Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Part I

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Episcopal Bishop Calls Down Liberal Judgment on Trump: Prayer Meeting at the Washington National Cathedral Turns Political

Since the 1933 inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President of the United States, it has been traditional for a service of prayer to be held in connection with a presidential inauguration. It’s basically taken place every inaugural ceremony since 1933, and more often than not it has taken place in what is known as the National Cathedral. 

That service took place yesterday and in attendance was the President of the United States, along with Mrs. Trump and the Vice President of the United States, along with Mrs. Vance, members of Congress, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson and many others. It was not a public service in terms of being open to the public, but by now, many among the public know that in the service yesterday, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C. directly addressed the new president and did so with words of appeal and judgment.

Many on the Left will simply refer to this in the language of the ’60s as speaking truth to power, but what we actually witness there is liberal, very liberal, Episcopalianism running into a headlong collision with President Trump and the Trump administration. And as you look at what the Bishop had to say, you recognize it was all very calculated. Bishop Budde said to the president, “In the name of God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” She spoke of migrants, she said, particularly children, “Who fear that their parents will be taken away.” She also asked the president to consider, “The gay, lesbian, transgender children in Democratic Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.” It was theatrical language, but it was intended to be theater.

Now, let’s just look at the background of what in the world is going on here. First of all, we have the phenomenon of what is known as an interfaith service. Now, I’ll just be blunt about this. I would not participate, as a Christian minister, in an interfaith service. This was a very pressing issue, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. All over the United States communities and others, very famously at the national level in Washington D.C., were organizing interfaith services, but I could not participate because given my Christian convictions I cannot participate in a service in which the spiritual direction is towards some generic God in general, the deity referenced, if referenced at all, is ambiguous or for that matter, by a Christian estimation, an absolutely idolatrous religion. That is to say we can have good relationships with people of other faith, we cannot a worship service with them. The moment you say interfaith service from a Christian perspective, the participants are going to be the kinds of Christians who can participate in interfaith services, so that is something that takes place overwhelmingly on the theological Left.

Now, remember, the location is also significant. We talked just a matter of days ago on the briefing about the National Cathedral as it is usually known. I mentioned then that even back in the original design of Washington D.C., Pierre L’Enfant had suggested there needed to be a great national church.  That was not built when Washington was first occupied and first became the nation’s capital. And as a matter of fact, what is known now as the National Cathedral was really begun only in the early years of the 20th century. It was completed only in the closing years of the 20th century. It is a grand building. It is one of the largest Gothic structures you will ever see. It is majestic sitting there on a very prominent spot in the area of Washington D.C.

But it’s also important to recognize that even as it is the cathedral seat of the Episcopal diocese there in Washington D.C., it was also intended from the beginning to be something of a national church. And the moment you say that you recognize in the United States that becomes a problem, because there is no national church that is under any direct sponsorship of the United States government. It is a quirk in all of this that the United States Congress, back about 1903 or so, did give a charter to what became the National Cathedral. But one of the problems with this is that the National Cathedral is going to have to represent just about every faith tradition in the nation. On the one hand, it is an Episcopal Cathedral, on the other hand it is the National Cathedral, and that’s why these kinds of services are held there.

The reason we talked about it recently is because the National Cathedral hosted the state funeral of former president Jimmy Carter, but it also hosted this service. And as I said, in most inaugurations since 1933 there has been some service as a part of the formalities held in the National Cathedral. In this case, it wasn’t scheduled for Monday, the schedule was too busy already, it was scheduled for Tuesday. And so it was the President of the United States inaugurated the day before, the Vice President of the United States, inaugurated the day before who were basically set upon by the Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C.

Now here’s what’s really interesting. When you look at this, you recognize that, as I said earlier, the kind of Christian minister who would participate in an interfaith service is well, the kind of Christian minister who would participate in an interfaith service. That’s a very designated group. The same thing is true when it comes to denominations. A denomination that would be able to have, say, a diocesan cathedral that would be the diocesan seat of the bishop, and at the same time a national cathedral holding interface services. Well, you would look at a very interesting pattern here that would simply come down to a mathematical formula of one, and that would be in particular the Episcopal church. And that’s because the Episcopal church, which after all is the American branch of Anglicanism, which hearkens back to the Church of England, which is of course a state church. When you consider the Episcopal church in the United States, it was never at the national level a state church.

