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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) visited three Black churches in Los Angeles on Sunday morning to campaign for California’s redistricting effort, which could add five or six Democratic representatives to his ranks.

Amid a congressional deadlock over healthcare subsidies that has left the government shut down for more than two weeks, the minority leader returned to the Golden State to campaign for Proposition 50. The ballot measure would give his party more power against Republicans, who Jeffries said have refused to negotiate in the shutdown and otherwise.

“This is trouble all around us,” Jeffries told the congregation at First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles in West Adams — after poking fun at President Trump’s 2016 gaffe misspronouncing a book of the Bible. “Folks in the government who would rather shut the government down than give healthcare to everyday Americans. Wickedness in high places. And now they want to gerrymander the congressional maps all across the country to try to rig the midterm elections.”

The packed congregation — most wearing pink to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month — were receptive to his message.

“This is a way of trying to keep things equal,” said Kim Balogun, who was in Sunday’s crowd. “A level playing field.”

For many of its members, First AME is more than just a church. As the city’s oldest African American congregation, it has been at the forefront of the fight for civil rights since its founding in 1872.

“This is family,” said Toni Scott, a retired special-education teacher who has been with First AME for 52 years. “As one of the church’s previous ministers used to say, ‘This is a hospital. People are sick; we come to be healed,’” she said.

When news reached L.A. that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison, South African immigrants and anti-apartheid activists flocked to the church, anxiously awaiting the first sights of Mandela walking free. During the 1992 riots, First AME was a bastion of hope amid a sea of chaos.

“We thank you, God, for bringing us through dark times and chaotic times,” the Rev. Charolyn Jones said to the congregation on Sunday, “knowing that our church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was born out of protest.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, left, greets parishioners at First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. “It’s an honor and a privilege to spend time worshiping at Black churches here with Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove to reinforce the message of the importance of voting yes on Proposition 50,” Jeffries said.

(Ethan Swope / For The Times)

For Jeffries, the first Black person to lead a major political party in Congress, the West Coast trip amid a congressional impasse was important.

“The African American churchgoing community has always been the foundation of the Black experience in the United States of America,” Jeffries said, who also visited the congregations of Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in South L.A. and Resurrection Church of Los Angeles in Carson. “It’s an honor and a privilege to spend time worshiping at Black churches here with Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove to reinforce the message of the importance of voting yes on Proposition 50.”

The state’s redistricting effort, Proposition 50, is part of a national fight over control of the U.S. House of Representatives, instigated by President Trump. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, but in June, Trump began pushing Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional maps to yield five more likely GOP seats.

In response, Newsom proposed California temporarily depose of its independent redistricting commission, led by 14 citizens, to redraw the state’s maps and add five Democratic seats, effectively canceling out Texas’s move.

The Democratic-controlled state Legislature quickly produced redrawn maps and scheduled a Nov. 4 special election to put them up for a vote. Mail-in ballots are already in the hands of voters.

California Republicans, including former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, have slammed the initiative as a “big scam.” Schwarzenegger called Democrats hypocritical, arguing that while they call Trump a “threat to democracy,” they want to “tear up the Constitution of California” and “take the power away from the people and give it back to the politicians.”

Jeffries noted that California was letting its citizens ultimately decide — unlike some Republican-led states.

“We said from the very beginning that we want to find bipartisan common ground whenever possible, but unfortunately, Republicans, from the beginning of this presidency, have adopted a take-it-or-leave-it, go-at-it-alone strategy,” he said, which is part of why, he added, Proposition 50 is so important.

In the current shutdown, Democrats said they will not vote for a funding bill unless it extends tax credits in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire for many Americans at the end of the year and reverses cuts to Medicaid that Republicans passed in July’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

If the ACA credits expire, premiums would on average more than double for Americans on the enhanced tax credit, one health policy research firm found. But Republicans point out they come with a price: The Congressional Budget Office estimates they would cost the government $350 billion over the next decade.

