President Jimmy Carter entered hospice care when he was 98 years old. Nine months later, his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, whom he described as, “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” died. Carter said he wanted to live long enough to cast his vote for Vice President Kamala Harris for president. On October 16, he fulfilled his wish but ultimately failed to achieve his goal of defeating Donald Trump. 

Perhaps Carter just could not, or did not want to hold on to see Trump return to the Oval Office. On December 29, just three weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Carter passed away at the age of 100.

On January 9, Carter’s casket arrived at the steps of the Washington National Cathedral. It was draped in an American flag and borne by a special military honor guard. Before entering the towering cathedral doors for his state funeral, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde; Reverend Randy Hollerith, Dean of the cathedral; Reverend Rosemarie Logan Duncan, the Canon of Worship; and Reverend Sean Rowe, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, placed their hands on the coffin and prayed. 

The invited guests were already seated inside, including every living U.S. president and vice president (excluding Dick Cheney). Most of the Supreme Court was there, the House and Senate leadership, foreign heads of state, and some 3,000 additional guests. As we waited inside, spiritual music chosen by Carter and his wife was performed by the United States Marine Chamber Orchestra, Armed Forces Chorus, and the cathedral choir. When suddenly the music shifted to something more contemporary, I realized that pianist David Osborne was playing “The Wind Beneath My Wings.” 

The funeral marked more than the death and celebration of President Carter. It exposed the profound challenges that lay ahead for both our government and the nation as we prepare for Trump to not only resume the presidency, but do so at a time when the climate crisis is wreaking unparalleled devastation and right-wing resentment politics having gained enough ground to elect Trump president again, give Republicans control of the House and Senate, and build an ultra-conservative Supreme Court. 

The funeral was an unexpectedly fitting location for a handoff Carter had fought so vigorously to avoid. The cathedral has often stood as a symbol of resistance to Trump, his politics, and policies — and is prepared to continue to do so in the times ahead. 

In 2019, midway through the previous Trump administration, Bishop Budde, Dean Hollerith, and cathedral Canon Theologian, Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas, released a searing statement, likening Trump to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and asserting, “As faith leaders who serve at Washington National Cathedral — the sacred space where America gathers at moments of national significance — we feel compelled to ask: After two years of President Trump’s words and actions, when will Americans have enough?” 

One year later, Bishop Budde made national news after President Trump stood before St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square — the most historic and famed church within the diocese — after having violently cleared a Black Lives Matter protest so that he could hold up a bible for a photo op. Bishop Budde strongly condemned Trump’s actions, calling both his message and posture “antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that we as a church stand for.” 

These and others members of clergy officiating Carter’s service and in leadership at the cathedral have not only demonstrated tools for a Trump resistance, but also embody those attributes and aspirations most vigorously pursued by Carter, but which Trump has pledged to squash: diversity, equity, inclusion, racial justice, gender equity, LGBTQ+ rights, the rights of immigrants and migrants, environmental justice, climate action, human rights, and the separation of church of state. 

These include retired Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly-gay Bishop in all of Christendom; Reverend Leonard Hamlin, cathedral Canon Missioner, whose work includes ending gun violence and advancing racial justice and reconciliation; and Reverend Douglas, one of the first Black women to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church and a leader in the fields of womanist theology, racial reconciliation, social justice, and sexuality and the Black church. In her most recent book, Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter, Douglas warns of Trump: “In 2016 America elected a clear white supremacist as president.”

While they are nonpartisan, and clear that all are welcome at their cathedral, including the president-elect and his followers, leaders of the cathedral tell me that moving forward they fully intend to hold anyone who tramples their spiritual values accountable while also ensuring support for those most likely to be the targets of harm. Their strongest contempt is for white Christian nationalism, a movement that has embraced Trump and to which Trump has offered not only a platform but also real political power. 

Bishop Robinson likens this moment in our history to that which preceded the Civil War. 

“As far as I’m concerned, anything that devalues another human being is violent,” Reverend Douglas tells me. “That goes for racist, sexist, misogynistic, transphobic ideology. It’s violent, and we have to name the violence. We have to stop the violence. That’s our task.” 

From a Confederate Flag to Racial Justice

Despite its name, the Washington National Cathedral has no formal connection to and receives no direct support from the federal government. But it does maintain a special place in the federal sphere. In 1893, a congressional charter authorized a cathedral dedicated to religion, education and charity. Construction in the gothic style began in 1907 atop Mount St. Alban, the highest peak in the city, when President Theodore Roosevelt helped lay the foundation stone and ended 83 years later, when President George H.W. Bush oversaw the laying of the final stone in 1990. It is the sixth-largest cathedral in the world and the second-largest in the nation. 

