Local opinion: Clergy criticism of Trump is moral witness, not partisanship

Every time a member of the clergy criticizes this president, someone accuses us of "getting political." I reject that charge. There is a difference between partisanship and moral witness, and that difference is the whole point of this essay.

Partisanship asks which team should hold power. Moral witness asks what any power, of either party, is doing with it. When Republican members of Congress rubber-stamp policies that concentrate authority in one man's hands, clergy are not obligated to stay silent simply because the party label says "Republican." We would say the same about a Democratic president who behaved this way. Biblical morality tilts towards the well-being of all people.

Consider the dismantling of USAID. A peer-reviewed modeling study in The Lancet, led by researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, projects that continued cuts to U.S. foreign aid could cause roughly 14 million additional deaths worldwide by 2030, more than 4.5 million of them children under five. Independent trackers monitoring the shutdown in real time have already logged hundreds of thousands of deaths from the loss of HIV, malaria, and malnutrition programs. Reasonable people can argue over the precise numbers, but no honest reading of the evidence calls this a victimless budget line. Congress had the power to intervene and largely chose not to. Naming that failure is a pastoral duty, not a partisan one.

Then there is the casualness with which this president has spoken of unchecked power. In December 2023, asked point-blank on Fox News whether he would ever abuse the presidency for retribution, he answered, "Except for Day One," then repeated the line at rallies as an applause line. The Founders who separated power into three branches, precisely so no single man could rule by decree, would not hear that as a joke. They would hear it as the thing they built the whole system to prevent — and alongside it sits a Department of Justice increasingly used not as an independent guardian of the law but as an instrument dispatched against political opponents, journalists, and even faith communities organizing around causes like immigrant sanctuary. The DOJ, reduced to serving one man instead of the country.

What troubles me most, though, is not any single policy. It is the absence of humility, mercy or self-examination in this president's public speech — the very qualities every spiritual tradition I know asks of those who hold power over others. Cruelty toward the vulnerable, contempt for the truth, and a taste for dominance are not conservative or liberal failings. They are spiritual ones that denote depravity, corruption and hypocrisy.

This is old ground for people of faith. The prophet Amos did not critique Israel's court because he preferred another dynasty. He critiqued it because the powerful were selling the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, building houses of hewn stone on the backs of the poor while claiming God's favor. His demand that justice roll down like waters was not a policy platform. It was an indictment of power that had stopped noticing who it was crushing.

Jesus did the same, and not only in words. He walked into the temple, the seat of religious and economic power in Jerusalem, and overturned the tables of those profiting there. He called Herod, the client-king who ruled by Rome's leave, "that fox.” He was executed by an empire that found a poor rabbi's moral authority more threatening than any army. None of that was partisanship. It was prophetic action — power confronted in the name of the powerless.

Clergy who criticize this president are not campaigning for a party. We are doing what Amos and Jesus did: reminding power that it is not God.