When Prophecy Becomes a "Hot Take"

The Perils of Prophetic Preaching in the time of Trump Part 1

This essay has three parts. Here is Part 1 concerning the pressure on preachers to speak about everything—and why speaking more may mean saying less.

The second Trump administration was still only a few weeks old. His executive orders were piling up like an overwhelming snowdrift blocking a garage door. Each day’s headlines were filled with commentary and critique. No matter which side of the aisle you fall on, I think all can agree that the pace was dizzying.

One Sunday morning, I opened my email to a bevy of messages about the political state of things. One was from an admired mentor. I could sense the anxiety in her words, “how will the pulpit address these things?” A list of political comments, actions, and executive orders were bulleted. My blood pressure immediately shot like a rocket.

Prior to preaching with the newspaper (to invoke Karl Barth’s notion about preaching a two-handed approach), I already had a message planned. It was from the lectionary, so it was seasonal and theologically it was part of a series we were enmeshed in. Added to this strange brew were two more complicated ingredients: it was one of those dreaded “special days” on the church calendar when some non-liturgical/biblical/theological notion was to be addressed, as per congregational expectations. The other contender is that it was the kick-off to our church’s centennial year of celebration.

For a congregation these all fit into the important bucket. Her email poked my already underlying anxiety. I had no idea how I was going to address all of that, and I was not convinced that all of it needed to be addressed. But it was my job to do so and to somehow tie them all together. Or, at least, that is the expectation.

Ours is certainly an age of political and social angst. But to be fair, all ages are. It seems that humans suffer a bias some might call “presentism,” where we prioritize the ideas and assumptions of today over and against the past. Our understanding of the world is superior than understandings of the past and our problems outrank past problems as well—it seems that for good or ill the lyrics are true, “anything you can do, I can do better,” we say to the ages.

The past and those who occupied such waters are easy punching bags. We can all too simply and reductively levy non-contextual critiques of dismissal against them. It is the case that when current calamities or injustices befall our world today, we speak of their unprecedented nature or of a time when such things would not have occurred. Yet, when I think about it with any sustained focus, I remember similar hand wringing in past decades about other injustices and even administrations.

In the Trump era, I often hear opponents speak in psalms of laud for the likes of George W. Bush, but that was not the rhetoric when his administration was in power. No, opponents to his administration were just as apocalyptic in their assessments then as they are now. We were just as polarized. We cried out just as much for unity. Our world then, as it does now, feels wounded.

None of this means, of course, that things are not in fact worse now. Nor does it mean that President Trump will automatically be looked back on with praise for making our country and world better than when he found it; indeed, appraising history is an exercise in reading tea leaves. I will leave that work for future minds to sort out.

All I really mean to say is that for religious, ethical, and value leaders with a platform, the pressure to speak out and against the powers that be, or to “speak truth to power” to use a well-worn phrase about prophecy, is an unrelenting pressure tied with urgency.

I do not pretend to know when and who should speak out prophetically in our day. My gut feeling is that prophetic speech is primarily an occasional vocation and given my faith, I tend to think this is a Spirit-led endeavor. This is to say that the spirit moves when the time is right. It is also to suggest that prophecy is not a sustainable career—no, many good prophets died early deaths.

Is it really better to burn out than to fade away?

Let’s put that curiosity aside for a moment. My main concern is personal—how am I handling emails like the one I got that day, indeed on many days? My question concerns the office I occupy as a pastor of a church with a modest public platform—how and when am I to speak out in the prophetic tone?

It was far more than an email that brought that question to the fore. During those first weeks of the second Trump administration as well as with every other major move like DOGE, the bombings of Iran, or the 2025 Budget Bill my social media accounts are filled with professors, denominational leaders, authors, and others with a much larger public platform than I have, saying things like the following:

“If you have a pulpit, now is your time to speak.”

“Time to change your sermons for tomorrow.”

“Silence is approval for this action.”

There was so much more than that. Do these people really have so many followers on their socials that by pontificating thus, it makes a difference?

Though I am aware that the pulpit I occupy is something of a public platform, I am aware that I only have it because I am called to shepherd a congregation of political conservatives, progressives, theological mixes, new believers, ecumenical types, reactionaries, those who keep their politics to themselves, Generation Alphas, the elderly, international students, and people of varied race and socio-economic background.

