WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 21: Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who was a priest at St. John’s Episcopal in Minneapolis for 18 years, delivers a sermon during the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
Stories gain a momentum all their own, and that’s especially true of political stories. We see it in the wake of the 2024 election, where a narrow but decisive loss has been blown up into an epic shellacking that plunged the Democratic Party’s brand deep into the toilet. Now we have the New York Times writing headlines like “Trump Leaves Democrats dazed and on the defensive.”
It reminds me of the “Dems are in Disarray” storyline that was such a common trope that it became an inside joke among online Dems as far back as the Obama years. In our protean, zero attention-span culture, what’s here today can be gone tomorrow, so let’s keep our heads up and scout opportunities to change the storyline.
Already I see an early path out of the political wilderness emerging.
Ironically, it comes under the banner of religious freedom. Ironic because we tend to think of religious freedom as a divisive Republican issue — a high school football coach demanding the right to pray out loud like a Pharisee during games, no matter what the kids entrusted to him for guidance may or may not believe. Or churches refusing to protect their parishioners from exposure to COVID-19 during depths of the pandemic.
The opportunity here is for Democrats to lean into religious freedom and the love and compassion required of us by the great religions. Maybe you heard the brave words Episcopal Bishop — and former rector at St. John’s Episcopal in Minneapolis — Mariann Edgar Budde spoke from the pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral at the inaugural prayer service. Her sermon calling for compassion and mercy for migrants and other marginalized people left the new president squirming in his pew, and then taking to social media to attack her as a “so-called bishop” and “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.” That is hogwash, of course. The bishop was speaking the words her faith requires of her.
The Old Testament Book of Leviticus states it with exquisite moral clarity. Treat the stranger among you as one of your own, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. You find the same basic concept all over the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious texts. My favorite take comes from the Book of Hebrews: Do not forget to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
These aren’t mere suggestions, like some tip on a psychology app to make you feel better about your life. Many of us see it as a fundamental duty of our faith, inextricable from the commandment to love God and love your neighbor. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration policy, described the services the Church provides to the poor and the displaced as “part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.”
Trump’s threat to forcefully draft state and local officials and who knows how many of us into service for his migrant roundups violates the constitutional right to religious freedom.
If you’re among those wondering what it will take to resurrect the Democratic brand, a message grounded in the notion of religious freedom has the right mix of ingredients for the current moment.
It’s a disciplined moral argument. It’s a principled legal argument. It’s precise, unlike the open-ended outrage of the “resistance” during Trump’s first term. It flips the script on the Republican Party’s appeal to people of faith, some of whom were potential Democratic voters up until the last election. It feels more like courageous leadership than blind opposition, and it works from the local and state levels up.
That’s especially true here in Minnesota, where we have a robust movement of religious progressives.
I like that it takes us back to the first things of the American narrative. Freedom of conscience was a fundamental question during the 17th century conflicts that brought the Pilgrims to New England. As well as the heroic Civil Rights Movement, which arose out of Black churches.
The astonishing corruption, the lawlessness, the selling out of our nation’s security, and all the other transgressions spinning out of the new administration, like scenes from a chainsaw movie, will all need to be addressed. But first the brand needs some wind in its sails. The Democrats sorely need a win, and the conservative Supreme Court loves a good religious freedom argument.
The message is simple and emotionally resonant. Right out of the gate, Trump, his administration and his party have put themselves on the wrong side of God and the wrong side of America.
A similar argument is already before the Texas Supreme Court, where the state is trying to shut down a religious charity that provides services for migrants in El Paso. Scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims that the Catholic-run shelter, Annunciation House, isn’t religious enough in his mind to warrant protection from the state’s coercive immigration laws. David French, a conservative who has litigated religious freedom issues and now writes about them for the The New York Times, argues that Annunciation House has a strong case, which is widely acknowledged even among conservative legal scholars.
During her now forgotten victorious debate performance against Trump, Kamala Harris showed how easy it is to goad Trump into rage and distraction.
And unlike many who can find solace in prayer, Trump knows no divinity other than his own ego.