Liberal Christians and their Allies Are the “Resistance” America Needs to Fight
Forget the "Progressives." Liberal Protestants, Liberal Catholics, and Reform Jews Undermine Conservative Constitutional Populism
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
On January 21, President Trump, Vice President Vance, their wives, and their families filed into pews at Washington National Cathedral and heard the Trump Administration’s policies excoriated from the pulpit by the Right Honorable Mariann E. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C. Budde’s “plea” on behalf of illegal immigrants and LBGTQ+ identifiers was the first direct “strike” against Trump since his election. It appealed to establishment newspapers, which ran it on their front pages to signal a new “resistance.” But Budde may have revealed more than she wanted, or knew. Digging into the Episcopalian church she leads, and its religious allies among liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, shows that these groups have been key players in the "progressive" takeover of our constitutional republic. Budde's screed revealed the depth of the pushes in liberal churches for pro-amnesty and pro-“queer,” as well as pro-atheist, pro-“Social Justice,” and pro-SEL-and-CRT. All of these policies undermine the traditions of their faiths—and of America—from within.
A Powerful Plea on January 21—and One that Deceives
Certainly, the optics of the scene Budde staged on January 21—a lone bishop sending a plea to the most powerful man in the world on behalf of the “dispossessed”—hit deep chords of Christian history. These historical allegories range from Jesus with the Sanhedrin to Martin Luther with Emperor Charles to Pope John Paul II with the Soviet Union. But Budde’s “testimony of faith” was a false one, because the power differentials at play were exactly the opposite of what she and the media told us.
The Episcopalian Church for which Budde speaks is among the oldest in the United States and has been tied to institutional power here since its inception. Along with Puritans, Congregationalists, Unitarians; Jesuits and liberal Catholics; and reform Jews, it has been the religious grounding for the administrators, corporatists, academics, non-profit “leaders,” and media operators who form what we call the deep state.
These religions are aimed at powerful institutionalists, America’s very high; but they legitimize themselves by claiming to serve the very low. Tracing their moves and the threat they pose to the republic means first examining the history of their operations and, second, their current salvos against American citizenship and culture.
The Silent Rise of a Religious Elite
The Episcopalians came quite literally from America’s enemies. The end of the American Revolution “severed the Bishop of London’s jurisdiction over members of the Church of England in thirteen former British colonies.” This Church of England became Episcopalian, but Episcopalian leaders’ contempt for one of its on-the-ground wings under Francis Asbury, a lay preacher close to regular people, diminished their ranks. Episcopalian leaders “snubbed Asbury, regarding him as an uneducated social inferior” and “Asbury, accordingly wanted nothing to do with them, certain that methodist clergy would forever be treated as inferior by their ilk.” Instead he split with them and founded what became the Methodists.
The new Methodists, along with Baptists and Roman Catholics, favored the Christian populism of America’s constitutional republic. The Episcopalians, along with the Congregationalists, the Puritans, and the Unitarians, supported elite politics, and clustered at elite universities and magazines and charities. Throughout the nineteenth century, when America was dominated by Christian constitutional populism, these “elite believers” stayed in the Northeast and quietly garlanded their influence. They kept their hold on elite education via secondary schools like Groton, founded by an Episcopalian minister. And they allied with rising monopolists to expand or create institutions we know today. These included Harvard and MIT; The New Republic and Atlantic Magazines; and the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. These Protestants were joined by Reformed Jews who bought The New York Times and founded the Ethical Culture Fieldston school; and Jesuit Catholics like those who founded Georgetown, St. Louis University, and Boston College.
All of these religious operators were intellectuals, and they stayed away not only from the deep religious commitments of other Christian and Jewish believers (Baptists, Methodists, conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews) but also from the rough and tumble of populist politics. Instead they embraced higher causes like “world peace,” “human rights” and arms control. Domestically, they focused on helping the helpless, which didn’t exactly mean helping. Instead, as Restoration News has reported, it meant “reforming” by educating Irish and Italian Catholics to elect “the better sort” rather than the “big man” that “primitive people” admired. If this sounds like a familiar criticism of MAGA supporters, it probably should.
As the Deep State Rises, the Liberal Believers Increase Control
With America’s entry into World War II and the Cold War and the massive funding for their institutions that came with it, the liberal “believers” had new scope for their operations. Their main pipeline was education. Liberal Protestants and Reform Rabbis near Harvard and MIT started ministering to arriving flocks of academics funded by federal government grants. They updated the old intellectual Protestant preoccupation with searching for sin into a “therapeutic” search for “self-expression” and “personal fulfillment.”
New secondary schools like St. Ann’s in Brooklyn joined Fieldston to serve as a pipeline for the Ivy Leagues. (Today St. Ann is known for a child sex scandal and for the number of people it sends to the Ivy Leagues. But it was originally founded as the school wing of a historic Episcopalian church in the 1960s.) From cradle to college, then, the postwar elite had an educational path. But it wasn’t just the Ivy leagues. The National Association of Episcopal Schools was founded in 1965 and today presides over almost 1,200 schools. There are 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the country, and 60 high schools.
Liberal Believers’ Priorities: Atheism, Social Justice, and SEL/DEI/CRT
The priorities of these liberal “believers,” the people they educate, and the large government-funded institutions they influence are disquieting in the extreme.
