Episcopal Diocese of Washington Bishop Mariann Budde has worked her way into a froth over a photo opportunity by President Trump.
Lafayette Square across from the White House was cleared Monday evening of Black Lives Matter protesters (with the use of either tear gas or smoke canisters, depending on which report you read) seemingly for the purpose of facilitating Trump’s walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church for the photo op. Reports from the Washington Post describe Trump briefly standing in front of the church with Bible in hand, but neither entering the building nor speaking with anyone nor opening the Bible, which apparently signaled something at merely being raised like a talisman.
Workers install temporary plywood to protect windows from damage at the parish house of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, June 2, 2020 (Photo: Jeff Walton/IRD)
“I am outraged,” Budde told the Post about Trump’s posturing in an interview a short time later, pausing between words to emphasize her anger as her voice slightly trembled. She had nothing critical to say about the burning of one of her churches, which according to the parish vestry incurred about $20,000 in damages, mostly to the church nursery.
“This evening, the President of the United States stood in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, lifted up a bible, and had pictures of himself taken. In so doing, he used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes,” Tweeted Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. “This was done in a time of deep hurt and pain in our country, and his action did nothing to help us or to heal us.”
The prominent St. John’s Parish House located on Lafayette Square had been briefly set afire the night before, after peaceful protesters headed home for a District of Columbia curfew.
Some who remained in defiance of the curfew threw rocks at windows in the adjacent U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs building and spray painted a nearby statue of Revolutionary War hero Tadeusz Kościuszko with profanity. Most of the damage appeared directed at a small building that houses park bathrooms. A number of storefronts in the downtown, Georgetown and Tenleytown neighborhoods were also vandalized, including a hair salon and a looted sandwich shop owned by Pakistani immigrants directly below IRD’s downtown offices.
A brief walk around the St. John’s building this afternoon showed graffiti had largely been removed and windows were proactively boarded up to prevent any further damage. A pole with an American flag had been yanked off the building and thrown into a fire by protesters, but little else was noticeably amiss.
Would Budde have given a similar pass if right-wing protesters had done the same? the bishop of Washington doesn’t shrink from activism. Budde herself is engaged in advocacy for firearms restrictions and even weighed in on changing the name of the city’s floundering NFL franchise. Within the Diocese of Washington, Budde defended a push for “gender-inclusive” language “to avoid the use of gendered pronouns for God.”
The Post report noted both Budde and Curry “are among the pantheon of progressive religious leaders who have long been critical of Trump’s political agenda.” I was last present in the now-damaged St. John’s parish house as it hosted a press conference for the Religious Coalition on Reproductive Choice, a progressive lobby that voices approval from religious officials for unrestricted abortion-on-demand, and which counts the Episcopal Church as a member.
Post religion reporters Michelle Boorstein and Sarah Pulliam Bailey cite data from the Pew Research Center showing 49 percent of Episcopalians are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 39 percent of church members who are Republican or lean Republican.
Episcopalians have increasingly found themselves in roles difficult to maintain. Church officials simultaneously embrace leftist causes, while also serving as a boutique chaplaincy to the affluent and as presiders over American civil religion in events of national importance including state funerals.
For his part, President Trump is in close proximity to the Episcopal Church: his youngest son was baptized at an Episcopal parish and attends a private Episcopal high school (Trump himself is Presbyterian and his wife Melania is Roman Catholic). The Trump family typically attends services at Bethesda-by-the-sea Episcopal Church when in Palm Beach, Florida, minutes from Mar-a-Lago.
Budde draws a distinction between those engaged in peaceful protest, opportunistic looters and violent organized provocateurs like Antifa. Would she do the same if the partisan affiliations were flipped?
The danger of selective outrage is in exposing one’s self as another partisan instead of acting like a senior shepherd.
Hasn’t St. John’s already prostituted itself as a presidential prop? Haven’t they sold themselves to tourists as the “Church of the Presidents?” Beyond that – words fail me.
