More than 50 New Orleans faith leaders — Baptist ministers, Catholic priests, imams, rabbis, and lay leaders — crowded into Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church on Rampart Street Tuesday afternoon and did something rare for a city where religion and politics rarely share a pulpit: they named names.
The coalition, known as the Communities of Hope, publicly released its “Moral Statement Defending Human Dignity and Civil Rights.” In it, the group called on elected officials to uphold the Constitution's due process and equal protection guarantees, reject white nationalist ideology, protect immigrant communities from detention and deportation without due process and defend the independence of the judiciary.
It also calls on congregations to register voters, open their doors as sites of legal referral and community organizing and to show up as community support at courthouses, detention centers, school board meetings and legislative chambers.
The four-page declaration condemns a string of recent government actions as violations not just of law, but of conscience. The document, signed by leaders representing more than 20,000 New Orleanians, calls the current moment a moral emergency and demands that elected officials, institutions and fellow citizens act accordingly.
Among the coalition's chief concerns: Louisiana v. Callais. The April Supreme Court decision effectively dismantled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the federal provision that had allowed voters to challenge election maps as racially discriminatory. Louisiana was the case's origin point, born from years of litigation over congressional district maps that civil rights groups argued diluted Black voting power in the state.
"We view it as a human rights issue, not as a civil rights issue," said Joe Givens, the coalition's organizing director. "It's a question of human dignity."
Communities of Hope, an initiative of the Isaiah Institute of New Orleans, has spent the past 18 months working with city officials and law enforcement on crime and public safety across New Orleans neighborhoods.
Givens, a veteran New Orleans community organizer who spent decades organizing through the Pacific Institute for Community Organization and served as a political aide to Mayor Ernest "Dutch" Morial, said the group has been building toward a public statement for some time, but a series of events in recent weeks forced their hand, including passage of new measures targeting unhoused people at the state level, and ongoing federal immigration enforcement actions that have rattled immigrant communities across the Gulf South.
"When finally the legislature acted this past week and these things were actually signed into law," Givens said, "I saw this as the critical opportunity for the churches to come together and say how they felt about this."
The statement draws on scripture across traditions — the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Gospel, the Quran and Jewish concepts of tikkun olam — to argue that silence in the face of injustice is itself a moral failure. The document also quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state."
Givens said drafting the document brought the coalition face-to-face with the same tensions King described in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” — moderates urging patience, caution and delay.
"We found ourselves back in 1963," he said. "The tension around people coming to conscience around where am I going to stand at this moment — where would I have stood in 1963, where am I going to stand today?"
Not everyone who was invited came. Givens acknowledged that some faith leaders balked at the statement's language, deciding it went too far. But those who did show up, he said, left with a mandate to take next steps and with a harder question to answer: how far they're willing to go.
Father Pat Williams, rector of St. Louis Cathedral, said the coalition's vision of sanctuary is less about shielding people from law enforcement at the door and more about creating spaces where people feel human.
"When human dignity is assaulted, people don't feel welcome anywhere," Father Williams said. "Our churches need to be places where people are welcome, whatever their situation is."
Before the press conference concluded, leaders lined up to sign a petition, endorsing the document by hand — a deliberate echo, Givens suggested, of an older tradition of public moral witness.
Givens framed the moment in terms of humility rather than heroism — pointing to the Beatitudes as a counter-model to what he described as a culture of pride running from Washington down through state government.
"The thing that cast Satan into hell was his pride," he said. "The message would be about humility — and folks feeling that even though they're ordinary people, they can get things done, and they can make change happen."
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
