Many Christians rejoiced after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. They cheered him on as he embraced Christian nationalist activists working overtime to marry church and state and to restrict the rights of non-Christians.
Not Skye Perryman. She had grave concerns about Trump’s many threats to democracy — challenges eventually epitomized most dramatically in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“In the wake of the 2016 election, it became clear that the threats to democracy and our progress in this country were grave and severe,” she explained.
Skye Perryman
Instead of fretting, she got to work, helping found Democracy Forward in 2017. The legal group took the Trump administration to court more than 100 times and now is engaged in 75 legal battles in 37 states over efforts to suppress and intimidate voters, ban books, limit women’s choices in health care and more.
Perryman, a Christian, is the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a secular advocacy group. She’s a magna cum laude graduate of Baylor University and currently serves on the board of the Baylor Line Foundation.
Her Baptist upbringing is foundational to her work, she said. It leads her to support democracy and to fight against those who say America is a Christian nation and should start acting like it by eliminating abortion, eliminating dirty books, suppressing votes and prohibiting private companies from exercising their right to incorporate environmental, social and governance considerations into their investment strategies or analysis.
“I have a fundamental belief in the equality of all people based on the radical equality embodied in the teaching of the New Testament texts.”
“I have a fundamental belief in the equality of all people based on the radical equality embodied in the teaching of the New Testament texts,” she said.
Perryman also is committed to the “core distinctives that Baptists hold dear, including the separation of church and state and the priesthood of all believers,” she added. “That’s foundational to my spiritual commitment.”
Growing up in Waco, Texas, she was not part of the religious right that took over the Southern Baptist Convention from the 1970s through the ’90s, but she could see it in churches and in her community.
“As a child, I remember our family receiving direct mail with graphic images of abortions that were designed to misinform women about health care,” she said. She also witnessed “concerted efforts to continually redraw the maps in my hometown to favor conservative candidates.”
Those experiences inform her work today.
“I saw early in my life the harms of what happens when far-right extremists gain power” in churches and denominations, she said. “Now, we’re seeing far-right extremists gain power on a national scale to shape politics and society, harming the ability of people to determine the course of their lives.”
Democracy Forward has three “strategic pillars” — defend, disrupt and build, she said. That means defending democracy, disrupting bad actors who support such efforts and building “a bold and vibrant democracy for all people.”
The group focuses on a handful of challenges, she noted. In many cases, it is squaring off against conservative Christian legal groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom, the $100 million organization founded three decades ago by James Dobson of Focus on the Family and other conservative evangelical leaders.
“The courts are now a frontline in the battleground for democracy, not merely the last resort protectors of it.”
These “highly coordinated, well-funded array of extremist legal organizations … are propping up extremist actors, misusing our courts to roll back rights and seeking to create a country in their own image, a country that only works for the few, not for all,” Democracy Forward notes. “The courts are now a frontline in the battleground for democracy, not merely the last resort protectors of it.”
Key issues include:
- Freedom to vote: Democracy Forward works against the growing tide of groups seeking to undermine voting and fair elections and promoting misinformation regarding the 2020 election. It is litigating in Wisconsin to prevent officials from destroying evidence of their attempts to undermine the 2020 election.
- Keeping mifepristone on the market: The group is representing the nation’s only generic manufacturer of mifepristone, an abortion drug that evangelical groups are trying to restrict.
- Freedom to read: Democracy Forward has represented parents, teachers, a teacher’s union, students and librarians who have been attacked over their choices of reading material as part of an effort to undermine public education.
- Freedom to invest: It is defending the right of investors to factor in financial risks, including climate-related harms. In Texas and Wyoming, it is working with companies and other groups to oppose regulations prohibiting financial firms from recognizing such factors. Laws restricting environmental, social and governance concerns have been enacted in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
- Protecting the civil service: Democracy Forward is working with two dozen organizations to support the Biden administration’s proposed safeguards to prevent the politicization of civil servants who work throughout federal agencies. Trump tried to politicize America’s civil service while in office and has pledged massive firings and ideological loyalty tests for government workers if he is elected to a second term.
- Racial equality: In Mississippi, Democracy Forward represented the National Medical Association amid efforts “to undermine racial equity through the courts through attacks on anti-racism health care plans.”
Democracy Forward’s board includes some leading Democrats. Chairman Marc E. Elias is a Democratic Party elections lawyer. Board member Ron Klain served as White House chief of staff for Joe Biden and chief of staff for vice presidents Biden and Al Gore. Mindy Elizabeth Myers is a Democratic political strategist who served as the first female executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
But Perryman says the group and its goals are nonpartisan.
“We’re pro-democracy,” she insisted. “We’re unapologetically in favor of and advocating for the advancement of democracy, equality and progress. And we’re unapologetically opposed to extremism and regressive efforts to roll back an inclusive society for all people. We don’t align in any other way.”
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