But it was in some ways the established denomination, and that’s because so many members of Congress, so many Justices of the Supreme Court, so many presidents of the United States, had deep Anglican or Episcopal roots. The Episcopal church has been, from the very beginning in the United States, an elitist church, which is to say it caters to and tends to attract people from a certain socioeconomic background. I want to be clear that’s not universally true, it is just sociologically manifested. And, for one thing, the Episcopal church has been very proud of its out sized political clout, its out sized cultural and social clout. The Episcopal Bishop in most communities throughout the United States was someone who would have a good deal of influence and a good deal of voice. But the other thing you need to note about the Episcopal Church is that along with the other major denominations of liberal Protestantism, it has basically been in severe decline, particularly in terms of membership for the course of the last several decades, and that has been tied to a theological collapse.

The Episcopal denomination, the Episcopal Church in the United States is now one of the most liberal religious bodies imaginable. Now, note carefully, I’m not saying that there are no persons of evangelical or conservative Orthodox belief within the Episcopal church. I’m just saying that if they are in the Episcopal church, they’re the kind of, well, the kind of person who can hold those beliefs and still be in the Episcopal church, which is overwhelmingly liberal. It has been for decades now avidly pro-LGBTQ, for same-sex marriage, but even before then, the great liberal turn, which took place in liberal Protestant world back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it basically was set loose in the second half of the 20th century with absolutely no braking system whatsoever.

Let me just also point to an obvious factor when it comes to the Episcopal church, it has never been Evangelical in terms of its general witness. It holds to infant baptism, and it was basically quite happy to be restricted to an elite component of society. But even as there has been a demographic revolution in the United States matched to a theological revolution in the Episcopal church, decades ago the Wall Street Journal ran a very memorable editorial entitled “The Episcopal Church Goes The Way of the Dodo.” Just in case you had to look that up. It means to extinction. Back when she was installed as the bishop, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C., the Washington Post described her as unapologetically liberal. And of course she is, and what she addressed to the president was basically the voice of liberal culture, and unsurprisingly, she went right to the LGBTQ issues.

Remember that in his inaugural address, President Trump had said that he would establish an executive order. It was actually a part of a larger complex of many executive orders that would say that for the purposes of the federal government there would be only two genders and that would be male and female. And furthermore, he stipulated, or at least his executive order stipulated that the distinction here is between sperm and eggs, or described as the larger reproductive cell and the smaller reproductive cell. Yes, it gets that technical, but it’s a sign of the times that if you’re going to be clear on these issues these days, when there is such widespread confusion, you have to be just that technical.

One point we just have to make here is that when you have liberal theology it leads to a liberal understanding of everything, including gender and sexuality. But you also have to work the logic the other way. When you are confronted by the view on, say, sexuality and gender held by this Episcopal Bishop, you have to know that that is based upon a prior revolution towards theological liberalism. All of this, of course, goes back to doctrines as fundamental as the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Scripture. Everything else after that simply follows. Liberal at the start, you’ll be liberal at the end and at every point liberal in the middle.

The other point I want to make is simply the political point that in that context, the bishop knew exactly what she was doing and the President knew exactly what she was doing. After the ceremony, he was asked what he thought, and he spoke about it pretty clearly. He told news crews, “Not too exciting, was it? They could do much better.” Historically, it is important to note just how revolutionized the Episcopal church has become, and it’s not just what this Episcopal Bishop had to say, it is the very fact that it was a she who said it that represents in its own way the revolution within the Episcopal church. Largely the same revolution throughout most of all liberal Protestantism.

Part II

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Is the GOP ‘Obsessed’ Over the Trans Issue? USA Today Columnist Makes an Ironic Claim

Okay, on a different front, I want us to look at how moral revolutions work, and the best way to understand it is to see it in progress. Yesterday’s edition of USA Today in the sports section, yes, we’re turning to the sports section. It featured an article by columnist Nancy Armour. The headline was “House GOP Obsessed with Transgender Athletes.” Nancy Armour has written about this issue over and over again. Now just hold onto that for a moment.

In the article published yesterday, here’s how she began, “Exit poll after exit poll found the economy was the driving issue for most voters last year, whether it was the price of eggs or housing costs, Americans said they felt squeezed financially and wanted those elected to do something about it. What did the New House of Representatives do in one of its first acts? It passed legislation to put a stop to that great economic threat of transgender girls and women playing sports. That’s right,” she wrote, “Instead of trying to limit onerous fees for consumers, passing incentives to create more housing stock or taking aim at the disingenuous price hikes behind skyrocketing grocery bills, the first priority of the house was to police the bodies of girls and young women instead of trying to help the majority of Americans house lawmakers focus their time and energies on the minuscule number of transgender girls and young women who play sports.”

Now, speaking of disingenuous, what’s disingenuous about Nancy Armour in this case is that she acts as if she’s really concerned about economics. That’s not really why she’s writing. If you look at the published record of USA Today, you will find article after article, about six just since say the last week of October or so, that Nancy Armour has written her own opinion columns in which she is pushing the LGBTQ line. And in particular, she is pushing the transgender agenda, pushing back against any limitation of so-called transgender women and transgender girls from participating on girls and women’s teams. That means male bodies, that means men and boys participating as girls and women. And Nancy Armour says, “The number is relatively small, and so you should get over it.”

