‘It's a sin if you do not vote’: Progressive National Baptists urge midterm turnout

WASHINGTON (RNS) — Progressive National Baptist Convention President David Peoples ended his tenure leading the historically Black denomination with a plea for members of its churches to do everything they could to get people — in their churches and in their homes — out to the polls for the November midterm elections.

“You ought to tell them we have no choice but to vote,” he declared from a ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel on the last night of the denomination’s annual session Wednesday (July 22). “It’s a sin if you do not vote.”

Peoples also threatened to stop welcoming nonvoting members of his family to his home and nonvoting members of his congregation in the church he pastors in Lexington, Kentucky.

The denomination, which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called home, was started 65 years ago after its founders left another Baptist denomination over its lack of support for civil rights and its officer election policy.

Peoples concluded his four-year term as the annual session ended. He assumed the presidency in 2021 after the unexpected death of the previous president, the Rev. Timothy Stewart. Peoples was succeeded by the Rev. Keith Byrd, a Washington, D.C., pastor who had served as first vice president.

Peoples also addressed another theme of the four-day meeting: displeasure with Supreme Court decisions and the administration of President Donald Trump.

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“What I am seeing in this country is a cruelty, is an evilness, is an intentionality to disenfranchise, to make sure that it’s harder for people to vote, make sure that it’s harder for people to live, make sure that it’s harder for people to come up in life,” Peoples said, noting fears of pending raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “When I think about the man that currently occupies the White House, I am convinced that he’s evil.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., was among the speakers at the meeting who urged his fellow Baptists — despite concerns about gerrymandering and a high court decision that gutted a section of the Voting Rights Amendment — not to forsake hope for despair.

“Do not give in to those who are trying to weaponize despair,” said Warnock, a former co-chair of the PNBC Social Justice Commission and the senior pastor of the Atlanta church where King was once co-pastor. “We’ve seen tyrants before. We’ve seen bigots before. We’ve seen wannabe kings before.”

Hours before Peoples’ last sermon, the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network civil rights organization, urged PNBC members to join his and other organizations at a Lincoln Memorial event on Aug. 28 to mark the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington. The event aims to focus on voting rights and economic justice.

“We are in very serious times,” Sharpton said, before members of a social justice panel discussed opposing white Christian nationalism, protecting voting rights and building political solidarity. “It calls for those that are seriously called by God to stand up in these times.”

PNBC social justice advocates distributed fliers that declared “All Issues are Voting Rights Issues,” describing a policy platform that included protecting access to health care and equitable pay and dismantling mass incarceration. They said their strategies would include providing virtual trainings, giving talking points for sermons and sending postcards to infrequent voters, especially in battleground states.

Women attend a luncheon at the PNBC’s 65th annual convention on Tuesday, July 21, 2026 in Washington, D.C. (RNS photo/Adelle M. Banks)

At a women’s luncheon on Wednesday, Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., recalled how in the 1940s and ’50s, his preacher father maintained three things in his pulpit: the Bible, the hymnal and a “little looseleaf book of every registered voter in our precinct.”

Just as he and his brothers knocked on doors to urge residents to vote in that precinct decades ago, Clyburn urged PNBC women to work with their churches and sororities to do the same thing ahead of the midterms.

“We’ve got to turn the vote out this year like never before because they’re trying to rig the election, and what we’ve got to do is make our turnout too big for them to rig,” he said of political opponents.

Earlier in the week, PNBC members, both young and old, boarded a bus to Capitol Hill to visit congressional offices. The Rev. Jacqueline Thompson, first vice president of the denomination as of Thursday and senior pastor of an Oakland, California, church, told members of the media that some PNBC leaders also joined with ecumenical partners and met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus during their time in Washington.

“The unifying goal for all of us is to make sure that we close that gap in those who did not participate in the 2024 election, presidential election, that we do not see a repeat of that in the midterms,” Thompson said, noting that the leaders hope to bridge divides over issues such as Gaza and socialism to meet the needs they’re hearing in the pews.

“The focus has been around health care, but we have people who literally cannot afford the Uber that will get them to the free health care opportunity,” she said.

Although national voter turnout in the 2024 election was the second-highest in the past century — 64% of eligible voters cast a ballot — it marked a two-point drop from 2020, the highest voter turnout of the past century (66%). Midterm elections see lower voter turnout than presidential elections.

According to Pew Research Center, an estimated 27% of Black adults voted in the three most recent national elections (the 2024 and 2020 presidential elections and the 2022 midterms), compared to 48% of non-Hispanic white adults.  

The Rev. Willie D. Francois III, co-chair of the denomination’s Social Justice Commission, was elected second vice president in a three-candidate race.

Soon after the denomination’s new leaders were installed, Byrd announced plans for a new partnership with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, that he hopes will also include the labor organization AFL-CIO in a joint initiative to educate, mobilize and protect voters.

“We got to hit the ground running,” Byrd said on Thursday, the final day of the annual session. “We don’t have time to mess around. Everything is at stake.”

The Rev. Gina Stewart speaks at the PNBC’s 65th annual convention on Thursday, July 23, 2026 in Washington, D.C. (RNS photo/Adelle M. Banks)

Yusef Jackson, the son of the late Jackson and president and CEO of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, told PNBC members: “It is culturally mature for us to vote, to vote in great numbers, and also to vote not just for the sake of voting, but to vote our economic interests.”

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond, whose organization renewed a faith and labor alliance with PNBC in 2022, said “we look forward to continuing our partnership and working together” and that he will take the plan involving Rainbow PUSH to his organization’s leaders.

The Rev. Gina Stewart, a Memphis, Tennessee, minister who was the first woman to preach in person in the meeting’s landmark sermon slot, likewise said it was not the time to lose faith.

“We’re in the wilderness right now: The erasure of history, the backlash against Black excellence, the backlash against justice, contempt for the poor and renewed attacks upon the dignity and humanity of marginalized folks,” preached Stewart, former president of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Missionary Society. “The Bible has never asked us to pretend that the wilderness isn’t dark, but neither does faith let us believe that the wilderness is all there is.”

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