BY NOW, you’ve probably heard of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. You will likely be aware of the homily she gave at Tuesday’s post-inauguration ‘interfaith prayer service’, which took place in the Washington National Cathedral (a beautiful interior, though closed at night in case any homeless people wander in).
The sermon was an unremarkable, scripturally adjacent exercise in performative wokeism, addressed personally to the new president (bad pulpit etiquette to single out a congregant).
Safe to say, it’s caused quite the stir.
Bishop Budde has a wonderfully Dickensian name and, although my research is admittedly rushed, is of a familiar ecclesiological type. Her Jesus is not the challenging and discomfiting religious revolutionary of the Gospel accounts, but the agreeable hippie of more recent invention. She is a proponent, it seems to me, of that untroubling and therefore inadequate theological tradition which insists – against all evidence – that the primary goal of the religious life is to be nice.
Here’s the bad news: it isn’t. Christian teaching is that each of us is called to be a saint, and the saints that we revere were not always nice to be around; that’s how they were able to become saints.
I’ve found this whole business energising, not because of anything the bishop said, but because of the reaction to it. The normal M.O. of secular liberals is to look at believers such as myself with despairing condescension. However, the Jesus-lite apologetics which shaped this act of clerical self-indulgence have been welcomed by the legacy media and its internet outriders.
Following Bishop Budde’s intervention, many of these intellectually fulfilled sceptics have stumbled upon a previously hidden inner evangelical core. Having left the Church after reading The God Delusion and concluding that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’, they have suddenly been reminded that there is another Messiah. Not the one who conquered death and was the intersection of timelessness with time, that stuff is by-the-by, but the guy who used the parable form to signal his endorsement of open borders, and to correct that earlier draft which mistakenly suggested that biological sex is fixed.
This is a recurrent heresy, to think of Our Lord without regard to his Jewishness and to ditch the Old Testament on the grounds that He came not to fulfil it so much as to apologise for any offence it might have given. *
Now that this Bishop has delivered a message that is balm, many of them have overnight become biblical scholars and evangelists for this comfortable version of Our Lord, a Jesus who is only too keen to conform to the ideological fashions of a godless age.
Funny though this is, it really won’t do. As St Paul reminds us, it is the function of the Church to go on Mission to the secular world, not to lazily embrace the transient orthodoxies of the day. Bishop Budde has been congratulated for her ‘bravery’ in standing up to this supposedly odious President, and his obnoxious indifference to Christ’s second command, that we should love our neighbours as ourselves. In reality, it is not ‘brave’ to preach in a way that is guaranteed to curry favour with the secular Left. That’s the Have I Got News for You version of evangelisation – telling your crowd exactly what you know they want you to say.
If Bishop Budde really wanted to speak Christian truth to power, she could have used her pulpit and reputation as a liberal pastor to call out the powerful interests and enemies of Faith, which have seized and bastardised the honourable traditions of moral liberalism to the exclusion of many people of various faiths.
As is always the case, things immediately go wrong as soon as we wander unguided off the Word. The issue of border security and repatriation is particularly relevant. The biblical narrative is written in the language of geography, nation, territory and border: The Fall is a story of exclusion from a place; the early history of the Jewish nation is a chronicle of exile. Plots of land are set aside in the Old Testament and thereby sanctified as places of right worship.
In the Abrahamic faiths, borders perform a moral function. In the Christian tradition nations are families which have a duty to love the stranger, it is true, but not in cases where charity crosses over into subversion. Jesus instructs us to love our neighbours even when – especiallywhen – we do not feel well disposed towards them, but this requires that we have neighbours, and therefore the stable social order which makes neighbourliness possible. We must extend hospitality to the extent only that it does not become self-destructive.
To cherry pick the words of Our Lord, or to read the Beatitudes through a secular lens, risks the amusing but irritating mass confirmation bias that was on display in the aftermath of Tuesday’s event.
We should worry that the message many have taken from Bishop Budde’s sermon is not one of Christian love – or agape – but its opposite: that you should love your neighbour as yourself unless that neighbour happens to be Donald J. Trump. Those determined to hate on the new president have thought themselves into positions which add up to a theology of disdain, more dogmatic and intellectually eccentric than anything the Church has to offer.
These new and temporary converts are unfamiliar with what happens in Church, and, if they were, they’d not be so insufferably smug about all this. Nobody listens to the homily;that is the point of it. While Budde was castigating him for his homophobia, it’s quite possible that Trump’s mind had wandered back to a few hours earlier, when he was busting out moves to the most famous gay anthem ever written.
Our culture is spiritually thirsty, but the water this bishop was offering has a too much salt in it.
*This tendency is beautifully critiqued in Brant Pitrie’s Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary.
