Bishop Budde Demonstrated REAL Christianity

by Josh Colletta
Bishop Mariann Budde speaks at the 2012 public memorial service for Neil Armstrong.

I am a Christian.  I don’t wear it on my sleeve, but I don’t make any bones about it, either.  I was raised mostly in Evangelical churches.  My maternal grandfather was an ordained Southern Baptist minister, and in my middle childhood, I spent several years as a founding member of his church.  When my parents divorced, I became a member of two different churches: another Southern Baptist congregation with my father’s side of the family, and an Evangelical Lutheran congregation with my mother’s side.

The change my mother made was a bit of a shock. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is not an “evangelical movement” denomination, it’s mainline protestant theology. The Southern Baptist Convention was, at the time (and possibly still today), teaching its congregants that Lutheranism was a cult, an offshoot from Catholicism — which, itself, isn’t real Christianity; those Mary-worshipping heathens.

But in searching for a new church, my mom was looking for something that she didn’t see in any of the “evangelical” or even some mainline denominations: grace, mercy, forgiveness, and leading with Christ’s love.  Those are all things that the ELCA happens to lean pretty heavily into.

It was a jolt for me, as well.  To be clear, my grandfather was not the fire-and-brimstone or condemn-the-sinner type at all, and neither were the head pastors at any of the conservative churches I attended with my dad later.  But while all of those churches did some work in their communities, most of the charitable giving went to supporting missionaries abroad.  Trinity Lutheran Church was not just giving to missionaries and paying lip service to helping those in need at home, they were actually doing the work.

Not long after I was baptized as a member, we started King’s Kupboard, a food pantry that now operates thrice weekly because the need in our community is so great.  This is the Rust Belt.  As I’ve mentioned before, our economy here in Hillsdale County has never fully recovered from the Dot-Com Bust, and some say we haven’t even fully recovered from the 70’s recession (which was before my time, both living here and just being alive altogether).  Most food pantries here were open only once a week and put tight restrictions on who qualified for help.  People were going hungry.

King’s Kupboard’s qualifications are simple: there are no qualifications.  You can come from as near or far as you need.  You can come as often as you need.  The only information collected is a minimal amount of demographic data required for participation in the state food pantry program.  The amount of food and goods you’ll receive each time depends on the size of your household, but within that limit, you take whatever you need; just be sure that you use whatever you take (or give it to someone who will).

Trinity has also worked over the years to form partnerships with many of the churches around the county of various denominations in an effort to increase involvement in the community, which has made quite a bit of progress in helping those in need.  We also participate in the annual Loaves & Fishes event, in which local churches, businesses, and volunteer groups give away all kinds of things like food, toilet paper, and socks; to school supplies and haircuts.  It has become the largest charity event in Hillsdale County, and it typically serves anywhere from 250 to 450 people.

And those are just the most public-facing ways my church shows Christ’s love to our neighbors.  There are plenty of others.

When I witnessed these things, I knew that this was the Christianity I read about in my Bible.  This was the love of Jesus.  A cult?  Hardly.  Though a Catholic offshoot we obviously are, both in history and liturgy.  Many of us like to jokingly call ourselves “bastard Catholics.”  But nobody is being indoctrinated.  Nobody is being forced into the congregation or to conform to anything.  And nobody’s “worshiping” Mary.  We don’t even pray to her.  Marty didn’t go for that idea.

Now, one might say “oh, but they got you to change your mind!  See?!  It was indoctrination!  It was brainwashing!  Nay, it was HERESY!

My mind wasn’t changed.  These were all things I already believed, and like my mother, I wasn’t satisfied with what “Evangelical Christian” doctrine was quickly becoming.  At that point, in the mid nineties and early aughts, the faith of conservative-theology churches was… stagnant, at best.  While I have nothing against the head pastor of the last church I was a member of with my dad, I can’t for the life of me remember one single poignant lesson that I ever learned from him.  I can think of one or two from the church we were members of prior to that from 1995 to 2000.

