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Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde

Washington’s High Priestess

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › woke-bishop-misses-the-point › 681420

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.”

[Read: How social justice became a new religion]  

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?

[Read: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

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.

Of Course Donald Trump Didn’t Enjoy Hearing a Truly Christian Message

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › bishop-budde-trump › 681415

When Donald Trump sat down Tuesday beneath the exquisite stained-glass windows of the National Cathedral, he likely expected a sermon that would reflect his earthly glory back to him: something about unity in America, perhaps, or a meditation on fading American Christianity and the possibility of a Christian future, both of which would have flattered the president’s stated priorities. But the sermon Trump heard from Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde instead resulted in the president demanding an apology from Budde and the Episcopal Church, calling her “a Radical Left hard line Trump hater” and fuming that she “is not very good at her job!”

Budde earned Trump’s ire by imploring the leader of the free world to show mercy on the weak during a post-inaugural prayer service: “Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” Budde specifically listed LGBTQ people and migrants—“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.” These members of our society may be undocumented, Budde submitted, but “the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors … I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.”

Trump was outraged by Budde’s remarks, and predictably so: Those vested with an abundance of worldly power should find the radical Christian message of mercy hard to hear, because it demands mildness and leniency of the mighty rather than strength and bombast. As the Book of Wisdom in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles reads: “For the lowliest may be pardoned in mercy, but the mighty will be mightily tested. For the Lord of all will not stand in awe of anyone, or show deference to greatness.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: If only people actually believed these Trump-as-Jesus memes]

Christian priests and pastors have thus exhorted leaders to mercy for many centuries—in fact, this style of communication with power could constitute its own genre. In the fourth century, Ambrose, the Catholic bishop of Milan, wrote a letter to Roman Emperor Theodosius after a massacre to implore that Theodosius repent of the killings and turn instead to peace: “I urge, I beg, I exhort, I warn, for it is a grief to me, that you who were an example of unusual piety, who were conspicuous for clemency, who would not suffer single offenders to be put in peril, should not mourn that so many have perished … Do not add another sin to your sin by a course of action which has injured many.” Likewise, the 16th-century Dutch Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus wrote a book titled The Education of a Christian Prince, which seeks to advise Christians who have found themselves in power; his prescription is typically Christian—a turn toward peace, leniency, clemency, and forgiveness.

Trump complained that Budde “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way.” Such a distinction between religion and politics is something of a farce, as the two categories are not easily disentangled. What can Christian clergy members say when brought before a politician without mentioning the demands placed upon crowned heads by the tenets of Christian morality? There are not two worlds, but rather only one. Budde couldn’t have delivered a truly Christian sermon without addressing the moral obligations that Trump’s stated religion imposes upon believers.

The Christian faith is careful to exhort the powerful to mercy because mercy is so opposed to the exercise of power; in fact, mercy requires that a leader restrain themselves from the harshest of decrees and punishments, and the Christian tradition proudly recommends as much. For having mercy protects not only mercy’s recipients, but also the merciful themselves. What Trump despises in Budde’s plea for mercy may be the key to saving his own soul—if only he would listen.