Song of the Week: “Be My Escape,” by Relient K - “The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair”1
At the National Prayer Service this Tuesday, the Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde preached a sermon in front of the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and their wives. It ended with a plea for mercy. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared right now,” Rev. Budde exhorted him.2
"There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives,” she said. She went on to talk about the hard work of immigrants, who have been attacked for a decade by Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and are now once again the target of his administration’s draconian, unConstitutional policies.
"They pay taxes and are good neighbours,” Budde said. “They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”
Budde’s plea came at the end of a sermon about unity: not a demand for conformity, nor a set of falsely cheerful sentiments about everyone just agreeing to disagree. Rather, she urged her listeners to acknowledge that we are all united by our shared humanity. The unity she described was based on three principles: the fundamental dignity of every human being, a commitment to telling the truth, and a humility about our own shortcomings.
And then she begged for mercy towards the most vulnerable members of society.
In preaching this sermon, Budde did an extraordinary thing. She spoke truth to power - and she extended President Trump grace.
Despite his lies, crimes, sexual violence, bigotry, and delight in cruelty, Trump has been openly and warmly supported by white evangelicals since he announced his first bid for president in 2015. In the 2016 election, 81% of white evangelicals propelled him to power, and in the 2024 election, their support remained steadfast.
Despite the fact that Trump could not name a favorite Bible verse, ordered peaceful protesters tear gassed so that he could pose for photos holding a Bible in front of a church, and bragged that he has never asked for forgiveness, white American evangelicals have repeatedly affirmed that he represents their values. In 2016, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson excused Trump as a “baby Christian.” And, indeed, eight years later, Trump seems more willing to talk about faith: in his inaugural address he claimed that God had specifically chosen him to “save America.”
And so Rev. Budde spoke to Trump as a fellow Christian, offering him the grace that the Bible says all are in need of, and all can receive. She articulated the gospel for him, hoping that he might actually hear it and take it to heart. “In his Sermon on the Mount,” she preached, “Jesus of Nazareth exhorts us to love not only our neighbors but to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us, to be merciful as our God is merciful, to forgive others as God forgives us. And Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts.”
And then, Rev. Budde begged him to use his power to be merciful.
Instead, Trump went home and tweeted a series of insults. Budde, he wrote, was a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater…She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” He demanded an apology: offended, apparently, by the sentiments of known Radical Leftist Jesus of Nazareth.
He was joined, of course, in his vitriol, by many of his cronies. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that the Bishop had “hijacked the National Prayer Service to promote her radical ideology.” Representative Mike Collins tweeted that “the person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.” And Joe Rigney of Doug Wilson’s Christ Church framed the sermon as the natural result of allowing uppity women to preach the gospel at all: “Women’s ordination is a cancer that unleashes untethered empathy in the church (and spills over into society).”
In an interview with Time the following day, Budde addressed the angry backlash against her sermon.3
“It's about the kind of country we are called to be. And that's what I did my best to try and speak to, to present an alternative to the culture of contempt, and to say that we can bring multiple perspectives into a common space and do so with dignity and respect,” she says. “And that we need that, and the culture of contempt is threatening to destroy us. And I'm getting a little bit of a taste of that this week.”
The one thing she refused to do, however, was apologize. “I am not going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.”
At What Cost?
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the relationship between grace and justice. These are concepts that I - like many people in North America - encountered first and most prominently through the lens of Christianity. But grace and justice - and the tension between them - are ideas that concern us all.
Why are we exhorted to give the benefit of the doubt to oligarchs making Nazi salutes and aspiring to fascism, but told that the most marginalized of our neighbors deserve only punishment?
Or, more troublingly to me: what does it mean to forgive those who have hurt us, who might aspire to hurt us again? To truly believe in second chances? Can justice and grace co-exist?
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in an era chillingly similar to ours. A pacifist and advocate for social justice informed by a deep spiritual conviction and practical experience working alongside members of the Black church in the United States, he was an early and outspoken critic of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Even as the majority of Christians in Germany - the Deutsche Christen - supported Adolf Hitler during his rise, he refused to sanctify the regime’s evils. In 1933, two days after Hitler was installed as Chancellor, Bonhoeffer spoke against him in a radio broadcast, warning Germans against creating an idolatrous cult of the führer.4
He continued as a defiant voice against the Nazis throughout the 1930s, calling on Christians to not only “"bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam a spoke in the wheel itself.” And - despite his conviction that his actions might doom him before God - he attempted that interference himself, eventually participating in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler. For his resistance against the Nazis, he was first imprisoned, then executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945.
Eight years before his death, Bonhoeffer published his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship (1937). In it, he speaks at length about grace: specifically, about the distinction between “cheap grace” and “costly grace”:
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the church’s inexhaustible treasury from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! (53).
In other words: Christians are eager to forgive powerful leaders who have never asked for forgiveness. They extend good faith to those who espouse no genuine faith at all. No cruelty, no violence, no abuse of power is a bridge too far for them, because already they have extended their easy, endless grace.
By contrast, Bonhoeffer argues, costly grace requires remorse. It “comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart.” It begins with regret, and is received with a change of heart and a change of behavior.
Bonhoeffer, of course, was a Christian minister, and his understanding of grace is tied up in the death and resurrection of Jesus. But I find his definition broadly useful in thinking through how we structure our society. We must demand justice, yes. But surely - when there is genuine remorse, and an effort to heal from hurt - there must also be room for costly grace.
