Preaching in the Trump era

How to address politics without driving hearers away

This is the first Substack piece I have ever written. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to write anything more substantive than what used to be a Tweet. So why now? All human motivations are to some extent mixed, but I’d like to think that this contribution is motivated by two commitments: devotion to the church—the family of Jesus our Lord, the lover of all humankind; and a high level of alarm about the role of the church in the United States in this time of political and cultural crisis.

I have preached only a handful of sermons since my husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s seven years ago. During the first years, I was content to stay out of the pulpit. In recent months, however, I have felt it pulling at me. The pressure to say something has increased.

I have read The New York Times every morning for over 60 years. It is not an accident that my first published book of sermons (1996) is called The Bible and the New York Times. (If I’d been living on the West Coast, maybe it would have been The Los Angeles Times.) I also read Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and a number of other sources. I have therefore never been lacking in illustrations for sermons.

Last week I read an in-depth piece of journalism that galvanized me at last to sit down to write something of what has been gnawing at me for months and, indeed, for years.

The article appears in the Wednesday, April 8, 2026, issue of The New York Times. It was written by Yeganeh Torbate and Sanam Mahozi, both highly experienced journalists specializing in Iran and the Middle East (look them up!). Headline: “Complicated Emotions Over War Are Dividing Iran’s Diaspora.” Subtitle: “Losing Relationships As People Take Sides.” The people who are described and interviewed are Iranian expats in various European countries and Canada:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/world/middleeast/iran-war-diaspora.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ZVA.5I30.HhM9qFleYZBM&smid=url-share

From the perspective of leaders of congregations, this article should focus the challenge for the Christian community that has been simmering, yet widely unacknowledged, for months. We are fearful about breaking down into hostile parties. This sort of crisis has confronted the American church many times in my 88 years. I vividly recall the struggles during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the other social shifts that challenged clergy in pulpits where the congregations were split. But none of them, in my observation, were as alarming as what we are seeing now.

For several months I have been making a small personal inquiry into what the churches are doing about the crisis of conscience that we are facing today in the United States. My impression is that many churches are not doing much of anything. It is true that some Episcopal churches are pointedly using the traditional prayers for peace that are found in the Book of Common Prayer and other sources. Some are praying for the President by name in the customary fashion. Some are burrowing further down and using prayers For Time of War and For Our Enemies—and better still, the Great Litany. That is a great deal better than doing nothing.

But what about the pulpit? What is happening in the pulpits?

The Roman Catholic church has an advantage here. There is a tradition of papal outspokenness, certainly since John Paul II, who put his thumb on the scale as Stalinism began losing its hold on Eastern Europe. Pope Benedict was much more restrained and cerebral, but did not lack commitment to Catholic social teaching (Protestants need to read more of it). Francis, as is well known, put social, economic, and justice issues front and center. As for the present Pope, he has already made moves indicating that, whereas he is not in-your-face as Francis was, he is bold and courageous, and he is not going to sit on the sidelines. The Pope of Rome is in a unique position to address the planet, and the first American Pope is showing, in his calm and measured way, that he is willing to take this on. He is able to address the American public in American English, and he has begun to do so.

But what about the mainline Protestants? The Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists and others? (The matter of who else is “mainline” will not be discussed here. Nor am I speaking of the Black church leaders who, especially in the South, are masters of integrating politics and worship.)

My unofficial survey yields a rather discouraging picture. The “progressive” clergy that have dominated the mainline scene for decades continue to exhort and self-congratulate from the pulpit in the same way that we have been doing all these years.[1] The more evangelically inclined clergy, recognizing the truth that being progressive will never be “inclusive” enough to entice the unenlightened, have fallen back on saying nothing at all about the crisis in our national politics. That means continuing to preach and teach with no references whatever to the fact that we are in danger of losing our democracy in the very year of our semiquincentennial. How that can this crisis be denied? It cannot be denied. It can only be fatally ignored. To say nothing is to acquiesce.

The problem, it seems to me, is not that we are divided on issues that many would consider world-changing. The problem is that so many preachers are pretending this division does not exist. Inside the church, nothing is said about the way our country is splitting. Outside, many members of these same churches are expressing their views in various degrees of dismay, anger, and, it should be admitted, real animosity sometimes expressed in harsh, vulgar, or scornful terms that would not be accepted inside the church building. Therefore, there is widespread avoidance—as though the Christian community was actually able to suppress the reality of what is happening.

But what to say? And how to say it from the pulpit?

There were several things that struck me in the Times article. [2]

First, an Iranian expat in Germany says, “This is not a healthy environment. People are kind of scared of clearly explaining their point of view.” Note that! Can we say that clergy and lay leaders, also, are “scared of explaining” their stance? Or, scared of even trying to explain it? If church leaders are scared to discuss Jesus’ command to “love your enemies,” how can we really be Christians at all?