These women, like most of the Episcopal rectors, don’t really believe the bible, so why should anyone expect that they would have Christian values?! Their leftist politics is their real religion that makes them feel self-righteous. Btw, I am very surprised that there are still 39% of Episcopalians who are or lean republican. They must be mostly from the middle of the US.
My word to those 39% is a slogan a friend saw scrawled on the wall of the police drunk-tank: G.O.O.S.N.
Get out of Sodom now.
People who hate Trump have suddenly discovered the Bible. Strangely they never seemed to bother with it before. Now they know all about what it says. And what it says (they think) is that Donald Trump is very, very bad. He has not (they think) got the Bible in his heart – but they have got in their hearts of course. Each one is thinking: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector”.
Apologies. I should not be posting twice. But how ridiculous is the complaint that Trump “has done nothing to help or heal us”. One would imagine that the average Christian, in possession of a bible, would not think it suggested looking to a politician for either help or healing in the existential sense implied. And their response, when not supplied with the “help” and “healing” they demand, is to subject the unfortunate offender (Trump) to their “outrage”, hatred and contempt! I should take this seriously, but I’m afraid it just makes me laugh.
From my perspective, as an ex-Anglican from t’other side of the pond, I was rather shocked that Trump thought this was remotely the right thing for POTUS to be doing.
What did he intend for the Word of God – to use it as a (literal) cudgel if someone who disagreed got near enough (presumably having dodged the actual bullets)?
That said the “Bishopess’s” response was equally offensive. Stephen D put it very well, except that I didn’t laugh when I read the report.
There’s a far-too-big proportion of Christians in the USA who still think Trump is on the Lord’s side, so-to-speak. His campaign marketing activities were really, really clever it seems. If the Church in America wants an end to social unrest, righteous government and godly laws, it needs to get on its knees ASAP, as Foley Beach has just reminded us so sensibly.
And yes, of course, we need to be doing just the same thing here in the UK too…
I view Trump as I view Oskar Schindler, a very flawed human being capable of doing God’s work in ways that many don’t understand.
Well brother pond hopper, England certainly uses the Churches as props whether they believe or don’t believe. I for one disliked Donald Trump before he was elected. I was amazed at what he has become. From a cradle Presbyterian, I personally believe somewhere in the events leading up to the presidency, that Jesus actually became His savior and Lord. He’s still using training wheels, but the presidency has regained so very very much. No president in my memory as surrounded himself with people who actually believe the Bible, and I know some of those people well, they witness, they pray and they keep the Word close to their hearts. I learned that right after Washington and the lesgistators finished the Constitution they went to St Pauls at ground zero in New York. This nation was grounded in God. That my brother from across the pond, was what believe he was doing. We prayed for God to send us a president and God sent us Trump! Who would ever have thought? By the way, there is a true story in a movie where God began speaking to a man in dreams several years before the election and through what can only be called a miracle, hundreds of thousands were praying on that day of the election. The movie is called “The Trump Propecy”. Truly. I know He listens…and He sent us Trump..
Hmm – membership in RCRC, working to take property from parishes, hypocrisy on many if not all fronts – perhaps she should read that book there.
I tarry between grief and anger at these who use selective outrage to “speak for the church” when clearly they do not. What a disappointment Bp Budde has become! “How long oh Lord, Holy and True?” (Rev) I would not broad brush the women of the Episcopal clergy any more than I would broad brush the men. However I know wha Anglican Ink means. I seek for comonalities among Episcopal and Anglican clergy. I recently saw an old quote in some old sermon notes. It said: “you believe as much of the Bible as you live.” After the training of most clergy since the advent of so called “higher criticism”, so much of the practicality of scriptural use for spiritual growth has been subsumed to be descicated I always thank God I can feed on the preachng of many people of faith in every specter of the church and of course Holy Scripture itself. I always rejoice when I meet someone is is more than the 1928 used to say, “baptismally regerate” and we can discuss Holy Scripture for what it is, the well of life. My first job as a deacon was in DC. The church there was so very, very political. Yet God had still left a remnant there among the churches and clergy. He will bear witness until Jesus returns I pray.
