A Reply to Bishop Budde

Perhaps it is time for you to hear some pleas, as well.

Bishop Budde, I would like to address you directly. Since you chose to directly address President Trump in your sermon, rather than to speak to the nation, the precedent has been set that we should personalise our political differences. I’m sure you will understand then that the best way to respond to that, is to address you directly.

It is time for you to sit through a sermon. It is time for you to hear some hard truths. I doubt that this will ever reach you since I’m an ordinary citizen, and not the Bishop of Washington. I don’t have a beautiful church to invite you to in order to scold, berate and try to humiliate you. So I’ll have to do it here.

First, I’d like to make a plea to you and everyone like you. I’m not a Christian, except culturally, as I don’t have faith. I respect Christianity, and I respect faith, but I want to be totally honest with you. So I should be honest about the fact that I have tried, and failed, to believe in God. I want to, I see the solace and the beauty in it, so please understand the deep respect I have for Christianity.

And the total lack of respect I have for you.

I think, Bishop Budde, that just like me, you don’t really have any faith. I think you have less faith and fewer Christian values than me, or than President Trump.

I can see that you have all the trappings of Christianity. You wear the robes of a Bishop, although I note that they often seem closer to a Pride flag in their design than a traditional Bishop’s robes. But you have the clothing. You have the job. You are professionally employed as a minister to a Christian flock, and as a preacher schooled in the language of the Bible. You use that language, and you talk about love, empathy and kindness in ways that a real Christian might. You even manage to mention God now and then. Everything on the surface of what you are employed to do, everything about the setting in which you speak, would suggest you are a Christian.

And everything about what you actually seem to think, actually want to do, and actually seem to feel, suggests the opposite.

I don’t think you are a Christian, Bishop Budde. I don’t think you understand Christianity. I don’t think you worship God, at least not a Christian one. I think you serve an entirely different Master. One might say, God’s rival or God’s Enemy. I don’t think you or anyone like you cares about Christianity, about most of the Christians in America or around the world, and about true Christian values.

I think you use Christianity for your own purposes. I think you exploit your position as a Bishop, and you put on the raiments of a Bishop, to worship other things and serve other purposes. There can be no greater contempt for Christianity than to use it in this fashion. To fail to have faith is surely less of a sin than to twist the faith of others, to mock it and deform it, by bending their faith to your purposes.

I think you use Christianity, in the manner that a rapist uses the body of a woman. I think you actually have a deep loathing of Christianity, and secretly and perhaps not so secretly delight in turning the trappings of faith against the very institution, the very values, the very culture you are claiming to represent.

I don’t think you worship Jesus or a Christian God. I don’t think you adore Mary as the Mother of God. I don’t think you follow Christian values or Biblical teaching. I think you worship yourself, in many ways. You don’t believe in a God that might encompass more than you. For you God has to be, well, very much like a lesbian woman who voted Democrat and hates Donald J. Trump. And I think that is why you took a sermon that gave you an opportunity to address the nation and share Christian values of forgiveness and reconciliation, and made it about your personal hatred of Donald Trump and an opportunity to express that malice and loathing, all cloaked in the language of care and concern for others.

I do think one part of your speech, which was entirely about you and your politics and not in the least about the nation, or God, or Christianity, was sincere. I think you are genuinely obsessed with LGBTQ rights. LGBTQ rights, the political activism of that movement, is the closest you have to a faith and the closest you get to worship. I imagine it’s distressing to you that God took on the form of a man when He gave his Son as a gift to the world and as a means by which to heal our sins and suffering.

You see, Bishop, people who don’t actually believe can use the language. Just like you do. The difference, though, is that I don’t pretend to believe it as I am saying it. I see it as full of lessons and wisdom, and if I reference it I try to do it with actual respect, but I’m honest in the fact that I lack faith.

I don’t substitute something else and pretend that other thing, perhaps even just a vague, sexuality inspired worship of the Other, is Christianity.

Our genders, our sexual tastes, and our politics all differ, Bishop Budde. That is obvious. We are very different people. But I think the greatest difference is, like President Trump, I am honest. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not. If I hate someone or something, I’ll say it. If I love someone or something I’ll say it. Very much like President Trump does.

But that’s not what you do, Biahop Budde.

What you do is to pretend to love a thing, in order to use and exploit it. That’s what you do with Christianity. You are given a pulpit and a wage to express Christianity, but you use it express LGBTQ activism. You use it to express Democrat Party inverted values, and Democrat ideas about Equity, Diversity and all the other modern things you actually worship and adore.

You take 2,000 years of Christianity and you distill it down to only those parts that might, might, be twisted to agree with a set of values and opinions that are purely political and which have only existed in our lifetimes.

I know this will come as a shock to you and those who rushed to say that your speech was brave, compassionate and intensely Christian, but I feel that this is a revelation you need.

