On Tuesday, after celebrating the MLK holiday, I engaged in my last act of resistance in the Obama era. For over 30 hours, I and 17 other faith leaders and people of good will from the black church, evangelical, Mennonite, Roman Catholic and other value-based traditions were jailed for protesting the death penalty. In the Central Booking division of the Metrpolitan DC Jail, I sat in a roach infested cell, remembering why we were there.

It has been 40 years, over 1400 executions. Family members of the executed as well as family members of people who have been murdered led our procession to the Supreme Court of the United States, calling for an end to a barbaric and immoral practice of killing those who have killed. I don’t believe in the death penalty because I don’t believe you eliminate killing with more killing. Violence is not the solution. Especially when the agent of the execution, the United States of America, has more blood dripping from her hands than any person being executed. Dr. King was right when he said our government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

Our nation seems to be addicted to death. Its muscle memory is one of aggression and dehumanization. There has not been a day in this country’s history that the bodies of dark and indigenous and poor people have not been subjected to arbitrary violence with the complicity and at times sanction of the State. Even as we exercised our constitutional right to protest, knowing that the location of our protest put us at risk of arrest, I never imagined we would be treated so unevenly.

At times we were treated with care, as when one of our comrades started to hyperventilate due to a panic attack, and the Supreme Court police were responsive. Or when my brother, Leroy Barber, had shoulder pains due to a previous injury and they brought Advil to relieve his pain. Other times, we were cursed, ignored, manhandled, placed in roach infested quarters, denied access to phone calls and shown that we were regarded as less than human.

It was harrowing.

I am learning to have pity on the participants in this system. For many of them, their indifferent and uneven behavior seems to be a necessary coping mechanism for human beings asked to carry out the inhumane on their very human neighbors.

Our dehumanizing system has the full attention of my righteous indignation and moral rage. If you consider our 32-hour ordeal, it is but a small reflection of the cruel and unusual punishment state sponsored executions unleashed on the bodies of the executed and the souls of we the executors.

None of us have the moral standing to take the life of anyone given our own moral inconsistencies as participants in a fallen and corrupted system of governance and justice.

As we were handcuffed, shackled, led from cell to cell, van to van, holding room to holding room, we heard from various officers how this seemed to be excessive treatment for protesting. Yet they continued to comply with their inhumane treatment. I wondered what caused these officers to become adjusted to injustice. Why would they not complain about working in an environment with roaches and insects of all varieties streaming across the floors and the walls? Why would they be agents of such a system, knowing that it is excessive?

I’m reminded of what a mentor said to me: there are many ways to kill a person: physically, spirually, emotionally, psychologically. It seems to me that the guards who work in the system, and we the citizens who have empowered this system, are already victims of a moral execution. I can’t help but think that the death penalty is only possible because we all have had our moral conscience seared. We are already dead people walking. We have become a people who tolerate the conditions of injustice and violence and dehumanization, so we can profit from it with incoherent and morally bankrupt payments of false security, temporary safety and constant retribution.

But is the God of all creation and sustainer of life calling for something more from people of faith? How can we who claim to follow the One who came to set the captive free be so committed to captivity? How can we who drink from the Well of Life be such complicit agents in the instruments of death?  Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words ring out to me: “Few are guilty… all are responsible.”

As God always does in times of challenge, we experienced the Light shining through the dark places. Literally. The bodies of black men who were citizens of the District of Columbia darkened these spaces of incarceration, and their light emanated through to show us great comfort. They didn’t know us, but one told me, “You don’t belong here, let me give you some advice… don’t let them wear you down. That’s what they want this process to do. Wear you down to the point of despair and have you act out so they can keep you longer.”

I thought about it: tightened cuffs, which cut off circulation; cramped transportation; invasive body cavity searches; insect infested quarters; metal beds with no mattresses; toilets with bugs crawling inside and out; soggy sandwiches and kool-aid; chained feet; chained waists; long waits in rooms with no chairs or benches; no food for hours at a time; having to beg guards for access to a toilet; being told false times for your release; standing before judges and lawyers who look down on you; being cursed out by guards; being manhandled by large white men who taunted us with Trump jokes.

I can think of at least four times I almost broke down. But the light of the incarcerated gave me hope. My spiritual disciplines sharpened during my already engaged season of fasting and consecration steadied my soul and spirit. The enriching conversations Shane Claiborne and I had with the young men in our holding cell gave me life and hope. One of them was so captivating and brilliant; I told him he could run for office to represent his community. He said, “I always thought that…maybe I’ll give it a go when I get out of here!”

All of this has shown me that life is always at work, even when death appears to be surrounded us. Each arrest related to civil disobedience has left me with takeaways that inform my calling to serve God’s people. If God has no pleasure in the death of anyone, we must ask ourselves, why do we? Why is it necessary?