It is also constantly reinventing itself, such as the addition in the 1980s of a sculpture of Darth Vader’s head to its 112 grotesques (think “gargoyle,” except that a gargoyle serves a function — to spout water — or gargles, otherwise, it’s a “grotesque”).

Its many arches and small recessed chapels provide a surprisingly welcoming environment even to the non-religious. Multicolored light paints over the grey limestone as the sun moves across the sky and cuts through the 215 stained glass mosaic windows covering the cathedral walls. Though a member of the Episcopal church, the cathedral holds itself as “a house of prayer for all people.” Dean Hollerith is keen to open the building to the public, hosting yoga classes, talks on energy justice and the climate crisis, and guest speakers including Liz Cheney. 

The cathedral is also wrestling with its own racist past.

In addition to providing its own regular services, the cathedral serves as host to many key moments of national celebration and mourning. Carter’s is its fifth presidential funeral, following those of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush. President Woodrow Wilson is buried within the cathedral. 

Had any of the attendees of Ford’s funeral in 2007 looked to their right, they would have seen the Confederate flag emblazoned within stained glass windows of the church. Two window panes commemorating Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were donated to the cathedral by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1953. They remained installed there for 64 years. 

On January 5, I sat in one of the many small chapels in the cathedral, a yellow and red pillow hand-stitched with an image of Sojourner Truth on the seat before me. Reverend Douglas had just delivered a Sunday Sermon steeped in messages of hope, love, and resistance and then bid personal farewells to a long line of enthusiastic parishioners. Now changed out of her voluminous white robes, she opted for a somewhat oversized brown checkered jacket atop her white clerical collar, while maintaining her signature red lipstick and white pearl earrings.

Reverend Douglas came to the cathedral in 2015. When I ask what it was like for her to look upon those windows for the first time, she instinctively closes her eyes and tightens her lips. Pain travels rapidly across her face as she chooses her words carefully. “Unwelcoming” is the word she finally settles on. In Resurrection Hope, she has a good deal more to say on the topic, describing their placement as a kind of blasphemy. “A display of these men within sacred spaces insinuates theological legitimacy for white supremacist ideologies and values. Such a display provides a sacred canopy over the Lost Cause narrative, which of course was the intention of the UDC in placing these memorials there,” she writes. 

Douglas served on a task force formed to plan for the windows’ removal, part of a broader movement to confront monuments to white supremacy across the nation. “We embarked on a journey of trying to change the narrative of this place around race, and really engaging in issues of racial justice,” she says. 

In 2017, a white supremacist mob brandishing torches and weapons descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to stop the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. “After Charlottesville happened, we knew the windows had to go,” Douglas says. The windows were promptly removed. In September 2023, the church installed the “Now and Forever Windows” heralding racial justice and the Civil Rights movement created by the eminent Black artist Kerry James Marshall. 

In her book, Douglas details Trump’s overtly racist response to the broader movement, describing how he has “shamelessly trafficked in white supremacist and anti-Black rhetoric.” Trump defended the Charlottesville mob, saying some were “very fine people.” He tweeted, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” and in 2020, Trump warned, “a radical movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance. [They] have torn down statues of our founders, desecrated our memorials.” 

Douglas shares a text from her son, which reads, “He [Trump] literally is reigniting the KKK…. Supporting these confederate statues is really about the same thing as supporting the KKK — white supremacy. How come white people can’t see that?” 

Pray Today, Protest Tomorrow

A few days before Carter’s funeral, Dean Hollerith takes me on a tour of the cathedral. If you want to humanize a massive religious institution, there’s no better way than seeing the wine bottles lined up in the attic placed there across a century by the masons who constructed the building. Out on the roof, the highest vantage point in the city, he encourages me to look not out at the Washington Monument, but instead down under my hands. The roof’s tiles are marked with etchings made by students who have snuck up to the perch over the decades to write, “Stan was here” and the kinds of drawings more typically found on a teenager’s notebook than a church edifice.

Seated in his comfortable yet modest office deep within the cathedral, Dean Hollerith describes arriving at his job in 2016 just in time to host the traditional prayer service following inauguration of the president. He reiterated that all are welcome to the cathedral, but, he says, “you know, we can pray for you today and protest you tomorrow, right?” On the same day that Dean Hollerith and Bishop Budde led the inaugural prayer service for the new Trump administration, they immediately put on their tennis shoes and spent the rest of the day at the Women’s March. 

