President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has energized anti-DEI and conservative voices across the nation. In response, reparations advocates in Boston are shifting their focus from government toward religious institutions.

“There is a rightward shift and there is antagonism toward many progressive causes,” said the Rev. John Gibbons, a community minister at Boston’s historic Arlington Street Church. “Nonetheless, the issue of reparations is one that predates Donald Trump and predates any current administration.”

Gibbons is one of a handful of white religious leaders in Greater Boston who are working to persuade their peers to support the local reparations movement despite the change in Washington. The informal coalition is an offshoot of the New Democracy Coalition, a civic engagement organization founded by Boston-based public theologian the Rev. Kevin Peterson.

Earlier this month the group unveiled a docket of “demandments” — a play on the Bible’s Old Testament religious and ethical guidelines for personal conduct. The list contains a set of actions for historically white churches to take in support of the reparations movement, including the formation of an independently controlled, $50 million fund for Boston’s Black community by the end of the year, the audit and public release of each institution’s total wealth, and the pledge to pursue racial reconciliation “through self-education, public visioning and practice.”

“There is a long, deep history of white power, white Bostonian financial muscle, white Boston privilege that has been very much a part of the Back Bay and the legacy of many of the churches that remain predominately white,” said Gibbons, describing his involvement with the cause.

The demands and the broader movement, Gibbons said, are part of a necessary step toward racial repair that the group hopes Boston can model through the voluntary participation of progressive-minded, non-government institutions, starting with churches.

“Racism is a moral crisis and in the history of this country,” he said. “In the history of striving toward justice, churches and faith communities have been able to bring focus and zeal, moral purpose and righteousness to the causes of human rights and that is what faith communities are supposed to be about.”

“There is no way, to heal the wounds of racism in America without reparation,” Gibbons added. “It is complicated and it’s not going to happen imminently, and there are lots of reasons why there are white people in particular who are resentful and resistant, but reparations is never going to happen if white people don’t say, ‘this is important and this must happen.’”

The demands come as a growing number of historically white churches in Boston have begun examining their colonial origins and publicly acknowledging their connections to slavery . Most recently, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts established an inaugural 10-member committee , including former state Rep. Byron Rushing, to steer its reparations fund.

Boston joined a reparations wave when the city formed an official panel to explore the idea in response to widespread protests over racism, police brutality and public safety funding in the wake of the death of George Floyd. That tide of social justice concern lifted the idea of reparations out of its longtime position as a political non-starter and into a concept that multiple cities and states across the country sought to explore.

In the years since, national backlash against social justice initiatives — initiatives intended to promote fair treatment and address historic underrepresentation — has been forceful, and helped fuel Trump’s reelection last year.

Within hours of being sworn into his second term, Trump made good on campaign promises to stop diversity, equity and inclusion efforts with an executive order terminating “radical and wasteful” DEI programs and jobs inside federal agencies.

His perhaps most notable mention of paying restitution to victims of discrimination on the campaign trail came in 2023 remarks regarding a pledge to fine colleges and universities that “persist in explicit, unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity” through DEI policies. The comments were interpreted by some as a veiled promise of reparations to white people.

Despite reparations for Black people not being a federal priority, advocates like Kamm Howard, international reparations scholar and director of the advocacy organization Reparations United, said they are undeterred.

“The federal avenue is not there, however, we can do some meaningful things at the state and local level,” Howard said in a recent interview with GBH News.

“What’s happening in Boston, I think is novel in the country,” he said. “Most of the work in reparations in the country is around targeting governments [federal, state and local], but there are also other complicit actors in the harms against our community and the crimes against our community and they were institutions like faith institutions, religious institutions, hospitals, educational institutions, as well as corporations.”

“Every entity that was complicit in the crimes that were complicit in the harms has an obligation to remedy, to redress.”

Faith leaders from Greater Boston’s historically white churches met the group’s demands with warmth and caution.

“It’s going to take a few minutes to digest,” said the Rev. Pamela Werntz, rector at Emmanuel Church in Boston, when the demands were unveiled earlier this month. “I think they’re all reasonable, I don’t think they’re all possible in 2025, but I [also] don’t think this problem started last year. I think it started more than 400 years ago and we’ve gotta all take the next step.”

The Rev. Rob Mark, lead pastor at Church of the Covenant, said the list was both “overwhelming” and “an incredible invitation.”

“I see this as a gift and I’m incredibly humbled to be invited into this work,” Mark said. “I don’t want to quickly respond because I need to digest this in my congregation. I will commit to bring this to them.”

Meanwhile, to undergird his group’s demands, Gibbons pointed to a popular quote from Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

“So there has to be a demand,” he explained. “I think that is rising in Boston and we will hear more of that rather than less of that, and Trump has nothing to do with that.”