As an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I have a visceral response to emotional manipulation.
My abuser was a grown man who made me feel like I hung the moon. He took me to fun places, bought me pretty things, gave me candy, and told me I was pretty and that he loved me very much. I was too young to recognize that his brand of love was abusive and that it was actually going to cost me way more than I would ever willingly agree to pay.
You limp away from a situation like that, even 30 years later, sadder but infinitely wiser about the dynamics of emotional manipulation and sabotage.
And I’ve got to tell you that watching Bishop Mariann Budde’s “sermon” at the Inaugural Prayer Service recently brought me right back to that headspace. I felt instant rage to a degree that may be hard to explain to those unfamiliar with my personal journey out of abuse. I guess in order to explain this, we would have to start by examining what the bishop actually said:
“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you… In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives…”
“Well what’s so bad about that?” you might ask. “All she did was ask for mercy. Doesn’t God love even marginalized people? Isn’t He merciful? Doesn’t He want us to love them, too?”
One need only spend a few minutes familiarizing herself with the entire body of Bishop Budde’s work to realize that what she was really asking for is not mercy but capitulation. She wasn’t asking him to use softer words. She was asking him to pump the brakes on necessary policy changes that would protect the greater good.
Jesus loves people. He loves you. He loves me. He loves illegal immigrants. He loves kids who are confused about their gender. His heart is merciful toward us. But loving every person does not mean He loves every idea or every action. Mercy doesn’t look like capitulating to ideologies that lead to harm. Mercy looks like intervening to stop the harm from happening, and it’s precisely that intervention that Bishop Budde was standing staunchly against in her speech. She framed the whole thing as love, of course, but the brand of love she was peddling wasn’t love at all, and that’s why it vexes me.
You should be able to step foot in a Christian church and find that the leaders are pointing you toward Jesus and the truth that can save.
Jesus says, “Come as you are,” not “Stay as you are.” Faithful Christian leaders lovingly encourage their congregants to surrender their sins to Jesus and allow Him to transform them from the inside out. To be a Christian is to be willing to change. It means your identity is in Him, not your sexual preferences or rebellion against the material reality of your sex. But false leaders like Bishop Budde encounter this necessary shepherding and shout, “Have mercy! Don’t tell people they need to change! That’s hateful.” And in so doing, they circumvent the very repentance that could bring the healing we all claim to desire.
Budde’s speech perpetuated both the myth of the “transgender child” and the histrionic belief that children will die if we don’t indulge their delusion about their bodies. There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Mercy and compassion for kids who are confused about their sex looks like lovingly helping them make peace with the immutable nature of it. It does NOT look like forcing the rest of society to play make-believe with the cult ideology that’s harming them. The price tag here is just too high. Kids are not dying because we refuse to tell them lies about their bodies. The suggestion is preposterous and harmful.
She appealed to the misguided belief that trans-identified people are powerless, when, in fact, the opposite is true. The trans lobby is not “powerless.” Until very recently, they’ve had ALL the institutional power. All of it. They’ve had a death grip on the entirety of mainstream media, big tech, big pharma, the medical industrial complex, academia, Hollywood elite, and, increasingly, of the now largely apostate church.
How do you think female inmates raped by men in their prison cells feel when people who claim to be abuse survivor advocates defend their rapists in the name of God?
What does “mercy” look like to a physically castrated young man like Ritchie Herron who will never be a father because people like Bishop Budde encouraged the cult belief that they could be born in the wrong body? What does “mercy” look like to grieving parents whose children have committed suicide after the medical intervention experts promised what would make them happy failed to deliver?
I’m focused heavily on the trans element of Budde’s speech for obvious reasons: it’s been my soapbox for the past 10 years. I’m so inundated with the stories of harm perpetrated by the gender cult that it keeps me up at night. But the same logic could be applied to Budde’s opposition to Trump’s border patrol policies. What would mercy have looked like for Laken Riley’s family? It’s not “unloving” to restore law and order where abuse and chaos have been running rampant.
Imagine someone comes up to you and demands that you remove all the locks from your house. “There are people who need your help,” they shout. “Let them live in your house and eat your food. Let them use your credit card to buy their clothes and pay their bills.”
So you ask questions: “Well, how many people are we talking about? Who are they? What are their names? Have we conducted criminal history screenings on any of them?” You’re willing to help but you’ve got your own kids to feed, your own bills to pay, and the money has to come from somewhere. Your assistance must be reasoned and measured. You don’t want to accidentally put a convicted rapist in the same room as your daughter so you ask for some reasonable boundaries and protective measures.
“Hateful self-centered white supremacist bigot!” they cry in response. “I thought you were supposed to be a Christian.”
Suggesting that President Donald Trump is somehow in need of a lecture about mercy for policy positions like only women give birth and you need to enter the country legally is emotional manipulation. I’m not having it.
This drastic, left-leaning agenda from Budde is anything but loving and caring. Rebuking the president to push a political agenda and suggest that he does not care for those in need—especially from the pulpit—fails to express Christian love and righteousness.
Preaching identity politics is a dangerous slippery slope that reminds us to cling to Christ, hold firm to the truth of the gospel, and keep our eyes on biblical truths that empower others to know the Holy Spirit