I tarry between grief and anger at these who use selective outrage to “speak for the church” when clearly they do not. What a disappointment Bp Budde has become! “How long oh Lord, Holy and True?” (Rev) I would not broad brush the women of the Episcopal clergy any more than I would broad brush the men. However I know wha Anglican Ink means. I seek for comonalities among Episcopal and Anglican clergy. I recently saw an old quote in some old sermon notes. It said: “you believe as much of the Bible as you live.” After the training of most clergy since the advent of so called “higher criticism”, so much of the practicality of scriptural use for spiritual growth has been subsumed to be descicated I always thank God I can feed on the preachng of many people of faith in every specter of the church and of course Holy Scripture itself. I always rejoice when I meet someone is is more than the 1928 used to say, “baptismally regerate” and we can discuss Holy Scripture for what it is, the well of life. My first job as a deacon was in DC. The church there was so very, very political. Yet God had still left a remnant there among the churches and clergy. He will bear witness until Jesus returns I pray.
There is a quote circulating on Twitter from an Episcopal priest condemning Trump for his cowardice in dodging the draft.
An Episcopal. Priest. Condemning. Draft. Dodging. As. Cowardice.
“This was done in a time of deep hurt and pain in our country, and his action did nothing to help us or to heal us.”
Because your RANT was so full of Christian Love….
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/09/washington-national-cathedral-same-sex-marriages
This statement from the Nelson Mandela Foundation is going big on FaceBook, so I reproduce it here in its entirety for your consideration; especially those in leadership..
” Thursday 4 June 2020
Media Statement: Enough! Black Lives Matter
News
Protests in response to the deaths of Black people at the hands of police or military – George Floyd in the United States, Collins Khosa in South Africa, Adama Traore in France – speak to a growing rage across the globe at continued white supremacy and the use of state violence to support it. As the case of South Africa demonstrates, such violence is to be found even in countries where Black people hold the levers of government and of the state more broadly.
When communities are confronted by both resilient structural violence and attacks on their bodies, violent responses will occur. This is especially evident right now in the US, where many of the protests have been characterised by violent action. The latter is too readily dismissed as the work of extremists or of criminal elements. As we have seen in South Africa during the democratic era, violent protest is often the result of a careful calculation by communities who have come to see that only such action elicits the desired response from the state. And we dare not forget the country’s tradition of armed struggle – in his speech from the dock at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, Nelson Mandela said the following:
“I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.”
The use of violence can be rational and carefully targeted as part of a strategy to counter structural and other forms of violence against Black lives. And, of course, it ought always to be so.
Protesters in the US are signalling that enough is enough. Black lives matter enough to warrant getting out in the streets and demanding an end to a system which creates the conditions for (and legitimises) violence against Black bodies. More than a thousand Black people die at the hands of police in the US every year. And mass incarceration, predictive policing, targeted surveillance and a host of other tools render Black lives more vulnerable than all others.
It is clear that in South Africa twenty-six years of democracy have not as yet ensured that Black lives matter as much as White lives. Collins Khosa, Andries Tatane, the Marikana miners – the list is long. The most recent Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) report indicated 201 deaths in police custody, 436 deaths as a result of police action, 217 reports of torture and 3 661 reports of assault by the police. The victims are almost always Black people. And we must also factor in the structural violence against Black lives constituted by patterns of poverty and inequality deeply rooted in our histories of colonialism and apartheid. As Thomas Piketty noted in the 2015 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture:
“if inequality is not addressed through peaceful means and peaceful democratic institutions, it’s always potentially a source of violence.”
Now is the time for sober assessment of a resilient White supremacy in our country, in the US and globally. We need to reckon with the fact that structural and other forms of violence will provoke violence. And we must face the reality that the ravages of COVID-19 will further entrench structural violence unless we fundamentally restructure our societies. It is time to apply our minds to this challenge. Black lives do matter.
[ENDS]
For media enquiries, please contact the Spokesperson of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Luzuko Koti, at LuzukoK@NelsonMandela.org or on (+27) 082 994 0349.