A few months later, Hollerith condemned the Trump White House and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ use of the Bible to justify separating immigrant children from their parents, calling it “the same lopsided reasoning used to justify slavery.” 

On December 12, 2020, demonstrators from a pro-Trump rally, including members of the Proud Boys, marched through Washington D.C. ripping down Black Lives Matter banners outside two historically Black congregations, Asbury United Methodist Church and Metropolitan AME Church, and setting one banner on fire. Bishop Budde and Dean Hollerith denounced the “racist and religious overtones surrounding the effort to discredit the presidential election,” stating: “We reject the version of Christianity that seeks to provide a mantle of spiritual authority to the poison of White nationalism…. What we are witnessing is nothing less than idolatry — the worship of someone other than God as though he were God.” 

And less than one month later, following the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Bishop Budde and Dean Hollerith released a video informing the president that there had been no fraudulent election, and denouncing his actions to call supporters to the U.S. Capitol, feed their conspiracy theories, and whip them into a frenzy. They warned, “To those who see this as a Christian endeavor, or something to be blessed in the name of Jesus, there is nothing Christian about what we are witnessing today. Nothing.” 

Matthew Shepard’s Ashes

Reverend Hamlin says that the best tool of resistance is not just speaking but embodying and acting upon one’s values. In 2018, the cathedral provided a resting place for the ashes of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who died of injuries inflicted in a brutal hate crime in 1998.

Standing in the cathedral crypt alongside Reverend Hamlin, Bishop Robinson shares how, for 20 years, Shepard’s parents had not buried their son’s ashes, fearing that his grave would be desecrated by the Westboro Baptist Church, a designated extremist hate group and family-based cult that picketed Shepard’s funeral. They asked if the cathedral would consider taking the ashes. The Dean responded, “This is where Matthew belongs.” For Robinson it was a critical moment. “It’s not just a church welcoming Matthew’s ashes, it was the freaking National Cathedral!” he says, shock still filling his voice. 

The chapel where Shepard is interred has become a place of pilgrimage. “The vast majority of the Christian world is still anti-gay. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that we are intrinsically disordered,” Robinson says. “For this place, sitting high on this hill overlooking Washington, to do this thing offers comfort and solace and hope to all kinds of kids who are still suffering.” 

On November 30, 2023, Reverend Mother Felix Culpa of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of queer and trans nuns, read at a service held at the cathedral honoring Shepard, and naming him a “modern day martyr.” The cathedral commissioned a spiritual portrait of Shepard by Kelly Latimore, a preeminent iconographer of contemporary icons. 

Later, they commissioned several more paintings by Latimore, now featured in an exhibit on the seventh floor depicting people across time advocating for social justice, including Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, a woman helping a man receive clean water in Flint, Michigan, based on the parable of Jesus the Good Samaritan, and a migrant mother and her young son held captive in a cage based on the Madonna and Child. 

The Cathedral and Carter’s Environmental Legacy

The National Cathedral, like Washington itself, is progressive and political. It nonetheless came as a surprise that while I sat at the cathedral café after observing services on December 29, I just happened to find myself beside two cathedral parishioners who are also both veterans of the Carter administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

Dr. Stan Meiburg is Executive Director of the Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University and William Dickinson is President at the Environmental Policy Network. Back in 1977, Meiburg was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University just starting what became a 39-year career at the EPA, during which he rose to become deputy administrator during the Obama administration. Dickinson began his services under Ford, continuing with Carter, and culminating in a 16-year career at the agency, including serving as Special Assistant to the EPA administrator for Toxics and Pesticides.

“I had great pride in being a part of this administration,” Meiburg later tells me. “It was inspiring.” Dickinson describes Carter’s EPA as the most impactful in U.S. history. (Rolling Stone contributing writer Jeff Goodell calls Carter “America’s greatest environmental president.”) 

Meiberg and Dickson describe Carter’s EPA as the antithesis to what the Trump administration pursued in its first term, and the destruction it now intends to accomplish over the next four years, particularly with the support of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court. 

Both shared a long list of achievements and bristled at a revisionist history that Carter’s only serious achievements occurred after he left office. This still relatively new EPA was tasked with writing and enforcing the rules needed to implement a new suite of critical laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (managing hazardous waste). They also worked to confront the climate crisis and support passage of the Superfund program which holds industries responsible for cleaning up (or paying to clean up) hazardous and polluted land. 