But here’s where we need to note if you look at her argument over time, it’s not really about the numbers. The numbers are a way of saying, you just need to get over this. It’s really about the principle because she goes at the fact that there is no adequate research, she says, that proves that someone who went through male puberty in a male body, has an athletic advantage over girls or women. And of course, that’s a ridiculous argument, and it’s so ridiculous that people on the left are decreasingly using the argument simply because it fails the test of basic rationality. Anyone who observes girls and women’s sport knows the problem. Anyone looking at that photograph of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team sees the problem. You can just go down the list sport by sport, you’ll see the problem. And it is morally dishonest to say it’s about the numbers, because after all, at the very same time, people are arguing that the transgender count is woefully under counted.

As you look at this, you recognize, number one, the number doesn’t matter, but the moral agenda behind this, the cultural agenda behind this, it does matter. And that particular cultural strategy shows up big time. When you look at the headline of this article published yesterday, “House GOP Obsessed with Transgender Athletes.” When you see a headline like that, you need to pause and understand this is the way the Left works, and this is the way the Lleft wins. The social activists for the LGBTQ movement and other very liberal movements trying to upend not only established morality, but even ontology and creation order, in the case of male and female, one of the things they do is to paint anyone who opposes their revolution as obsessed. She’s arguing here that Republicans in the House of Representatives are obsessed with a transgender issue.

Note this carefully. If you are in a position of decision-making, and you don’t have to be in Congress, you could just be, say, on a school board or you could be on a PTA board, or you could be just about anywhere, say, one of the leaders of a little league team or a little league league, you could look at this and recognize that what you’re going to be told is that if you don’t go along with this kind of thing, then you’re obsessed with the issue. If you say no, much less try to adopt some kind of policy responding to it, you’re obsessed with the issue.

The big lesson behind this is that in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century, those who were seeking to push a basic seismic revolution in western societies, they shifted their strategy from an economic strategy to a cultural strategy. They shifted the ground. Instead of trying to bring about a revolution through Marxist economics, they would bring it about through a cultural revolution. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist theorist, famously pointed to the fact that the cultural revolution would be even more fundamental, and for that matter, even more widespread and popular, than an economic revolution in many Western countries. That’s exactly what has happened.

Rudi Dutschke, one of the Germans following in the same pattern, argued for what he called the long march through the institutions. In other words, you just have to go through everything. The point is the everything now includes sports, and this is one of the things that Christians need to keep in mind. The people who are trying to transform the culture aren’t always working, say, in changing the dictionary. They do that. They’re not always just trying to teach a doctoral seminar. They do that. They’re not just trying to put pressure on corporations. They do that. They are trying to bring about change where people live. They’re trying to bring about change even where people play sports. They’re trying to bring about change, and to force that change, even where children and young people are on sports teams, either in school or in extracurricular activities. If you can force these kinds of revolutionary changes at all those levels, you don’t have to worry about what happens at the highest levels. That becomes inevitable.

Thinking about the influence of Nancy Armour just as a singular individual at one newspaper, USA Today, writing in the sports section, I decided I would go back into the USA Today archives and find every article that Nancy Armour wrote on the transgender issue just in recent times. Again, you’re talking about a half dozen or more just in the last few months. Then ask yourself, how does she turn around and say that when Congress takes this one act, members of Congress are obsessed with the issue? It’s one of those situations in which if you argue that someone else is obsessed, it just might point to the fact that you yourself are obsessed. Something else to note is that when you look at an argument like this, you know it’s coming from someone who is absolutely sure she is on the right side of history. She is absolutely certain her side is going to win, it’s just a matter of time.

And here’s where we need to recognize that she might be right when it comes to the direction of the culture. Our responsibility is to bear witness and make the best arguments we can and make certain that our families and our churches understand what is at stake. One of the issues we need to understand is that when USA Today goes to hire a sports writer, well, this is the kind of sports columnists they hire. I just want to assure you it’s not by accident.

Part III

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A Pivotal Figure For the Culture of Death Dies: The Legacy and Influence of Cecile Richards

Finally, for today, I want to note the death of Cecile Richards, who had been for many years the president of Planned Parenthood. She died in recent days at age 67 of cancer. She was a very influential figure in the history of Planned Parenthood, and in the history of the abortion issue in the United States, but it wasn’t just the abortion issue. It’s not just the abortion issue now. When you look at Planned Parenthood, you are not looking only at the nation’s largest provider of abortions in the culture of death. You’re looking not only at an organization that was founded by someone like Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist who argued in the main for more children from the fit, less from the unfit. It is also true that the Planned Parenthood organization right now is one of the major facilitators of the transgender revolution as well, and that gets down to hormonal treatments, other medical treatments available through Planned Parenthood clinics, by the way, aimed at adolescents as well as at adults.

