There’s nothing quite like the sight of some tilty-headed lefty woman in a cassock preaching a load of woke nonsense to get you thinking that maybe the ordination of women really was a mistake. Can anyone, Christian or not, subject themselves to some empty-headed old bat wittering that ‘We are all Muslim’, without wanting to vomit?
But that’s without reckoning with the likes of Father Rod Bower. The “Reverend Tilty McJesus”, as Tim Blair, maybe unkindly, but certainly accurately, dubbed him. There isn’t a woke bandwagon, from illegal immigrants to trannies, that this cassocked clown won’t jump on.
Then there’s the utterly nauseating 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).
Which goes to show just how far these preaching ninnies’ Christian charity really goes. What was it Matthew said about those who blow a trumpet to signal their own virtue?
I don’t blame JD Vance for looking as if he wanted to vomit.
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.
More accurately: to be nice and left-wing.
It’s quite astonishing how many leftists seem able to pivot from thundering denunciations of religion, and Christianity especially, to piously blatherskiting some half-arsed (or more often, completely made up) version of Christian ‘teaching’. Jesus was a Palestinian refugee! When, of course, he was neither.
The normal MO 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 […]
To cherry pick the words of Our Lord, or to read the Beatitudes through a secular lens, risks the amusing but irritating mass confirmation bias that was on display in the aftermath of Tuesday’s event.
To become a bishop, even in the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Christianity! Anglican/Episcopalian church, one assumes necessitates more than a passing familiarity with the Bible. Maybe even understanding it.
The issue of border security and repatriation is particularly relevant. The biblical narrative is written in the language of geography, nation, territory and border […]
In the Abrahamic faiths, borders perform a moral function. In the Christian tradition nations are families which have a duty to love the stranger, it is true, but not in cases where charity crosses over into subversion. Jesus instructs us to love our neighbours even when – especially when – we do not feel well disposed towards them, but this requires that we have neighbours, and therefore the stable social order which makes neighbourliness possible. We must extend hospitality to the extent only that it does not become self-destructive.
Just as Budde locks her church at night to keep out the poor and suffering, lest they nick her good vestments or something, her idea of Christian charity is notably lacking. Far from loving her enemy as herself, Budde, like most leftists spouting cherry-picked scripture, only loves her friends and only so long as they agree with everything she thinks.
We should worry that the message many have taken from Bishop Budde’s sermon is not one of Christian love – or agape – but its opposite: that you should love your neighbour as yourself unless that neighbour happens to be Donald J Trump. Those determined to hate on the new president have thought themselves into positions which add up to a theology of disdain, more dogmatic and intellectually eccentric than anything the Church has to offer.
Bishop Budde may want to remember something else Matthew said: “Beware of practising your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them.”
