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.
Read it all in The Conservative Woman