One person in the mix may come to worship looking for help to make sense of the new budget and its implications for their parents’ Medicaid. And another attends looking for hope amidst their breast cancer diagnosis. Presumably, all are interested in the general question of what it means to follow Jesus Christ (we are a Christian church) in this century which implies political issues as much as it does learning how to pray and study the Bible.

How should I navigate the challenging social world of a congregation in a time where prophetic speech is necessary?

Hot Takes and Prophecy

Without a doubt, if I commented on every social issue or news story that required moral and ethical analysis, then I would burn my congregation out. I would also burn myself out. How could I keep up with it all?

My sense is that when I enter the realm of “news-junky” my struggles with anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal rise. With the media saturated, frenetic 24-hour news cycle, and digital ubiquity, speaking of such issues would make one like a real life “chicken little” adorned by a robe and stole.

But even if it were not so, congregations are communities going about living lives. They raise children, deal with death, get bored, try to break bad habits, and have goals. In short, folks are out there just living as best they can. Sometimes what they yearn for is more than anything else, is hope and a sense of purpose. Purpose amidst the fluorescent lighted cubicle.

This makes tolerance for the prophetic tone quite low, because it can create the feeling that no matter what one does or what we do together, it is never enough—spiritual Sisyphus’s all of us in our own way and time!

I recall being a much younger minister at a gathering of local clergy. One present senior clergy was a pastor of a large, historic congregation. He had quite a reputation for his skills in the pulpit. He graciously took me aside to chat about my work, to “pour into a younger minister,” you might say. I appreciated the chance to unburden myself to an expert!

I told him I struggled to know when to get prophetic or to directly address things some might call “political.”

Quite confidently, as though he had this worked out for some time, he said, “you are allowed two prophetic sermons a year. Congregations will only really tolerate two such sermons in churches that are historically Anglo-Saxon in makeup.”

Two is not much. But when you are the pastor of a church you do not have the same luxury of the guest preacher in the pulpit who is leaving town after the final “amen.”

“You have to live with these people,” he reminded me.

We will set aside the obvious point that historically African American churches have a greater tradition of prophetic preaching and note that this colleague was telling me that from a church’s regular preacher there is a real limit to what they can say on such matters. I had better pick and choose wisely.

Over the years this advice has served me well. Anecdotally I can affirm my senior colleague’s observations. But has anything changed since those early days in my ministry that might edit those guidelines?

Yes, but not the political uncertainty, nor our world’s penchant for creating unjust systems.

What has changed most clearly is the digital nature of the contemporary world.

It has been much commented on that digital spaces have overtaken embodied physical spaces for social connection. With social media’s ubiquity it now appears that every person with an account has a public platform. This is a truly novel notion in the history of political and religious communication. In most of human history platforms went to the smallest number of people—having one was a rare responsibility.

The prophets of old had platforms. How biblical prophets got their platforms is no mere formula. The same is true for late day prophets such as Martin Luther King Jr., and William Barber. Studying them shows that on a case-by-case basis, the prophet is one who has a message in a particular moment, and when called to speak, they spoke—truth to power, as they say.

The strange mix of message, gifting, moment, and need created the platform. At times that platform was a one-off speech (the “man of God” who rebukes Eli I Samuel 2:27-36), at other times it was through a demonstration (Jeremiah and the clay jar), still others through writing, or even some form of performance art (Ezekial’s lying down, Hosea’s marriage).

What is primary for the prophet is more in substance than in style. The prophet must be credible through a lived integrity, faithful to the covenant and to the heart of God for the world, they need to be engaged with the injustice of this world, and then they must voice a new or an alternative image of the world to that of the despotic status quo.

This work can take place in many forms, but it is a given that by confronting the world that is with what God intends it to be, the result often is rife with conflict, reprisal, and pain.

Ours is a different age from the mid-century Civil Rights movement, and even more so than the age(s) of biblical prophets. In the digital landscape of our time, anyone can be platformed. Indeed, each social media outlet or YouTube account is an opportunity to reach an audience.

And the digital linking of society means that with the news of injustice far and wide—one can pay witness to real time horrors a half a world away and consume countless points of view on it at the same time.

The situation is further complicated by algorithms. It is old news that social media, live streaming content, and almost everything else is run by algorithms designed to keep your attention on the interface you are using. The best way to keep your attention is to show you what you love or what you hate. Hate, or what angers people, is the most effective at keeping people’s attention, it turns out.

