Why Bishop Mariann Budde Wanted to Speak to Donald Trump

The Right Reverend Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., has a history of practicing what’s called “the prophetic tradition”: naming the world’s ills and calling out those who perpetrate them. In 2020, after President Donald Trump ordered the dispersal of Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Square and then posed there for photographs, standing before St. John’s Church and holding a Bible, she expressed outrage. “Mr. Trump used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands,” Budde wrote in an op-ed. When Trump ran for reëlection in 2020, she said that she had “given up speaking to President Trump.”

Yet earlier this week, from the pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral, Budde addressed President Trump directly and personally. Her nearly fifteen-minute sermon focussed on what she described as three necessary elements for national unity: dignity, honesty, and humility. Then, toward the end of her sermon, she added a fourth, calling on Trump to “have mercy” on those in America, particularly immigrants and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, who are currently afraid. The final two minutes of her sermon went viral, drawing ire from Trump’s supporters, who have commented that she should be placed on “the deportation list,” and that Budde is “exhibit A for why women should not be pastors, priests, or bishops.” Trump posted on Truth Social that Budde was a “so-called Bishop.” “She is not very good at her job!” he added. “She and her church owe the public an apology!”

Budde, the author of “How We Learn to Be Brave,” from 2023, has not apologized to Trump, nor to anyone else, for her remarks. On Thursday morning, she spoke with me by phone from her home in Washington, D.C. In a forty-minute conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Budde reflected on what she’d intended to say in the sermon, the role of prayer in her life, and the responsibility of religious leaders to address the social and political realities of their time.

You’ve mentioned that your decision to speak about mercy came after hearing Trump talk about God’s will, and invoke the divine right of kings in his inaugural speech. Can you walk us through how you made this decision to speak out, and the role that prayer played in it?

I was starting to feel incomplete, just unsettled, about the three pillars of unity—that there was something missing. So I was struggling before Monday morning, actually, just talking back and forth with people with whom I was sharing my ideas and thoughts.

At some point on Monday—and I can’t remember when, but it was in the context of the sweeping descriptions of whole swaths of people in our society in ways that were so harsh and inconsistent with what I knew to be true, what most of us know to be true—the word mercy kept coming to me, mercy and empathy. I decided to stay with mercy, in part because I knew that, in that context and in that moment, I needed to honor the office of the President and the fact that millions of people, as I said, placed their trust in him and were counting on him to lead the country. He himself felt providentially spared to make America great again, as he said, but also to lead, right?

I was trying to find a way to bring into the room those who were not part of the vision of unity that he described in his Inaugural Address, and, indeed, the way he’s been talking about our country through the entire campaign. And, of course, I was in prayer. I was in conversation with different people within my own inner dialogue. And so I chose to ask for mercy, and I also tried to humanize the people I was referring to, who are in need of mercy—the people who are afraid.

I figured there were probably one thousand people in the cathedral that morning. And I was guessing that there were parents in the room of children who were gay and lesbian, or maybe even transgender, or they themselves were gay or lesbian, so they would know something of the struggle. I was trying to humanize, to bring us into that same spirit of when we get to know each other, we’re more alike than we are different. And also, in speaking of the immigrant population—and particularly those who are arriving into this country and taking on the tasks that keep our society going, often behind the scenes or at off hours, and doing really back-breaking labor—to say that these are people that many of us know. I wanted to bring them into the room, to help evoke the images of actual people, rather than broad categories or characterizations.

Writing—and you’re a writer, so I think you understand this—is a form of prayer for me. It involves everything, right? Every aspect of my being, all of my ego, my insecurities, my strengths. You know those rare moments when you feel like you actually have energy to write, and other times when you feel like you’re going to fall asleep in front of the screen? It’s all prayer, and so that was certainly a part of it as well.

You’ve spoken in the past about the uselessness of speaking to Trump, that you’re done speaking to Trump. I thought, as I listened, that yes, you addressed him, but were you speaking to Trump?

That’s really interesting. I guess when I said in the past that I was done speaking to Trump, I really meant I had given up any illusion that my words would have any influence on him. I did not see myself as one he would consider a credible voice to listen to. And I daresay that is still the case. Yet, in that moment, I chose to address him personally. I could have kept it in the broad third-person plural, like I had for the other three [principles of unity], right? We need these three things. We all need to do them. But I thought, in that moment, I would honor his office.

As a communication technique, family-systems people will often tell us that, if you really want someone in your circle to hear you, let them overhear you talk to somebody else. Like if my children, my grown adult children, talk to someone else about their lives, and I happen to be eavesdropping—I’m sitting over in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, you know what I mean—and they’re talking to a college friend, or they’re talking to a family friend or an uncle, they talk differently, and I listen differently.

I was actually counting on people overhearing me talk to Trump in a way that would communicate to them. So there was that. The other part was that I was very aware that I was not simply speaking to those gathered in the sanctuary of the cathedral but that we were actually part of a public discourse that had been going on throughout the political season. As I mentioned, there’s a certain amount of rhetoric that we take as normal now, and particularly so in political seasons, and it’s a really dangerous way to run a country. If we talk to each other like that all the time, we are going down a path of self-destruction as a nation.

