On Saturday, October 17, people in cities and towns across the country will gather again under a simple banner–No Kings–and a specific call: vote early, make a plan, and protect the right of every eligible neighbor to be counted on November 3.
Pacific School of Religion will move with them.
The word move has shaped our 160-year history. When we see injustice, we move. When we see oppression, we move. When the long valley of the shadow stretches to consume everything in its path, we move
The Judeo-Christian tradition carries an old and uncomfortable story about kings. When the people asked for a king so they could be like other nations, the prophet Samuel warned them what a king would do. He would take their sons for his armies and their daughters for his household. He would take the best of their fields and a share of every harvest. He would take, and keep taking. The people wanted a king anyway.
Scripture tells this story because it never stops repeating. Power that answers to no one, that stands above law, courts, and conscience, finds the most vulnerable first. We see it today in immigrant neighbors taken from their workplaces and their homes, in federal troops and agents sent into American cities over the objections of the people who live there, and in an executive branch that treats the Constitution as an obstacle rather than a limit.
Mary saw this pattern too. Before Jesus was born, she sang of a God who brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly. The earliest Christians put it even more plainly. To say “Jesus is Lord” was to say that Caesar is not. Paul named the forces behind repressive systems “principalities and powers” and told the church to stand against them. That confession cost people their lives. Today, it still asks something of us.
For 160 years Pacific School of Religion has sought to live that confession in public. PSR stood with Asian immigrants as hatred took on the cover of law in the Chinese Exclusion Act opposed the internment of Japanese Americans, marched with farmworkers in the Central Valley, shaped some of the earliest female and LGBTQ ordained leaders in mainline denominations, and has stood firm in the belief that diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to creating a world where all can thrive. More often than not, we moved before others were ready to follow. We have never done it for a political party. We have done it because our faith leaves us no other option.
At Pacific School of Religion, we proclaim, without apology, that no human being is a king, that government belongs to the governed, and that the measure of any nation is how it treats the stranger, the poor, and the ones with the least power to fight back.
To our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends: if you take part of a No Kings march on October 17, go in the spirit of the nonviolent witness our tradition has always practiced. And if you cannot be in the streets, then pray, teach, organize, and give. If you are eligible, vote for your sake and for the sake of those who cannot vote. Make your voting plan and help a neighbor make theirs. Regardless of the outcome of this or other elections, let’s keep moving together to build a world where all can thrive.
So move with us, fearless of principalities and powers, to remind a frightened world that grace still lives, that the door is wider than we were told, and that no one is beyond it.
No kings. No fear. A world where all can thrive.
Rev. Dr. David Vásquez-Levy
President, Pacific School of Religion
