A Message from Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe: Resistance as Patriotism

Our Presiding Bishop has a challenging messaging for the Episcopal Church in particular, and American Christians more broadly.

Writing in Religion News Service (and reposted at Episcopal News Service), Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said the Episcopal Church — for generations the church of presidents and the political establishment — is being called to a different kind of patriotism:

When we are awash in propaganda, even our resistance can be bound by its definitions and incline us to see the world in the same categories — foreigner and neighbor, cisgender and transgender, white and people of color, Christian and Muslim — that we seek to transcend.

These historical lessons are urgent. Churches like ours, protected by the First Amendment and practiced in galvanizing people of goodwill, may be some of the last institutions capable of resisting this administration’s overreach and recklessness. To do so faithfully, we must see beyond the limitations of our tradition and respond not in partisan terms, but as Christians who seek to practice our faith fully in a free and fair democracy.

Bishop Sean, as you may recall, has been a soft-spoken but fierce critic of the Trump Administration, particularly on questions of refugees and immigration. He pulled the church out of government-funded refugee resettlement rather than settle white Afrikaners from South Africa, and joined in a suit against the government over ICE raids in churches. He is similarly critical of the president’s travel ban, in part because the Episcopal Church counts members around the world, not just in the U.S.

Regardless of partisan affiliation, he said, Christians are called to decide which master they serve:

We did not seek this predicament, but God calls us to place the most vulnerable and marginalized at the center of our common life, and we must follow that command regardless of the dictates of any political party or earthly power. We are now being faced with a series of choices between the demands of the federal government and the teachings of Jesus, and that is no choice at all.

This is not the same kind of patriotism that has guided our church since its founding in 1785, but this July Fourth, it may be the most faithful service we can render — both to the country we love and the God we serve.