The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend. Trump and THAT Sermon

If we ever needed proof of the veracity of the ancient adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, then the sermon at the Trump inauguration by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde sealed the deal.

It’s been interesting watching the reaction of Christians, progressives AND evangelicals to the sermon. Trump in his usual petulant manner was having none of it, and responded like a graceless 12-year-old on social media:

Not sure what the hanging letter “t” is at the end of that, but I assume it’s not the start of “tut-tut”. And you can almost hear his intonations as you read it, can’t you? Bishop Budde, by the way, is certainly a more gracious public figure than Trump could never be.

Now I am not going to go into the full unpacking of the sermon (Murray Campbell has done an excellent job of that here).

What I do want to do is raise the concern that many erstwhile orthodox Christians, especially in the broader evangelical camp in the West outside the USA, are fawning over it. Budde gets a heretic hall pass because she paid out on the bloke you despise.

And I think I know why. Yes, it’s because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And that’s despite the sermon coming from someone who has been historically hostile to orthodox Christians, indeed has apologised for their presence in the very same pulpit from which she addressed the President.  I would have hoped for some more cold-eyed and realistic takes from some evangelicals on this matter, but the fawning ramped up.

As Murray Campbell points out when Max Lucado (yes that Max Lucado of thundering fire and brimstone sermons [not]! ) preached at that church, Bishop Budde said these words in response to the anger from post-orthodox revisionist Christian leaders that such a fundamentalist as Lucado was allowed to speak there:

I made you feel at risk and unwelcome in your spiritual home.

To which I might say, “Do not say the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.”

Having read up on her frameworks and beliefs, Budde may have said true words about the nature of the President in her sermon, and she may have appealed to some obvious concerns – some of which I share -, but she is no fearless defender of Christ’s honour in any orthodox manner. So let’s not pretend she is, or eulogise her as somehow speaking the words of God.

I just won’t honour her with “prophet of Christ” language. I won’t overlook her destructive theology, even if it is couched in the language of love.  Did she say some true things? Sure!  But she’s no friend of the gospel, and as her put-down of Max Lucado demonstrates, no friend of people who are friends of the gospel.

Bishop Budde rejects substitutionary atonement, she holds universalist views on salvation, and her view of Scripture is not Scripture’s view of Scripture. And therefore not Jesus’ view of Scripture. And that should be a matter of concern or indeed sorrow to those who claim to be orthodox. They should be sobered by that reality.

But, well, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and all that.

If Budde were a common garden-variety Christian leader who espoused the things she did, it would be simple to label her heretical. Given who she is, and what she has done, it is not simple to label her heretical.

Okay, I will get flak for it, and the sneaking suspicion among many that I must be – shock, horror, a Trumpist. But she is a heretic. And sigh, no, I’m not a Trumpist.

Budde also wields a lot of power herself. As does her friend and fellow Episcopal Bishop Curry of Meghan and Harry wedding fame. Bishop Curry wrote the forward to Bishop Budde’s book. And guess what? We fawned over him too!

Fawned over a sermon about love, while simultaneously using his own power to  prosecute a minister in his own diocese, the aptly named Bishop William Love for holding to the orthodox tenets of the faith around the issue of marriage.

In an unprotected case of speaking truth to power, Bishop Love lost his job and his church. Mercy was in short supply for Bishop Love. Orthodoxy was non-existent.

By the way, there’s little chance that Bishop Budde’s job is in any danger. But in light of what she has said about Trump, it disconcerts me to see how evangelicals who oppose him are so quick to photoshop out the heresy and destruction of truth of Budde’s ministry for a greater good – the calling out of political power.

“Of course she has some views we don’t agree with. But, you know, Trump!”

Which sounds suspiciously to me like the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Trump may be hostile to the health of the nation (that’s a debatable and mixed point, let’s face it). I don’t like a lot of his rhetoric and I don’t like his narcissistic personality.

But it’s possible to hold both tensions at once (it’s called adulting): that Trump is a mixed bag of ideas and will get some stuff very wrong and some stuff right, and that the person who preached against him is not a true prophet of Christ, but said some stuff that Trump might have to take heed of. Indeed a truly gospel response to both Trump and Budde would be to admit that. But no.

Will Trump show mercy to LGBTQI people? I hope so. But that does not mean he has to comply with the unbiblical idea that there are a myriad genders, or, more pointedly, that to deny there are myriad genders should bring a t0nne of opprobrium down upon your head in the workplace or the university.

That has happened. Power silenced truth. Power kicked truth out of its job or doxxed it on social media. And it will continue to happen. If all Trump does is give some air cover for orthodox practice and freedom of conscience in this area, even if he is doing for his own vanity, then that’s a good thing.

Radical ideas about gender have done a lot of cultural damage in the USA and across the West. And a lot of physical damage. Read Abigail Shrier on this. Plenty of people have been burned by this bad idea, and plenty of well-meaning people will burn people by this bad idea.

The outpouring of “wow” over her sermon and the eulogising of it by people who claim to be orthodox, with a commitment to “the faith once for all delivered to the saints”, makes me wonder: Have such types made politics their idol just as much as the Christian Nationalists on the other side of the fence have?

Are they too primarily committed to a deeply politicised vision of Christianity that will reflexively overlook the heresy of a church leader, and pronounce her as a prophet of Christ because, well, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”?

I’ve said it before on this site, but I will say it again: There is an equal and opposite error to the Christian Nationalism that merges the laws, commands and prophesies of biblical Israel and supplants them onto the state. And it’s this: Christian progressivism that merges the laws, commands and prophesies of Biblical Israel and supplants them onto the state.

The church is the new Israel. Period. Get that wrong and all sorts of political power plays ensue. All sorts of evils are excused for the sake of holding onto that power.

Both extremes have, in their words and in their actions, betrayed the fact that politics is their actual transcendence. Lip service to the church of course, but winning the politics is the preferred goal.

Both transpose Israel language onto the state. The only difference is that they focus on different verses, chapters and books of the Bible when doing so.

Both prove that their ultimate hope is more political than it is theological, and certainly more than it is eschatological.  The only difference is that Christian Nationalists have an insufficient eschatology and progressives have no eschatology at all.

Which is another way to say, if the shoe were on the other foot, and inevitably it will be, both sides will settle for “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Let’s not fall for it.