When "All are welcome" really means "Only those who agree with us are welcome"

This morning Trump made a visit to St. John's, the Episcopal Church opposite the White House and which was attacked and set alight yesterday. Fortunately the blaze was extinguished and supposedly the damage is minimal. I have seen a couple of clips of Trump's excursion to the church and it does come across as a bit of a photo op but is also clearly intended as some sort of message of allegiance and support for churches in the face of looting and rioting.

This morning, in the car, I heard a brief interview with Bishop Budde of the Diocese of Washington who was outraged by Trump using the church as a backdrop. It was an indictment of the present Episcopal church leadership. Bishop Budde:

The president just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese without permission as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our churches stand for.

Trump is Presbyterian and there is little that is antithetical between him, Presbyterianism and Episcopalian teachings.

Her outrage is not with his message, it is with him as a politician. She is personally outraged that someone she clearly hates used a church in her diocese as a backdrop to his message to the American people. Her words were sharply ideological to the point of political and there was not much evidence of the Episcopalian traditions of openness, welcome, redemption, forgiveness, etc. This was personal condemnation.

For the past thirty years, the Episcopal leadership, starting in the seminaries, has become overrun by weak leaders steeped more in social justice and critical theory rather than theology. I am an Episcopalian by marriage (baptized in the Presbyterian Church) and have always loved the tradition, liturgy, language, and music of the Episcopalian Church.

When I first joined, we still had priests and rectors who were focused on traditional teachings and serving their congregations. But the then slow encroachment of newly minted priests much more inspired by serving as agents of social change and social justice has turned into a flood. Hard to find a priest these days who can speak to a broader community not already committed to postmodernism, critical theory, and social justice. Their knowledge of history and culture and tradition and even religion, is paper thin. Church leadership appointments now rest entirely on race and gender rather than any sort of competency or effectiveness.

As a consequence, church identification and attendance has plummeted. When I first started attending, we were at about 3.5 million members thirty years ago. We are now at about 1.5 million. A complete failure of leadership. The hunger from the congregation is great but when all they are fed is the thin gruel of social justice, racism, and gender identity rather than Christianity, they drift away.

Instead of seeking to serve its own members, the leadership is overwhelmingly obsessed with being relevant and righting wrongs and helping distant communities with whom they do not relate to fix problems they cannot understand. They are obsessed with the belief that America is institutionally and persistently racist. The hunger to white knight for "marginalized" communities is fundamental. And members keep drifting away.

Episcopal congregations tend to be very open, welcoming, tolerant, etc. The leadership is increasingly closed, scolding, shrill and antithetical to the old religious traditions and American values. And members keep drifting away.

It is institutional suicide by leadership decay.

Budde sounds like a stand-in for the whole institutional leadership class of the church. The congregations tend to be moderate and in the past a healthy mix of light right, moderates and light left. There is now a mismatch between the leadership and the congregations in front of whom they stand. And members keep drifting away.

The leadership abhors tradition, American culture, Republicans in general and Trump in particular. So Budde's words are not a surprise, as unwise and untrue as they might be.

"I am outraged. The President did not pray when he came to St. John's, nor as you just articulated, did he acknowledge the agony of our country right now," Budde told CNN's Anderson Cooper on "AC360."

"And in particular, that of the people of color in our nation, who wonder if anyone ever -- anyone in public power will ever acknowledge their sacred words. And who are rightfully demanding an end to 400 years of systemic racism and white supremacy in our country. And I just want the world to know, that we in the diocese of Washington, following Jesus and his way of love ... we distance ourselves from the incendiary language of this President. We follow someone who lived a life of nonviolence and sacrificial love."

"We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others," she continued. "And I just can't believe what my eyes have seen."

When she uttered them, my first thought was "That's not who we are. We are welcoming of all people. We bridge our differences. We seek reconciliation and understanding. We forgive." But those are thoughts grounded in the old church traditions, not the new ideology of extremist social justice and critical theory obsession.

I heard her words first on the radio and had been hoping that I had misidentified her or had misheard her. When I was able I went to the video clips and discovered that no, those were the things she said. And more than that, there was the ultimate indictment and hypocrisy on display.

There Trump stands, Bible in hand and with the traditional church bulletin board with the words so ingrained in our traditions - "All are welcome." And while that might be true for the congregation, it is clearly no longer true for the leadership.

Click to enlarge.