The bill, which is now law, will cut Medicaid spending by $793 billion, the CBO estimated, and lead to 7.8 million Americans losing their insurance.

On the government shutdown, Richard Balogun, a member of Sunday’s First AME congregation, thinks fighting for healthcare is a worthwhile cause.

“Isn’t it amazing that in England, Australia … you can have national healthcare? Maybe you don’t get treated within the first hour, but you get treated,” he said. In America, “you have to ask yourself sometimes, if I’m going to the emergency room, can I afford that thousands of dollars I’m going to have to pay? That should not be the case in this country.”

A government shutdown has consequences: 2.3 million civilian federal employees are going without pay — roughly 750,000 of whom are furloughed. When the employees are back-paid after the government reopens, that’ll correspond to roughly $400 million of taxpayer money spent every day of the shutdown to pay employees who were not working, the CBO estimates.

Beyond National Park closures and air travel delays, food programs for low-income families could run dry without a funding bill. The Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC) can see effects as soon as one week after a shutdown, the CEO of the National WIC Assn. said. Meanwhile, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) could also run out of funding further down the line.

Republicans blame Democrats for shutting down the government over their healthcare concerns, but Jeffries pinned it on Republicans, who’ve refused to negotiate.

To Scott, the pink her congregation was wearing to support breast cancer survivors only emphasized the importance of access to healthcare. (Jeffries sported a pink tie.)

“More people need to know what’s going on, so just having him go from church to church, mostly in the Black neighborhoods — that’s where we have the most people: in our churches,” Scott said. “Some may hear the word, see something on fake news, but we know in the church you’re going to hear truth.”

WASHINGTON — For decades, Doug Wilson was a relatively unknown pastor in Idaho, relegated to the fringe of evangelicalism for his radical teachings.

Now he’s an influential voice in the Christian right. That shift in clout was apparent this past week as he took a victory lap through Washington, sharing a stage with Trump administration officials and preaching at his denomination’s new church.

“This is the first time we’ve had connections with as many people in national government as we do now,” Wilson told The Associated Press in August.

Wilson and his acolytes within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches still teach that empathy can be a sin, that the U.S. is a Christian nation, that giving women the right to vote was a bad idea. But as evangelicalism has aligned more closely with President Trump’s Republican agenda, these teachings have a larger and more receptive audience.

“Whatever he may have been in the past, he’s not fringe now,” said Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and Wilson critic who wrote the forthcoming book “The Bible According to Christian Nationalists.”

Wilson’s Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, opened a church blocks from the U.S. Capitol this summer. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, member of a CREC church in Tennessee, attended the opening.

On Saturday, the fledging congregation gathered for its first church conference. It rented a larger space in Virginia for the weekend to accommodate the 350 people who went to hear Wilson, more than doubling their usual Sunday attendance.

Wilson said they started the congregation to serve church members who relocated to work in Trump’s administration.

“We didn’t come to D.C. in order to meet important people,” Wilson told the gathering. “We’re here because we want to create the opportunity for important people and other people to meet with God.”

Making the case for Christian nationalism

At the National Conservatism Conference days earlier, Wilson was a featured speaker along with members of Congress and Trump’s Cabinet, including border czar Tom Homan, budget director Russell Vought and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Two more CREC ministers were on the program to give an opening prayer and speak on a panel.

From the lectern in his affable baritone, Wilson gave a full-throated endorsement of Christian nationalism.

“America was deeply Christian and Protestant at the founding,” he said, while admitting numerous “credentialed” historians dispute this notion, “which should tell you something about our credentialing system.”

He talked to a sympathetic crowd, filled with conservatives who support a populist, nationalist and largely Christian America. Like Wilson, their movement has momentum, thanks to Trump’s return to the White House.

Wilson’s vision for a renewed Christian America calls for the end of same-sex marriage, abortion and Pride parades. He advocates restricting pornography and immigration.