Even by the time my grandfather’s church began in 1992, he was an anomaly in that he preached exactly what he read in the Bible, he divulged the theological training he’d received about any passage in seminary, and if that went against what other Southern Baptist pastors were saying behind the pulpit, too bad.  He wasn’t going to conform to popular theology, he was going to preach it how he was taught — which in some ways was surprisingly different from what many Southern Baptists were hearing every Sunday morning, and sometimes aligned a little closer with those Lutheran “cultists” than I think even he was willing to admit.

In other words, I left a dying faith tradition for one that actually reflected everything I knew about what Jesus had called us to do.  Not that we’re saved by works, but that Jesus called us to do those works because we’re saved, as the Holy Spirit compels us to do.  Be servants of others in His name.  Be his example in the world.  Heal the sick.  Provide for those in need.  Defend the defenseless.  Champion, protect, and support those who society has rejected.

As DC Talk put it so simply: “Luv Is a Verb.”

We don’t do these things to claim that we’re better people.  We’re not.  We all have our faults.  We do them because, even without the religious context, they’re merely the morally right things to do.  We should all be helping each other and working for the betterment of all.  After all, a rising tide lifts all boats.

So when Bishop Mariann Budde spoke truth to (illegitimate) power during Tuesday’s prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, I saw exactly what “Evangelical Christians” (both words in sarcasm quotes) have, at this point, outright rejected: the message of Jesus Christ.  It wasn’t political.  It was not some “vicious attack” as the Nazi Republicans have claimed.  It was a plea for mercy coming from a place of love.

I’ll even give you her exact words so you can read them for yourself:

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President.  Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God.  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.  The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals.  They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation.  But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.  They pay taxes and are good neighbors.  They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples.

I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.  And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.  Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.

May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people.  Good of all people in this nation and the world.  Amen.

If you can find fault with any of that, you are not following Jesus Christ, and you are blaspheming his name every time you invoke it.

This is how I know that the Nazi Republicans and the “Evangelical Christians” — many of whom have now fully embraced the term “Christian nationalist,” which is just an obfuscated way of saying “theocratic Nazi” — are not Christians.  Trump sure as hell isn’t.  The hatred for and violence against anyone who isn’t a white cisgender heterosexual “Christian” male (and you’d better be the right kind of “Christian” and male) utterly negates any claims to Christianity.  You don’t get to engage in genocide and claim to be a Christian.  It proves your claim of faith to be a damnable lie.

And damned they are.  This behavior is literally what Jesus himself rejected in Matthew 7:

21 ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.  22 On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” 23 Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.”

As I began to write opinion pieces in the mid-2000’s, one thing quickly became abundantly clear: there is a strong connection between my faith and politics.  Over the years, some have accused me of allowing my politics to shape my religious beliefs.  Nine times out of ten, those people are “Evangelical Christians” who are more devoted to the Republican Party than they are to any principles of Christianity.  Their churches’ pulpits have become Sunday morning reinforcement of whatever Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have already said.  Maybe not in the same context or words, but certainly by the same ideology.

They can’t fathom the concept that it’s actually my religious beliefs that shape my politics.  They can’t fathom the concept of faith-informed political positions that are not theocratic in nature.  To them, politics is religion and vice-versa.  If your politics differ from theirs, they believe that it’s your faith which must be wrong.  In their minds, you can’t be a Christian and not be a right-winger!  That’s just not possible!

It’s exactly what both Billy Graham and Barry Goldwater warned about when they begged Ronald Reagan not to marry the Republican Party with the evangelical movement ahead of the 1980 election.  For their own reasons, both wiser men knew that this would be the only possible outcome of that coalition.  Now, the two are completely one unit.  You can’t even say they’re intertwined.  There is no separation between them.  The “Evangelicals” are the Republicans, and the Republicans are the “Evangelicals.”  They are synonymous.  They are the exact same thing.

What they are not are followers of Christ.  The backlash against Bishop Budde only further confirms that undeniable fact.

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