The far-left Episcopal bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington (D.C.), Mariann Budde, directed predictably misguided left-wing remarks to newly inaugurated President Trump in a sermon at a now widely publicized interfaith “Service of Prayer for the Nation” held at the Washington National Cathedral the morning after Trump’s inauguration (Jan. 21). She focused on “unity” for most of her message, which she said is “not partisan.”
Yet her message conveyed the opposite on both counts: It was neither unifying nor nonpartisan to anyone who doesn’t embrace her leftwing views, least of all to Trump. With the Trumps and Vances sitting in a front-row pew, she called on Trump at the end of her sermon “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” both “gay, lesbian, and transgender children … who fear for their lives” and children who “fear that their [illegal immigrant] parents will be taken away” (full text of prepared sermon here, with some variation in the live delivery).
She was responding to Trump’s new executive order that defines “male” and “female” on the basis of objective reproductive cells (egg or sperm) rather than by subjective “gender identity,” and to an array of executive orders dealing with illegal immigration, including the deportation of many whom Biden intentionally let cross our southern border in the millions.
The Leftist Track Record of Bishop Budde
As indicated by her “plea” to Trump, Budde is a leftist who received her position as bishop in the leftist Episcopal denomination in part because of her leftist views. As regards abortion, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” this past March 31, she declared: “I … respect a woman’s right to choose … when to have an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy.”
She has long been intolerant of any who have not supported the “LGBTQ” agenda. In February 2021 Budde issued a public apology for allowing popular evangelical pastor Max Lucado to preach at National Cathedral, even though Budde had nothing to do with the invitation. Lucado’s grave offense was having written an article 17 years earlier in which he called homosexual practice a sin (Lucado may not even hold that position any longer; he has since withdrawn the article from the web).
Ironically, what this means is that Jesus himself could not preach at National Cathedral, nor any of the apostles. So much for “unity.” So much for Jesus.
Jesus’s Clear Espousal of a Two-Sexes Prerequisite for Sexual Relationships
Don’t think that Jesus was opposed to homosexual practice and transgenderism? His Scripture (our Old Testament) clearly did. So too all Jews of his day and all Christians in the early church after his death. Furthermore, in the key Jesus “sex text” (Mark 10:2-12; parallel in Matthew 19:3-9), Jesus, quoting Genesis 1:27, depicted God’s intentional creation of a sexual binary (i.e., a male-female or man-woman prerequisite for sexual relations) as the foundation of all sexual ethics, the basis for limiting the number of persons in a sexual union to two persons, whether concurrently (no polygamy) or over time (no revolving door of divorce and remarriage).
A more rigorous proponent of the logic behind God’s deliberate design of two (and only two) sexes did not exist in the ancient world. Moreover, Jesus certainly would have recoiled at any allowance for abortion, the taking of innocent and defenseless human life.
Budde as a Leftist Heretic and a Virulent Trump Hater
As a female who claims to be a faithful minister of the gospel while promoting the twin evils of abortion on the one hand and “gay, lesbian, and transgender” behavior on the other, Budde falls under the rubric of what the risen Christ called a “Jezebel” (Revelation 2:20, alluding to the pagan wife of King Ahab in 1 Kings 16 to 2 Kings 9). In rejecting the teaching of earthly Jesus and the apostolic witness to the Risen Christ, she is a heretic “bishop.” She does not carry the authority of Jesus Christ, whatever title she bears.
Trump was accurate in calling Budde after the church service, on his Truth Social, “a Radical Left hard-line Trump hater.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a policeman, Budde complained bitterly about Trump on June 3, 2020, calling for him to be “replaced.” She blamed him for having police clear protestors from Lafayette Park on June 1, just moments before Trump walked across it to deliver a message, holding a Bible, in front of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church.
Rioters had set the church on fire the night before, damaging part of it. She expressed no concern over the fact that for the three days prior to Trump’s action (May 29-31) there were destructive and violent riots throughout D.C., including an attack on the White House that injured 60 Secret Service agents and forced the Trump family to be rushed to the White House underground bunker. Budde later offered the benediction at the closing of the second night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
The Error of Budde’s Appeal to Show Mercy to “Transgender Children”
Budde’s plea that Trump “have mercy upon … gay, lesbian, and transgender children … who fear for their lives” is both exaggerated (Trump has done nothing to put their lives in jeopardy) and anti-mercy. Is it “mercy” to allow an impressionable child to be chemically castrated for life and to go through mutilation surgery? Or to be indoctrinated into the delusion that he or she is a sex at odds with the reproductive configuration of the body? It is manifestly not “mercy” but, functionally speaking, hate and child abuse.
Budde contends that affirming homosexual desire or gender dysphoria is a matter of “honoring” their “inherent dignity.” It is the exact opposite: effacing, rather than enhancing, the image of God stamped on their God-ordained sex. The apostle Paul refers to it as a “dishonoring of the body” and the desire behind it as “dishonorable passions” (Romans 1:24, 26).
