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?