Second (and the second point is linked to the first), to my admittedly limited knowledge, there is little or no communication on a serious level taking place between the two sides in the churches. Some perceptive journalists refer to “purity politics” on both sides, which allows one group to think of itself as invulnerably righteous over against the unrighteous views of the other side. This is what we are seeing in the US today, not least in the churches. But this is not the only problem. There is no communication across these lines because the two sides have permitted themselves to deteriorate into personal attacks, vicious accusations, incendiary rhetoric, and perhaps most important, total dismissal not only of the other point of view but also—this is important—of those who are assumed to be holding that point of view. I say “appear to be” because often there is nuance complicating the other person’s stance. George W. Bush famously said, during the fateful Iraq war, “I don’t do nuance.” Apparently, he was well aware that attending to nuance is hard work.

Third, and here’s where the Christian community comes in, the Times article examines the way that relationships broke down among Iranian expats without any real discussion. “Friendships and business relationships have broken down…vicious insults have been exchanged online…‘People are kind of scared of clearly explaining their point of view,’ says an Iranian-born academic.”

The authors of the Times article have a case to present, but good journalists that they are, they have taken care to interview people from various positions on the expat Iranian spectrum. For instance, a woman living in the Emirates takes a right-wing position supporting the son of the deposed shah. This is not the view that the American left would support.[3] But she is wise in a certain way. She says: “Bad behavior exists in every group. If I want democracy, I must practice it first. I hope we can reach a point where we earn to be tolerant and express ourselves properly.”

This, to me, is a call to the church precisely now, in a time when public expression of contempt for those who are on the other side politically has reached an extreme never before seen in American public life. Universal connection to social media has been the principal engine driving public acceptance of this poisonous animosity, but there has been almost no effective protest against it. There are laments, but very polite ones—an ironic result of decorum; I think fondly of the elderly woman (probably younger than me) who attended training for public protest (in Minneapolis of all places) and came away discouraged. “I’m just not an f--- you person,” she said.

Surely the church can do better than this sort of “training” in this time of polarizing division between “red” and “blue.”[4] The article about the split among the Iranian expats illustrates how painful such divisions are, and often how cruel: “vicious insults have been exchanged online.” One woman states her view in moderate terms: “I want the Islamic Republic to disappear immediately, but I don’t believe this is the way.” Despite her calm approach, she says that “I’ve lost friendships without even having arguments. People simply cut me off.”

As I was beginning to become a preacher, I received some foundational advice that I have relied upon for fifty years. Among the most important admonitions that I absorbed was this one: “Never exhort. Illustrate!” I soon realized that most of the preaching I had heard in my life were exhortations. My first sermons were in this vein. I was at that time surrounded by the ethos of the late 60s, with its self-righteous certainty that we had the enlightened approach to everything. I remember one of my seminary classmates not long after our graduation. He was quoted in a newspaper story: “Preaching? I don’t have time for preaching. Preaching is helping the poor.” There was no mention of Jesus Christ. We all believed we were among the righteous, and we reinforced each other. This certainty continues to be the foundation of many sermons in the traditional mainlines. In such settings, the preacher simply assumes that the congregation will nod along with the “politically correct” positions of the preacher.

When preachers exhort the congregation in this way, a portion of it is certain to feel alienated, unless it has already sorted itself out as a “progressive” or “liberal” congregation. I remember a particular sermon from the late-sixties. It was brilliantly written and delivered, based on the text from Isaiah 3:13-15. “What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?” A specific constituency was the target. The problem was that all of us in that particular congregation were already essentially on board with the preacher’s theme. Those in town who would have felt targeted were in the other local Episcopal church. So those who heard the sermon were encouraged to think well of themselves, or, at best, to resolve to do better still in alleviating the local rich vs. poor imbalance, while at the same time feeling much superior to the unenlightened worshippers at the other church. (I am exaggerating a bit to make the point, but not all that much!)

Exhortation has its place, of course. If you are commanding an army preparing to attack an enemy, Henry V’s great speech (“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”) is the way to go. The exhortations of black preachers during the Civil Rights Movement were addressed to downtrodden sufferers who had endured enough and were ready to claim their lives as free people. This sort of exhortation rightly assumes that the hearers are already on the march. But exhortation to a mixed congregation does not work that way. The preacher cannot assume the readiness of the hearers. Therefore, all too often in the circumstances of our fraught society, we see two different approaches: exhortation, or avoidance. This accounts for the sharp line drawn by those preaching to mixed congregations. Preachers who exhort are willing to alienate a large slice of their membership. Perhaps they even think it is their duty to do so.

But there is another way, the way of illustrating.

