A radical Episcopal bishop gave President Donald Trump a stern lecture on Tuesday during a prayer service meant to encourage national unity.
About halfway through the service at the Washington National Cathedral, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, used the end of her sermon to scold President Trump.
God makes a human either male or female; he does not make mistakes.
First, she advocated that Trump “have mercy” on LGBTQ-identifying Americans.
“Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Budde said. “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in both Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives.”
Then she turned to illegal immigrants, using a dehumanizing argument that contradicts federal law.
“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,” Budde said. “They may not be citizens, or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”
Budde further pleaded that Trump “have mercy” on people “in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land,” she said. “May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, and walk humbly with each other and our God.”
The problems with Budde’s comments are obvious.
First, despite many claims otherwise, the Bible and Christianity do not support the LGBTQ agenda.
This, of course, does not mean that people who identify as LGBTQ are not made in the image of God with the same inherent worth and dignity as every other human. But God created humanity to reflect a binary of biological sex: male and female (Genesis 1-2). And God’s word teaches that it is only through the covenant of marriage that humans should engage in sex, an ethic that Jesus and the apostles upheld (Matthew 5:27-30, 19:1-12; 1 Corinthians 5-7; Romans 1:24; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 4:19).
The problem with the LGBTQ agenda is that it not only promotes a type of “marriage” and sexual relations that God does not ordain, but it leads adherents to make their core identity about who they are attracted to or what type of people they want to have sex with.
God, however, wants all humans to make their identity congruent with a Christian ontology, that is, as the apostle Paul would say, to be “in Christ.”
Importantly, Trump’s belief and declaration that only two sexes exist — male and female — reflect God’s truth. God makes a human either male or female; he does not make mistakes, and people are not born into “the wrong body.”
Second, God’s commands to be extremely generous to immigrants were given to Israel (e.g., Leviticus 19:33-34). This does not mean it is not God’s wisdom to have mercy on and care for immigrants and the vulnerable among us. To the contrary, Christians have historically been the most generous to such people.
What it does mean, however, is that God did not give such commands to modern nation-states like the United States. It is a wise command, but its historical context must be respected. Moreover, the apostle Paul implores Christians to submit to “the governing authorities” because “there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13:1). In this case, the U.S. is a nation of laws — including immigration law. Moreover, the vast majority of illegal immigrants are not violent criminals who have committed further crimes since arriving in the U.S., but by nature of residing illegally in the U.S., criminality is involved.
Finally, Budde repeatedly appears to abuse words like “compassion” and “mercy” to justify a progressive agenda, using the terms to mean affirming and approving the LGBTQ agenda and a liberal view of immigration policy. But to have mercy and compassion on people is not limited to adopting a progressive worldview. And certainly, Budde’s identification of immigrants as people who merely “pick our crops,” clean office buildings, and wash dishes is dehumanizing.
Trump was later asked for his thoughts about the service.
“Not too exciting,” he reportedly said. “They could do much better.”
Budde, meanwhile, hides neither her woke views nor her apparent disdain for President Trump, telling an ABC News reporter in the midst of the 2020 racial uprisings, “We need to replace President Trump.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Donald trump, Christianity, Christians, Bible, God, Lgbtq agenda, Immigration, Illegal immigration, Mariann budde, Politics
