The Priestess versus the President

On Mixing Politics and Religion

The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, is in the news this week for the scolding she gave Donald Trump at the National Prayer Service on January 21st in the National Cathedral. In her talk, she insisted, among other things, that “gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families . . . fear for their lives” because of Trump’s election and that strict immigration policies are cruel and un-Christian.

Her comments sparked outrage on the Right. This outrage is warranted, but some of it was directed at the wrong target. In particular, some prominent Conservatives suggested that the problem with what Budde said was that she was mixing politics and religion. Utah Senator Mike Lee, for example, wrote that the problem with Budde’s sermon, in addition to its woke ideology, was that it was an instance of “political priestcraft,” also suggesting that her tone was un-Christlike. While House Speaker Mike Johnson is correct that Budde “hijacked the National Prayer Service to promote her radical ideology,” he followed this up with comments revealing that he too was equally uncomfortable with the mixing of politics and religion, since Budde’s “political crusade” could have been “an opportunity to unify the country in prayer,” but was instead used “to sow division.” Abraham George, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas voiced similar thoughts: “Instead of delivering something remotely unifying or spiritual, she spews out a political diatribe.” Todd Starnes argued similarly: “The blasphemous bishop at National Cathedral preached politics from her pagan pulpit.” One can find many conservatives saying similar things, summed up succinctly in the words of one commentator: “Leave religion out of politics, Period!”

Must a faithful pastor keep religion and politics hermetically sealed off from each other? Is Budde’s fundamental problem that she mixed the two? There are indeed many bad ways in which politics and Christianity can be mixed. One can attempt to bind the consciences of the people of God in matters on which the Bible does not clearly speak. One can make a habit of neglecting the heart of Scripture, which is the gospel of Jesus crucified for sinners, turning preaching into mere political activism. Some of those quoted above rightly recognize this latter problem in Budde’s sermon, but I would suggest that their critiques would be better if they did not inadvertently maintain a false dichotomy that continually causes trouble in Americans’ understanding of the relationship between church and state.

The false dichotomy is that which Thomas Jefferson famously put forward in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, “a wall of separation between Church & State,” a dichotomy which many Americans (left and right) wrongly believe is enshrined in our Constitution. Church and state, from the standpoint of sound politics, as well as sound theology, are separate realms that must not overstep their divinely delegated spheres of authority, but this does not mean that the church has nothing to say to the state. It is right for the church to emphasize to worldly political leaders the divine purpose of earthly government (Rom 13:1–7; etc.), and in this capacity, it is legitimate to call the governing authorities to act righteously according to God’s moral law.

Regarding Budde’s sermon, then, it seems clear from most responses on the right (even those quoted above) that their problem with her harangue was not the mixing of politics and religion, but the woke, leftist ideology she was spewing from the pulpit. Rightly so. Had she instead proclaimed President Trump’s responsibility before God to implement justice in America by expelling those who have entered the country illegally, would these conservative voices have been offended because Budde mixed politics and religion? What if she had urged the President to ensure that violent criminality is suppressed by the power of the sword or that sexual perversion and woke ideology be banned from our schools and universities? I think we all know the answer.

We must not forget the occasion of this sermon either. It was a sermon coincident with a new presidential inauguration and, as such, was rightly focused on the responsibilities before God of the civil magistrate. America, just as England before the American Revolution, once had a tradition of semi-official “election sermons” following the election of important political figures like governors and presidents. In these sermons, it would have been exceedingly odd for the preacher to, say, preach an expositional sermon on the importance of the virgin birth in Luke 1–2, abiding in Christ from John 15, or the marks of true faith from James 2. It would be just as ill-fitting to take an important figure from my own theological tradition, as if the English Puritan John Owen had preached a sermon on the importance of generous almsgiving when instructed—as he was—to preach a sermon before Parliament the day after the execution of King Charles I.1

As any candidate for ministry knows, you must preach your sermons in a way fitting to your audience and the occasion of your sermon: you would not preach a sermon on Christian marriage at a funeral, just as a candidate for ministry standing before his future ministerial colleagues is taught to preach a sermon relevant to the issues those pastors face in their lives. The point being: that while preachers will have occasion from time to time to speak to the political and moral issues of the day in their normal weekly preaching, if one were asked to preach to an incoming president, it would only be fitting to direct the sermon toward the audience of political leaders and to press home to them their responsibility to serve as the “authorities . . . God has appointed” (Rom 13:2), as “God’s servants for your good” (Rom 13:4).

