When politicians act like preachers, we get members of the House of Representatives falling over themselves to sponsor House Resolution 59 condemning Bishop Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C.
Imagine the House of Representatives taking time away from its current agenda on taxes, tariffs, immigration, birthright citizenship, and cutting food stamps to attack a bishop’s sermon. This is absurd.
As is well-known by now, Budde preached the sermon Tuesday at the traditional inaugural prayer service with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in attendance. As I watched the service, I knew it would not go well because our nation’s two most powerful leaders were laughing and rolling their eyes during the reading of the Scripture.
Rodney Kennedy
After the service, Budde was assaulted by a crescendo of criticism led by Trump with his usual trope calling her “nasty.” A choir of Republican leaders and MAGA evangelicals took up the song to blast the bishop.
All the bloviating reached the offices of the U.S. Houe of Representatives, where a group of politicians pretending to have religious knowledge, acting in complete contradiction of the First Amendment to the Constitution, dared to offer what amounts to censorship of a clergyperson.
Even if this resolution were to pass, it is not worth “a bucket of warm spit.” But it shows the danger of having half-ass politicians acting like half-ass preachers.
House Resolution 59 is sponsored by Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma with 21 cosponsors. The full title of the bill introduced in the House (it is hard to imagine reading this all the way through without bursting into laughter): “Expressing the sense of the Houe of Representatives that the sermon given by the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde at the National Prayer Service on January 21 at the National Cathedral was a display of political activism and condemning its distorted message.”
“When the response to a sermon is outrage and a desire to censor takes root, there is a strong possibility truth has been spoken but rejected.”
When the response to a sermon is outrage and a desire to censor takes root, there is a strong possibility truth has been spoken but rejected.
As to the sermon being an example of political activism and a distorted message, half these politicians are up to their steeples in misinformation, misinterpretation and plain bad manners.
For decades, conservatives have insisted issues of homosexuality are biblical in nature. Now, when an Episcopal bishop pleads for mercy for gays, lesbians and transgender people, conservatives see that as “political activism.” Not what they’ve been doing, of course, only what someone on the other side does.
And the bishop carried on the clear biblical tradition of appealing for compassion for immigrants and refugees — something that once was mainstream Christian belief but has been hijacked by the MAGA mind meld.
Trump and his allies at the National Cathedral want to remake the Bible in their political image rather than be challenged by the truth of Scripture.
As Episcopal priest and scholar Ellen F. Davis reminds, “Using the text to confirm our presuppositions is sinful; it is an act of resistance against God’s fresh speaking to us, an effective denial that the Bible is the word of the living God.”
Trump and his allies in the House do not understand there’s more to Christianity than the evangelical base that supports them.
“Trump and his allies in the House do not understand there’s more to Christianity than the evangelical base that supports them.”
There always has been a more powerful voice in Christianity than the fundamentalist-to-evangelical voice. These House members seem utterly ignorant of the powerful tradition of the Social Gospel in American Christianity. They may not know that evangelicals, in the late 19th century, were deeply involved in support of the right of women to vote, the organization of unions and care for the poor. Evangelicals were for the Social Gospel before they were against it.
Somehow, MAGA politicians and preachers have decided Budde’s sermon at Washington National Cathedral is the religious version of the shootout at the OK Corral. As the good guys, they came out guns blazing. They are bullying someone they think is an easy target.
But this time they picked on the wrong female bishop. She has reinforcements, a progressive church awakening to the dangers evangelical bullying holds for America.
Southern Baptist pastor Jack Graham unloaded a dump truck of vitriol on the bishop: “See the face and hear the voice of a woke ideologue who represents the reason apostate churches are dead and dying. This is religion at its worst. No Jesus. No Bible. No future.”
Did he really say, “No Jesus. No Bible”? Here’s Bishop Budde: “In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth exhorts us to love not only our neighbors but to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us, to be merciful as our God is merciful, to forgive others as God forgives us. And Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts.”
“Did he really say, ‘No Jesus. No Bible’?”
That’s not Bible?
Far-right evangelist Lance Wallnau thought there should have been preaching by Paula White. This is the same loony-tune who claimed angels were being dispatched from Africa and South America to save the election for Trump in 2020. The mind seizes at the idea of Paula White screeching in the National Cathedral and speaking in tongues.
House Speaker Mike Johnson also got his dander up: “Bishop Budde hijacked the National Prayer Service to promote her radical ideology. This was an opportunity to unify the country in prayer, but she used it to sow division. Even worse, she’s continued her political crusade in media interviews. Shameful.”
Johnson somehow missed the 25 times Bishop Budde called for unity. She set the tone for her homily in the introduction: “As a country, we have gathered this morning to pray for unity as a people and a nation, not for agreement, political or otherwise, but for the kind of unity that fosters community across diversity and division, a unity that serves the common good.”
Johnson’s call for unity smacks of hypocrisy.
After 10 years of hateful, divisive language, harsh judgments, violent imagery and demonizing progressives as servants of Satan, on what basis do they now want unity? I am convinced evangelicals mean “conformity” when they use the term “unity.”
And now they seem willing to flout the Constitution itself to exact their revenge. This is dangerous territory.
Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., shared a clip of the sermon on X and wrote: “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”
That reminded me of Baptist fundamentalist J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1920s claiming the government should herd Roman Catholic cardinals onto ships filled with bombs and send them out to sea to be blown up.
These self-proclaimed spokespersons of God, who act as if they have just returned from a one-on-one meeting with God on Sinai, have made fools of themselves. The accusations they fire at the bishop are unsophisticated in logic and pompous in their certainty.
“The real problem here is that Budde’s Bible-based sermon was a direct assault on the entire Age of Trump.”
The real problem here is that Budde’s Bible-based sermon was a direct assault on the entire Age of Trump. She rightly proclaimed unity is only possible if we honor human dignity, if we embrace honesty, and if we model humility.
Without calling him out by name, her appeal to honor human dignity clashes with Trump’s assault on almost everyone not kowtowing to his will. Her Bible message attacked his constant habit of lying. Her gospel appeal for humility smashed Trump’s bragging, boasting, super-hero, television star image.
Budde preached the gospel, and Trump is not a gospel man.
The bishop spoke truth to power. The biblical models for this kind of preaching range from Moses preaching to Pharaoh, Nathan condemning David for his abuse of Bathsheba, Amos rebuking King Jeroboam, John the Baptist insisting Herod was wrong to take his brother’s wife, and St. Paul preaching to Agrippa.
We also have precedence for such prophetic preaching in America.
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. preached perhaps the greatest sermon of his life: “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” The sermon garnered almost universal condemnation with 168 daily newspapers castigating the great civil rights preacher for calling upon President Lyndon Johnson to have compassion on the children of Vietnam. America then was too racist, nativist and hateful to accept the sermon.
Apparently, not much has changed. America still struggles with racism, nativism and hatefulness.
There are more preachers like Budde than anyone knows. They preach faithful gospel sermons in obscurity and anonymity every Sunday. They carry on the prophetic tradition. Our nation’s pulpits, universities and seminaries are filled with faithful biblical scholars, theologians, ethics professors, historians, philosophers, preachers and priests.
According to the law of our land, they are allowed to preach and teach according to the dictates of their conscience without government censorship, which is what these House members want to apply.
Budde deserves an “amen” rather than outbursts of acrimony leveled at her by preachers and politicians unworthy to carry her shepherd’s crook in a liturgical processional. I hope every preacher with an ounce of courage references Bishop’s Budde’s plea for mercy this Sunday from the pulpit.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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