But it’s important for us to recognize that a person like Cecile Richards doesn’t come out of a vacuum. She was raised in a liberal democratic context. Her mother, Ann Richards would become the governor of Texas. And Cecile Richards would go on to gain an education and then to join the staff of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. And she learned a lot about political organization and political activism under the tutelage of Nancy Pelosi. She then went into the nonprofit activist sector and eventually was hired as the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. And as president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards was an incredibly articulate defender of the culture of death. She was an incredibly articulate and powerful figure in the corridors of politics and culture.

Conservative Christians looking at a figure like Cecile Richards need to understand that she knew how to enter those corridors of power. She knew how to influence figures in politics, particularly in the Democratic Party because she was raised within that context, and she also came to understand, through her own mother and through Nancy Pelosi, how to offer a message and push it, how to push an agenda and make it successful, and that’s exactly what she did for a very long time. In the period she was the president of Planned Parenthood, that was from 2006 to 2018, she was amazingly successful at pushing back on conservative pro-life efforts through legislation and all the rest.

And it just points to the fact that when you look at an organization like Planned Parenthood, you’re looking at an organization that receives millions upon millions upon millions of dollars from government, hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of monies that go directly or indirectly to Planned Parenthood, and we come to understand that Planned Parenthood becomes something of a cultural center for the progressivist Left. And it enters into an agreement with other special issue organizations because it’s not by accident the LGBTQ movement and the pro-abortion movement, other movements of similar stature, they push similar agreements and they have a similar mode of activism. They also have a very similar mailing list.

The New York Times, in its obituary for Cecile Richards, offers this sentence, “During her 12-year term, Ms. Richards orchestrated Planned Parenthood’s evolution into a potent political organization and the country’s largest provider of reproductive and women’s sexual healthcare.” Understand what’s at stake here. By using the language, “reproductive and women’s sexual healthcare,” that means to avoid the language of abortion, but everybody knows that’s exactly what they’re talking about here. Another lesson is euphemism. You use other language. You don’t say pro-abortion, you try to argue pro-choice. You try to avoid mentioning a baby ever. And when it comes to something like abortion, you put it in the category of reproductive and women’s sexual healthcare or a woman’s reproductive healthcare in order to make the pro-life cause extremely difficult, and frankly, to be able to posture before the cultural influencers of this society in order to say, we are the future, they are the past. We’re the persons of rationality and progressivism. We are the ones who are speaking on behalf of women.

And you’ll notice the word they can’t say is baby. They can’t say baby, particularly in the context of abortion because it gives their entire enterprise away. Cecile Richards was largely responsible for that strategy. She was also very important in terms of political activism when Planned Parenthood faced all kinds of efforts by Republicans and other pro-life activists to try to restrict or to cut off its government funding. She was very persuasive, she knew how to use political leverage, and furthermore, she was just incredibly effective in her work in the media. But on that angle, it was easy because all she had to do was wait for the liberal media in conspiracy with these activist communities simply to refer to her as if by deference, she was the voice of wisdom and respectability and intelligence. That’s just the way the game is played.

No one in recent American life has played that game more effectively than Cecile Richards. Her obituary in the Washington Post also pointed to something interesting, “In 2006, Ms. Richards became president of Planned Parenthood. Her selection was seen as an inflection point for the abortion issue as the organization had selected a leader with a background wedged deeply in politics rather than healthcare.” That is to say that when Planned Parenthood hired Cecile Richards in 2006, they meant to play an even more serious political game, and that’s exactly what, under her leadership they did. And we just have to say, understanding the cost of what happened, she played that game extremely effectively, and that was to the cost, not only to the pro-life cause, but to the cost of the lives of many, many unborn human beings.

All this reminds us that when we think about all these issues, and all these movements sometimes right down to organizations and laws and politics and all the rest, it is simply true that we’re talking about human beings who use their influence for this cause or for that cause, for truth, or for untruth, for righteousness or unrighteousness, for that which is good, or that which is evil. Quite honestly, we live in a time in which it is considered judgmental even to use that language, but we as Christians understand that is exactly the language we have to use otherwise the entire battle is already lost.

The pro-abortion movement, with people and leaders such as Cecile Richards, has pushed very, very hard. The big question for Christians and for others who have pro-life convictions is how we’re going to raise up a generation to press back even harder.