Inadvertently, conservatives who argue that politics must be kept completely out of religion may be further entrenching the total privatization of religion in American life that has been proceeding apace for many years, where the foundational moral truths of Scripture are relegated to the realm of personal opinions (values) roughly of the same significance in the “real world” (facts) as whether one believes in Santa Claus or unicorns.

Arguing in this way is also an instance of the dead end—sadly all too common in ostensibly conservative circles—of exalting procedure above moral substance. This is the same argument that one commonly finds regarding education: what we need, it is said, is education, not indoctrination in woke ideologies, as if the purpose of education is simply to fill a child’s head with isolated pieces of information absent a moral framework and knowledge of the purpose of life. On analogy, Budde’s sermon would be just fine in the minds of some conservatives if she had kept to the proper procedure and not touched on anything that has to do with the moral question of how politicians rule.

In sum, we would all be better off if we just addressed the real issue. Not even getting into the biblical impermissibility of a woman being a pastor and preaching, Budde’s sermon was terrible because it was full of destructive falsehoods, not because she addressed the political responsibilities of the civil magistrate in a sermon, the occasion of which is the very inauguration of that magistrate.


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  1.  It is sometimes claimed that because Owen did not explicitly mention the execution of Charles that he was attempting to avoid the taint of participation in his death. Owen’s own preface to his sermon, written over a month after it was preached shows this to be clearly not the case: “The contradictions of sinners against all that walk in the paths of righteousness and peace, with the supportment which their spirits may receive (as being promised) who pursue those ways, notwithstanding those contradictions, are in part discovered in the ensuing sermon. The foundation of that whole transaction of things which is therein held out, in reference to the present dispensations of Providence, — being nothing but an entrance into the unravelling of the whole web of iniquity, interwoven of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny, in opposition to the kingdom of the Lord Jesus, — I chose not to mention. Neither shall I at present add any thing thereabout, but only my desire that it may be eyed as the granted basis of the following discourse.” This, and the fact that in Owen’s sermon, as Michael Haykin puts it, “his hearers and later readers would have been easily able to deduce from his use of the Old Testament how he viewed the religious policy and end of Charles. From the story of wicked King Manasseh that is recorded in 2 Kings 21 and with cross-references to Jeremiah 15, he argued that the leading cause for God’s judgments upon the Jewish people had been such abominations as idolatry and superstition, tyranny and cruelty. He then pointed to various similarities between the conditions of ancient Judah and the England of his day.” ↩
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Ben C. Dunson is Founding and Contributing Editor of American Reformer. He is also Professor of New Testament at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary (Greenville, SC), having previously taught at Reformed Theological Seminary (Dallas, TX), Reformation Bible College (Sanford, FL), and Redeemer University (Ontario, Canada). He lives in the Greenville, SC area with his wife and four boys.

13 thoughts on “The Priestess versus the President

  1. You wouldn’t post my comment that you hate women because you’re a pathetic coward. If you’re going to hate women at least own it. Say it out loud that women are in all ways inferior to men.

    1. This is an unserious comment from an unserious person void of reason or compassion. You are what you claim to hate.

  2. All I see in the response by Trump and many of his allies is an authoritarian approach. Such an approach, as opposed to a rational one, seeks to discredit Budde rather than to examine and analyze what she said.

    And so what if Budde is speaking from the experience of listening to the people she has been serving? What if there were members from the LGBT community who expressed their fears of Trump being President? Why would Budde be wrong in relaying what they said to Trump.

