“It’s wicked and absolutely evil for this regime to treat children like they are disposable,” Ekemini Uwan, a thirty-six-year-old public theologian who recently completed a Masters of Divinity Studies at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, told me. “And I’m supposed to believe that Trump is pro-life?” For Uwan, who became a born-again Christian while at California State University, Northridge, in Southern California, being pro-life, rather than anti-abortion, also involves protecting people’s rights to health care and education. “If you’re weeping for the child who has been aborted, you should be weeping for Trayvon Martin and black mothers in Flint who are experiencing miscarriages as a result of lead poisoning,” she told me. Uwan is in many ways theologically conservative, yet she prefers to call herself a black Christian rather than an evangelical. “Historically, it really means white and Republican, and I am neither,” she said. Instead, Uwan is a Democrat and a public theologian and a supporter of Black Lives Matter who believes that, in addition to her faith, she must always consider the marginalized people for whom her votes matter. “I’m thinking about what’s going to be best for immigrants,” she said. As a black Christian, she sets herself in the tradition of women like Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth. Her faith requires her to reject politics that discriminate.
The New Yorker