Acknowledging a history marked by power in high places that included 54 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and 11 presidents including George Washington, the top officer of the Episcopal Church in the United States declared the oldest ecclesiastical body on the North American continent is known today “less for the powerful people in our pews than for our resistance to the rising tide of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism emanating from Washington, D.C.”
Stan Hastey
In a message released to coincide with Independence Day and published as an opinion column in Religion News Service July 3, Sean W. Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, spoke to his nationwide flock and beyond in unflinching terms: “When religious institutions like ours enjoy easy coexistence with earthly power, our traditions and inherited systems can become useless for interpreting what is happening around us. But our recent reckoning with the federal government has allowed us to see clearly the ease with which the Protestant tradition of patriotism can lead Christians to regard our faith more as a tool of dominion than a promise of liberation.”
Declaring this July 4 as “a complicated Independence Day” for the Episcopal Church, Rowe wrote of “an eventful few months” that began mere days after President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated for a second time as the 47th president. He noted that in February the church joined in a lawsuit brought by an interfaith coalition against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for its newly announced policy of raiding houses of worship, calling the practice “a violation of our religious freedom.”
Next, in May, the Episcopal Church ended its 40-year participation in the federal refugee resettlement program “over the current administration’s demand that we resettle white Afrikaners designated as refugees.”
In recent days, he added, the church is assessing how to respond to the Trump administration’s announcement of a travel ban that “prevents us from gathering and worshiping freely with the people of our churches in Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba, and may limit entry for our members in several other of the 22 countries and territories” where the Episcopal Church maintains a presence.
Sean W. Rowe
“These challenges to our ability to practice our faith,” he wrote, “have strained the comfortable intermingling of church and state that our institution has enjoyed for nearly 250 years.”
At the same time, Rowe acknowledged with unusual frankness such “reckoning, if we are honest, is long overdue.” Pointing to a prayer in the church’s Book of Common Prayer offered every July 4 that “the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us,” Rowe demurred: “But not all of us. The Episcopal Church did not make a moral stand against slavery, and some of our eminent leaders were pillars of the transatlantic slave trade.” Besides, “our church ran residential schools for indigenous children at which they were denied their culture and God-given humanity.” Later, in the mid-20th century, his church’s overseas missions “aligned with U.S. foreign policy in Asia and the Pacific, and in Central America and the Caribbean,” Rowe acknowledged.
He recalled the tortured history of the Lutheran state church in Germany during the rise of Nazism as “a cautionary tale about how Christians can falter in perilous times.” While some in the Confessing Church, including most notably the martyred dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, courageously rejected the rising tide of antisemitism, some German Christians “sided with the Reich based on their theological tradition of nationalism and loyalty to the state.”
Rowe concluded with a warning: “These historical lessons are urgent. Churches like ours, protected by the First Amendment and practiced in galvanizing people of goodwill, may be some of the last institutions capable of resisting this administration’s overreach and recklessness. To do so faithfully, we must see beyond the limitations of our tradition and respond not in partisan terms, but as Christians who seek to practice our faith fully in a free and fair democracy.
“We did not seek this predicament, but God calls us to place the most vulnerable and marginalized at the center of our common life, and we must follow that command regardless of the dictates of any political party or earthly power,” he said. “We are now being faced with a series of choices between the demands of the federal government and the teachings of Jesus, and that is no choice at all.”
Stan Hastey, a veteran Baptist journalist and first full-time leader of the Alliance of Baptists, was confirmed into the Episcopal Church in 2018. A member of the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Fla., he serves that congregation as a lay reader and caregiver and this year was elected an alternate delegate to the annual convention of the Diocese of Southeast Florida.