“Be nice.” That was the gist of the Episcopal bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon at the January 21 post-inauguration prayer service, but it caused Donald Trump to lash out furiously, and to declare that she was a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.” The ensuing fuss and furore have resulted in Budde being hailed as a brave hero who dared speak out against a tyrannical president. In fact, Budde is no hero, we don’t need heroes, and her brand of liberalism needs to die. In its place, we need a radical left agenda, one that brings about actual, lasting change.
The service was expected to be the usual, humdrum affair attended by the president, his family, and approximately a thousand other people. Most were there for a photo-op, not an enlightening message from anyone’s god, but the event became a media sensation as Budde reached the end of her sermon. For the large part of her fifteen minutes, she spoke of the world and current affairs in the usual elliptical style that religious leaders use when there are political figures present. The aim, in such cases, is to be deliberately anodyne, and any calls to action are disguised as exhortations to all of humanity. Budde’s sermon called for unity and mutual respect among communities. Only in the last two paragraphs did she address Trump directly:
Let me make one final plea, Mr President. Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God.
In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families who fear for their lives.
And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals—they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.
Have mercy, Mr President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.
Trump’s face, as he listened, indicated his displeasure, which he voiced afterwards in his strong criticism of her. Inevitably, Budde drew the wrath of others, like Georgia representative Mike Collins, who suggested adding her to the deportation list. But she has also received praise from luminaries like Berenice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Rev. Caitlin Frazier, who said, “Her plea for mercy met this moment in American history.”
Budde has since appeared on the Rachel Maddow show, and been featured in numerous articles and interviews, including one with the New Yorker’s Eliza Griswold who described her as “radical” and as part of the religious left. Responding, she said, “So I would say, both as an American and as a Christian, I’m pretty much right in the center. If it comes across as radical, that just says something about the times we are in.”
In that she’s right: it’s a sign of the times that a bishop calling on an elected president to treat people well is seen as some kind of radical stance. This does not mean that there is not an element of courage in her being willing to call on Trump—and effectively call him out—at a televised event, given his well-known tendency to take revenge upon those he perceives as his enemies.
Still, despite what her new and growing cohort of fans might say, Mariann Budde is not a hero. Her words exhorting Trump to take care of immigrants and LGBTQ people don’t empower anyone: they pathologise and demean individuals and communities, and they shut down the possibility of real defiance, revolts, and revolutions against the status quo. Budde is now the spiritual leader of the Nice White Ladies Club: an expansive group that includes, for instance, Maddow—liberals whose presence in any space, political or discursive, provides the appearance of radical or contentious politics but gives cover for a more conservative discourse and far less radical call to action (“have mercy”).1For more on the phenomenon of Nice White Ladies, ome of whom are necessary and not all of whom are nice, white, or ladies, see my forthcoming essay, “The Nice White Ladies Club.”In her sermon, Budde effectively erased the radical potential of organising among people who have historically (though not lately) been known for fierce and revolutionary politics, redrawing them as passive, sad humans in need of our help.
The fact that Budde has been publicly critical of Trump in the past serves to amplify her reputation for being a radical: in 2020, she criticised him in a New York Times op-ed for posing with a Bible after having protestors removed from Lafayette Square. Like her sermon, that piece does no more than echo the usual and trite reminders about justice: “I stand with those engaged in peaceful protest, calling for meaningful change, and especially with young Americans who rightfully wonder if there is hope for their future.” Oddly—even bizarrely, given the context of the protests that year—she fails to mention that the “young Americans” in question were mostly Black and members of Black Lives Matter. She emphasises that she and her cohort “were working to make the plaza a kind of resting place, a sanctuary where people could get food and sanitizer and face masks, and you could say a prayer with them, to stand in solidarity with those who were protesting peacefully.” Budde is the nervous Nice White Lady, seeking to assure readers that she was only there as part of a peaceful protest, handing out necessities. Heaven forbid, no pun intended, that a protest ever make loud, angry, demands to actually force change.
Budde’s record in the search for justice reveals that she takes the safest positions on the most fraught political matters. Ali Abunimah, of Electronic Intifada, points out that she, along with Randolph Hellerith, the dean of Washington Cathedral, uncritically echoed the standard and entirely false narrative about rapes on October 7, and portrays Israel’s attack on Gaza as an act against terrorists, erasing the long history of resistance by Palestinians. As with queers and immigrants in her January sermon, Budde emphasised the plight of those she renders as innocent, implying that the brutality of the state, any state, can and should be visited upon others.