The Carter administration was not only an environmental advocate, but also virulently anti-monopoly and painfully aware of the risk of a growing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals and mega-corporations. I detail in my book, The Tyranny of Oil, Carter’s historically aggressive Federal Trade Commission under the leadership of Michael Pertschuk. He argued that the FTC should be “the greatest public interest law firm in the country.” Among other antitrust actions, he relentlessly pursued the fossil fuel industry. President Reagan’s FTC then dismissed his case against the oil companies.

Meiburg and his wife now live in North Carolina, but they return to attend cathedral services. He describes being raised a Southern Baptist “just like President Carter,” he tells me. “I know what small Baptist country churches look like and the cathedral is a long step from there, but it’s not a step of discontinuity.”

A Funeral to Honor the “First Millennial”

At George H.W. Bush’s funeral in 2018, the presidents and their wives all sat together in the front pew of the cathedral with the vice presidents seated behind them. As a family member of the deceased, former President George W. Bush and wife Laura were seated across the aisle.

At Jimmy Carter’s funeral last week, the presidents and vice presidents were largely unchanged, but their seating arrangement was quite different. Gone was the long front row. In its place were just four chairs in which President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff were seated. Behind them sat the former presidents and their wives, followed by the vice presidents and their wives. Thus, Harris was seated in front of, rather than behind, Trump. 

In a rare occurrence for such an event, Michelle Obama was notably absent from Carter’s funeral. This meant that Obama and Trump were seated side-by-side and the two quickly took advantage of the unique opportunity launching into a lengthy discussion. At the end of the funeral, I spotted them appearing to depart in a different direction than the other presidents, perhaps heading off to speak together further. 

Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang a radiant rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” one of Carter’s favorites. He once said of the song, “In many countries around the world — my wife and I have visited about 125 countries — you hear John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ used almost equally with national anthems.” Atlanta gospel singer Phyllis Adams and pianist Leila Bolden moved even the non-spiritual attendees with their transformative performance of “Amazing Grace.” 

As the eulogies progressed, it became clear that much of the proceedings had two primary goals: celebrating the life and work of Jimmy Carter and sending out warnings to and about the president-elect. Many focused on Carter’s honesty, integrity, and adherence to the rule of law, even when it cost him politically.

President Biden repeatedly emphasized Carter as a man of great character whose life demonstrated how “we have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor and to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all, the abuse of power.” 

Seeming to target both Trump’s policies and the power exerted over him by billionaires including Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Jimmy Carter’s grandson, Joshua Carter, said that until his death, his grandfather worked to confront “the richest people in the world using their enormous wealth to buy a nation’s poverty,” and identified “the most serious and universal problem on our planet as the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth.” 

Reverend Andrew Jackson Young Jr., a renowned civil rights leader, served as Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations. In that role, Young brought Carter’s historic effort to advance human rights to international diplomacy. “Dr. King used to say that greatness is characterized by antitheses strongly marked. You’ve got to have a tough mind and a tender heart, and that was Jimmy Carter,” Young shared.

John Carter, another grandson of President Carter, and chair of the Carter Center Board of Trustees, extolled Carter’s efforts to end racial discrimination, advance gender equity, end mass incarceration, and decriminalize marijuana. He said of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, “He gave voice to dissidents, stood up to dictators, brought countries together in peace. His heart broke for the people of Israel, it broke for the people of Palestine, and he spent his life trying to bring peace to that Holy Land.”

As a climate crisis driven by fossil fuels decimates huge swaths of California in historic fires, Carter’s grandson was one of several speakers to herald his historic climate and environmental leadership: “50 years ago, he was a climate warrior who pushed for a world where we conserved energy, limited emissions, and traded our reliance on fossil fuels for expanded renewable sources.”

John Carter added, “He was the first Millennial. And he can make great playlists.” 

After the service concluded, I spoke with Bishop Budde. She felt exalted by the celebration of President Carter. But when asked about Trump, she said matter-of-factly that “Trump seeks to dismantle everything I stand for.” She plans to organize, “to get political, find like-minded constituencies. We have to lobby, we have to show up and debate, all those things we have to do as people of faith, as part of a civic society.” Whether or not they’ll have an effect is another question, one she says is largely out of their control, including if the media will pay attention. “Every once in a while, Antonia, in my 13 years as Bishop, the traditional media notices and gives us our proverbial 15 seconds,” she adds, “Even Rolling Stone, if we’re lucky.”

“But the one thing I can control is I’m going to show up.”