A thing about America is that we are not supposed to have religious royalty. Our head of state isn’t the head of any religion. We claim no national religious affiliation. We have no archbishop of Canterbury, chief rabbi, commander of the faithful, or pope.
And yet we have a long history of embracing national religious figures: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, Lyman Beecher, Dorothy Day, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name a few.
And yet, in the year of our Lord 2026, at exactly the moment that religion is in a period of sustained retreat, we are experiencing an ascendance of sterling-and-powerful American religious voices—from Chicago-born Pope Leo IV to Texas titan T.D. Jakes to the first East Asian-American ordained rabbi Angela Buchdahl.
One of the clearest moral authorities of all is Mariann Budde. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, since 2011, the New Jersey native has found herself thrust into some of the country’s diciest moral quagmires—and handled them all beautifully. In 2017, she oversaw the removal of Washington National Cathedral‘s stained-glass windows honoring Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and replaced them with windows representing the civil rights movement. In 2018, she presided over the interment of the ashes of the murdered gay man Matthew Shepard at the cathedral.
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In June 2020, amid the George Floyd protests in Washington, DC, Budde criticized the use of police and National Guard to forcibly clear protestors from Lafayette Square ahead of President Donald Trump’s pose for a photo op in front of St. John’s Church. She condemned the use of the church “as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.”
The day after Trump’s second inauguration, Budde hosted the tradtional interfaith service, in which she implored the president sitting in the front row: "Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now." She specifically cited the LGBTQ+ communities, immigrants, and refugees fleeing from war in their home countries.
She absolutely embodies the title of her bestselling memoir, How to Be Brave. And at a time when politicians cynically drape themselves in religious language and iconography, she is a reminder that true courage is speaking truth to power, even when then convenient thing to do is to claim more power for yourself.
This week Bishop Budde hosts me in conversation in the National Cathedral’s popular podcast, Crossroads. It was her first episode hosting! I was deeply honored when she reached out earlier this summer about how much she enjoyed my new book, A Time to Gather, and how valuable she thought it would be to catalyze a conversation about the role of organized religion in rebuilding communities of trust across the country.
You can listen to the conversation below, or by clicking on this link. I know you’ll enjoy it. I teared up with gratitude at the end of our taping.
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Speaking of first-ever, join me in Santa Fe next month with Chip Conley and Kari Cardinale for my first ever live class on making meaning in life’s biggest moments!
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