Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent didn’t go exactly as I had planned this year. Instead of church, I went to the emergency room, and my plans to start a Lenten journal got put on hold . (It’s hard to journal properly when you’re balancing a laptop in a hospital bed with a pulse oximeter strapped to your finger.) But I did have plenty of time to meditate while waiting for labs in the ER, and, later, when I was admitted for the next few days.
The hospital routine also inadvertently nudged me in the direction of a Plan B for my Lenten journaling. My original plan (you can see it HERE) was to follow the lectionary readings until Easter instead of doomscrolling about “the collapse of Western civilization.” Instead, I wound up bingewatching the TV news from “Morning Joe” (at 5 a.m. CST, about the same time they woke me up to take my vitals) through the rest of the day.
So I don’t have a Plan B yet for my journaling, but it looks like it’s going to have a news peg. Over the weekend Kristin du Mez, a Christian Reformed historian who writes about the “intersections of religion, gender, and politics in an effort to do my part to protect and defend our democracy,” may have set the tone for it with a “Call to Christians” on her Substack.
As it happens the pericope for the 1st Sunday in Lent features the Temptation of Christ — “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only’.” Not a bad fit for the news of the day. But du Mez gave me a more immediate text to reflect on, as she linked in turn to an interdenominational “Call to Christians in a Crisis of Faith and Democracy.” It’s worth quoting at lsome enght; in pertinent part, it reads:
[…] as Christians in the United States, representing the breadth of Christian traditions and one part of our nation’s religiously plural society, we are compelled to speak out more boldly at this time.
We call on all Christians to join us in greater acts of courage to resist the injustices and anti-democratic danger sweeping across the nation. In moments like this, silence is not neutrality—it is an active choice to permit harm.
This call is particularly dire as our nation commemorates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a time of celebration and reflection on our historic racial and human rights progress and setbacks, as we seek both democratic and civic renewal. Instead, current trends and forces assault our core rights and freedoms and threaten to derail and even destroy our democracy. This is not a distant danger or a future possibility. It is a present and urgent reality.
The government-sponsored cruelty and violence we are witnessing stands in total opposition to the teachings of Jesus. We refuse to be silent while too many people who call themselves Christians aid, abet, or simply stand by and allow these atrocities.
I didn’t realize it till later, after I was discharged from the hospital and did some keyword searches at home, but the Call to Christians in a Crisis of Faith and Democracy was issued on Ash Wednesday. Acccording to Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service, who obtained an advance copy, it was signed by nearly 400 faith leaders. Jenkins added:
The statement adds to growing faith-led resistance to the president’s agenda that has erupted over the past year, particularly in opposition to his immigration policies. In addition to statements and sermons issued by religious leaders — including Pope Leo XIV — condemning various policies, more than 100 clergy and faith leaders have been arrested while protesting Department of Homeland Security actions over the past year, and others have been pepper sprayed or shot with pepper balls and pepper rounds.
In addition, dozens of denominations, religious groups and individual houses of worship — as well as several individual faith leaders — have sued the administration over the last year claiming violations to their religious freedom. [Links in the original.].
So maybe my Lenten discipline this year is to answer this call to resistance?
After all, as du Mez and her colleagues of various denominations1 point out, we are called to resist “powers and principalities.” And when religion and politics get too cozy, it damages both, as it has ever since the Emperor Constantine wagered a battlefield bet on Christianity in 325 CE. Their statement puts it like this:
We are facing a cruel and oppressive government; citizens and immigrants being demonized, disappeared, and even killed; the erosion of hard-won rights and freedoms; and a calculated effort to reverse America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity– all of which are pushing us toward authoritarian and imperial rule. What confronts us is not only an endangered democracy and the rise of tyranny. It is also a Christian faith corrupted by the heretical ideology of white Christian nationalism, and a church that has often failed to equip its members to model Jesus’s teachings and fulfill its prophetic calling as a humanitarian, compassionate, and moral compass for society.
I struggle with all of this. How does a congenitally moderate 83-year-old resist Caesar resist effectively? And how do I do it without feeling smug, judgmental and self-righteous myself?
Good questions, all. Questions I’ll have to sit with a while longer. Long enough, at anyh rate, to keep me journaling till Easter. So here’s my Plan B! Journal on today’s crisis of faith and democracy.
So farI’ve been encouraged by the community response to what can only be identified racial animus and as “incipient state terror,” especially in Minnesota. And inspired by the response from clergy nationwide as masked DHS agents terrorize immigrant communities. While so many insitutions of civil society, from white-shoe law firms to legacy media corporations, have knuckled under to the regime, a variety of Catholic and mainline Protestant religious bodies have resisted its mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
National media coverage has tended to focus on demonstrations, like the mass arrest of 100 clergy at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in January. But I think the local CBS affiliate, with another story in the same news cycle, came closer to the essence of what is at stake when the federal government flirts with state terror and what’s beginning to look like ethnic cleansing.2 The same evening, WCCO-TV, CBS News Minnesota reported on an interfaith service at Temple Israel in Minneapolis.
Among the speakers was the Right Rev. Mariann Budde of the Episcopal diocese of Washington, DC. Budde, best known nationally for urging President Trump, “in the name of our God, to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now” during his inaugural service at the National Cathedral, was one of 700 clergy who visited Minneapolis in solidarity with the local community. She said:
Across the country, we see you. And we will follow your example of love, decency and courage. […] Together we will bring this nightmare to an end. It is for this moment that we are here.
Each and every one of our traditions believes in the dignity of every human being,” said Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman of Temple Israel. “We don’t want hate,” she added. “We don’t want division. We want a voice that is of hope and clarity of compassion.”