In the overwhelming majority of cases, a child who is not given puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones will grow out of their gender dysphoria. Even the few that don’t grow out of it are still leading a life of self-delusion in rebellion against the Creator. There is a growing body of evidence that transitioning children to the other sex serves no good purpose. Nor is it merciful to promote coercive indoctrination of children and adults to accept the immorality of homosexual and transgender behavior, attenuating the civil liberties of those who are faithful to biology, conscience, and Scripture.
The idea that there is a fixed number of homosexual and transgender persons in the world that is impervious to societal influences is a myth. The percentage of Generation Z persons who identify as “LGBT” (21 percent) is eight times as high as the percentage of Baby Boomers (2.6 percent). The percentage of 18-29-year-olds who identify as transgender (2 percent) is seven times greater than the percentage of 30-49-year-olds who so identify (0.3 percent).
The Error of Budde’s Appeal to Show Mercy to Illegal Immigrants
Budde contends that “the vast majority of [undocumented] immigrants are not criminals.” She seems not to realize that all those who enter this country illegally are criminals by definition.
“Welcoming the stranger” has nothing to do with promoting illegal entrance into the country without vetting while those who follow immigration protocols must wait in line. In order to be fair, we couldn’t only show “mercy” to those who cheat by entering the country illegally, which is a form of fraud, while we say to law-abiding foreigners who apply legally that you have to go through a long and uncertain process, unless you want to cheat too and cross the border illegally. We would really have to say to the world: Anyone who wants can settle in the U.S.
Of course, we can’t possibly take in all the world’s people who want to emigrate here without destroying the country. We can’t survive completely open borders. So why should those who break the law be rewarded with mercy but not the law-abiding? That doesn’t make sense even under the guise of “mercy.” We should welcome “the stranger” who abides by the laws of the land, but not those who start by violating that law.
This is not about the validity of legal immigration, which no one denies, but about the invalid nature of illegal immigration. Trump is not even in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. Last December he indicated that he would support keeping in the country those included under Obama’s DACA proposal.
The Biden administration’s promotion of unvetted illegal immigration was all part of an election cheating scam: Allow millions of persons to cross the southern border unvetted, persons who will be heavily dependent on government services and thus much more likely to vote Democratic; send illegal immigrants to swing states; thwart all efforts at voter verification by the states; and as soon as the votes in Congress are there, pass a sweeping and radical amnesty bill. Who cares what crimes will be committed or what financial burdens it may cause citizens? The important point, Democrats aver, is to win elections by any means necessary.
Building One’s House on Sand: The Myth of the Liberal Jesus
The scripture reading for her sermon was the conclusion of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 7:24-27, regarding the wise builder who builds his house on rock and the foolish builder who builds his house on sand. What little Budde did with the text, she did wrongly, using it to say what she wanted to say, not what the text actually says.
She identified “unity that serves the common good” as “the solid rock … upon which to build a nation.” Yet Jesus was rather warning his followers that those who only “hear these words of mine” but “do not do them” will face cataclysmic judgment from God on the Day of Judgment.
It is the last of a series of warnings in Matthew 7:13-27, which collectively narrows, rather than widens, the expanse of God’s mercy. Only “few” take “the road that leads to life” (Matthew 7:13-14). Not everyone who calls Jesus “Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, much less still those who do not confess him as Lord. One must “bear good fruit” and “do the will of my Father in heaven” (Matthew 7:15-23).
Yes, as Budde briefly notes, Jesus did talk elsewhere in the Sermon about loving one’s enemies, forgiving, and showing mercy. Yet none of this detracts from Jesus’s warnings that few will enter God’s kingdom. And, yes, “Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts.” Yet the exploitative tax collectors and sexually immoral sinners to whom he reached out were still called to repentance by Jesus as a precondition for the inheritance of God’s kingdom. Otherwise, they remained lost in their sins.
The “liberal Jesus” myth that religious leftists tout is nowhere to be found in the Gospels. Jesus was more demanding in his ethics, not less so, as the first part of the Sermon makes clear (Matthew 5:17-48). That includes Jesus’s intensification of sexual ethics (Matthew 5:27-32). Jesus was not focused on establishing broad sociological or cultural unity (which, in any case, Budde’s rhetoric does little to promote) but on the necessity of devotion to himself as “Lord” and to his rigorous teachings (Matthew 10:37-39). Far from coming to bring unity, Jesus saw himself as bringing “a sword” and not “peace,” dividing even family members from each other (Matthew 10:34-37).
There is nothing wrong about speaking “truth to power.” One of the three main functions of ancient Israel’s prophets was to make or break kings, holding the king to the values of the Tribal League. Mother Teresa spoke truth to power when she spoke at a Class Day ceremony at Harvard in 1982 and called abortion “the greatest evil.” The difference in the case of Budde is that she wasn’t speaking “truth” but rather heresy (regarding “transgender children”) and misinformation (regarding illegal immigration).
READ MORE from Robert A. J. Gagnon:
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Robert A. J. Gagnon is a visiting scholar at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Ridgeland, Miss., and has taught previously at Middlebury College, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and Houston Christian University. He has degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A.), Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.), and Princeton Theological Seminary (Ph.D.). He has published a number of works, including The Bible and Homosexual Practice (Abingdon).
