When the Right Rev. Mariann E. Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., turned to address President Donald Trump during the customary inauguration prayer service, the reaction was predictable. Blue clergy and believers cheered her courage, while the red faithful denounced her intrusion into politics. Lost in the knee-jerk partisanship was the larger context of the bishop’s role as religious leader.
As a congregational rabbi who must prepare a weekly sermon, and as a cleric who often interacts with elected officials, I have struggled for the past weeks to articulate the wisdom of Bishop Budde’s remarks that day. On its face, the sermon was rather standard Christian theology, tucked into a non-partisan, multi-faith service emphasizing transcendent national values. However, the decision to face the president solely, especially given the architecture of the Canterbury Pulpit, and the vivid mentions of specific groups under partisan attack, meant the sermon was bound to spark controversy, raising questions about a cleric’s role in our politics.
Every congregational cleric knows a faction that wants to create spiritual bubbles in our houses of worship away from the issues of the day. They argue for our silence, following John F. Kennedy, who said: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” But Kennedy turned one of America’s bedrock political commitments into a social injunction to crack the social hegemony of White Protestantism, an irrelevance in today’s more inclusive religious marketplace. Besides, those who argue for religion’s silence should read our sacred texts; Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad engaged in politics every day.
Religion has long held a key role in American liberal democracy. To reverse Andrew Breitbart’s dictum, if culture is upstream of politics, then religion is upstream of culture. Faith, practice, institutional participation, cross-cutting social groups, and wisdom traditions help shape the Overton window of morality. Religion accomplishes this by providing emotional and social sanctuary (sometimes physical, too), while also challenging parishioners to our highest aspirations. We like to apply the dictum—originally about journalism—that we “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Religion, almost uniquely in American culture, can move people beyond intellectual rigidity through the brain’s spiritual side door. One has a hard time maintaining disdain when a political opponent arrives to pray with your mother at her hospital bed, deliver a meal after your baby is born, or studies Scripture with you sincerely and courageously.
Given that our information ecosystem has been completely colonized by the algorithms, and since our social interactions have been fundamentally altered by technology, religion’s role has grown even more important, as Jonathan Rauch argues in his new book, Cross Purposes. Our texts remain analog, our interactions face-to-face, our pace slow, our vision generational, our communities diverse. America needs more of these qualities that religious communities offer to combat loneliness, radicalism, toxicity, and despair.
Given all this and the urgencies of the Trump era, Budde’s move can serve as a guide for my profession, institution, and flock. How do we speak the truth of our traditions constructively without being drawn into the maw of destructive polarization? How can we maintain peace in increasingly violent times? And, crucially, how do we respond to the extreme anxiety, hate, fear, despair, and cynicism we encounter in our pastoral relationships?
Priest and Prophet in American Democracy
To decipher these questions, I see the bishop straddling two archetypal roles familiar to every cleric in America—the priest and the prophet—both with long and necessary traditions in our democracy. These are roles entrusted with communicating God’s commands, even uncomfortable ones. They are not the only models from religious tradition—the martyr and messiah (or the savior) come to mind as well—but they are the most pragmatic options available (none of us want to be martyred, and only the delusional think they are a messiah). These four categories are extra-legal and often non-rational roles, which allows them to maintain and shape the liberal system from the outside. While others can fulfill them, clerics are uniquely suited because spirituality speaks to a primal, meaning-based truth, not necessarily a cognitive, scientific truth.
The priest is the maintainer of institutions, the keeper of rites, and the necessary guardian of universal moral truths. This was the role Dwight Eisenhower described when he said, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” The priest maintains civility, offers institutional space during disaster or disruption, and provides a form of civic chaplaincy throughout experiences of high anxiety or grief, all of which create a kind of civic ballast for democracy.
But the priest’s commitment to stability must, when times require, yield to the prophet: the dissenter, the social outcast willing to name injustice and error, the pin-pointer of specific moral falsehoods, the courageous voice “speaking truth to power” (a term so valorized by clergy, it risks becoming a cliché). The prophet’s lips burn with a belief that society is off-track, that great harm is being perpetrated beneath our noses, that we are distracted from justice, or worse, that we are complicit in injustice. If the priest creates civic ballast to keep the moral ship of state upright, the prophet guides the social tiller away from the rocks of immorality.
The balance between these roles was best captured in the message Martin Luther King Jr. sent to the local clergy (including a rabbi) in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He wrote:
First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.
It is a stinging rebuke, one that reverberates in the mind of any thoughtful cleric today, especially white clergy. We must interrogate ourselves: When are we upholding “civility,” which is a “negative peace,” a falsehood masquerading as truth?
In the early part of my career, I favored the prophet, immersing myself in social-action leadership and faith-based community organizing in the service of specific policies to further the cause of what I believe Jewish tradition sees as justice. I do not think the anti-abortion, right-leaning religious leader is doing anything different. Both of us give voice to what we think our traditions demand.
How the Priestly Role Took Priority
About 10 years ago, as political toxicity crept into my personal life, synagogue governance, class discussions, and pastoral appointments, I shifted my focus to the priestly role. Trumpism, Charlottesville, and Pittsburgh had illuminated our civic health’s decline. I set aside the prophetic and threw myself into experimenting with ways that religious practice could strengthen democracy, ultimately creating a national program that teaches Jewish clergy how to weave America’s foundational documents into Torah study.