For some, this is a “necessary evil.” To them I would say that our collective moral resistance, particularly in the age of Trump, must be a necessary virtue. For people of faith and good will to engage in this kind of duplicity in our name is not acceptable. And given what this new administration has already unleashed and promised to institutionalize, we must become more clear why executions in our name cannot continue.

We must abolish the death penalty and end executions, whether they happen in the death chamber or the on street corners. If we do not engage in moral resistance, we risk a death of our spirit which makes us complicit. And then we can protest no more.

Ezekiel tells us that God has no pleasure in the death of anyone. Neither should we.

As an African-American pastor, I’m painfully aware how many of our congregations need to be born again…again through a radical revival of prophetic faith. This revival is needed not only for white evangelicals, but in many respects for the entire faith community in America. In the weeks since the election, I have cringed at over-spiritualized requests to “pray for our President, ” “trust in the Lord, ” and “wait and see what the President-elect will do.” Faith leaders have actively conspired to silence the moral outrage flowing from tens of millions of Americans who rightly despair the election of Trump and the genuine threat his supporters and policies present to immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans, refugees, and poor communities.

Without a strong commitment to prophetic faith in the public square, Christianity risks losing all credibility in the coming Trump administration, and potentially being complicit in the loss of many lives and liberties.

I learned this lesson the hard way. As an organizer for the PICO National Network’s “Live Free” campaign, I brought clergy to Ferguson to march with local activists in the days following the killing of Michael Brown. Wearing a preachers collar, I was greeted with a question from a young man in the community that I will never forget: “What are you preachers doing out here?” he asked. No faith he was familiar with had any relevance to the movement for which he was willing to lay down his life.

Whether we supported his candidacy or not, people of faith in America must take responsibility for the moral vacuum that made Trump possible. Many of us have quietly become agents of the state with decreased moral authority in the public square and a diminished spiritual capacity to exorcise the worst demons in our own ranks. Our spiritual blindness makes room for structural and interpersonal violence against the vulnerable and oppressed.

We blame our moral decline on the private choices of consenting adults rather than the public decisions of greedy individuals and corporations. We fight for the lives of the unborn while sanctioning the drone bombing of families in war torn countries, the breaking-up of families through radical anti-immigrant policies, and the denial of healthcare to both the born and the unborn.

Dr. Martin Luther King said that the church cannot be the master or the servant of the state, but must instead be the state’s conscience. Neglecting our prophetic identity, faith communities have become irrelevant social clubs without moral or spiritual authority.

This Advent season, as America prepares for the Trump years, people of faith must recapture our prophetic zeal and our commitment to the poor. We must listen to the poor and unwed women like Mary, the mother of Jesus, and learn to pray with her to the God who “pulls tyrants from their thrones and raises up the humble.”

As I read and listen to the prophets of scripture, the American church has failed to embody what Mary welcomed into her womb when she gave birth to the “Prince of Peace.” We have over-emphasized encouragement for for individual’s spirits while ignoring the material conditions of a world possessed and over-determined by human weakness. We have done this, in my best estimation, because we have quietly accepted the forms of Christian faith that accommodated America’s original sin of race-based slavery.

Is there any hope for prophetic Christianity to be born again in the Trump years? Can a new faith-rooted movement replace the compromised Christianity which has been exposed?

My faith and America’s history tell me that it’s possible, but only if we look for leadership from communities that have been overlooked and rejected. Nearly a century ago, E.F. Frazier suggested in The Negro Church in America that blacks should leave black churches en masse and join white churches to force a conversation about the moral inconsistencies related to segregation in the early 20^th century. Has this moment called for such a radical reciprocal step? My proposal: white Christians who are ready to confess their sin need to show real signs of repentance by going to join the black, brown, Asian-led or woman-led congregation nearest to them.

The faith community has failed to face the principality of race in America, and the rise of Trumpism is the result. White-led multi-cultural megachurches have been lauded as signs of “reconciliation, ” but inarticulate if not deafening silent on matters of justice. I am convinced it is because white Christians have not submitted to the wisdom of those prophetic traditions which emerged from the brush arbors of plantations and the storefronts of urban wastelands.

Is this because the average white Christian is too inherently biased to sit and be taught by people of color? Are the ears of the average white Christian incapable of hearing the good news, and the bad news unless it comes from the minds, lips and words of white male sensibilities? Can they not imagine worshipping the unseen God in ways that do not assume white culture, music, art and speech? It is an act of violence for people of faith to continue with business as usual within the institutions that accommodated themselves to structural sin.

Prophetic Christianity already exists in America. It’s time for anyone committed to following Jesus to humble themselves to learn from new teachers, and be born again…again.