I am a dog and, like a dog, I form near instant likes or dislikes of people. I suppose most of us are dogs if we would only stop trying to have an “open mind.” In any event, my nose did not like Marianne Edgar Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington who delivered a sermon at the Interfaith Prayer Service for President Trump's inaugural. Everything about her manner of walk, talk and gesture bespoke faux dulce, affecting meekness, humility, and caring while delivering an unmistakably and intendedly sharp message. Passive aggression at its finest. Humble people don't bite with teeth of steel.
False Spirit.
Everyone present, in the press and on social media instantly recognized Budde's “prayer” as a direct rebuke of Trumpian policies. But she concealed the dagger beneath a cloak of humility and pious entreaties.
She began by invoking humility in unity acknowledging that “we all have our blind spots.” She continued,
“[P]erhaps we are most dangerous to ourselves and others when we are persuaded that we are absolutely right and someone else is absolutely wrong. Because we are then just a few steps from labelling ourselves as the good people versus the bad people.”
True enough.
“... to be fair we don't always know where the truth lies and there's a lot working against the truth now, but when we
do know, when we know what is true, it is incumbent on us to speak the truth...
Was there any doubt but that
this time she was absolutely convinced that she was right and that it was incumbent on her to speak against those “working against the truth, now...” ?
She then implored Trump to have “mercy” on illegal immigrants and trans people; in other words, to reverse his policies and do things her way.
“May god grant us the strength and courage to honour the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, to walk humbly with one another and our god, for the good of all people. Amen.”
It is the nature of hypocrisy that it stains its own garment. Let me quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the nature of Christian love.
“To the natural man, the very notion of loving his enemies is an intolerable offence and quite beyond his capacity: it cuts right across his idea of good and evil. ...
“The Christian [on the other hand] must treat his enemy as a brother, and requite his hostility with love...
“By our enemies Jesus means those who are quite intractable and utterly unresponsive to our love, who forgive us nothing when we forgive them all... Love asks nothing in return....
“Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy's hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. ... For God allows his sun to shine upon the just and the unjust....”
“This is the quality whereby the 'better righteousness' exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees. ... [T]he fatal mistake of the false Protestant ethic [was that it] diluted Christian love into patriotism, loyalty to friends and industriousness which, in short, perverted the better righteousness into
justitia civilis.”
Does this sound like the attitude Budde was adopting from her pulpit? Was she unconditionally and unqualifiedly embracing Trump in love for him despite his wrongs whatever they may be? Or was she perverting Christian righteousness into mere civil justice?
In other chapters Bonhoeffer discusses condemning the sin while loving the sinner; but one doesn't get to condemning the sin until one first loves the sinner, and there was no love in Budde's entreaty. On the contrary, she was reading Trump the riot act. She knew it, he knew, it the press knew and it was there for all the Democrat peanut gallery to cheer on.
“I was trying to counter the narrative that is so divisive and polarizing” she said afterward, offering a divisive narrative of her own.
(A disclaimer. I, for one, am not so sure that I don't believe that justice is doing good to one's friends and harm to one's enemies. I take stands on things all the time. What I do not do is pretend to be meek and mild and loving of my enemies.)
False Word.
No other Western country is as drunk on religion as the US. As a result, everything is looked at through a moral lens and political issues get distilled into personal homiletics. Nevertheless, up until the 1960's, U.S. political discourse remained mostly secular and practical. For example, the great battle between Republicans and FDR over the role of government in the economy, was fought with many references to the Constitution and to political ideologies...but ne’er once a quote from the Bible or by dragging Jesus into it. All that changed with the Civil Rights movement. It was then that the Negro Gospel seeped into politics, with all its now dog-eared refrains and metaphors.
Of course, the battle had to be waged and segregation had to be ended, but the unfortunate by-product was that “the left” got into habit of thinking that “all politics is personal.” Discussion of the public and common good, got sliced and diced into personal goods: women rights, gay rights, disabled rights, immigrant rights, and the whole litany of victimized personal grievances of “cognized groups.” Common unity got pixellated into a thousand complaints and gimmes. Even conceptions of right got bastardized into entitlements. The Bill of Rights being seen as just an incomplete “bunch” of rights which we can alter, abandon or add to au gout, its fundamental nature being lost in a sea of personal wants, identities and aspirations.
