enslaved Africans, workers, women, and anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world.

Founding Fathers, or Deadbeat Dads?

The contradictions that confronted colonial society on the cusp of the revolution were real enough, but nowhere near as momentous as Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence would suggest. “No taxation without representation,” the battle cry of the revolution, hardly seems like the sort of demand that would arouse the masses. Measured against the popular grievances in British colonies like India and Ireland, where the economic stakes were greater and the human cost far higher, the “long train of abuses and usurpations” cited by Jefferson look like small potatoes.

But the leaders of the revolution, Jefferson among them, had class interests to protect that distinguished them from most colonists. They saw British trade and taxation policies as detrimental to their businesses, and many of them feared that Crown-appointed colonial administrators lacked the resources and the wherewithal to protect them should the masses of people show any signs of restiveness.

Jefferson identified with the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, who challenged hereditary rule by royal families and a landed aristocracy. For them, and for much of this country’s revolutionary generation, political power properly flowed not from bloodlines but from property. The Declaration’s famous line about governments “deriv[ing] their just powers from the consent of the governed” is widely seen as a call for democracy, but it was also a defense of private property—including property in slaves. Significantly, there was already a growing debate in England about the morality of the slave trade, and American slaveholders regarded it with deep unease.

Jefferson himself was deeply ambivalent. Born into the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson disliked the idleness and self-indulgence of the planter class; he believed that slavery not only robbed enslaved people of their natural rights but also corrupted the slaveowners. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he would write in 1782. But he was too burdened with debt to consider freeing his own 600 slaves—even after he fathered several children with one of them. And politically, abolishing slavery outright was a bridge too far. A denunciation of slavery in the original draft of the Declaration was left on the cutting room floor, replaced by a specious claim that King George had “forced” it upon the colonists.

The “chosen people”?

If Jefferson thought the Southern planters were morally compromised, he pinned his hopes on the white yeoman farmers whom he considered “the chosen people of God.” He envisioned a democracy of small producers and hoped that the settlement of the frontier would allow their emergence as the dominant social class in the new nation. They already made up a majority of the population of colonial America.

But wealth in the colonies was concentrated in the hands of a few whose fortunes were tied to transatlantic trade, mainly shipowners and large planters growing crops for export. For anyone else, the largely unsettled west held out the best hope of an independent livelihood.

Lacking access to markets in the coastal cities, farmers in the interior produced mainly for their own use. What business they engaged in was apt to involve barter with their neighbors. If taxes imposed by the Crown affected them, it was because without access to currency they had no way to pay them. Tax collectors on the frontier sometimes came in for rough treatment.

What really rankled, though, were British restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians. After a long, grinding war, Britain had wrested formal control of the area from the French, but it was still wilderness, and for all practical purposes it remained Indian land. Occupied with expanding and defending its empire in other parts of the world, Britain had no stomach for colonizing the Mississippi Valley, much less policing it. But people still defied the British ban on settlement, and they resented that the government would not protect them from Indian resistance, or even provide them with authorization and resources to protect themselves.

It was an issue that united hardscrabble yeoman farmers of the West and wealthy land speculators from the East. In deference to their interests, Jefferson would include the Second Amendment when he drafted the Bill of Rights 10 years later. The “right to bear arms” enshrined by our current Supreme Court was originally about Indian removal, a process that would continue a century longer as the nation expanded westward.

Black lives mattered

Yet if the Declaration meant property rights and political independence to the founders, and land and local autonomy to frontier settlers, its promise of equality took on a very different meaning in Black hands.

The much-quoted passage in the Declaration that “all men are created equal” seems truly revolutionary even today. With a few exceptions, the Founding Fathers never suggested that the Declaration’s embrace of equality applied to Black people. But that did not stop Black people from acting as though it did. The Declaration actually served as an inspiration for Gabriel’s revolt, an aborted slave rebellion that occurred in Virginia 25 years later. The abolitionist movement repeatedly invoked it. In a famous Fourth of July speech in 1858, Frederick Douglass excoriated white America for betraying its promise. In the Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln—his own racism notwithstanding—said the Civil War was being fought to defend it. Every struggle against racism in this country, every effort to extend democracy in the face of capitalist power, has found the idea indispensable.

By the same token, antebellum slaveowners found it increasingly hard to swallow. At the time of the Revolution, they typically defended slavery as a necessary evil and viewed their slaves mainly as a source of cheap labor. But as the abolitionist movement gained steam, drawing strength and moral authority from Frederick Douglass and others who had escaped bondage and fled North, they stopped apologizing and started justifying their ownership of human property as a good thing, indispensable to civilization’s survival. In the South Carolina low country, where Blacks outnumbered whites by as much as eight to one, the perceived threat of rebellious slaves loomed as large in the minds of slaveowners as the fabulous wealth being wrested from their labor.

