The Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe, presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church, recently wrote an opinion piece for the Religion News Service. https://religionnews.com/2025/07/03/once-the-church-of-presidents-the-episcopal-church-must-now-be-an-engine-of-resistance/ In the article, he calls for “resistance to the rising tide of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism emanating from Washington, D.C.” 

He mentions that the Episcopal Church “did not make a moral stand against slavery,” and therefore, the time has come to make a stand against the current administration, who are arresting and deporting illegal aliens. The letter concludes, “We are now being faced with a series of choices between the demands of the federal government and the teachings of Jesus.” 

The bishop doesn’t specify exactly what “resistance” needs to be taken. Instead he rallies the Church to learn the lessons of history. The letter’s style, with its occasional florid notes - “Christians in perilous times” - is not entirely convincing. It tries too hard to sound epochal and comes across instead as pompous and tendentious. Its argument is further weakened by a number of clearly disingenuous statements. 

Here is one: “When religious institutions like ours enjoy easy coexistence with earthly power, our traditions and inherited systems can become useless for interpreting what is happening around us.” Here he is describing, with an apparent lack of self-awareness, the close relationship between the Episcopal Church and the Democratic Party under President Joe Biden. This may explain why the Church never criticized any of the last administration’s social and economic policies, despite the harm that some of them caused. 

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping statement in the bishop’s letter is this: “history teaches us that 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.”

Has the bishop had his head in the sand for the past decade? The use of identity politics - putting people into categories in order to foment division - is enthusiastically embraced by the Episcopal Church and enshrined in its own teachings. To say, “we aren’t like that now” is simply gaslighting.

The most egregious element in the letter is the false equivalence of our democratically elected government to Nazism. We had four years of the “Trump is Hitler” state propaganda, a lie intended to stoke hatred towards republicans. The example given by the bishop simply echoes all of this. There are other implications that his comparison carries - such as extolling Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who plotted to kill Hitler - that are unworthy of the person holding office at the bishop’s high level.

The Presiding Bishop began his tenure in encouraging fashion, by appealing to both sides of the political spectrum. In his conversations with colleagues and parishioners, one wonders how often he is hearing a voice contrary to the party line? He needs to hear it now, for the sake of the Episcopal Church, which has seen a 34% decline in attendance over the past decade. 

Recent events show the Democratic Party lurching toward the far left. If the Church follows suit, it will simply make them a far left version of the Christian Nationalists they so rightly deride. The real challenge now is whether the Church can plot a truly independent path. If not, the Presiding Bishop risks becoming the man who said “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Father David