This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
While much of the nation was captivated by Rev. Mariann Budde’s sermon calling on newly inaugurated President Donald Trump to show mercy, I missed it.
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, asked for mercy specifically for LGBTQ+ children, migrants, and refugees — people the president had targeted in his campaign.
OK, so I didn’t really miss the sermon — I knew it happened. I was just on vacation, and I knew our team could cover it in my absence. That meant, when it was time to prepare for my April 1 interview with Budde, I had to retrace the moment: An interfaith service with a long history, a cathedral that serves as a de facto site of civil religion, a president who does not like being told what to do.
As I sat with it all, I realized that the questions I had were larger than that one sermon. They implicated the existence and purpose of the Washington National Cathedral. To me, there’s an inherent tension in the mission to be a prophetic witness to the peace of the gospel and the request to host and honor the state. I see that tension in funerals for state figures such as the late President Jimmy Carter, Gen. Colin Powell, or Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. But I also see it in the cathedral’s special police — a force licensed by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.
In my interview with Budde, we spoke about the breadth of those tensions, how she’s spent her vocation discerning them, whether it was appropriate to ask Trump for mercy, and why the cathedral is no longer letting presidents plan their own inaugural prayer services.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio:In 2017, for President Trump’s first inauguration, the cathedral’s interfaith service didn’t have a sermon. You said then that it was “not the occasion that we will use to address particular issues of policy or concerns we might have about the direction he’s taking the country.”
Did you change your mind in the eight years since, or did you feel circumstances changed?
Bishop Mariann Budde: For a long time, those services were planned and executed by the cathedral. But at some point — I don’t know when, but it certainly was true by the Obama administration — the vast majority of the planning was handed over to the presidential inaugural committee and the religious advisers of the president-elect or the president, depending on if it was an election or a reelection.
The preacher, the music, the speakers — while the cathedral was involved, the leadership really went to the inaugural committee. We were struggling in 2017 with what President-elect Trump and his advisers would want. At some point, the request was made by the incoming Trump administration that there be no homily. That was a request from his side. The dean [Rev. Randy Marshall Hollerith], with my approval, said, “OK.”
That’s saved us from having to vet somebody that we may or may not have been enthusiastic about in the pulpit of the cathedral.
As the dean and I were thinking about how we felt about this service with all of its implications — before the election, back in the summer — we did a lot of consulting with people around the country. He proposed, and I agreed, that we would simply announce in June that there would be a prayer service for the nation after the election. Its theme would be prayers of unity after the divisive nature of the electoral season, it would be an interfaith service, and the cathedral would be in charge of it from beginning to end, and the bishop of Washington would preach regardless of who won.
So, I knew in June that I was going to be preaching at that service. The only thing I didn’t know was who the president would be and how the service would unfold within the context of the outcome of the election.
And we are gonna hang on to the service from now on. We’re done handing it over to the inaugural committee.
Does that feel like a necessary step because of the times or a correction from some slippage in the decades before?
A little bit of both. It was always meant to be a service to bring the nation together after the inauguration. In the beginning, that was the tone of the service, and it was very representative. Everyone showed up, on both sides of the aisle. It was a really big civic-religious event. That was beginning to slip over time. Also, there was concern — particularly in the environment in which we live now — that regardless of who won, it would feel like a spiritual coronation of a civic outcome. We wanted to step away from that regardless of who won.
And that’s because of the intensity of the polarization in the country right now. Which I mean, we’ve seen in the past, but it’s taken on overtones given what some have called the “culture of contempt” in which we live now, and the ways that we speak about people who disagree with us politically.
Part of the mission and vision is for the cathedral to be “a great church for national purposes.” I wondered about the tension between “church” and “for national purposes.” How do you think about the tensions of being prophetic and also bringing the nation together?
I think about it in the classic pastoral/prophetic tension that clergy live with all the time. It has implications everywhere. When I was a rector in Minneapolis, I was there the year that Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in Northern Minnesota. Wellstone was a beloved man to many people in the state of Minnesota, and he was not universally loved by those who disagreed with him politically.
He died on a Friday, and I had to preach on Sunday. Half of my congregation served in politics. So that was a civic moment, and it was a pastoral moment. It wound up being more charged than I realized, because of a couple of things I said in the sermon that really upset people who felt I had taken a stab at Wellstone — I didn’t mean to. So, that tension is always there in churches.
It’s obviously writ large in the cathedral. And people rightfully observe and critique us, saying sometimes we’ve crossed the line one way or the other. We live with that.
