Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com.
I was in Eagle Grove last week. Like many travelers in Iowa, I stopped at Casey’s before leaving town.
Eagle Grove is a meatpacking community, and many jobs are held by Hispanic men and women. As I waited with my coffee in the check-out line, I was behind a Hispanic man whose hands showed his labors had taken a rougher toll than my life’s work at a computer has taken on mine.
A convenience store in the middle of America is not a place where one typically pauses to reflect on a church sermon given three days earlier at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
But I can’t be the only person nowadays who wonders whether people are listening to each other amid the chatter that constitutes our supposed national dialogue. Are our ears the most under-used part of our body?
Normally, what a pastor says from the pulpit rarely makes headlines. But at this time and place in our history, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Washington Diocese of the Episcopal Church was not just another pastor looking out over another flock when she addressed the interfaith prayer service to recognize the new president’s inauguration.
I will get to the heart of Budde’s sermon shortly. First, I want to take note of what struck me beyond her softly-spoken words. I was taken by the reaction from many across our nation.
Yes, there were those who praised her tone and her message. But plenty of others suggested the bishop disrespected her audience, besmirched her church, and missed the true meaning of what all Christians supposedly believe. One member of Congress even said the bishop should be deported.
Do we really think all Christians hold the same beliefs? Do we really think this is the first minister ever to make some in an audience uncomfortable?
The new President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance were seated before Bishop Budde in the front row of the National Cathedral. What got under the president’s skin, and bothered many of his supporters, were the closing thoughts the bishop shared with the audience in the massive cathedral and watching on television around the world.
In a polite, under-stated tone, the bishop said:
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. There are gay, lesbian and transgendered children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.
And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, and 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.
They pay taxes and are our good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
The bishop said she is concerned “the culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country … threatens to destroy us.” She went on: “We are bombarded daily with messages from what sociologists now call the outrage industrial complex, some of that driven by external forces whose interests are furthered by a polarized America.”
Budde told the New York Times, “I wasn’t necessarily calling the president out. I was trying to say, ‘The country has been entrusted to you,’ And one of the qualities of a leader is mercy. And to be mindful of the people who are scared.”
The speaker and her spectator-in-chief both were blunt in their remarks after the prayer service. Budde told the Times, “I’m saying this is what I believe … the Holy Spirit might be wanting us to hear.”
The president criticized the bishop in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying, “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart.” Trump called Budde a “Radical Left hard-line Trump hater”—as if he were the first president to be criticized by a person of the cloth, or as if a unanimous view ever occurs about any incoming president.
For decades, Christianity in the U.S. has been roiled by the conflicting views among churches and denominations—conflicting views on racial tensions, on what constitutes a marriage, on gays and transgender people, or on the place of women in positions of authority in some denominations.
These conflicting views, at their heart, boil down to the question of W.W.J.D. Yes, what would Jesus do? And what would Jesus say—about gays and transgender individuals, about migrants and refugees, about our contempt for each other?
All excellent questions.