The first year of Donald Trump’s second administration has been as bad as some feared and worse than many might have imagined. Unceasing attacks on immigrants, education, humanitarian aid, the rule of the law, and democracy are distressing and dispiriting, and often downright scary. Yet if anything brings solace, it’s the wave of resistance by everyday Americans.

Nearly seven million people marched at “No Kings” protests in October, making it the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. In my home city of Chicago, moms have patrolled elementary schools to protect students and their families from ICE, a whistle brigade warned migrants about border-patrol sightings, and thousands of Catholics gathered to demand that detained persons be allowed to receive Communion. Even the U.S. bishops overcame their division to produce a statement criticizing the administration’s mass deportation tactics, although it stopped short of mentioning Trump or ICE by name. 

All of these are acts of resistance—and resistance must be a group project, according to Timothy Snyder, historian and author of the currently bestselling On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Among the lessons from his book: Do not obey in advance. Defend institutions. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. 

I recently saw Snyder speak at a sold-out appearance in Chicago hosted by commentator Rachel Maddow, where he offered another important piece of advice. No one person, one party, or one tactic is going to save democracy, he said. Instead, he told the audience to “keep doing the thing.”

“To resist doesn’t mean that you alone or your group has to do everything,” he said. “We get demoralized by the Hollywood notion that there’s a happy ending that’s going to solve it all. It creates the impression that you, today, have to solve it all. You don’t.”

But you do have to do something, he said. “You have to do it with other people. You have to do it in the zone where you feel somewhat comfortable but also somewhat uncomfortable. You have to do it with people that you didn’t always know before. And you have to keep doing it. As long as we’re all in that zone, I think it’s going to be okay.”

Protests are necessary, but so is the on-the-ground work of educating immigrants on their rights, accompanying asylum-seekers to court, and providing for the material needs of people afraid to leave their homes. Snyder also recommended financially supporting organizations and subscribing to local news organizations. 

Maddow’s introductory monologue was a love letter to Chicagoans for modeling how to respond to tyranny. “Chicago, you won,” she said, congratulating those who, armed with whistles and cell-phone cameras, provided a playbook for democracy for the rest of the country. 

While it’s true that ICE seems to have moved on from Chicago, the administration may just be taking its reign of terror to the next city. Now the fight has turned to the courts, where a judge has ordered the release of thousands arrested during Operation Midway Blitz, the majority of whom had no previous criminal record. 

To be honest, when a friend invited me to the Snyder and Maddow event, I almost declined, because I feared having to confront, once again, the reality of growing authoritarianism in our country. But Snyder was like a firefighter calmly leading people out of a burning building. He didn’t sugarcoat things. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, he said, but he had a plan: resistance.

“If we’re going to get through this, we have to remember that resistance is fundamentally normal,” he said. “This country is built on the premise that you have to resist, that revolutions are actually normal, that you can’t be a conformist and you can’t be complacent.”

Resistance also must be constructive. It must create, not merely oppose. “There are a number of things that are not working, things that will have to be rebuilt,” he said. “But it’s not enough to say, ‘Let’s go back. Let’s reconstruct. Let’s reform’…. Too much has been broken.” But the future will be even better than the previous status quo, he said. “The habits you’re building up are what we’re going to have on the other side.” 

Maddow and Snyder also highlighted two Chicagoans doing their part: Baltazar Enriquez, president of Little Village Community Council, who first got the idea to use whistles to disrupt ICE actions; and Pastor Julie Contreras of United Giving Hope in suburban Waukegan, who has turned her church into a clearinghouse of services for immigrants in her community. 

The pastor wasn’t the only mention of religion that evening. During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the relevance of a Chicago-born pope being elected during Trump’s reign. Maddow, who mentioned she has recently returned to the practice of Catholicism, said Trump’s actions seemed perfect for “radicalizing American Catholics.” Snyder praised the Church as an example of coalition-building. He also mentioned the need for resisters to use “moral language” in fighting for democracy. 

Their calls for action reminded me of a recent essay on intercessory prayer by author and theologian Ann Garrido, who is currently undergoing cancer treatment. She writes that she is both grateful for all those praying for her, but also wonders how such prayer “works.”

“It is not like I think God has forgotten who I am and doesn’t already care about me,” Garrido writes.

It is not like I think God has a limited amount of attention to give to people and must distribute it in different percentages to different people at different times…and now should be my time, gosh darnit! Most importantly, I can’t believe that if God wanted to erase glioblastoma from my life journey, He would refuse to do so unless 100 people asked him vs. 99. What kind of God would it be that I worship?

She quotes Fr. Ronald Rolheiser’s classic The Holy Longing to explain that the Incarnation means that God’s power is now partially dependent on human action:

Thus, not only God in heaven is being petitioned and asked to act. We are also charging ourselves, as part of the Body of Christ, with some responsibility for answering the prayer. To pray as a Christian demands concrete involvement in trying to bring about what is pleaded for in the prayer.

Garrido says she feels God’s presence through the actions of people around her—and not just those being kind to her. “When I find out that one of you is witnessing to what is happening to immigrants, even though I don’t live in your state, I also feel that you’ve cared for me,” she writes. 

Don’t stop praying, she says. But her charge is much the same as Snyder’s: we must act and bring our Christian witness into the world. Keep doing the thing.