This suited the actual leadership of the Democrat party which are as much capitalist pigs as the Republicans. Far better (and certainly cheaper) to be seen to be making “incremental” progress on personal rights than to tackle structural socio-economic issues (which is sorta fancy way of saying “who gets how much of what pie.”) As I've said elsewhere : if it's not about bread and butter, it's bullshit.
And bullshit has been the Democrat playbook since LBJ ... The proof of this is very simple and incontestable. Whatever progress may have been made on personal civil rights, the fact is that the net worth of the working class of the country has declined and flatlined in real dollar terms while that of the upper 10% has soared. More and more people are making less and less. Oh but we got plenny o' rights.... and rights is plenny fo' me....
It is against this background that Budde's Word has to be gauged.
“Millions have put their trust in you... in the name of our God I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children ... who fear for their lives.”
She continued:
“The people who pick our crops, and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals, they might not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals... I ask you to have mercy on those who fear that their parents will be taken away."
Of course it is impossible to deny that we should “welcome the stranger” and that we should “suffer the little children” and so on. It would be blasphemous to gainsay the moral clichés of Christianity. But that is not what Budde meant. She was using those clichés as code for policies in the Democratic Party lexicon of distractions.
In the name of our God I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared...” How can one object to reassuring people who are scared? But she did not mean the people who are scared of eviction because they can't afford skyrocketing rents. She did not mean people who are scared because they can't afford a drug without which they will die. She did not mean people who are scared they can't afford to pay the fine for not having the insurance they couldn't afford.... No. Budde meant ... the fear of gay, lesbians and trans people, the latest pet cognized group of the Democrat party.
By welcoming “the stranger” she mean immigrants from LatinxAmerica. She did not mean Palestinians rendered strangers in their own lands by Israel's brutal ethnic cleansing and running “scared” of the next bunker blaster bomb. Why not. ? Because that would buck a major bi-partisan consensus in favour of aiding and abetting genocide and ethnic cleansing... Not a word about that. Not a word about political and economic issues that affect the country as whole over and beyond the Democrat bugaboos of race, gender, sexual identity. In short, Budde was just pushing the justitia civilis” of the Democrat Party.
If Budde really wanted to thump the bible, she might have thumped the social justice of Ezekiel,
“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” Ezekiel 16:49-50
Not a word about that. Why not? Because she is just an operative for the Kumbaya Division of the Democrat party. Her own website describes her as “an advocate and organizer in support of justice concerns, including racial equity, gun violence prevention, immigration reform, the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons, and the care of creation”. Snore.
The basics are always general in nature whereas particulars are always non-essentials. Thus, Ezekiel's "poor and needy" encompasses all types of poverty and all types of needs whereas Budde's "trans people" encompasses less than one percent of the population and her "migrants" don't include the millions of non-immigrants who are in need of basic education, livable wages, affordable housing, healthcare and secure retirement.
Trump was right when he said “"She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way," "She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one.” My sole disagreement is with Trump's statement that Budde was “not very good at her job.” When it comes to false humility and passive aggression, Budde is
sans pareil
She has managed to rouse the entire liberal-progressive-left into a chorus of “Go git 'm” while she herself says “won't apologize” for her sermon. So much for humility in unity.
The role of clerical religion in politics is an interesting topic. There are those who think religion should confine itself to the spiritual and those who thing that religion must be politically active...even Marxist. Throughout most of our history clerics have confined themselves to platitudes phrased in general terms. But increasingly this moderation and restraint is being cast aside. The rabbi's invocation at the inaugural was all but a battle cry for Israeli Lebensraum. And into this fray steps Budde's peddling Democrat social policies wrapped in the tissue of Christian charity. All I can say is that Budde did a better job of humble hypocrisy than the rabbi. One should be fooled by neither.
©2025, WCG
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