A MORE PREFECT UNION
Rev. Cameron Trimble offers us thoughtful insights about the NoKings Rally.
"On Saturday (October 18th) something remarkable happened.
In cities across the United States, and in places around the world, millions of people took to the streets in protest in what looks to be the largest protest in US history. We marched not just in anger or outrage, though there was plenty of both. We came in fierce love, in deep solidarity, in the sobering clarity that this nation has entered a new chapter of repression, and in full-bodied refusal to cooperate with it.
"We came dressed in inflatable dinosaur costumes, in rainbow flags, in clerical collars, in nothing extraordinary at all. We came as ourselves. And that was the most revolutionary thing of all.
"We have entered a season in which absurdity and cruelty walk hand-in-hand. When a president invokes “law and order” while undermining the Constitution, when he awards the Medal of Freedom to white nationalist figures while criminalizing children at the border, when inflatable joy is framed as terrorism and dissent is met with tanks: these are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the tactics of authoritarianism.
"And yet—millions refused to stay home. Millions refused to be afraid.
This moment is not the collapse of democracy. It is the reveal of what has long been true.
"It reveals a political system that has for generations depended on the pain of the marginalized to subsidize the comfort of the dominant. It reveals a state that disguises control as stability, and retaliation as righteousness. Perhaps most sobering: it reveals how fragile our collective myths have been—about progress, about innocence, about who this country is.
We are now living inside a disillusionment that feels, at times, unbearable. But we are also living inside an opening.
"Theologian Dorothee Sölle called this kind of moment “revolutionary patience.” She wrote that resistance must be rooted not in rage alone, but in a deeper faith in life itself, a faith that no system, no empire, no regime, can extinguish the human longing for freedom, for dignity, for beloved community. That longing is holy.
"That is what animated the protests this weekend. Not performance. Not partisanship. Something older and deeper: a recognition that this nation has reached a spiritual threshold.
"People of faith must name this moment for what it is, one that requires more than commentary or charitable acts. It requires presence. It requires courage. It requires a holy refusal to be useful to injustice.
Bonhoeffer, writing from prison in the final months of his life, said:
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice. We are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
"That’s what this movement is doing. It’s not just calling out what’s wrong; it’s declaring what’s right. It’s refusing to be complicit in systems that demand silence. It’s insisting that joy, play, and fierce tenderness are not weak responses to tyranny. They are necessary correctives to its deadening logic.
"We cannot outgun authoritarianism. But we can outlive it, not by waiting it out, but by refusing to be shaped in its image.This is the work now. Not just protesting—though protest matters. Not just voting—though that too is critical. The deeper work is to reclaim our moral clarity. To find each other again in the streets and sanctuaries and kitchens and Zoom calls. To remember that we belong to one another. And to act like it.
The body knows what the intellect forgets: we are not machines. We are ecosystems of feeling and memory and care. When we show up together, we signal to the world, and to ourselves, that something deeper is possible. That may be enough to keep us going.
"We are in this together,
Cameron"
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