By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
Whenever persons are rejected by society, the result is Exile… they have no sense of belonging, neither to the community nor to the territory. – Peter Paris
Every election cycle, the same call goes out to the Black church: mobilize your people, open your doors to the candidates, get the young folks to the polls.
The call is grounded in history — from Montgomery to Selma to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Black church (Church) made the difference in acquiring the franchise.
As November approaches with young Black voters among the most disengaged in a generation, the Church is being called again to “do what it do.” But whether it can deliver, another question must be first asked: Can the Church be the answer to exile if it has become a source of it?
The Missing Voters
The 52nd Harvard Youth Poll, conducted in spring 2026, found that only 12 percent of young people feel motivated and ready to participate in the midterms. The University of Chicago’s GenForward survey also found roughly six in 10 young people hold unfavorable impressions of both parties. Young people are not choosing between the parties. They are declining both. In other words, young people care. They just don’t believe their participation changes anything.
The First Exile
U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown put it like this: “The appeal to young voters used to be aspirational — vote for this candidate and your life gets better. That appeal no longer lands.” Brown argues that the same forces that produced Jim Crow are active right now — suppressing voting rights, erasing history from school curricula, dismantling the institutions that documented the struggle.
Today’s youth don’t know John Lewis or Fannie Lou Hamer. They are unfamiliar with Bloody Sunday in Selma, the Montgomery bus boycott, or the Freedom Schools which taught Black southerners organizing and voting rights alongside math and literacy. Not because youth don’t care — because nobody told them. You cannot vote to protect a right you never knew was fought for.
Peter Paris explained decades ago: “When rejection by society persists across generations, the result is Exile — a permanent state in which the rejected have no sense of belonging, neither to the community nor to the territory.” Yet the Black church was born precisely to respond to that exile — to be the substitute community, the place that said to a people with no sense of genuine national belonging: you belong here.
The Second Exile
But young Black people today are not only exiles in America. For many, they are exiles from the Black church itself. Because of the Church’s inflexible rules, norms and traditions that no longer have meaning for today’s generation — the institution built to be the answer to exile has become another place where Black youth do not belong.
“The world young Black people — young Black men in particular — inhabit has shifted so dramatically that the church’s inherited frameworks no longer reach them where they actually are. They are not lost to the struggle. They are lost to the language,” says ethics scholar Walter Fluker.
The Church’s identity has been built around the Exodus narrative — a people in bondage, a march toward freedom, a promised land of justice. That framework produced extraordinary things. But for many young Black Americans today the Exodus has lost its meaning. They are living inside Exile instead — dispersed, disconnected, without the landmarks that told previous generations who they were. Exile requires not the courage and solidarity of the past but imagination and reinvention — finding a way to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. The Church built for Exodus may not have the tools for Exile, according to Fluker.
And, from my vantage, the church has sometimes made it worse. In protecting its own form — its music, its theology, its dress codes, its misogynist patriarchal leadership and decorum — it has communicated an unspoken message to young people: you are welcome here, as long as you become someone other than who you are. That message lands. Young people heard it. Many left — not in rejection of what the church stands for, but in response to a container that didn’t fit them. New wine cannot survive in old wineskins. The skins burst, the wine spills, and both are lost.
The Question the Church Must Answer
If young Black voters are going to show up in November — in Toledo, in Ohio and elsewhere — the Church must find new ways to draw on its historic identity to infuse character, civic empowerment, and a renewed sense of community into the generation it is losing.
So, how will faith leaders respond to the challenge? Will they adapt, remain or reimagine? Can the church be flexible enough to meet young people inside the Exile rather than insisting they return to the Exodus? Can this venerable institution create space for a generation to belong without requiring them to become someone else first? Or does it hold its form and cede the generation — and with it, the role Paris described as the reason for its existence?
Young people care. Help them believe. And ask honestly whether the door you are opening is open on their terms — or only on yours.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org