Institutional resistance matters and brings assets

In the context of withdrawing from participation in Donald J. Trump's discriminatory refugee program for white Afrikaners, the Most Rev. Sean Rowe, whose elected office of Presiding Bishop makes him the public spokesperson for the institutional Episcopal Church, has called out something vital about the place of churches in the current desperate moment for American democracy.

Graphic by way of Elizabeth Kaeton, Telling Secrets

Churches and other religious institutions are much better situated than much of civil society to repudiate the cruelty and stupidity of DJT and MAGA. At their best, they answer to a different mission than the imperatives of American politics. And they are less dependent financially on a federal government which is being weaponized against both justice and inclusion for all. At least 25 percent of individual "charitable giving" and actual charity still passes through churches in this country; churches have some money to use for the common good.

Church history within civil society is honorable, if spotty. Pre-Civil War abolitionism lived in both Black and white churches. The weak but enduring thread of American principled opposition to our wars has survived on the margins of both Protestant Christianity (Fellowship of Reconciliation) and later, as Catholics entered the American mainstream, in the Vietnam-era Catholic Peace Fellowship with the clerical Berrigan brothers.

The Episcopal Church is often dissed as  "the ruling class at prayer." There's a reason that Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington DC had the chance to call out Trump's threats to so many Americans: the Episcopal Church's so-called National Cathedral screams past riches and power, long attenuated. The building remains a monument to an imperial America; the people of the Episcopal Church (450, 000 weekly attendance in this nation of 340 million) not so much so. Empire was then ... though a good deal of past riches remain.

Previous federal governments have tried to rein in Episcopal churches whose justice mission threatened the authorities; the George W. Bush administration threatened the tax-exempt status of All Saints Pasadena in 2007 for a sermon against the War on Terror. Bunch of trouble makers, that lot!

Part of why Bishops Budde and Rowe can speak out -- and lend moral authority and some material resources to the developing defense against authoritarianism -- is that the people in the pews more or less have their backs. According to right-leaning statistician of US religion Ryan Burge, alone among mainline Christian Protestant denominations, Episcopalians are leaving any past Republican allegiance behind. 

Yes, that even includes the long liberal UCC and Disciples of Christ who seem to have voted in majorities for Trump in 2024. Presbyterians and Lutherans seem pretty evenly split.

Burge concludes:

When you think of the average mainline Protestants, it’s just not accurate to conjure an image of a thirty something pastor wearing a rainbow stole and preaching a sermon about the non-binary nature of the Holy Spirit. Instead, it’s probably a retired school teacher living in a small town in the upper Midwest. And, on average, that person voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

Those of us who live and struggle in these arenas have a lot of work to do -- and important friends.