The bishop who implored Trump: ‘Will somebody say something?’

Standing in the storied Canterbury pulpit above the president on Tuesday, Bishop Mariann E. Budde was a little scared.

The head of the Diocese of Washington had planned for months to preach about three elements of unity – dignity, honesty and humility. But just 24 hours earlier, she had watched President Trump proclaim his inaugural agenda as conservative Christians anointed him with prayer.

He wasn’t just campaigning anymore—he was ruling, she thought. His fledgling presidency and flurry of executive orders had so far met with little opposition. She felt called to add a fourth element to her sermon: a plea for mercy on behalf of all who fear the ways he has threatened to exercise his power.

“I had a feeling there were people who saw what was happening and wondered if anyone was going to say something?” she explained quietly in an interview on Tuesday evening. “Would someone say something about the turn the country is taking?”

So she breathed and spoke.

President Trump, sitting seven feet below and about 40 feet to her right, made eye contact. One representation of American Christianity began to speak to another, and the most powerful man in the world was arrested by the words of a silver-haired female bishop in the pulpit. Until he turned away.

For anyone watching, Washington National Cathedral’s enormity compressed in a stunning moment into sudden intimacy. And with that, all the existential struggles not just of politics, but of morality itself. In a flash, the war for spiritual authority in America erupted into a rare public showdown.

The Canterbury pulpit confronted the bully pulpit on the biggest stage possible.

For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of the gays. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of that has been Mr. The rise of Trump as the de facto leader of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power that declares itself to be the only true voice of God.

Many of these struggles have remained in silos, rarely in dialogue. Christians with opposing perspectives almost never worship in the same sanctuary. They do not listen to each other’s sermons or hear each other’s prayers. Mainline Protestants have wondered whether their voice can carry any degree of authority. At a moment when conservative Christians are poised to gain even more power through Mr. Trump’s second term, Bishop Budde tried something different at the interfaith service.

Mr. Trump was unfazed. As the sermon ended, he exchanged a look with Vice President JD Vance, a conservative Catholic, who shook his head in apparent disapproval. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump on his social media platform Truth Social, demanding an apology from the “so-called bishop” and “the hard radical left Trump hater”.

“She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ruthless way,” declared Mr. Trump Wednesday. “She was nasty in tone and not persuasive or smart.”

Bishop Budde, 65 and the first woman to be elected to her role, and Mr. Trump clashed in 2020 when he held up a Bible in St. John’s Church, after officers used tear gas against protesters calling for racial justice in nearby Lafayette Square. She wrote in a statement to The New York Times that she was “outraged” and “horrified” that he used sacred symbols to advocate “positions that are contrary to the Bible.”

On Wednesday, Representative Mike Collins, Republican of Georgia, said Bishop Budde should be “added to the deportation list.” Others said that her gender itself undermined any claim to spiritual authority.

“Female bishop is all you needed to know how it was going to be,” Kristan Hawkins, a Catholic anti-abortion activist, wrote on X.

But progressive Christians felt their beliefs finally had a voice in the melee. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a practicing Catholic who represented a resurgence of liberal Christianity after the first Trump presidency, has left Washington and is taking an era with him. Catholic power in America has shifted far to the right since Pope Francis, now 88, was welcomed to Washington during the Obama era.

More than 14,000 people signed an online petition thanking Bishop Budde within four hours. Episcopalians around Washington proudly posted online in gratitude that Bishop Budde was their spiritual leader representing their Christianity.

For her part, Bishop Budde felt that her sermon was “a perspective that’s not getting a lot of airtime right now, and it was a perspective of Christianity that has been somewhat muted in the public arena,” she said.

She knew she didn’t have much authority in the room, she said, “because I’m not part of the spiritual circles that have surrounded the president and his party.”

The venue was meaningful and offered her words the power of the Christian story. Washington National Cathedral has long been home to significant American political moments — services marking the end of wars and state funerals for presidents from Eisenhower to Carter.

And the Canterbury pulpit itself is an impressive platform, even when not speaking to the president, Bishop Budde knew. Its Caen limestone is believed to have been brought to England by William the Conqueror and used in Canterbury Cathedral itself. The pulpit is where pastor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last Sunday sermon, days before his assassination.

Its central carving depicts the signing of the Magna Carta, the 809-year-old charter that established that the King of England was not above the law.

Bishop Budde occupied the high perch with no real power beyond the spiritual authority of her position, and the power to speak continuously for 14 minutes. She was dressed in her liturgical vestments, the red and white rochet and chimes, used for prayer services without the Eucharist. Her academic cap meant her seminary doctorate. The black tippet around her neck was embroidered with the cathedral’s emblem.

Bishop Budde does not believe that she spoke directly for God. “I’m saying it’s the best I can do to understand and interpret what I believe in our teachings and our scriptures and what the Holy Spirit might want us to hear,” she said.

In the midst of America’s diversity, she sees discernment over spiritual authority as an important task. She thought of what Howard Thurman, the American theologian, called “the sound of the real”.

“What is right?” she asked. “What resonates with authority because it rings true and it touches on some basic principle that we might agree on?”

In the past, inaugural prayer services were held by the cathedral but planned with the Presidential Inaugural Committee, meaning that the president-elect often chose the participants. But that changed last year, when the Cathedral itself took over the planning well before election day, said Bishop Budde. It was a step towards religious independence so that the service itself would be free from partisan interference and so it would not be seen as a coronation or holy anointing.

After Mr. Trump won in November, the cathedral gave his team a selection of suggested music and readings to consider for the service. But the choice of preacher was reserved for the cathedral alone, a spokesman for the cathedral said.

However, the part of the sermon that would attract the most attention was not made until hours before the service.

“Asking for mercy is actually a very humbling thing to do,” Bishop Budde said. “I didn’t demand anything from him. I pleaded with him, can you see the humanity of these people? Can you recognize that there are people in this country who are afraid? … If not him, if not the president, then could anyone else?”

On Wednesday afternoon, Bishop Budde was still dealing with the aftermath.

She had not anticipated the level of fury and personal attacks her words had sparked, she said. People questioned everything from her character and qualifications to the state of her eternal soul and “how soon I should get to my eternal soul and whether I belong in this country.”

“Maybe this was naive on my part, when I decided to plead with the president, I thought it would be taken differently,” she said, “because it was a recognition of his position, his power now and the millions of people who put him there.”

But she also hadn’t expected the overwhelming gratitude from so many others.

“These are things I say all the time,” she said. “But in public, people don’t pay attention.”

In the pulpit, she said, “you can never really predict how things will land.”