You just talked about your kids, and, as a pastor’s kid, I have some experience of how the political can play out in the personal. I would imagine your kids are just so proud of you. How are they? How is your family with all this?

I have two adult sons, and they have both been so supportive. And, of course, they have friends, communities, and colleagues, and this has been a bit of a whirlwind for them. They are proud, they are grateful, but they’re also themselves, you know? These are things that they strive to live by every day. So, in some sense, I wanted to honor them.

I’m in my sixties now, so I spend most of my time thinking about how I can live in a way that puts wind in the sails of those coming up behind me in the years I have left, certainly as a bishop, and whatever time God gives me on this earth. That’s my most important work now: to encourage rising generations—all of us, really, but particularly those who will live on past my lifetime—to live in hope. To hold on to the things that build community. To work for the things that matter. To trust in God. To believe that there is a spiritual force beyond us that is trustworthy and a source of strength and courage. And these things really, really matter.

People are talking about only part of what you said. And so I want to ask, are there other things in your sermon that you’d like to draw attention to?

I think the whole beginning, which was the idea of: What does unity mean in a country of such diversity and difference? Can this country actually be the United States? That’s an age-old question in America, involving how we have lived through our aspirations and our failures to live up to those aspirations, and the people who call us to live up to them, and the ways we change.

That’s our story, or part of our story, but then we have this other overlay, which I was trying to describe. I think I first heard this phrase from Tim Shriver: the culture of contempt. We are living in a time when we are being socialized to respond to those who disagree with us on anything as if it were the worst possible thing that anyone could possibly think or feel.

And in that culture of contempt, the word “hate” easily falls off our lips. And I’m guilty of this—how easily I find jokes at the expense of other people funny, particularly if I disagree with those people. This has become so normalized. There’s a little bit of that that’s simply human, but when it’s amplified by social media it becomes part of the outrage-industrial complex: “Let me say something that is sure to cause offense, and then just watch everyone explode.” So how can we be mindful of that? How can we transcend that?

But, also, I can understand the sermon would have landed very differently if I had left the last part out. And, in fact, someone actually said to me, “You might want to consider not saying it, given how it will be received.” Someone I really admire, who works in the public arena—someone who is daily trying to uphold our values in the federal government—said to me, “Look, Mariann, you don’t have to go there if you don’t want to.” And I thought about that for a minute, and I thought, Well, but if I don’t?

She suggested, if I was going to do that, “One issue, do one issue.” And so I was focussing on immigration, and I was sharing it with somebody else. But I said to them, “What about what’s being said, particularly about trans kids and the L.G.B.T.Q. and what it’s like for them?” And then another person wrote to me and said, “You know, if there were one thing that I’d ask you to include . . .” So there it was again.

I try not to do this in isolation anymore, because I just need more eyes and ears to help me think this through. And so I was with the director of communications at the Cathedral, a dear friend, Kevin Eckstrom. And I said, “What do you think?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, put it in there.” And he himself is a gay man. And I thought, O.K. I wasn’t speaking in the abstract. These are not stick figures in my head, these are real people, my friends’ children. And so I knew what was going to happen, but if I’d just started with “Mr. President, I’d love to talk to you about your positions on immigration,” that wouldn’t have been appropriate.

“If you really want someone in your circle to hear you, let them overhear you talk to somebody else,” Budde says.

Listening to you, I think about Karl Barth’s famous dictum, about “preaching with the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.”

I was taught by someone who was taught by Karl Barth, and he was very fond of that expression. I think he even said, “The New York Times in one hand.” I think there are two ways that I believe about that, one very pastoral and the other more public-minded. I had a professor say once—and I believe this with all my heart—that if you know what people are thinking about when they’re coming into church on Sunday morning, it’s very important to acknowledge that. So if something’s happened in your immediate surroundings, the country, or the world and it’s on people's minds, he said, you just need to acknowledge it. That doesn’t mean it can be the topic of your sermon, but somewhere make space for that.

So I believe that, and I honor that to the best of my ability. And, sure, I think it’s important for us. It may not be the newspaper, always, it might be other sources of news. But to trust that Jesus came for the world. Jesus came for the world. It’s the world for which he died. And so to not be mindful of what is happening in places beyond our immediate sphere is a denial of the world that God loves. I’m all in on that one.

You spoke against Trump when he was on the campaign trail and during the Black Lives Matter movement. And I’m wondering if the response you’ve had now is larger than any you’ve had before. Is this a new moment for you?