When you know you have to prepare a sermon where politics is going to be front and center, what does your preparation look like? Put another way: When you realize that you do need to step into that prophetic role, how do you try to do it pastorally?
That’s the major vocational question of my life. First of all, I seek to have a consistent voice in the pulpit, regardless of which side of the balance I’m on, so that every sermon potentially has some element of both prophetic and pastoral.
What I mean by prophetic isn’t so much, “the spirit of the Lord came upon me because God has anointed me,” but just speaking any kind of truth that makes us all uncomfortable. A truth that perhaps none of us really wants to hear, or that we know is true, but we don’t really want to deal with it. I try to make sure that I’m not stepping out of an overall worldview that I believe is my essential calling as a clergyperson.
I always see myself as standing under the same prophetic word that I preach to other people, so that I’m not perceived — to the degree that it’s possible — as speaking at people, but rather with them. Speaking prophetically is not something that I do lightly.
I try to make it clear whenever I preach that it is not my expectation that everyone is going to agree with what I have to say. Part of my function is to raise issues and to help people think about them prayerfully, theologically, and biblically, in the context of a community of faith. I’m one person speaking, and if they don’t agree that doesn’t make them any less in God’s eyes. If it causes them to think and for us to have a conversation or to move the conversation forward, that’s the homiletic task.
I also try, to the best of my ability, to avoid language that I know is just going to set people off. Adam Hamilton describes it well, he says, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be heard?” I think about that a lot. To whom am I speaking and for what purpose?
I know a lot of people were caught off guard by you directly asking President Trump to show mercy. I found myself caught off guard because I wasn’t sure mercy was quite the right thing, theologically speaking, to ask him. When you use that term “mercy,” what are you thinking of?
Let me say that it’s a pretty common homiletic tool when there’s a service where someone is at the center of it to address them directly. If you’re parents whose children are being baptized, if you are being ordained, if you are at a funeral, all of those things. The fact that people were — if you go back to any of the presidential homilies, you will see that, pretty commonly.
Whether “mercy” was the right word — that’s a really valid question. It’s one that I struggled with. I was thinking about “empathy.” I was thinking about “compassion.”
Mercy, as a theological concept, has really rich overtones of mutuality. There are times when any of us are in need of mercy, and there are times when we are in a position to offer it. It suggests a power imbalance or a state of being imbalanced. I was deliberate in the sense that I was trying to acknowledge that he had been elected president, and he had been elected by most Americans who voted in that election.
He believed he had been spared by a loving God to carry out his vocation. I wanted to impress upon everyone, not just the president, that when we are in a position to be merciful, it’s biblical and it’s our obligation. It’s part of what it means to be a humane and moral society.
I chose mercy in a deliberate appeal to his position of authority. I was expecting more pushback from that than I actually received.
Pushback from whom?
From people who said, “How dare you ask for mercy? You should demand that. You should demand compassion. Why are you being subservient?” One of your colleagues wrote in Sojourners about the sermon, at the very end he wrote “in our role as democratic citizens, it is our place to demand rather than plead.” I think that’s a fair critique. I was going for a different energy.
Something I found in my research was that in 2020, when you were asked to do a closing prayer for the Democratic National Convention, they asked you to do it at St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square, where Trump had done his photo-op that summer.
And they asked me to do it in the cathedral. They wanted it in the cathedral, or they wanted in front of St. John’s.
Does it feel like you’re always being asked to baptize political power, as the bishop of the Diocese of Washington?
Sure. I’m pretty sure the DNC didn’t invite me to do that sermon because they thought I looked nice at the back of processions, right? They asked me because of my position when President Trump walked across Lafayette Park and held a Bible in front of the church. I know that.
It was a judgment call, and some people rightfully criticized me, saying, “What are you doing offering a prayer at a partisan event?” I thought about it. I thought of all the other religious leaders that I admired that had offered prayers at either convention. I didn’t think less of them as clergyperson because they did that. I said to myself, “If the Republican party asked me to do the same thing, I would say yes.”
But it was also very clear that I was not going to stand in front of, or be in, any of our churches. For the very same reason that I criticized President Trump. I wasn’t going to extend the spiritual iconography of our architecture and our sacred spaces into that moment.
If it hadn’t been COVID-19, I might have been invited to do it at the convention itself. That would’ve been different. We did it in my home. I doubt anybody saw it, by the way. Everything was running late that night and everything had shut down on television.
God saw the prayer! [Laughs]
God saw it. And the people who stayed to the very end. I did my best to have a prayer that I would’ve said anywhere.
I want to ask you about that extending of spiritual iconography. One of the places the cathedral most frequently does that is in funerals for political figures. When Colin Powell died, for example, the cathedral was used to honor him and called him a “peace-maker.”