In 1822 a well-organized conspiracy led by a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey probably would have seized control of Charleston had it not been betrayed at the last minute. Nine years later, in tidewater Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody slave uprising and remained at large for weeks until he was finally caught and executed.

The Southern slaveocracy concluded that any talk of abolition was a menace and had to be stopped, lest it encourage further rebellions. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, their leading voice in Congress, took the Senate floor to declare that the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights was “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Other spokesmen for the planter class insisted that slavery was not simply a labor system, it was “the step-ladder by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization.”

After slavery was finally abolished, Jim Crow laws were justified with the same language of social control, though the term “separate but equal” paid cynical lip service to the Declaration. In 1896 the Supreme Court offered its blessing to the charade in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Nearly six decades—marked by often bitter struggle—would have to pass before the high court finally acknowledged that segregation and inequality were functionally related.

Consent of the governed?

The Declaration of Independence has another abiding message today: its affirmation of the right of revolution. The mere fact that the American revolution occurred encouraged a succession of anti-monarchical and anti-colonial uprisings in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean that were more socially transformative and often far bloodier. In 1946, when the people of Vietnam had defeated Japanese occupation and were preparing to resist recolonization by the French, the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh would draft a national constitution taking entire passages word for word from Jefferson’s text.

At a time when too many politicians reflexively talk about the “right to exist,” it’s worth noting a central premise of the Declaration: states derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” No government possesses an inherent right to exist, independent of popular will. Governments do not have rights; people do.

Jefferson believed in the rights of the individual and insisted that there are some areas of our lives where the government has no business going. This tradition has yielded important gains. Jim Crow laws that dictated where Black people could live, work, and go to school have fallen. More recently, movements have challenged the state’s ability to dictate whom people can marry, whether women should have children, or how people live their private lives.

But the right of revolution goes beyond rejecting government intrusion in our personal lives. It’s not only about how we are treated as individuals, but about our collective destiny.

The Black liberation struggle—indeed, the struggle of any oppressed people—is all about making that distinction. Martin Luther King Jr. famously observed that the right to sit at a desegregated lunch counter doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford the price of a hamburger; he spent his last years challenging the class contradictions that kept people from affording it. Malcolm X didn’t pontificate about a “color-blind” society; he called for an end to white people’s power over Black people. The Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party didn’t demand equal treatment and an end to discrimination; it demanded “the power to determine the destiny of our Black community.” A Latino leader of the Third World strike at San Francisco State College in 1968 summed it all up nicely: “We don’t want equality, we want self-determination.”

Implicit in the call for self-determination is Jefferson’s argument that governments that rule without “the consent of the governed” should be overthrown. He spoke of “the tree of liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” and at one point mused about the need for a revolution every 20 years.

Mao Tse-tung, who pinned his hopes on the rising national liberation struggles in the Third World, believed that their fate was inextricably linked to that of the Black liberation movement in the United States. He pointed out that colonialism and imperialism had their roots in the African slave trade, and the capitalist system grew and flourished on the backs of enslaved African American labor. Viewed in that light, Black people’s confrontation with the ambiguous language in the Declaration of Independence is truly a global one.

For 250 years, Americans and people around the world have been fighting over the meaning of 1776. They still are. The Declaration of Independence has always contained profound contradictions. Simultaneously a defense of slavery and an inspiration for slave revolts, a justification for settler expansion and a touchstone for anti-colonial liberation, the Declaration remains contested terrain.

Revolutions may be defined by the class outlook of those who lead them, but they invariably hold out the promise of something bigger, a vision of human liberation. When they fall short, they inspire us to keep struggling—in ways that no cage match can contain.

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Peter Shapiro is a longtime labor activist living in Oakland. Many years ago he studied US history at UC Berkeley. More recently, he wrote Song of the Stubborn One Thousand: The Watsonville Canning Strike 1985-87 (Haymarket Books).

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This article was originally published by The New Liberator; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

How Dissent Shaped America

By Ralph Young

July 3, 2026

Source: Barn Raiser

Protester holds a placard saying, ''All power to the workers'' during a rally. Photo by Karla Cot

Dissent is one of this nation’s defining characteristics. Every decade since the earliest days of colonization, Americans have protested for just about every cause imaginable, and every time they did, defenders of the status quo denounced the protesters as unpatriotic and in more recent times as un-American. But protest is one of the consummate expressions of “Americanness.” It is patriotic in the deepest sense.

