‘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.,…