Jesus was not an LGBTQ activist. He was not a feminist. He might not, and I know, I know this is very hard to understand, vote Democrat. Jesus might, and I think the Biblical record attests that he did, have different concerns to those of a middle aged comfortably affluent lesbian Bishop of Washington. He didn’t exist to express your views, or for you, 2,000 years later, to express your views and claim that they are his.

I don’t think Jesus intended that his priests and representatives, the supposed custodians of his values and his example and of God’s concern for everyone, actually wanted people to use the language of love in order to express the depth of their loathing for Donald J. Trump.

And there’s a whole host of things about you and alleged Christians like you that I, that people with faith and without it, might consider very different to what Jesus lived, what Jesus thought, and what Jesus cared about, so much as we have Biblical and scholarly evidence of those things.

Just from the top of my head, and based on Sunday School lessons 40 years ago rather than your lifelong study of these things, I can’t recall Jesus ever saying “Vote for Kamala”. Perhaps you can point me to the place where he did? Nor can I recall him saying “Thou shalt have no borders”, or God instructing Moses, perhaps, that the 12th deadly sin is to believe that borders are real. I can’t recall the strong support Jesus gave to some Planned Parenthood of the 1st century AD, and to the idea that it is evil and wicked to oppose the murder of children in the womb. Indeed, from modern Democrat propaganda and constant references to the Handmaid’s Tale, I thought it was actually rather Christian to believe that all human life should be cherished, including that within the womb.

Perhaps Jesus would actually be on the side of the grandmother who prays for murdered infants outside an abortion clinic, rather than on the side of those who imprison Christians for silent prayer. I’ve never heard you question Christians being imprisoned for prayer, Bishop Budde, or protesting about that.

If Jesus was alive today, if Christian compassion means anything…why is it that compassion and empathy must be reserved for full grown adults who want tell everyone how proud they are of their sexual kinks and fetishes, and not for parents who would prefer that people aren’t grooming their children, sexualising their children, and telling us that cutting off the breasts and genitals of their children is a good thing?

What is it about the example of Jesus and Christian teaching, Bishop Budde, that makes you so certain that they are on the side of mutilating young children for profit, or on the side of insisting that some bizarre sex fetish is a gender or an identity worth building your whole life around?

I happen to like large tits, Bishop Budde. That’s one of my sexual likes. It’s not my gender. It’s not my identity. It’s my sexual taste. Should I design a Big Titty Banner, Bishop Budde? Should I insist that other people’s children be taught about my love of big tits? Should I tell women with small tits that they better get with my agenda or else? Should I pretend that Jesus and 2,000 years of Christianity should be boiled down to celebrating my love of Big Tits and calling anyone who says this isn’t really what Christianity is about a bigot and a Nazi?

I think there might be men out there who love Big Tits and are afraid to say it, in the modern climate. Maybe everything should be about empathy exclusively towards them? After all, Bishop Budde, these men are afraid. They are afraid that you will demonise them, call them names, and hate them. Have some compassion. I plead with you Bishop Budde, think about the men who love Big Tits. Think about them with loving kindness.

Can you see from that example how ridiculous it is to pretend that all compassion and kindness is about acknowledging and respecting sexual tastes, Bishop Budde?

Let alone the idea that all compassion and kindness and Christian charity is about hating Donald Trump and hectoring and scolding him in the name of love….after the exact same hectoring, the exact same fear mongering, the exact same hysteria prompted assassination attempts on his life.

None of that seems Christian to me, Bishop Budde.

But you are sure that Jesus and Christianity is on the side of abortion and of the political party that treats murdering your unborn offspring as the highest moral value imaginable. You must be right on that, and all those Catholics are wrong. Who knew that Democrat politics would lead an Anglican back to that old internal hatred of thinking that Catholics are evil, via the route of Gay Rights? Isn’t modern life complicated.

I want to understand, you see, what you think Christianity is. And from what I can tell, you think Christianity is:

1. LGBTQ activism and believing that gays, lesbians, transgenders all have more rights and deserve more protections than anyone else.

2. Celebrating sexual fetishes and forcing others to do so.

3. Supporting the alleged right of mothers to murder their unborn children.

4. Using the pulpit for party political broadcasts that offend many Christians.

5. Hating Donald Trump.

6. Demanding open borders no matter the consequences for others.

Perhaps you can see, Bishop, that some of us don’t consider any of this Christian, spiritual or even sane? Perhaps you could have some empathy and compassion for us and for Donald Trump. After a decade of stoking hate and fear against this man, does he deserve a little compassion, just a drop, from you? Don’t the people who voted for him deserve kindness?