The concepts of innocence and criminality are, as I’ve already noted several times (see below), always shifting: they are constructs, meant to empower states in brutal forms of repression that go unnoticed or unremarked upon as those defined as “innocent” and “not criminals” look away, thankful to not be included among the ones who are being rounded up.
In her words about queer people, she says that they “fear for their lives.” While this is actually, undoubtedly true for many, painting them as sad and piteous creatures asking for the mercy of a vengeful president ignores the vast numbers who are mightily pissed off, and ready to fight for their rights to medical care and self-determination. Her words about immigrants are even more pathologising, and renders them in the most dehumanising terms, often echoed by conservatives who argue for immigrants on similar grounds: These are the people who will do the work we won’t, and we should be nice to them because, otherwise, who will do all that work? Such a logic of utilitarianism applies to immigrants of all classes: Who will design our software? Who will make sure it runs properly? Who will build new business empires? She also asks Trump to “help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands,” when most of those wars and persecution have been a direct result of the United States’s foreign policies and direct interventions.
Then, there are the children, who “fear that their parents will be taken away.” We might recall here the sound of minors in cages crying for their parents in detention camps. Liberals and progressives love to return to this; it has become part of an immigration playlist, a soundtrack to the topic—on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman often refers to it. Years ago, when I visited the offices of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), I was struck and shocked by the sight of the very large and exploitative photographs of crying children that covered their walls. (I hope they have since been taken down, but it’s unlikely—nothing tugs at donor heartstrings more than the sight of weeping babies). Immigration organisations like ICIRR need the steady drip of pity and sympathy: after all, if immigrants actually demanded their rights and got them, where would they be? The emphasis on the cries and tears of children ignores the fact that they were also separated from their parents by previous Democratic administrations before Trump (with liberals trying to explain it all away). More significantly, the sounds of children crying, while awful and tragic, are a distraction from a much-needed critique of the immigration policies of liberal governments. As I’ve written here, the draconian policies that created the current and massive pool of undocumented people began with the Clinton administration.
Discourse matters. Rhetoric matters. How we choose to talk about marginalised groups reflects the extent to which we concede that they have autonomy and rights, as opposed to making them sing sad songs of woe so that we might take on the roles of their (ineffectual, inactive) saviours. Consider a different set of paragraphs at the end of that sermon, something to this effect: “Mr. President, you should know that the people whom you are bent on terrorising will not stand by and let you walk all over them. And we, in churches and other religious institutions, plan on fighting by their side.”
It may seem unfair to demand so much from a sermon and from Budde, who represents and usually only speaks to an extremely wealthy set: the elementary school run by the Washington Cathedral charges $43, 571 in tuition alone.2Many thanks to N. for pointing this out to me. The tenor and politics of her sermon reflect a community where even acknowledging the presence of gardeners and servers is considered unusual. In that context, Budde is probably the most radical voice.
There are costs to bear for such a toothless form of resistance (a favourite word of liberals who remain bewildered by a second Trump term, something that I predicted, as did others like Nathan J. Robinson). When Budde’s words are elevated to the extent that they are—and when even self-avowed leftists in my own circles sing her praises—the possibility of truly radical politics is, again, erased. The banners and signs at recent demonstrations are exactly the same as the ones that cropped up in 2017. We had four years in which to demand radical change from LGBTQ and immigration rights organisers and groups like ICIRR, which are stuck in a permanent state of crisis and response—and all we have now is an even worse backlash against vulnerable people. We, on the left, are literally marching in place.
There are currently several versions of what Trump promised in his campaign: shock and awe raids carried out in cities like Chicago and New York, designed to sow fear and terror in immigrants and their neighbours, who might be dissuaded from doing anything by the sight of the weaponry and military-style operations. Resistance is not impossible, on several levels, but resistance without a sense of empowered rage is useless. What we need right now is to inform and remind people of the histories of how we got here, and create plans for how to get out—and that means letting go of liberal narratives about sad, crying people who need our help. The only way forward is to dispense with calls like those echoed in Budde’s sermon. To make real change: kill liberalism, bury the corpse, and salt the earth so that it might never rise again.
If you like this, please consider supporting my work.
For more of my work on immigration, see:
On Trump, Immigration, and the Failure of the Left
On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative
“Undocumented”: How an Identity Ended a Movement
Trauma and Capitalism or, Your Trauma Story Will Kill You
Romancing the Border: Or, Making (Self) Deportation Sexy
Undocumented vs. Illegal: A Distinction without a Difference
Critical Race Theory Won’t Save Us
DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now
Travel, Passports, and the Differences between Expats and Immigrants
See also Nathan J. Robinson’s “The Difference between Liberalism and Leftism.”
There’s much more: use the search engine on this site to look for my work on immigration.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
