Bishop Leah Daughtry knows the importance of voting as a member of the clergy and a former Capitol Hill staff member.
Photo courtesy of House of Lords Church
Bishop Leah Daughtry was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a family where church was their life, which is the definition of a preacher’s kid.
She began teaching Sunday school at 13 but carries none of the usual “PK” cynicism. “Usher, church administrator; being a preacher’s kid in a smaller church, you had to do all these things. We didn’t get to sit and wear pretty clothes,” she says.
But a PK component emerged when asked if she’s ever cleaned the church bathroom.
“Yes, Ma’am, the bathroom, the kitchen, sweep the floor, make the bulletins in the old days with the mimeograph machines. Buy the chicken, fry the chicken, serve the chicken, raise the money, count the money, take the money to the bank,” she said.
Daughtry had no expectation of formal ministry until the call came in 2000. And she answered in a wholehearted way.
She is now the presiding prelate of that church, a Pentecostal Assembly founded in 1929 by her grandfather, Bishop Alonzo Daughtry. It’s formally called The Church on the Mount, but the national fellowship of churches is called The House of the Lord.
That fellowship describes its mandate as prophetic, political, pastoral, priestly, pedagogical, and programmatic.
And the congregation votes in large numbers.
“We believe in the small church model, which is biblical,” she says. “It’s important that the shepherd be able to count the sheep. Know them by name. Know what their conditions are. There’s no need to go through lots of layers to get to the shepherd.”
The members of The House of the Lord are educated in the necessity of voting and required to register; they are enlightened about the issues.
“We give them tools to make assessments for themselves. We don’t tell them who to vote for. They don’t have to vote, but they do have to register. When candidates come to speak, they know they’re addressing a church full of registered voters.”
So they immediately see the dichotomy in a platform that declares itself pro-life but has no care about the quality of the child’s life once it’s here.
“Abundant life in all its phases. Food. Shelter. Water. Good schools. Safe Streets.”
The Bishop responds to the revisionist history being propagated. “The boldness of the lie is quite stunning,” she says. “That people learned skills, had housing. What housing? Our responsibility is to challenge the lie. It’s just a lie.”
And her tone softened as she recalled the family history that recorded her then fourth-grade-age grandmother being raped, and chosen as the bed partner for the slave master. He legally claimed the son as his own, but who would deny the violence perpetrated upon a child?
Bishop Daughtry says the same force wants to make decisions for us — basic life decisions and choices: “It is the same force that made decisions over our grandparents. People outside myself make decisions. It’s the same demonic force.”
“My first vote was for Jesse Jackson for President in 1984. In my junior year of college, I interned for U.S. Rep., the Rev. Ed Townes of New York,” she says.
She says working on Capitol Hill for those four years gave her an on-ramp into the Washington political establishment through his values lens, which reflected her own values and showed that faith and politics could be intertwined without losing their parameters.
She also worked for Democratic National Committee Chair Ron Brown and had a hand in logistics for the 1992 convention. She was also an administrative assistant for Alexis Herman, the first African American to be Secretary of Labor.
Some people, especially Christians, say they’ll vote for the House and Senate, but not the top of the ticket.
“They should read Project 2025. it’s the Trump manifesto. It states what they plan to do if they get another go at the White House,” the Bishop says. “They’re going after everything they want with executive orders, all the that don’t require congressional approval.”
She says they’re planning to deport Muslims, and half her family members are Muslims.
“I’m concerned. They’re going to overturn laws — replace them with new laws. The top of the ticket matters,” she says.
Not voting is a missed opportunity.
“And you end up with, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’”
Rev. Dorothy S. Boulware is Word In Black religion writer and columnist
