ON NOVEMBER 13, 2016, THE Sunday after the election of Donald Trump, I stepped into the pulpit of St. Barnabas Memorial Church in Falmouth, Massachusetts, to preach. I do this two or three times a month, but it’s fair to say I approached my homiletical responsibility differently that Sunday. The months since November 2016 have buffeted us with report after report of scandal, violence, injustice, and deceit, so it may be worth remembering just what those five days between Tuesday, November 8, and Sunday, November 13, looked and felt like in the United States. At DeWitt Junior High, in my home state of Michigan, white students formed a wall outside the school and barred entry to any student of color. The white students said they were making America great again. A toy doll with brown skin had string tied around its neck and was hanged inside an elevator at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, students of color were spat upon while entering and exiting the multicultural student center. At San Diego State, a Muslim student was assaulted and her hijab torn from her head. There are many other examples.
These things saddened and frightened me, and as I climbed to the pulpit, I knew I must address them. The question, of course, was not if I should preach about politics, but how, and that question persists months later. Since early 2016 we have been told over and again by pundits and historians alike that our (continuing, unending) political moment is one of absolute singularity, one entirely without precedent. No one has ever campaigned like this, governed like this, spoken like this, lied like this, boasted like this, tweeted like this. So how should one preach in response to all this? What should political preaching look like in the age of Donald Trump? That is one question. But I want to ask a different, related, and perhaps more important one. In the age of Donald Trump, I do not want to ask how one should preach about politics. I want to ask: what will the politics of preaching itself be?
