Who will win the battle for the hearts and minds of churchgoing Alabamians?

In the third instalment of her series, Holly Baxter meets a reverend in Birmingham, Alabama, who has rallied against the state’s recent anti-abortion legislation

Pro-choice protesters at the rally for Reproductive Freedom in Montgomery in April (AFP/Getty)

Few people bar the members of her congregation might have known who the Reverend Terry Hamilton-Poore was before the middle-aged church leader decided to take an unexpected stand against anti-abortion legislation in her state. From an armchair in her spacious, air-conditioned office at the First Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, north Alabama, she explains what happened and what the fallout looked like. She has a stern gaze and everything about her is considered and deliberate. “This is a church that wants to stand for justice in the community,” she says. “With something like this, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t speak up publicly. That’s an expectation.”

A short corridor away from Hamilton-Poore’s office is the church proper. At the front of the church, a rainbow candle stands next to a basket of badges for visitors with preferred pronouns on them (“she/her”, “he/him” and “they/them”) and outside, billowing from one of the windows, is a rainbow flag in honour of Pride Month.

These markers seem progressive in a state where, up until April 2019, state laws demanded that sex education in Alabama schools taught that homosexuality “is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offence under the laws of the state”.