What is the process for thinking through funerals?
First of all, the request comes from the family of the person who died. In the case of Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, who died shortly thereafter, they were both Episcopalians. To be buried at the cathedral, it’s a very high honor and it is something that they asked for. Because of their affiliations with various branches of government, different entities get involved. The higher up they are, security and all of those factors come into play.
I would venture to say that, as with all funerals, the effort is to highlight the gifts that a person brought to his or her work and life and maybe not hammer home all of the contradictions and failures. That’s basically true of any funeral.
It brings together people of very different political persuasions into one room, and many people in the nation watch. It’s an opportunity to highlight aspirational values and to reflect a solemnity and dignity. I would say that’s civic religion in its purest form.
Now, when John McCain died, which was a fascinating service, his daughter was very clear in her sermon how she felt about President Trump. She spoke passionately, but that was her choice.
I don’t know if that’s helpful. Obviously, people had a lot to say about Colin Powell and particularly his endorsement and what proved to be inaccurate assessments that justified the invasion of Iraq.
You said it’s a great honor to be buried at the cathedral. I would agree with you that funerals are not really the place for picking through the mistakes of someone’s life. But I wonder, are there times the cathedral would look at somebody’s life and say they don’t reach the worthiness of this great honor?
That’s a really good question. We do a lot of funerals that don’t make it onto national television. I don’t know if that’s a question — I would have to think about that. It’s hard for me to imagine. Some public person whose life was so notorious that we would say no? I’m not sure. What would that say about us and our understanding of mercy and forgiveness, the wideness of God’s mercy?
That’s not a question I take lightly. Now, would I lie about a person? No. I’ve had to preside at funerals of people who were really terrible husbands, terrible spouses, terrible mothers. I’ve presided at all kinds of funerals. You know that in the congregation there’s a lot of emotion — that isn’t all necessarily grief.
So, that’s a really interesting question. Cuts to the heart of who we are.
You’re an alum of Virginia Theological Seminary. These days, students at VTS get invited to a service at the cathedral during the first week or two on campus. And spouses are kindly invited — even Mennonite spouses like me. The first thing I saw on site was the police presence. I did not realize the cathedral — and I know it extends to other institutions — has its own special police department.
What’s the balance between being peacemakers as Christians and employing a special police force?
The police, the security staff, are hired by the foundation that is in charge of not only the cathedral, but its three schools. There are three schools on the grounds of the cathedral. And security is an issue, for the schools and for the cathedral itself. It’s a sad thing, but more and more institutions — religious and educational — have increased security. And that has been true for us.
The whole question of whether or not they should be armed was something that we really wrestled with.
Do they carry guns?
Some do, yeah. And security has only intensified in these years, both because of the rise of gun violence and, broadly, the fact that there are family members who are often targeted for all sorts of reasons, not just political.
The cathedral sits on the highest mountain in Washington, D.C. It’s one of the most visual monuments, if you will. It’s a target. Am I pleased about that? Not really, but I realize that it’s the world that we live in.
I’ll get you out on a less challenging question. When you’re preparing to preach at the inauguration interfaith service, you’re also preparing other sermons for other contexts later even that very week. What’s that like, especially after all the attention started rolling in?
In my following sermons, there are times when I refer to the moment that we’re in and some aspect of that sermon or the response to it. Particularly the week after.
It was part of the air. That’s what people were thinking about when they see me, so if I just ignore it completely, that might be weird. But if I highlight it all the time, that would also be weird.
Most of my sermons take as their springboard the gospel texts for the day or the event that we are gathered for.
I am preaching a lot about mercy these days. I’m preaching about our need for it. I’m preaching about how to stay in relationship with people who disagree with us. All of those things come up on a pretty regular basis, in part because it’s the conversation we’re having nationally.
Keep in mind, I’m in Washington, D.C., and a lot of people are losing their jobs really fast and in whole swaths. We have a very high population of undocumented workers and people who are here on various forms of status that are about to be revoked. The fear and grief and confusion that people are feeling — some people are feeling perfectly fine about that, and I know that too.
That’s more on my mind than what people thought about what I said in January.
On top of all that, Congress almost took a billion dollars from the district’s funding.
And they haven’t reinstated it yet.
Sometimes you don’t have to actually explicitly say something because everybody’s thinking about it. You just have to create a space where people can fill in the blanks themselves. I try to do that a lot. I don’t need to spell out everything. People need to have space in their own lives to do that for themselves. And that actually gives more room for the Holy Spirit to work in people’s lives.
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