(RNS) — Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s plea for President Donald Trump “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now” at last week’s post-inauguration prayer service has drawn the predictable yelps. The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump supporter, told Newsmax that Budde was “a socialist activist,” that “she’s just wrong” and that Episcopal clergy are “all the same stripe.”
If by wrong Graham meant that Budde was wrong to assert that the vast majority of immigrants are “not criminals … pay taxes, and are good neighbors,” then he’s the one who’s wrong. If he meant that she’s wrong to ask mercy for immigrants and LGBTQ people, well, there’s time-honored precedent for that sort of thing.
Before the Civil War, abolitionist clergy such as the Boston Unitarian Theodore Parker denounced slavery as contrary to Christianity. It “degrades the Religious Activity of the People,” he said in an 1858 sermon, adding, “No swearing of the lowest men I ever encountered in an Ohio railroad car, or met in an Illinois bar-room, has ever filled me with such horror as the profanity of ministers in their pulpits, out of this Bible which they call God’s word, in the name of Jesus whom they affect to worship as God, attempting to justify the foulest wrong which man ever does to man.”
For their pains, Parker et al. were denounced by the likes of the South Carolina Presbyterian Benjamin Morgan Palmer as the irreligious heirs of the French Revolution. “The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic,” Palmer declared in a sermon delivered days before his state seceded from the Union. “Among a people so generally religious as the Americans, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. From a thousand Jacobin clubs here, as in France, the decree has gone forth which strikes at God by striking at all subordination and law.”
Like Palmer 167 years ago, Graham needed to insist last week that Budde et al. are motivated by something other than religious conviction. Likewise JD Vance, who, new convert to Catholicism that he is, told the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to “look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive more than $100m to resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”
Vance might have looked in the mirror a little bit himself and recognized that an awful lot of those immigrants are his co-religionists, but evidently the kind of Catholicism he signed up for has more in common with the Protestant nativism of his Appalachian forebears.
As my colleague the Rev. Tom Reese points out, it’s not as if standing up for immigrants in word and deed is a new thing for Catholic bishops. But the criticism that’s issued from them in the past few days reflects a greater urgency, given the ample evidence that President Trump intends to move ahead with his pledge to undertake mass deportations — which Pope Francis himself has called “a disgrace.”
On Monday (Jan. 27), meanwhile, a broad array of Jewish groups — including the organizations of Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist (but not Orthodox) rabbis — sent a letter to Trump opposing his “plans to launch mass deportations, build massive detention camps, and conduct sweeping raids.” The letter pointed out that the history of persecution as well as Jewish values make the issue of immigration “deeply personal to the Jewish community.”
In the middle of January 1963, leaders of mainline Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism held a four-day conference in Chicago marking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. They issued an Appeal to the Conscience of the American People to eradicate racism (“our most serious domestic evil”) “with all diligence and speed … for the glory of God.” After the March on Washington eight months later, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that the march’s “first significant test … will come in the churches and synagogues of the country this weekend.”
No doubt religion in America has undergone many changes in the past 62 years: Mainline Protestantism has shrunk, the nones have risen, and clerical leadership is a far cry from what it once was. Nevertheless, I’m willing to predict that as Trump’s deportation project proceeds apace, we’re going to witness an interfaith protest movement the likes of which we haven’t seen since then.
Last Sunday, in the Episcopal church down the street from me, where politics is never mentioned from the pulpit, Mariann Budde’s homily resonated in the sermon and in the Prayers of the People: “Your Son shared the life of his home and family in Nazareth: Protect in your love our neighbors, especially those affected by the California wildfires, immigrants and refugees, and those without a safe place to call home.”
I expect there were plenty of churches and synagogues where something similar occurred.
