A United Front

Hospitality To State Interference In American Churches

Jan 23, 2025

In the wake of Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral yesterday, several evangelical leaders, professors, and pastors have offered critical responses.

Taken together, these statements form a united front of welcome to an American State interfering in the churches through the executive branch. I’ll unpack this after we survey the aftermath and messaging itself.

Meanwhile…

Since the sermon, the Trump administration rescinded guidelines preventing the Department of Homeland Security from arresting undocumented people in “sensitive” areas such as hospitals, schools, and yes…churches.

The new directive rode the swell of criticism directed towards the Bishop by elected officials and evangelicals:

Rep. Mike Collins (R-Georgia) posted: “the person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”
Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA said the sermon squandered a “chance to unify America around a Christian message.”
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and the Council for National Policy, said that the “cause of America’s decline was not what was sitting in the pew, but what was behind the pulpit.”
Dr. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, said the Bishop “insulted rather than encouraged our great president.”
Dr. Thomas Kidd, evangelical historian at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, “say no to fake established religion!”
Sean Feucht, worship pastor/influencer said, “God is blessing America through President Trump…they should let Christians preach next time.”
Dr. Andrew Walker, Ethics professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said, “The very fact she is a woman holding this position is grounded in the liberal theology that she is declaring.”
Lance Wallnau of the NAR said, “Some traditions need to be WHACKED.”

These are a lot of different responses. Some take issue with her gender. Some call for her to be deported. Some imply violent censure of all Episcopalians. Some accuse her of dividing America and hastening its decline. Some are offended on behalf of the President. Some question her salvation.

Then there’s the words of the Bishop herself:

“I wanted to say there is room for mercy, there’s room for a broader compassion. We don’t need to portray with a broad cloth in the harshest of terms some of the most vulnerable people in our society, who are in fact, our neighbors, our friends, our children, our friends, children, and so forth.”

Some may take these criticisms seriously, but not literally. But I think that’s a mistake. What is at stake is whether churches across America (and to put it theologically, “the Church in America”) will be unified in its commitments to each other. Even in our disagreements, the church must be the church.

I want to press on the dangerous line public evangelicals are following by offering this united front against the Bishop’s sermon. This front functions on the whole as a tacit theological sanctioning of the Trump administration. No administration deserves this sanction from Christians, not the prior one, not any before it.

But this present danger is reflected in and by the Barmen Declaration of the past; which united the Confessing Church in the Third Reich. It describes this danger in two dimensions.

Part of its 5th Thesis Reads:

We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the church’s vocation as well.
We reject the false doctrine, as though the church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State.

In his commentary on Barmen, Eberhard Busch summarizes these statements in a very helpful way: “if in the first case the church lets the state suppress its commission, in the second instance the church itself surrenders its commission.”

This united front is a present danger that contains both distortions. Here’s what I mean:

The front assumes the chief purpose of the gospel in America is to create and sustain national unity. In the light of Barmen, the front invites State suppression of the Church’s task.

The criticism that the Bishop squandered a chance to unify the country or hastened America’s decline invites a different set of questions that confronts what lays at the center of this evangelicalism.

Times past of supposed “national unity” tend to correspond with partisan hegemony (Teddy Roosevelt is a good example) or national emergency (think The Blitz during WWII or the Cold War). But none of these contain theological grammar and logic. None of these are “Christian unity.”

To put it simply, what kind of unity are Christians to speak of? What sort of unity does the Spirit enact and establish in and among the Church? The answers to these questions reveals how the gospel most definitely does not proclaim, promise, or provide national unity.

This isn’t to say that unity isn’t a part of the Christian witness. It is. The critical question public evangelicals are assuming is that Christian unity can only be realized in the context of a national unity beneath a State totality. In other words, behind this united front lurks theological sanction for totalitarianism. This is the insidious danger in Rep. Mike Collins’ effort to deport the Bishop.

The Christian gospel gives witness to a different polity. One that includes all humanity. But the long legacy of State Christianity endures. Ever since Emperor Constantine endorsed Christianity, it became useful in sanctioning and preserving Empire. The citizenship Christians speak of is never national. It a citizenship defined by the humanity in, of, and with the God of Jesus Christ.

But the church historian Andrew Walls once remarked that evangelicalism assumes Christendom. And this feature is now publicly visible—it has been for awhile. The irony of Christendom is that its establishment of Christianity by Rome evolved into the exercise of persecution against variations of Christianity it found intolerable to its political order.

These were the very conditions that led to disestablishment of Church from the American State. Though this disestablishment has always been fractured, disparate, and uneven. It is certainly not, as avowed secularists claim, enacting a ban of religion from public life. But that’s another matter.

In rushing to criticize the Bishop, public evangelicals betray efforts to sacralize national unity—which inevitably sanctions violence in the name of the nation. But that’s another matter. We should be asking “what sort of unity?” And that is what the Bishop provoked. The advent of unity brought about by reconciliation with God can actually issue as a threat to all lesser unities, including the arbitrary borders of nation-states.

The front welcomes the State’s power as a means of endorsing theological positions and resolving theological questions. In the light of Barmen, the front also collapses the churches into the State.

Consider the ways the Bishop’s faith is called into suspicion in terms of support for Trump. This disoriented doctrine of election can only ever issue in damage or confusion. The front assumes that the ascendancy of Trump serves as a sovereign endorsement.

The New Testament bears witness over and over again: the Spirit does not authenticate Christian witness (in word and work) through the accumulation of political power; Christian proclamation is authenticated by the power of the Spirit, his harvest of mercy, patience, loving kindness, and the overflow of forgiveness among Christian community offered to, in, and for the world.

The danger of collapsing the church into the State, which is also the historical legacy of Christendom, carries with it a remarkable ability to calcify the living witness of God’s people into a static socio-political order that sacralizes the State and sanctions social oppression.

What concerns me by this united front is the way some evangelicals have come to associate the ascendancy of the party with the authentication of its theology. This is the spirit of the anti-christ. And, pressing deeper, efforts to disqualify a call for mercy by the “scandal” of her gender will (at some level) have to struggle with the scandal that is the Word of God revealed in a first century Jew executed by Rome.

There are (and forever will be) “live” theological questions in communions around the world. Conservatives may scoff that some entertain such questions based on the assumption that they are “settled matters.” But this is to deny the living Revelation of Jesus Christ that unsettles all we take as given. What is evident is that our talk of God is not disconnected for our ability to recognize our fellow humanity and the ways sin distorts and entraps us; related to this is recognition that political power is not a legitimate pathway to resolve theological questions.

The way the church relates to the state is never settled. It is always in flux.

We cannot outsource our responsibility for such consequential questions to the State without surrendering the Church’s vocation to testify to God’s reconciling work to and for all people.

Theological responsibility cannot be satisfied by the short cut of dictatorial fiat and Christian witness cannot be sustained by partisan ascendancy. That is the error Barmen sought to resist in the danger of the Third Reich.

We’re all in this. And the pull to contempt and cynicism or despair and dread is strong. Bonhoeffer believed the aftermath of his day would call not for idealists and geniuses, but straight forward, honest human beings. Rich in mercy, full of grace, and a willingness to recognize it is the poor in spirit and the meek who are called blessed. I see no reason to believe these words are any less true today than they were when they were first spoken by the Word before the foundation of the world.

I’ll leave you with the words of St. Oscar Romero:

"A church that doesn't provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a Word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, a Word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed, what gospel is that?"

The Homeward Dispatches

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