Much the same note was sounded on Ash Wednesday in Chicago’s west suburbs, in Cardinal Blase Cupich’s homily during Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel honoring migrants who have been detained by the regime:
He recalled that God “got down into the dust” when God created us. God “touched” the dust, “molded” it, breathed life into it to create each of us. “You may be undocumented in the eyes of the state,” he said, “but you were handcrafted by the creator of the universe. Your worth does not come from a visa or a permit; it comes from the breath of God inside you.”
Steven P. Millies, author of a biography of Cardinal Joseph Bernadin who took part in the service and procession, said it united the church with the families whose loved ones have been detained or deported. He explaind:
The Mass at Our Lady of Carmel was the latest “mobilization” organized by the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership — so-called, said CSPL board chair Anthony Williams before the Mass, because they are opportunities to resist the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement strategy in an unusual, prayerful, peaceful way. They are meant to remind believers that “Our faith calls us not only to pray but to act.”
Most of all, these mobilizations unite the church to the families and others affected most by the administration. The events allow them to see and feel the presence of the whole church gathered to support them — both the swollen crowd that spilled out into the neighborhood and in the person of Cardinal Cupich, known to be close to Pope Leo XIV, who grew up in another working-class Chicago suburb. [Links in the original.]
Thus at a Catholic shrine outside Chicago, thus at an interfaith service in Minneapolis. I think the commandment at work here — to respect the human dignity of all who are created in the image of God — is common to all faiths. In his writeup of the Mass at Our Lady of Carmel, Millies answers one of my questions. What can I do? At least points in the direction of an answer.
Anything we do together as a people, we must do both cooperatively and also each alone. Our way has to be like the thick crowd at the Mass, forgoing disorder and chaos. Uncountable individual choices to be patient, to smile, to give way to someone else made that crowd a people united to become the best version of what human beings in action together can look like. We did it each ourselves, and we did it all together.
It has to be like that procession through the streets [of Melrose Park], a protest, yet no shouting, no destruction of property. There was no disorder, no matter how angry we all were about all that has happened. That Mass and procession showed that a different way is possible.
This way is not easy. It requires a deeply felt sense of shared purpose — even faith. It demands a real change of heart, each of us singly and all of us together as a people. It cannot be forced. To turn a people into a better direction requires something else. It must be given an opportunity. It must be prompted. It must be invited. But each person must decide for change before their choices begin to make change.
And isn’t that what Lent is all about?
Notes
1 Jack Jenkins’ list of signatories reads like a Who’s Who of American religion: Signers include Bishop Vashti McKenzie, president of the National Council of Churches; Bishop Hope Morgan Ward of the United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops; the Rev. Jihyun Oh, stated clerk of General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA); Bishop Darin Moore, presiding prelate for the Mid-Atlantic Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; David Emmanuel Goatley, president of Fuller Seminary; Jennifer Herdt, senior associate dean for academic affairs at Yale University Divinity School; the Rev. Corey D. B. Walker, dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity; UMC Bishop Minerva Carcaño; the Rev. Otis Moss III of Trinity United Church of Christ; David Cortright, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; and the Rev. Randall Balmer, who holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College.
The signers also include several longtime faith-based activists, such as Bishop Dwayne Royster of Faith in Action, Pastor Shane Claiborne of Red Letter Christians, the Rev. Adam Russell Taylor of Sojourners and the Rev. Jim Wallis of Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice.
2 The terms are historian Timothy Snyder’s. See “State Terror,” Thinking about…, Substack, April 15, 2025 https://snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror. Wikipedia’s definition is as good as any: “State terrorism is terrorism conducted by a state against its own citizens or another state’s citizens.“ Snyder also makes a compelling case that only a temporary restraining order by a federal district judge in Ohio has prevented DHS from conducting an “ethnic cleansing of Haitians by the federal government. I use that term advisedly, since the deportations were to be directed at a specific group, defined by race, and racial defamed by the president and vice-president. See his Substack “An Ethnic Cleansing Averted (For Now),” Feb. 6, 2026 https://snyder.substack.com/p/an-ethnic-cleansing-averted-for-now.
Links and Citations
A Call to Christian in a Crisis of Faith and Democracy, Feb. 18, 2026 https://acalltochristians.org/.
Giovanna Dell’Orto, Sarah Raza and Jack Brook, “Thousands rally against immigration enforcement in subzero Minnesota temperatures,” Associated Press, Jan. 23, 2026 https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-ice-immigration-protest-unions-faith-leaders-edc6c4884f8cc26be9ad34a28d82a7a5.
Kristin du Mez, “This Week, and A Call for Christians,” Connections, Substack, Feb. 23, 2026 https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/this-week-and-a-call-to-christians.
Jack Jenkins, “400 Christian leaders urge resistance to Trump administration on Ash Wednesday,” Religion News Service, Feb. 18, 2026 https://religionnews.com/2026/02/18/400-christian-leaders-urge-resistance-to-trump-administration-on-ash-wednesday/.
Steven P. Millies, “An Ash Wednesday ‘mobilization’ showed us a way out of our country’s mess,” Religion News Service, Feb. 18, 2026 https://religionnews.com/2026/02/19/an-ash-wednesday-mobilization-showed-us-a-way-out-of-our-countrys-mess/.
“Minnesotans of different faiths gather to support immigrant communities,” WCCO – CBS Minnesota, Minneapolis, Jan. 23, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09FB80xQO9s.
David Paulsen, “Washington bishop’s plea to Trump: ‘Have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared’,” Episcopal News Service, Jan. 21, 2026 https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2025/01/21/washington-bishops-plea-to-trump-have-mercy-upon-the-people-in-our-country-who-are-scared/.
[Uplinked Feb. 27, 2026]
Ordinary Time 