Even before the United States was conceived, there was dissent. During the 17th century religious dissent played a significant role in the planting and development of the English colonies. In the 18th century political dissent led to the open rebellion that resulted in the birth of the United States. In the 19th century dissenters demanded the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, fair treatment of Native Americans, and the banning of immigrants. And they protested against the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War (on both sides), and the Spanish-American War. In the 20th century dissenters organized to prohibit alcohol but also demanded workers’ rights, women’s rights, African American rights, Chicano rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. They also protested against every war (declared and undeclared) fought by the United States. In the 21st century dissenters have protested against abortion, NAFTA, globalization, the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, the National Security Agency, bank bailouts, and out-of-control deficits. Most recently dissenters have mobilized to protest against systemic racism, sexual harassment and assault, and Congress’s inability (or refusal) to enact meaningful legislation to address climate change and gun violence. And then there are those who, despite their real grievances, having fallen for the widespread disinformation circulating on untrustworthy internet sites, raise their voices in protest on the basis of conspiracy theories, lies, and a distorted view of American history. Clearly, dissent has many faces.

On the broadest level, dissent is going against the grain. It is speaking out and protesting against what is (whatever that is), most often by a minority group unhappy with majority opinion and rule. However, history has shown that dissent is far more complex, that it comes from all political perspectives and in a variety of categories: mostly religious, political, economic, and cultural/social. Religious dissent is the insistence that everyone be allowed to worship according to the dictates of conscience and not according to the rules of an established religion. Although most religious dissent occurred during the colonial period, when individuals insisted on religious liberty, and during the early national period, when the new nation endorsed the principle of separation of church and state, the demand for religious autonomy persists to this day. Religious dissent was expressed when new sects such as the Shakers, the Mormons, or the Branch Davidians were formed, and it is still being expressed on a different level in the debates over school prayer, intelligent design versus evolution, abortion, capital punishment, and the right to die.

Political dissent is a critique of governance. As the United States grew from a fledgling nation into a world power, political dissenters expressed dissatisfaction about the way those who were in charge governed, and usually (but not always) they provided a plan or recipe for redressing what they perceived as wrong. Most often they used the nation’s founding documents as the authority to legitimize their protest. Antebellum abolitionists demanded the end of slavery, declaring that holding persons in bondage was contrary to the principle that “all men are created equal.” In recent years hundreds of thousands of Americans protested the decision to invade Iraq, proclaiming that doing so transforms the United States into an aggressive imperial power and that by embracing imperialism the United States is renouncing its democratic birthright.

When the economy crashes, economic dissent comes to the fore. People take to the streets protesting economic injustice and inequality. And as distress and suffering expands from the lower classes to the middle class, so too does protest. One thinks of the Richmond bread riots during the Civil War, the violent labor disputes of the 19th century, the Bonus Army’s encampment at the Capitol in 1932, the militant labor activism during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s liberal presidency, the tax revolts of the 1970s, the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011.

Cultural and social dissent is a rejection of the predominant attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of mainstream society. Utopian groups in the 19th century defied the conventional values of their time and established communities where all men and women would be treated equally. “Beatniks” and “hippies” in the mid-20th century rejected the conventional middle-class morality of their time, urged their fellow Americans to “do their own thing,” and influenced millions to reevaluate their views of race, gender, and sexuality.

But this is only part of the story. There is significant and frequent overlapping of religious, political, and cultural/social dissent. For example, many dissenters, such as temperance activists in the early 20th century and the Christian right today, can be labeled as political, religious, and social dissenters. The 1960s counterculture’s challenge to American values was also intricately tied up in the political protests against the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality. Furthermore, there are economic and psychological factors that often play roles in dissent movements.

There are some decades that are relatively quiet dissentwise and others when significant problems intensify so rapidly that tens of millions of people get involved in the discussion to find solutions. During these periods we see a sharp rise in dissent, and that dissent can take many forms as different groups propose different solutions. Some dissenters are reformers who wish to fix the problems through a process of reform. Some are reactionaries who seek to address the problems by returning to the policies that existed before the problems arose. Some are radicals or even revolutionaries who propose to solve the problems by smashing the system and starting over. The debate over slavery and the events leading to the Civil War, the Progressive era, and the 1960s, and the present day are periods when dissent, in all its diverse forms, exploded.

There are several levels or stages of dissent. At the beginning individuals might simply disagree with a policy or a law or an issue. Perhaps they are willing to tolerate a wrong or an injustice for a while, but when it becomes less tolerable, the next step is to become active. Individuals might write a letter or an article, give a speech, lead a protest march, or conduct a demonstration. Dissent and protest carried to a higher level entails resistance, civil disobedience, breaking laws, or even participating in a riot or insurrection.