How does a community work when there are sharp political divisions lying at the very heart of the way that Jesus taught and embodied? These divisions seem to make it impossible to love our neighbor. Here is the challenge to preachers who illustrate rather than exhort.

During the disastrous 2024 floods in the North Carolina mountains, there sprang up a new kind of neighborliness. There was no internet, no television—only the trusty radio. Many stories were told in various publications about the way that people depended on one another no matter what political views they had. These narratives were so moving that they appeared in faraway media, for instance, The Guardian of London: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/08/hurricane-helene-death-toll-government-response

You get the idea. Preachers should collect narratives like this to use as illustrations. Stories like these, when told from the pulpit as illustrations, work to arouse feelings of neighborliness where there might otherwise be only estrangement. The sense of “we’re all in this together” needs to be supported, not with morality lectures but with examples. “Don’t tell me! Show me!” is the watchword here. Another article I read described how, after one of the devastating California wildfires, a man who differed strongly from his neighbor walked over one day and said, in essence, “You and I totally disagree about Trump. But if there is a fire here, I want you to know that I will be here for you and your family.”

I vividly remember hearing of a conversation between a young, newly ordained clergyman and a seasoned older one. The topic of preaching came up. The cocky young man said, passionately, “I love to preach!” The older one quietly responded, “Just remember this: more important than loving to preach is loving the people you are preaching to.” To that I would add, not only loving them but giving them a place to believe what they believe without making them feel like aliens.

In closing this little memoir of how I learned to preach without ignoring the political storms that afflict us, I give these two examples from parish life that I witnessed myself, from the sidelines so to speak. These illustrations were powerful because they really happened and they happened in congregations that tilted left but still held to a generous and embracing care for all its members:

►A member of the congregation was a bachelor who was awkward with women. He wanted to date, but never made much headway. He was a devoted member of the congregation and faithfully attended the Bible study groups. He offered his services in many areas of church life. His views were far to the right of most other congregants; they knew it and he knew it. It became a sort of joke; provocative but affectionate little remarks would be made with him standing right there, not behind his back. Because his love of the church was deep and strong, he was always welcome as a member of Christ’s flock however much he held to his unyielding views. When he died, he was fondly celebrated as a member of the Resurrection just like everyone else.

►In another, much smaller church, a middle-aged man, was stricken with an advanced cancer and rapidly declined. He was an Army veteran of fierce and vocal convictions that conflicted noticeably with some of the more liberal-minded military vets (and others) in the congregation. That did not stop the church members from calling on him. A little episode from one of these visitations was told and retold afterwards. A man of the same late-middle age went to see the sick man in the hospital. The TV in the room was preset to CNN with the volume turned off. As the caller left, he raised the volume a bit and quietly changed the channel to Fox News.

No single narrative can encompass the very real problems of political differences. Would we want to change the channel to a virulently neo-Nazi network? Of course not. There are limits. The point is that an acknowledgment of the personhood of a longtime fellow Christian worshipper was made. The story was told and retold later, partly as an affirmation of the personhood of the dying man but especially, the acknowledgement that simple human kindness can make a statement that is stronger than any impassioned exhortation that speaks only to one side of the argument.

The purpose of using these particular illustrations is to show how to avoid the catastrophic splits in communities that result in hardened attitudes like those among the Iranian expats and the synagogue struggles in the New Yorker article.

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If I am able, I will endeavor to follow up with further ideas about how to move hearts and minds to think with Christian charity while still making a stand against certain things that Christians can never support…like, for instance, insulting opponents, trampling on hard-won human rights, encouraging inhumane prison conditions, debasing whole populations, and violating the laws of war.

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[1] I say “we” because most of my worshipping life, not inconsiderable over my 88 years, has been in liberal-minded churches. Most of my preaching life took place in more theologically robust pulpits—an interesting subject in itself.

[2] To the same point, there was a similar article in The New Yorker recently, “The Divide,” by Eyal Press in The New Yorker (April 6, 2026), describing the painful split among Jews since the murderous attacks of Hamas on October 7, 2023. The focus is on one particular synagogue and the dilemma of keeping the congregation intact.

[3] Again, to be clear about my own commitments, I vividly remember reading in the 1970s about Shah Reza Pahlevi’s secret police, the Savak, and its torture methods (with drawings). That cemented my stance about the Shah. Likewise I will never forget the day where the infamous photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were first made public. I was spending a month in Edinburgh at that time. Walking past a newsstand, I saw the photos on the front page of The Scotsman. I do not remember ever being so ashamed of our country. I give these illustrations to show how invested I have been for a long time in opposing torture.

[4] If one wants to talk about training, it is virtually inarguable that the training in non-violence of the young people doing the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement is still the example for the ages. A good summary is found at https://civilrightstrail.com/experience/student-led-sit-ins-across-the-south-lead-to-desegregated-businesses/