This priestly work has transformed my synagogue, and since then I have watched a growing interest in this intersection between religion and democracy. A robust national patchwork of thought leaders, funders, and practitioners are building a field. I have also discovered in my multi-faith local colleagues an enthusiasm for this work, which produced a pre-election tree-planting ritual, and a very homemade election week anti-violence video. With no connection to my Northern Virginia faith community, Bishop Budde and the National Cathedral are also in this work: this past September, they launched a program called, “A Better Way,” an effort to help Americans “see our neighbor beyond partisan labels or political beliefs.” The Cathedral is the ideal place for such an initiative, because even though it is primarily the independently funded, local seat of the Episcopal diocese in D.C., it also functions as the site for our national rituals. It is where we have funerals for our nation’s presidents (who thus far all happen to be Christian).
We citizens need these places, initiatives, and rituals to bind us together, especially when it is time to heal after a bruising electoral season. This was the context for the service that Tuesday morning following the inauguration.
The Prophetic Choice
But when Bishop Budde turned to the president as C-SPAN cameras rolled, she knew she was taking on the prophetic mantle. As Budde later explained to the New York Times, “I had a feeling that there were people watching what was happening and wondering, ‘Was anyone going to say anything?’” That was the prophetic call: to ensure that those who are watching, those who are afraid, know they are seen. Her lips were burning with what Charles Taylor has called the politics of recognition, the moral weight of seeing the other in a multicultural society.
Her decision to add that section of the sermon was fraught. She risked the civic neutrality her church had worked to develop. She put the clergy in attendance at risk of facing angry Boards of Trustees wondering if they had condoned the bishop’s confrontation with Trump. And in a landscape where Trump has successfully defined even the perception of dissent as combat, betrayal, and warfare, and where the public loves the spectacle, Budde risked the very unity she preached. The imbalance between the pulpit on high and the cramped pews only made the moment look more confrontational. Budde also very likely ensured that no president will ever risk a future post-Inauguration service including anyone other than chosen clergy-proxies. It will be prayer breakfasts from now on.
Worse, because our culture loves celebrity, the bishop’s call for mercy may become overshadowed by the bishop herself. She has had to publicly object to the push to turn her into a resistance icon, saying, “I’m trying to tamp that down a bit because it’s not about me. ... It’s about the fundamental teachings of a moral society.” Meanwhile, for every left-leaning post that says “Bishop takes King,” there’s a Fox News personality talking about “Satan in Granny Glasses.” In the era of hyper-toxic polarization, prophecy risks being click-bait.
So why heed the prophetic call, when she knew her priestly duty?
Because in yet another unprecedented feat of political norm-busting, Trump has turned order itself into injustice, civility into betrayal, and morality into evil. This is the classic populist attack on liberalism—the idea that the very systems of fairness, rational thought, institutionalism, and public deliberation must be rejected because they have been captured by a mysterious malevolent force (usually called “Jew,” but today more often called “DEI,” “Trans,” “Immigrant,” or “Career Civil Servant”). If in the 20th century, southern segregationists endorsed evil through the law, Trump seeks to make the legal system itself the source of evil. If Critical Race Theory wants to root out injustice from the justice system, Trumpism wants to burn it down, or use it. For those Trump loves, the law has been “weaponized” unjustly, and for those he hates—immigrants, trans people, political opponents, career civil servants—the law is his weapon of choice, and the cruelty is the point. But that is not enough. Trump’s executive orders, let alone his political rhetoric, seek to normalize the thesaurus of cruelty—mercilessness, heartlessness, spitefulness, vindictiveness, brutality—not only as policy or even politics, but as parts of our civic and moral culture.
In this context, how can an archetypal priest (or real bishop) work for civility in governmental leadership, without a prophetic denunciation of policies and systems that attack civility?
The bishop was right to raise her prophetic voice, even as she did so in calm, respectful, almost soft tones. She could not advocate solely for civility and unity if the person occupying the role of our national civic leader turns civic health into the very foil he organizes his followers against. She could not work for a false unity, while the Overton window of morality shifts toward malice. Despite the damage it may have done to the priest archetype, Bishop Budde needed to be prophet. She took a risk. The trade-off was worth it.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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The thing I most felt about the sermon was that it was lecturing. And this was delivered in a way which was sneering. I mean look at her face! The curled lip and condescending tone! She was loving every minute of it.
It would have been entirely different if exactly the same words had been delivered in a more measured and respectful tone. I kept expecting to see her wag her finger at the Don!
It really wasn't a good look.
Bishop Budde was clearly fulfilling her moral obligation to speak truth to power rather than crossing any professional boundaries. It is interesting how public roles, whether in the clergy or civic administration, require a strict balance of ethics and accuracy. For instance, just as citizens reviewing https://douglascountypropertyappraiser.org expect unbiased and straightforward information, people also look to spiritual leaders for honest moral guidance. Ultimately, every position of authority serves the community best when guided by unwavering integrity rather than mere compliance.