“It is not xenophobic to object to the immigration policies of those who want to turn the Michigan-Ohio border into something that resembles the India-Pakistan border,” he said onstage.

He questioned, in particular, Muslims’ ability to assimilate: “There’s only so much white sand you can put in the sugar bowl before it isn’t the sugar bowl anymore.”

Downplaying the horrors of slavery

Wilson and the CREC, which he co-founded, ascribe to a strict version of Reformed theology — rooted in the tradition of 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin — that puts a heavy emphasis on an all-powerful God with dominion over all of society.

Since the 1970s, Wilson’s ministry and influence have grown to include the Association of Christian Classical Schools and New Saint Andrew’s College in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is a prolific writer and content creator, and he and his ministry have a robust media presence, including a publishing arm, Canon Press.

His extensive catalog of books and blog posts provides plenty of fodder for his critics. In one infamous example, he co-authored a 1996 book that downplayed the horrors of slavery, an effort not dissimilar from recent Trump administration moves to revise museum exhibits.

Today Wilson says he’d make some points more clearly in “Southern Slavery as It Was.” While he condemns slavery, he still contends some slave owners and enslaved people “had a good relationship with one another.”

“There was horrific maltreatment on the one hand, and then there are other stories that are right out of Disney’s ‘Song of the South,’” Wilson told the AP, referring to the 1946 film that hasn’t been released in decades because it paints a sunny picture of plantation life with racist stereotypes.

Worries that patriarchy can fuel abuse

Wilson’s hard-line theology and happy-warrior ethos have attracted a cadre of young, internet-savvy men to his ministry. They help make slickly produced hype videos to circulate online, like one in which Wilson uses a flamethrower to torch cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses.

CREC leaders like to use humor to poke fun at their reputation.

“We want our wives to be barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen making sourdough,” joked Joe Rigney, one of Wilson’s Idaho pastors, at the church conference.

“Of course, this is a gross slander,” Rigney said. “We are more than happy for our wives to wear shoes while they make the sourdough.”

CREC practices complementarianism — the patriarchal idea that men and women have different God-given roles. Women within CREC churches cannot hold church leadership positions, and married women are to submit to their husbands.

Christ Church allows only heads of households, usually men, to vote in church elections. Though Wilson said his wife and daughters vote in nonchurch elections, he would prefer the United States follow his congregation’s example with household voting.

To the uproar of critics, Wilson has argued sex requires male authority and female submission, a point he acknowledges is “offensive to all egalitarians.”

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” he writes in “Fidelity.” “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

Former CREC members have accused Wilson and the denomination of fostering a theological environment ripe for patriarchal abuse of women and children.

“I’ve seen how much this hurts people,” said journalist Sarah Stankorb, who documented allegations of mishandled abuse within CREC for Vice and in her 2023 book “Disobedient Women.”

In her 2024 memoir “A Well-Trained Wife,” Tia Levings, a former CREC member, alleges Wilson’s writings on marriage and patriarchy provided a theological justification for her ex-husband’s violence toward her.

“I call it church-sanctioned domestic abuse,” Levings told the AP.

Wilson denies condoning abuse or ever sanctioning physical discipline of wives.

“Our teaching has to be taken as a whole,” he said, emphasizing wives should submit but husbands must love them in a Christ-like way.

“Beating their wives or spanking their wives is a call-the-cops situation,” he told reporters Saturday after his church conference concluded.

CREC has more than 150 churches in the United States and abroad. Wilson said its goal is to have thousands of churches, so most Americans can be within driving distance of one.

Wilson often says his movement is playing the long game, that its efforts won’t come to fruition for two centuries.

“Doug loves to play humble,” Levings said, “that his vision is going to take 250 years to manifest. That’s actually not the case when we look at the results of what his ministry has done.”

After all, it took him only a few decades to get this close to the White House.

Stanley writes for the Associated Press.