Rehabilitation
This Sunday, I went to see a movie called Sing Sing (2023). As the name suggests, Sing Sing is set in Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in upstate New York. Based on a true story, the film follows the members of one chapter of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a program founded in 1996 that helps prisoners learn life skills and develop their characters through theater.
The movie centers on Divine G. (Colman Domingo), a man who has been imprisoned for more than fifteen years for a crime he did not commit. Divine G. has found purpose and emotional escape through the RTA program; he is a fine actor, a leader among the other men in the group, and has written several plays as well.
While Sing Sing establishes its protagonist’s innocence, it does not do the same for the other members of the program: particularly the reluctant Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), a drug dealer and gang member who hides deep psychological wounds beneath a carapace of violence and hostility. In fact, the film is not particularly interested in what any of these men did to end up in a maximum security prison. Rather, it is concerned with what they are doing now.
Through acting exercises and theatrical productions, the members of the RTA are able to be vulnerable with each other in ways that have never been available to them inside or outside of the prison’s walls. They talk about their fears, regrets, frustrations, and dreams. As members of the program, they are given the chance to grow, to do something creative and joyful and beautiful. And, in turn, they extend that same grace to each other, and heal each other’s hurts.
That belief in the men’s ability to change - that grace - has real consequences. In the United States, the national rate of recidivism (released prisoners returning to prison) is 60%. For graduates of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, it’s 3%.
And Sing Sing itself is a testament to the program’s power: with the exception of the main character, nearly all of the RTA program members are played by real graduates of the program, now living full and meaningful lives reintegrated into society.
Maclin, who spent fifteen years in Sing Sing Prison, reflects on how the program changed how he saw himself:
But they actually see you as people, as a human being, and when my opinion became valuable, and, you know, when my thoughts became something that they wanted to know, you know, it changed the relationship. It's kind of like I have to see myself different as well. I have to formulate valuable opinions now. I can't just offer up anything. So my expectation of them also became an expectation that they had of me. And this was a beautiful exchange because it helps me to grow that way. That's a way that I can learn and grow from, by, you know, being respected and being treated as if I matter.
The Path of Grace
But what about when there is no remorse? When there is only hatred, and cruelty, and death? What then does it mean to live with grace?
Ten years ago, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof walked into a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina. After being welcomed by the members of the oldest Black church in the South, and listening to an hour’s study of the Parable of the Sower, he made a series of virulent racist accusations and then opened fire, murdering nine parishioners including pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney. A proud neo-Nazi and Confederate sympathizer, Roof’s express desire was to ignite a race war through his act of mass murder.
Instead, when they were able to confront him in court for the first time less than a week later, the families of each of his victims publicly forgave him. As the granddaughter of one of the victims stated, “This is proof; everyone’s plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love and their legacies will live in love. So hate won’t win.”
Too often, when there is a high-profile act of violence, people rush to circulate inspiring coverage of family members forgiving the aggressor, as if in sharing this they can assuage their own complacency, their own culpability in a culture that excuses bigotry and baptizes inequality as birthright. Too often, people hunger for grace without a commitment to change.
In his book Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (2022), former head speechwriter Cody Keenan narrates the ten days between the Charleston shooting and Clementa C. Pinckney’s funeral on June 26, 2015. By this point in his presidency, Keenan recalls, Barack Obama was exhausted and angry about the number of speeches he had made in the wake of mass shootings. His address following the Charleston shooting would be the fourteenth such speech in his presidency, most heartbreaking among them the one responding to the murder of twenty elementary schoolers and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012.
When Obama was asked to give the eulogy at Pinckney’s funeral, he initially resisted, arguing that he had nothing left to say. He was also concerned, Keenan recalls, that any eulogy he gave would “let America off the hook, offering absolution without penance.”
Ultimately, however, he decided to speak. After describing Pinckney’s remarkable and too short life - he was only 41, and the father to two small daughters - Obama turned to the racism and gun violence that led to the massacre:
…It would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again, once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual. That’s what we so often do. To avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society; to settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change - that’s how we lose our way again…Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other; that my liberty depends on you being free too; that history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind, but more importantly, an open heart.
As he delivered the speech, Obama’s cadence was that of a preacher, not a politician. As he spoke of justice and mercy, grace and goodness, the audience spoke back to him, calling out “mm-hmm” and “my my.”
That’s what I’ve felt this week - an open heart. That, more than any particular policy or analysis, is what’s called upon right now, I think, what a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls ‘that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things. That reservoir of goodness.
He paused, seeming lost in thought. “If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.”
And then - in what I believe was the most important rhetorical moment of his presidency - in a Black church, surrounded by Black clergy, at the funeral of a slain Black minister, the first Black president of a nation founded on white supremacy and chattel slavery sang “Amazing Grace.” And the people sang it with him.
When it comes to grace, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
I was a huge fan of Relient K as a teenager, and was so gratified to see that they have evolved in their beliefs alongside me. They made headlines two years ago for their decision to tour with queer Christian artist Semler as their opener, a choice that angered many but was immensely affirming for queer fans like me.
My thanks to Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of the essential Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020), who compiled an account of these events in a recent issue of her Substack.
It is worth noting, of course, that many, many people - myself included - were moved and heartened by Budde’s courage and clarity.
A goal to strive for.
That last footnote has me absolutely floored!