It is not unusual for clerics to address their leaders directly. King James regularly caught hell from the pulpit. So when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde went for the king, at the end of an interminable sermon on Tuesday morning in the National Cathedral, she was acting within an established tradition. She was also operating within another well-known tradition, the “Where did everybody go?” confusion within her church regarding its sharply declining membership.

She asked Donald Trump to think of America’s undocumented immigrants in a compassionate light, and to see them for who so many of them really are: “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”

Exactly right—and she was exactly the right person to say it in exactly the right place. These vulnerable people, now with the full powers of the American state readied against them, aren’t just a Christian concern; in a sense they are the Christian concern. Christ is always on the side of the outcast, the stranger, the prisoner, the leper. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

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I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

Then, with a straight face, she described the county’s undocumented, much-abused subsistence workers this way: “They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.”

Our gurdwara? Tell me, high priestess, are there many undocumented Sikhs laboring in poultry farms and meatpacking plants where you live? Sikhs are 0.06 percent of the U.S. population. Jews are 2.4 percent—the number of undocumented people of these faiths toiling in the shadows and performing menial labor must be tiny. And what “temples” is she talking about? Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian?

Have we considered the implications of Trump’s policies on the undocumented Zoroastrian?

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It was a minor moment of an otherwise forgettable sermon. And yet it was revealing. The problem, as she described it, was one in which the undocumented immigrant performing stooped labor in the California fields is as likely a Sikh as a Christian. She was presenting the world not as it is but as she would presumably like it to be: diverse and unified in the strength of its religious belief, although not any particular religious belief, which is a really strange position to hold. If she wanted to be more precise about the situation, she might have acknowledged that the huge majority of undocumented immigrants began their journey in Latin America. Latinos are joining the evangelical Church in huge numbers, which might help explain the significant number of Latino U.S. citizens who voted for Trump—and is that okay with you, Bishop Budde?  

In her appeal to a great big interfaith community of people who probably more or less believe the same or same-ish thing (a community in which all believers are equally imperiled by anti-immigration policies), she offered one more reminder of how we got ourselves into this sorry state, in which anti-intellectualism, populist rage at established institutions, and the thirst for ever more bizarre conspiracy theories have run riot over good sense and established fact.

The high priestess wanted to reveal her goodness, her moral purity, her inclusive and diversity-forward politics. She wanted a gold star, and in many quarters she got one. A headline in The New Republic read “Trump Seethes as Bishop Calls Him Out in Heartfelt Plea.” Trump issued a demand that the bishop apologize. But in the church he had looked only bored, as though his mind was on other things. Maybe he was seething. Or maybe he was thinking, That’s why I won.