Yes, Bishop, even the people who aren’t middle class lesbian priests or South Americans illegally crossing the border. Here’s a startlingly novel concept for you which I know you have never, ever considered:

Perhaps Christian empathy and kindness and mercy might finally extend, might finally include, people who want to be safe in their own country? Perhaps empathy might finally flow towards men who are heterosexual? Towards women who don’t want men in their changing rooms? Towards parents who don’t want to be labelled as domestic terrorists for having different opinions to you? Towards parents who don’t want their children groomed or mutilated or taken away from them because they don’t want that grooming to happen.

Any Christian kindness for them, Bishop?

Any for the families of those murdered by illegal immigrants? How about the children killed by illegal immigrants? How about the people murdered in the Black Lives Matter riots you no doubt also supported? Any consideration for them? Any compassion for them? How about the people sick to death of being demonised for wanting low taxes, a secure border, and a nation where their children are not going to be raped or murdered by some Third World person who should not be in the country?

When your kindness to illegal migrants results in the rape or murder of Americans, Bishop, do you ever wonder if it isn’t actually kindness at all? Of course not. The people who worry about that, who fear that, even those who have experienced that, are evil aren’t they, Bishop Budde?

Evil like Donald Trump.

Only lots of people who aren’t polyamorous dwarfs or illegal immigrants or Democrat voting lesbians in 2.6 million dollar mansions six bedroom mansions have been living in fear, Bishop Budde, a fear you never noticed or gave a shit about. A fear you, in your social position and affluence, have never had to feel.

They have been afraid that their country was becoming a tyranny, and that they could be arrested or imprisoned for an innocent joke, for being in Washington on a certain day, or for voting a way you don’t approve of. How many Republicans were fearing a knock on the door for things that aren’t actually crimes when people like you were in charge, Bishop Budde? How many suffered lawfare? How many were beaten up or abused by BLM thugs you supported, or by Antifa thugs you encouraged? How many Jews were chased across college campuses by students who vote the same way as you, Bishop Budde?

Maybe ordinary, decent, Christian people were living in fear because of people like you, because of the politics you support, and because of the open borders and insane demands you consider kindness, Bishop Budde.

When armed gangs from South America go through an apartment building kicking down doors, demanding money, and shoving guns in people’s faces, do you think those people in those flats were afraid, Bishop Budde? I think they were.

When a child is sex trafficked across the open borders you want, Bishop Budde, what happens to that child? What has happened to the half a million children who went missing thanks to that open border, Bishop Budde. Would Jesus support a version of compassion that led directly to half a million children going missing during a Presidency you never complained about and never criticised? Why didn’t you hector and berate President Biden on behalf of those poor children, Bishop Budde? I’ve not seen any public comment from you on the sex trafficking of children over open borders. Whoever not? Apparently these children do not earn your sympathy.

For some reason, once we have expended all our compassion, kindness, and Christian love on people who want to wave their genitals at children at a Pride parade, or once it has all been used up on people who say they are scared when others don’t use the ‘correct’ imaginary pronouns, there is never any left for raped, murdered and trafficked children, is there? Or for Americans similarly harmed by the policies you favour.

President Trump, you see, doesn’t support strong borders because he’s a Nazi. He supports strong borders because they protect people, Bishop. They protect the most vulnerable people. They protect innocent Americans. And they even protect the most vulnerable, the most innocent migrants.

But you, of course, don’t give a shit about actual harms and real suffering.

Because you aren’t a Christian at all. You are a Democrat and Marxist and LGBTQ activist using Christianity as a vehicle for your real loves, hates and hypocritical prejudices. And not once, not once, have you ever shown empathy towards those who vote differently towards you, or understanding that Jesus and Christianity isn’t the same as you and isn’t about just reflecting your sexual identity.

No, Bishop, Christianity does not consist of hating Donald Trump and loving open borders. Spare some thought for those millions afraid because of the things you supported before you pretend that refusing to use an imaginary pronoun or support a delusion is the same as threatening millions of people. People have suffered and lived in fear because of your attitudes, and now that is ending. You put those who disagree with you in fear of their lives. I have heard Trump supporters speak from prison cells where they have been beaten and tortured, and I have heard, too, your silence on missing children.

The days of pretending that you own compassion, that you are Christ and that Christ is a Democrat, when you show no compassion at all for your own people, are ending, Bishop Budde.

However much you hate it, that is ending.

So my final plea is this Bishop Budde. It is a Christian one, I think. And it is this: have some compassion for the rest of us, have some empathy for the rest of us. Have some Christian humility, and less Satanic Pride. Do some spiritual examination of your own sins. By that I don’t mean being lesbian or even being a Democrat. By that I mean shamelessly using your position in the Church to express your political hatreds, and the sins of hypocrisy and hubris, the sin of cloaking that hatred in the language of love.

It might make you a better priest. It might make you a better person.

And it won’t care whether you are straight or gay.

Just like President Trump.