A Christ-lite Sermon – The Atlantic

It is not unusual for clerics to approach their leaders directly. King James regularly caught hell from the pulpit. So when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde went after the king, after an interminable sermon Tuesday morning in the national cathedral, she was acting within an established tradition. She also operated within another well-known tradition, “Where Did Everyone Go?” confusion in her church regarding its sharply declining membership.

She asked Donald Trump to think of America’s undocumented immigrants in a compassionate light and see them for who so many of them really are: “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who work in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash up after we eat in restaurants and work night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”

Exactly – and she was exactly the right person to say it in exactly the right place. These vulnerable people, now with the full might of the American state arrayed against them, are not only a Christian concern; in a way they are the Christian concern. Christ is always on the side of the outcast, the stranger, the captive, the leper. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did for me.”

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I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the whole thing. It was dry, high-minded and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity”, where all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith where everyone directs their prayers to to whom it may concern.

Then, with a straight face, she described the county’s undocumented, highly abused subsistence workers this way: “They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras and temples.”

Our gurdwara? Tell me, High Priestess, are there many undocumented Sikhs working in poultry farms and meatpacking plants where you live? Sikhs are 0.06 percent of the American population. Jews are 2.4 percent – the number of undocumented people of these faiths toiling in the shadows doing menial work must be small. And what “temples” is she talking about? Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian?

Have we considered the consequences of Trump’s policies on the undocumented Zoroastrian?

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It was a minor moment of an otherwise forgettable sermon. And yet it was revealing. The problem, as she described it, was one in which the undocumented immigrant doing menial labor in the fields of California is just as likely to be a Sikh as a Christian. She presented the world not as it is, but as she presumably would like it to be: diverse and united in the strength of its religious beliefs, but not of any particular religious faith, which is a really strange position to be in. If she wanted to be more precise about the situation, she might have acknowledged that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants began their journey in Latin America. Latinos are joining the evangelical church in large numbers, which may help explain the significant number of Latinos who voted for Trump—and is that okay with you, Bishop Budde?

In her appeal to a large interfaith community of people who probably believe more or less the same thing (a community where all believers are equally threatened by anti-immigration policies), she offered yet another reminder of how we got even into this sorry state where anti-intellectualism, populist rage against established institutions and the thirst for ever more bizarre conspiracy theories have run riot over common sense and established facts.

The High Priestess wanted to reveal her goodness, her moral purity, her inclusive and diversity-promoting politics. She wanted a gold star, and on many occasions she got one. A heading in The New Republic read “Trump watches as Bishop calls him out in heartfelt prayer.” Trump issued a demand that the bishop apologize. But in church he had only appeared bored, as if his mind was on other things. Maybe he was seething. Or maybe he was thinking, That’s why I won.