What did Donald Trump think would happen when he showed up at Washington National Cathedral Tuesday morning for the traditional interfaith prayer service attached to most presidential inaugurations since 1933?
Did he think the Episcopal Church would change its theology to bless his anti-Jesus agenda? Did he think leaders of all major faiths represented in the U.S. would bow down to worship him like his evangelical friends do?
Mark Wingfield
Surely he had to know this wouldn’t go well. And yet he showed up in full force with his amen brethren in tow. He didn’t have to be there. And the service didn’t have to happen.
In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that such services shouldn’t happen at all because they merely function as a token of our implicit civil religion. Calling it an “interfaith service” doesn’t take the religious advantage out of it. It was an Episcopal worship service with interfaith guests.
“Calling it an ‘interfaith service’ doesn’t take the religious advantage out of it.”
We’ve fought this war already. It’s what the American Revolution was about. It’s what the First Amendment is about. Church and state must remain separate. We should not have even the appearance of the church colluding with the state to bless a presidential inauguration.
The whole idea of us having an unofficial national cathedral doesn’t provide nearly enough separation between religion and government as we ought to have. Yet this has been the way we’ve expressed our civil religion. And now that the Mainline churches are fading away into irrelevance, the problems with this arrangement are more evident.
Unlike previous presidents — Republican and Democrat — who felt easily at home in a high-church Mainline cathedral, Trump dwells most easily in the black box megachurches of conservative evangelicalism. Who couldn’t have seen this as a mismatch from the start?
President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance attend the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral on January 21 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
If you watch Tuesday’s service, you’ll notice it’s not just Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon that had Trump and his allies squirming. The very readings of Scripture about compassion had Trump and JD Vance laughing.
That sermon — the most controversial sermon of the year, no doubt — said nothing Christian Scripture doesn’t say. All the outrage is really outrage at the Bible itself. Which is ironic because those who have their knickers in a knot are the very people who used to tell us we liberals don’t believe the Bible.
We believe the Bible so much we think presidents who claim to be Christian ought to follow its clear teaching.
When Trump said Bishop Budde and “her church owe the public an apology,” that’s typical Trump bluster. Neither she nor the Episcopal Church owes him an apology for speaking gospel truth. And every Christian in America should be outraged that a president would demand an apology for a sermon — any sermon. Again, American Revolution, First Amendment.
“Every Christian in America should be outraged that a president would demand an apology for a sermon — any sermon.”
Among Trump’s clown car of sycophants, Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia wins the prize for stupidest reaction when he declared Bishop Budde “should be added to the deportation list.”
In a nation full of fear, as Bishop Budde pointed out, why would you threaten to deport an American citizen for speaking truth to power? Maybe he needs to listen to the sermon again.
On the other hand, Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State — whom I usually agree with — missed an opportunity to take a stand for the actual separation of church and state by calling for an end to these charades of civil religion at the Washington National Cathedral.
She said, rightly: “Religious freedom and church-state separation mean that clergy must be free to preach without threats from government officials and free from the demands of presidents. It’s one thing for talking heads to go after this bishop, but when the president of the United States and members of Congress attack clergy for exercising their religious freedom, they are crossing a line. This abuse of power is precisely the kind of authoritarianism our founders sought to prevent when they separated church and state.”
But she didn’t say let’s call the whole thing off.
Diana Butler Bass
The person who came closest to getting it right is Diana Butler Bass, an Episcopalian. She said she wished they had canceled the service altogether due to Trump.
“I can’t bear to watch DJT in the Washington National Cathedral. It makes me sick,” she posted on Bluesky. “They didn’t have to do this. It is a LIE that they have held such services for every president. In 1973, WNC refused to hold a service for Nixon. Instead, they had Leonard Cohen in concert — and no Nixon in sight. This is my denomination. I raised a huge national ruckus about this in 2017. They told me that they changed things. Not so much, it seems. I’m in lament.”
Here’s what the cathedral’s website says of its history: “The idea for a sacred home for all Americans in the nation’s capital is as old as the country itself. Pierre L’Enfant’s original design for the new capital city included a ‘great church for national purposes,’ an idea that sat idle until a congressional charter authorized a cathedral dedicated to religion, education and charity, in 1893. Construction began in 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt helped lay the foundation stone. Through world wars, the Great Depression and immense social change, construction ended exactly 83 years after it began, when President George H.W. Bush oversaw the laying of the final stone atop the towers, in 1990.”
The cathedral, listed as an official Episcopal Church, receives “no direct support from the federal government or any national church body.”
That’s nice, but it still functions as a semi-official state church. And that’s a bigger problem than a bishop rightly preaching the word of God in front of a tyrannical president.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality.
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