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Ordained and consecrated as priests 22 years ago this morning at St. John’s Cathedral in Los Angeles, five of us heard Bishop Chet Talton of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, reading from the “Book of Common Prayer,” say these words: “You are to love and serve the people among whom you work, caring alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor.” The ordination rite explicitly places this instruction in the context of the responsibility all baptized people share to renew not just the church but the whole world.
George W. Bush was president when I became a priest. This week at Holy Family Roman Catholic Church in South Pasadena, where I gave a speech, I met Noelia Rodriguez, the former Los Angeles deputy mayor and press secretary to First Lady Laura Bush. Noelia told me that she helped plan the president’s visit to a mosque the week after Sept. 11, where he made a vital statement designed to tamp down anti-Muslim sentiment.
This was leadership in keeping with the baptismal vows Bush had heard and repeated many times in Episcopal and Methodist liturgies. With all our presidents until now, one could discern a hint of the influence of their baptismal promises. Witnessing to power, religious figures used vocabulary in which leaders were steeped as children. When they were at their worst, we sensed their guilt and shame. At their most decent, they did the best they could for all our people and even tried to renew and repair the world.
Those days may be gone. Heretical nationalists serving as this regime’s canon theologians reckon empathy and decency as errors. Flashing their gold crosses, the high priests of cruelty laugh at our pieties, feast on critics’ rage, and use nonviolent resistance as an excuse for more state violence. They engages in sadism toward asylees and migrants for show. They murder people of color on the high seas for oil. They put Africans at risk of disease and death with aid cutoffs that save no money. They construe expressions of conscience as terrorism. They crush the marginalized. What scant information the people’s museums presented about slavery, they erase. They deny the humanity of trans and nonbinary people. They harass our citizens based on their accents. They gas helpless demonstrators, use toddlers as bait, and kill mothers without a hint of repentance.
Amid all this, those proclaiming the divine law of love are on the outside looking in. For the first time in a quarter of a millennium, we and the state are speaking completely different languages. We have to reclaim our territory. We’re not going to break windows or knock down doors. But we must breach what is commonly understood as the separation of church and state. People of faith need to write a new oath of office embodying the divine law of love, also known as the golden rule. We must do so not just as faith practitioners but constituents of a universe which, according not just to our belief but a considerable number of astrophysicists, God made for God’s own purposes of love, justice, and peace.
Alive in the human conscience for thousands of years, the golden rule is the ecumenical and interfaith common denominator. The wall between religious progressives and the rest of the faithful until recently seemed huge and unbridgeable. But conscience may tear the wall down and make Trump pay for it. Roman Catholic archbishops and bishops are coming aboard on immigration. Tens of millions of Americans of faith would be open to appeals to basic decency. The golden rule is neither conservative nor liberal. It just rules out hurting or killing others unnecessarily. All persons of faith and goodwill surely must share an abhorrence of cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
We will need to see evidence of compassion and empathy on every candidate’s résumé. We will preach, teach, and march against cruelty, endorse against cruelty, fund and donate against cruelty, and vote against cruelty. “You are to love and serve the people among whom you work, caring alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor.” This command to priests must now be our nonnegotiable command to our presidents and everyone in the world who wields power over the innocent and the creation. Beware, high priests of the Council of Cruelty. A new empire of faith rooted in love is at hand.