    We should also note that Budde spoke rationally. She didn’t use labels to try to smear Trump. And what she asked Trump to show mercy to certain groups of people. Is Trump’s problem with what Budde said was that he opposes the idea of showing mercy to the groups Budde spoke for? Do his allies oppose being merciful to the groups that Budde mentioned?

    1. This is a thoughtful and respectful response to an unchristian essay. The bishop asked the President to be merciful and he threw a pathetic fit. Between the two, any decent person would prefer the bishop.

      1. Karen,
        My response is respectful because like the people I disagree with here, I am a sinner. Just because I might be more correct on some issues than the people I respond to here, doesn’t mean that I am better than and can look down on them. We are all peers in sin here.

        That we are all peers in sin is why the Gospels and some of the Apostles, like Paul and James, warn us against judging and looking down on others.

      2. Ironically, you’re the only one we see throwing a pathetic fit here (distinguished from Curt’s sophisticated fit). Between your comment and the article, decent people by far prefer Dunson’s article.

  3. Budde completely omitted the evil effects of her theology on: the victims of murder, rape, theft, and other crimes committed by illegals; surgical and chemical mutilation of children too young to make an informed decision about “transitioning their gender;” the load thrown on social services by illegals taking away from American citizens; deaths due to drugs smuggled in by cartels. It’s a long list Budde would prefer we not consider.

      1. By definition someone who enters the country illegally has committed a crime. Therefore the crime rate for illegal immigrants is 100%.

        1. John,
          True, but that isn’t the complaint but the Trumpublicans. They are talking about violent crimes, property crimes, and so forth.

          The issue is if immigrants have a smaller crime rate of those acts that are crimes when committed by natural born citizens than natural born citizens, then what is the evil effect that you wrote about in your first comment?

  4. I honestly believe that Budde’s sermon has been one of the most important pieces of American religious history in quite some time. It has forced many American Christians to come out and willingly say the quiet part out loud that they willfully reject the teachings of Christ in favor of upholding some cultural “Christian” aesthetic. Just like the pharisees they wish to drag the adulterous women, the fornicators, and lepers out into society for their public stoning to uphold the Levitical laws, and revile in disgust as Jesus’ insists upon acting merciful towards the least of these.

    But how can the pious retain their sense of self righteous piety if they aren’t allowed to assert their goodness against those they deem inferior, or immoral, or unclean, or criminal? The rule of law pharisees sure wanted to maintain their God ordained law and order by stoning the adulterous woman in John 8, by condemning Jesus for healing on the sabbath in Matthew 12 Mark 3 and Luke 6, by being disgusted at the sinning woman’s great love for Jesus by adorning his feet with perfume in Luke 7.

    And all this self-righteous babble over one preacher asking the highest executive leader in our country to have mercy on those who feel most threatened and scared right now. But perhaps she is begging the question, assuming him guilty from the pulpit not understanding his true “justified” plans. Except non-other than his second in command came out a few days latter insisting that Federal agents must invade religious and educational institutions to instill, “a chilling effect”, upon who? Those who seek refuge in the lords house, and the children who study in our schools (whether they or their parents are “legally” allowed to be here or not).

    I hope anyone who reads this with disgust seriously does a review back through the bible to see the overarching trend of Jesus’ earthly ministry of uplifting the social pariah, the unclean, the criminal, and the sinner, against the attacks of the religious authorities who wish to use God’s word to tear down the weak, and pray that the scales may fall from their eyes. Look closely upon Matthew 7:21-23 and Matthew 25: 31-46 and take heart the message of the Gospel to Love the lord your God and Love your neighbor as yourself, lest you end up unknown by the Son of Man.

  5. IF the Bishop is called ‘priestess’ for mixing faith with politics in a sermon … is American Reformer going to call HUNDREDS of Evangelical preachers and pastors who did exactly that – mixed politics into Bible study, mixed electoral political into a sermon, etc – ‘SORCERERS’? It is shocking that American Reformer has made an IDOL of their own political theories! EXACTLY CONTRARY to Jesus’ explicit example and teaching that ‘God’s kingdom is not about power-wielding worldliness’. God, in the end, will have something to say to them who so despise Jesus explicit example and direct teaching.

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