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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