The methods and forms of dissent are wide-ranging. Many protesters express dissent through petitions and protest marches. Some use music or art or theater or comedy to articulate their message. Some engage in acts of civil disobedience, willfully breaking laws to put pressure on the system to force those who have political and economic power to acknowledge and address the issues. They are often marginalized individuals and groups that lack power but have a legitimate grievance against the way things are. Most times these types of dissenters have criticized the United States from the left. They have sought more equality, more moral rectitude, more freedom. They have demanded that America live up to what it had committed itself to on paper at the Constitutional Convention. Many of these dissenters have viewed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as binding contracts between the people and the government and protested when they believed the government was not fulfilling its part of the contract.

Dissenters often have a keen sense of history and build on the experiences and methods of earlier dissenters. It is not unusual to see dissenters quote those who have gone before as well as draw on the successful tactics and strategies of earlier dissent movements. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s employed many of the tactics of the labor movement of the 1930s, while antiwar activists adopted the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement in their protests against the war in Vietnam and later the Iraq War. Dissenters with a vision for the future look to the past for inspiration.

But there are some dissenters who have a sketchy understanding of American history who want to return to an imagined past that never existed. For example, those who protest against immigration in order to keep America white, not realizing that the country has always been a nation of diversity, peopled by immigrants of all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s opposing anyone who was not “One Hundred Percent American” and the Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanting “You will not replace us!” are examples of this.

Individuals and groups that protest against the protesters are also expressing dissent. Reactionaries have frequently resisted change and fought to maintain the special privileges and supremacy of their class or race or gender. Some have wanted to maintain the status quo and prevent change, while others have sought to turn back the clock to a “simpler,” more “trouble-free” time. When abolitionists denounced slavery, antiabolitionists argued just as passionately to preserve the institution. When women demanded equality, millions of Americans reacted with hostility and formed antisuffrage associations.

Although most dissent springs from those who lack political power, there are instances when a dissent movement is part of the power structure—the temperance movement and the Know-Nothings of the 19th century; the anti-tax ideologues of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are also notable individuals who fought entrenched interests from a position of political power—Senators Robert M. La Follette and Margaret Chase Smith, for example, spoke out against what they believed was a usurpation or misuse of power on the part of the federal government.

Over the years dissenters achieved varying levels of success. Some got in trouble. Some were arrested. Many were beaten. Some were killed. But they kept hammering away at the powers that be until those powers began to listen. As a result, public opinion was swayed, laws were enacted or repealed, slavery was abolished, unions were organized, women got the right to vote, the Jim Crow laws were invalidated. In fact, many dissenters who were maligned, vilified, and even demonized as unpatriotic and anti-American by their contemporaries are now considered heroes. Some dissenters never achieved the change they were seeking, but though their goals were dismissed, they raised new questions and had an influence on the political discussion.

For the most part dissenters have embraced lofty ideals and have a moral purpose. And most of them believe they are acting to ensure that the United States lives up to its promise to secure Americans’ natural rights. But there are dissenters whose goals are not well-intended or virtuous and who use questionable means to attain their goals—they are not in it to grant equal rights to a downtrodden minority but to restrict rights or to promote their own narrow interests at the expense of others.

During times of heightened passions—the Antebellum period, the Progressive era, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War—dissenters have protested from liberal, conservative, and radical standpoints. In the debates about the war in Vietnam, for example, there were those who believed that America was acting as an imperial power and that the capitalist system should be toppled. There were those who opposed the war primarily on ethical grounds because the United States was acting immorally. And there were those who opposed the war simply because the United States was losing it and thus argued that if the government was not going to go all-out in its effort to destroy communism in Vietnam, then there was no point in being there. In the end, for completely different reasons, radicals, doves, and hawks all came to protest the war in Vietnam.

Obviously not all dissenters are created equal. Nor are the consequences of their efforts necessarily positive or socially useful. There is a difference between dissenters whose goal is to create a more just society by expanding the rights of the disempowered, and those who are self-aggrandizing troublemakers interested only in disrupting society or denying rights to others. Historian Eric Foner, in The Story of American Freedom, points out that “freedom” is a “contested concept.” So too is “dissent.”

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This article was originally published by Barn Raiser; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Ralph Young

Ralph Young is Professor of Instruction in History at Temple University. He is the author of Dissent: The History of an American Idea, and the editor of Make Art Not War: Political Protest Posters from the Twentieth Century and Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation.