The congregants were glad of that. “I’m supposed to be leaving for vacation today,” Lena Jones, 59, told me. But she went to Mt. Zion before she left Charlottesville. The events of the weekend had left her heartbroken, she said—on top of everything else, they had been one more suggestion that the country is returning to an earlier era of turbulence, and of hatred, and of bigotry that expresses no apology and feels no remorse. The events had also left her simply embarrassed, she said—for Charlottesville, and for Virginia, and for the nation. So “today,” she said, “I wanted to be with my church family.”

But Jones also appreciated the self-conscious politicking that was part of this particular church service. She appreciated that the governor came to deliver—and publicize—a message of resilience against hatred. She appreciated, even, all the glad-handing. “To me, it was uplifting,” she said. “It’s nice to know that we have some support.”

Support they did have—and not only from the governor. Several representatives of Charlottesville’s local and state governments (all of them men, all of them white) delivered brief addresses on Sunday, both to Mt. Zion’s congregation and to the cameras that for the most part clustered behind the pews. Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, who seemed to be speaking at the church between appearances on nationwide Sunday shows, delivered a message of resilience: “We will get through this stronger than we were yesterday,” he said. Mark Herring, the attorney general of Virginia, reminded the crowd of the speech Thurgood Marshall had delivered in 1978 at the University of Virginia: “This is your democracy,” the justice had said. Ralph Northam, the state’s lieutenant governor, cited his background as a pediatrician to echo the message Barack Obama had sent—itself a tribute to Nelson Mandela—that hatred is not innate in humans, but learned.

And then McAuliffe rose to the church’s lectern. He began by saying that he’d been invited to many TV shows, but wanted to be at Mt. Zion most of all. And then he talked about his anger, and his hope. He praised the law enforcement response to the protests. He talked about his personal connection to two of the deaths that had resulted from the weekend’s violence: The state troopers who had died in a helicopter crash on Saturday had been part of the governor’s security detail, he said. And McAuliffe reiterated the widely publicized speech he had delivered on Saturday evening, at a press conference—the one making clear that the bigotry on display over the weekend has no place in Charlottesville or Virginia or the United States of America.

And then the governor, from his perch at the lectern of the church, spoke directly to the bigots: “You pretend you’re patriots,” he said. “You’re not patriots.”