So, whatever comments you make on social media will only ever add to the algorithm and it will serve some end that was not your design in the first place. Your content will become someone else’s tool.

This is a dangerous situation for those inspired by justice and prophetic speech. Just like the generalized anxiety it is creating in generations of people, it can create in people anxiety (felt need) to speak out now and on everything that one deems as evil in the world. I expect that there might even be a real FOMO for not utilizing your platform to speak out.

Allowing a fashion of any type, especially political fashions to drive moral concern is dangerous. And if fashions can be shaped by algorithms, then the very things we find ourselves attending to might be out of place.

What is the practical result of this hyperfocus, hyperawareness, and hypertension to use one’s platform?

An endless cacophony of moral speech (sometimes in a legalistic tone) propagates without end. The volume is loud, because everyone with a platform, which is theoretically most people, are convicted that they must use it to “say what they need to say” (cue the John Mayer song), and if they have even a cursory knowledge of the prophetic tradition, they say it in a loud and confrontational tone.

Clearly, I am suggesting that our culture makes the prophetic more difficult to deliver and much more difficult to take seriously.

If everyone has a platform, then does anyone really have a platform—or are we all just shouting at each other and discounting one another’s views in the process?

In practice what ends up happening on a social media post, or a red-carpet interview at an awards show, or a demonstration at a university is a series of sternly spoken “hot takes.”

And a series of “hot takes” does not a prophecy make.

As one who is asked to speak week after week, I often ask myself if all I am doing is offering my hot take on whatever topic I find important. Or am I conflating policies with values, and thus politics and morality? Or do I genuinely have a word from God and for the people?

Implied in all of this is that the prophetic tone is often a hard pill to swallow. Like Kendrick Lamar at an NFL halftime show, it can be creative and rousing, yet supremely contentious. Like punk rock group Pussy Riot at an Eastern Orthodox Church, it can be performative, vexing, and irreverent. Like Greta Thunberg it can appear naive and exasperating to listeners from another generation, or who have an alternative vision of society.

Like Dr. Martin Luther King, the prophetic quest leaves no stone untouched—it calls for the whole society to change, by standing up and articulating an alternative vision of the world; indeed, there are only two options “chaos or community.”

And like our prophet friends from the scriptures, it can lead to a showdown with the powerful that ends in their own lives being lost.

If this incomplete list is telling about the tone and role of the prophetic, then you can see my point: articulating an alternative order of our world, speaking truth to power, standing for those on the bottom of the stack is always confrontational, even when done in a calm and serene tone a la Pete Seeger singing protest folk songs in court.

And when the confrontational prophetic impulses are tied with our digital and media saturated age (and other toxic ingredients not listed) much fuel is added to today’s fire of public discord and polarization: speak more, speak louder, draw more lines in the sand, speak passionately, speak simply and thus without nuance!

Should sacred speech be prophetic?

“Yes,” the chorus of voices shouted.

Can we agree that sacred, prophetic speech has the purpose of healing?

That is less clear if my inbox is any indication.

No, my inboxes are full of pleas that I cease being silent and take up boldness, and so on. I do not take this personally, however. I know these are mass appeals for the class of people I belong to who have some sort of platform to speak.

Yet, when I survey the resources at my disposal, I rarely hear voices that lead like Brueggeman did when he wrote, “the practice of prophetic ministry is not some special thing done two days a week. Rather, it is done in, with, and under all acts of ministry—as much in counseling as in preaching, as much in liturgy as in education. It concerns a stance and posture or a hermeneutic about the world of death and the word of life that can be brought to light in every context.”

For Brueggeman, the prophetic is not only something that occurs behind a confrontational pulpit. It is a sacred action that undergirds all religious speech no matter what the forum is.

Similar to what I have been saying, Brueggeman says that the penetrating action of the prophetic is meant to break through numbness, and one way to achieve that is “rage and anger,” but he adds, “the numbness is more likely to be penetrated by grief and lament...the public sharing of pain is one way to let the reality sink in.”

According to a master interpreter and deliverer of prophetic material, the prophetic task need not be sung in a singular and harsh register.

But that raises another question. What happens when that register becomes not merely a voice within Christian proclamation, but virtually the only voice we know how to use?

That is where the danger of prophetic preaching becomes something else entirely.

In Part Two: When Prophetic Preaching Becomes Another Legalism.