The only comparison is to the response after the Black Lives Matter protest and the clearing of Lafayette Square. People had been starting to gather at St. John’s, and we were working to make the plaza a kind of resting place, a sanctuary where people could get food and sanitizer and face masks, and you could say a prayer with them, to stand in solidarity with those who were protesting peacefully. All that was being undertaken when this clearing thing happened. So that whole wave of response, both positive and negative, lasted for about four or five days in this same kind of whirlwind. The one difference was that there was a huge number of clergy in the D.C. area that wanted to join me in making a statement. There was this influx of people who said, “We want to go back to the plaza. We want to pray with you there.” And so there was this whole other thing to manage, which got out of hand. And then, like most of these things, the news cycle went on, and it all just went away.

This is day three of this particular cycle. So I can’t tell you if it’s better or worse.

You’ve received an overwhelming number of responses, both positive and negative. In the negative responses, is there a new sense of risk that you’re feeling?

To keep my own sanity, I don’t spend a lot of time reading the comments. But those who have been monitoring them are concerned about the level of violent speech that is embedded in them. But I honestly can’t say if it’s worse. I didn’t read them in 2020, either. Actually, my assistant at the time just said, “Yeah, you’re not reading these. You’re not reading these. You can only read these.” She only gave me the ones that were supportive. But I said, “O.K., what’s the ratio?” And she said, “Oh, it’s about fifty-fifty.”

I don’t know if it’s fifty-fifty here. But the people around me are almost universally concerned. I can’t say whether that’s accurate, or it’s just that there’s a state of fear in the air about the levels of violence in our society. I think there is a case to be made that we have become more violent in our rhetoric, and that there is greater license given to unguarded speech.

You have spoken in a radical and clear way about the root of faith, about what Christianity was, and Jesus’ message was. Do you see yourself in the prophetic tradition? What does bearing radical witness and being part of the religious left, if that’s fair to say, mean to you?

I think you could argue it a couple of ways. I would like to say I was being pretty normal. I don’t think I was saying anything that was all that radical, to be honest. I feel like it was pretty basic. Treat people with dignity, be honest, be humble. Care for your neighbors—not only care for your neighbors but care for the stranger. I mean, this is pretty basic spiritual practice.

Now, is it easy? No, it’s not easy. But you wouldn’t have to be a Christian or a person of faith to espouse those pretty universal values. But we live in a time and we are now led by a President who is, by his own definition, a disrupter. He’s really determined to disrupt the way our society functions. He feels a tremendous mandate to do that. He has a lot of influence. And, at least in his opening few days as President, he is leading the country in the way he promised in the campaign, which is harsh and inflammatory in its assumptions about whole swaths of human beings, and also what it means to be this country. So I would say, both as an American and as a Christian, I’m pretty much right in the center. If it comes across as radical, that just says something about the times we are in.

Of the many insults Trump levelled at you, the idea that your service was “very boring” made me laugh. I thought, well, how many Episcopal services has that man sat through? Because that’s pretty typical.

You know, it makes me laugh, too. To be honest, I find a lot of our services boring. And I try to liven them up a bit, right? I mean, we could always do better. And he’s certainly entitled to his opinion. Do those services go on? They do. There’s a lot of music. There’s a lot of different invocations of prayer. We had a lot of people to include in the service, so I could understand that he was feeling a bit restless. It’s not his preference, I don’t think.

I’ve sat in that very cathedral for several hours at a stretch.

Yeah, they can be long—we love our words.

I kept thinking of what you didn’t have to say, which is that you were a woman in that pulpit in front of a newly resurgent form of Christianity in America—whether we’re talking about conservative evangelicals or we’re talking about this kind of newly muscular Catholic opposition to women in the priesthood. You were ordained in 1989. Is that right?

That’s right.

The Episcopal Church first ordained women in 1974. So for you, being a woman and a priest and now a bishop, have you faced opposition?

Mild opposition; nothing compared to what the first women went through. I came after the hardest, hardest struggles and resistance had occurred. By the time I was elected bishop, there had been several women bishops before. So I would say I was blessed to be among those who benefitted from the ones who had come before me, and I have tried to remember them and honor them and open doors for other people, because doors were opened for me.

It strikes me that one of the aspects of your sermon that’s been missed is how pastoral it was. It was a message of care, and it was spoken with tenderness and humility. As a pastor, do you have advice to people listening to you about how to care for themselves and keep going at this time? How do you care for yourself? How do you keep going?

I think it’s a really good question. When I wrote “How We Learn to Be Brave,” I did feel that there was an internal kind of—well, you know, what Howard Thurman called “the sound of the genuine.” We are not on our own here. We are not isolated from one another. And there is a force at work in the universe that is ultimately for good which we can tap into and which can empower us. For people of faith, we give that very particular names. But even for people who are not there are ways to describe that sense of empowerment that is bigger than we are and can work through us in ways that astonish us. We can’t control it. We can’t evoke it on command, but it’s real, and we can count on it, and it allows all of us to do extraordinary things. When we do it together, then we can move mountains that seemed immovable before. And I do believe that, and I do believe that is the life of faith, but also you don’t have to be a person of faith to trust that innate human capacity to channel love, goodness, and real strength into our own lives and into the world. ♦