Liberal Protestants have made a special point of allying with atheists: they helped found, in 1948, the Alliance for the Separation of Church and State. Restoration News reported on the agenda of the Alliance, which was to hack away at the longtime collaboration between state governments and churches using the Courts. It has also reported that the Satanic Temple, which is sending promoters of atheism into today’s schools, is directly linked to the Alliance. And it has reported on the fact that the Alliance is currently headed by Rachel Laser: “an advocate for racial justice” who worked for the Religion Action Center of Reform Judaism, where she “ran interfaith campaigns on LGBTQ+ equality, immigration reform, gun-violence prevention.”
There is also Social Emotional Learning, Critical Race Theory, and Diversity Equity inclusion programs aimed at “educating” secondary schoolers and college students from the bottom up. These all flow from a focus on “mental health” that is a direct outgrowth of the focus on self-expression pioneered by Ivy league academics.
Beyond these focuses, liberal Protestants as well as Jesuits and reform Jews adopted the term “social justice” to cover a wide range of priorities. Reform Judaism’s website lists “racial justice,” “voting rights,” “gun violence prevention,” and “women’s rights,” under this heading. Jesuits have a special focus on “justice and ecology,” and Georgetown University, their preeminent university in the United States, lists as its top priorities “Intellectual rigor. Social justice. Self reflection.” Episcopalians focus on “racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and the war economy.”
These focuses lead all of these faith branches to the nurturing framework of the United Nations, which many of them had a hand in creating. Their work internationally also, as Restoration News has reported, circles back to American communities with “human rights” legislation that penalizes speech. These pushes are spearheaded by prominent Liberal Protestants and Reform Jews in conjunction with democratic socialists, whose aim for a post-nation world like the one before 1648 dovetails with the hopes of liberal “believers” for a world governed by international organizations.
The LGBTQ+ Agenda
LGBTQ+ issues also became a major push. In 1976, the leadership of the Episcopal Church voted for a "fully inclusive" church with regard to gay congregants; this eventually expanded to include transgenders. In 1995 Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum—the rabbi of a prominent Reform Jewish congregation in New York City which is the largest LGBTQ+ congregation in the country, and a prominent human rights advocate—sent a letter to the Reform Conference for American Rabbis asking it to approve same sex marriage, which it did. Kleinbaum has Democratic connections. She married Randi Weingarten. Weingarten is the head of the second-largest teachers union in America which serves as a front, as Restoration News has reported, for collusion between “respectable” and radical Democrats. She also served on President Biden’s Commission for International Religious Freedom.
For Jesuits, the push came later, at the hands of Father James Martin, the influential editor of the Jesuit magazine America, who interpreted the 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando as a reason to incorporate a belief in LGBTQ+ into his ministry. He later founded the organization Outreach to include LGBTQ+ in the ministry, winning praise from prominent members of an American church increasingly influenced by Pope Francis’s appointments. These included the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, “the key group for Catholic college and university presidents.”
Though these pushes are done in the name of helping the oppressed, their supporters are strangely powerful. One of these is the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a friend to liberal believers, which, as Restoration News has reported, was the project of Democratic financiers and Hollywood producers and directors in the early 1990s. Since then, it has become a faithful servant to corporate monopoly donors.
The Playbook Today: An Immigration Case Study
Today, immigration is the major push, from all of these players.
The Episcopal Church has set up an Office of Government Relations solely dedicated to taking action on behalf of illegals.
In the summer of 2024, Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit, had his work with illegal migrants profiled by The New Yorker, arguably the most influential liberal magazine in America—and the Jesuits’ approach to deportations has flowed from there. This past month, James Martin praised Bishop Budde and, in America Magazine, wrote arguing that while “nations have the right to protect their borders, broadly speaking,” helping refugees is “not optional” for Catholics, and “telling them to ‘Go home’ is not what Jesus had in mind.” Martin, tellingly, is an ally of Kerry Robinson, the CEO of Catholic Charities, which Martin praises fulsomely. As Restoration News recently reported, Catholic Charities receives State Department and USAID funding to minister to illegal immigrants, which has the longer-term effect of putting bodies in pews. The United Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken up this line, earning criticism from Vice President Vance.
As early as 2017, Sharon Kleinbaum joined Reform Jewish rabbis who got themselves arrested in the “holy act” of opposing Trump’s travel ban; today the Union for Reform Judaism has mounted opposition to deportations from their congregations on the same logic. So has Kleinbaum’s spouse Weingarten, speaking on behalf of the American Federation of Teachers. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has mounted a legal defense to deportations.
Maybe surprisingly, these stances receive support not just from Democrats but from centrists and centrist conservatives. When it comes to culture and institutions, then, the liberal believers still hold the cards.
How to Fight Back
How can President Trump’s Christian Conservative Populist movement fight back against the false prophets of elite liberal religion?
First, President Trump’s NGO freeze should be made permanent for any organization flowing from the branches of these faiths. Their leaders and advisers should be fired from any advisory post they hold with the United States government.
Second, the federal and state governments should investigate any religious school for which students receive vouchers to attend. If these schools are pushing SEL, CRT, social justice curricula, LGBTQ+, human rights, or a humanitarian agenda, the vouchers should be withdrawn.
Third, hospitals, universities, and graduate schools receiving federal and state funding associated with these agendas should lose it immediately.
Finally, in the face of this “resistance,” President Trump and his supporters should make one thing clear. The religious traditions represented by Mariann Budde and her allies are neither religious nor oppressed. Nor are they remotely American. They are tools of unaccountable institutional power and institutional capture, and should be treated accordingly.