Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
At the National Prayer Service held last week in St. John’s Episcopal Church, Episcopalian Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde demonstrated everything that has gone wrong with mainline Christianity since the early 1960s. Taking what was intended to be a moment of reconciliation where people of all kinds could pray for God’s divine grace at the dawn of a new Presidency, she instead offered up her own narrow politics as if they originated from God Himself.
Shamelessly, this politicized prelate has since basked in the glow of the political Left’s acclaim. She expresses pride in her willingness to thwart the purpose of the occasion by delivering her own personal message directly to the new President and Vice President and their families.
A fair-minded person cannot help but wonder precisely who and what she serves. Is her understanding of Divine Providence so wrapped up with the controversies of human politics that she cannot see anything beyond her own prejudices? Has she actually taken the zealot’s step of conflating her own ideological preferences with both objective truth and divine revelation? Does she really assume that only stupid or evil people disagree with her?
Each of us who wrestle with the challenges of faith has a duty to inform ourselves about the events of our time, prayerfully reflect on their meanings, and thereby cultivate our own consciences. I hope that any believer, especially an Ordained Priest, would undertake this duty with genuine humility and scrupulous honesty.
One of my personal daily prayers relates to this. I pray that I might be loyal to God’s Truth with my notions. I also pray that He might bestow the grace for me to distinguish between these two very different things, His will be done. Anyone who enters life’s arena to strive on behalf of the dictates of their conscience has my respect and gratitude.
As Teddy Roosevelt once wrote “In the Arena”:
It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena… who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.
I sympathize with any person of conscience when they err, because I err so very often and so very deeply. My vocation is to teach the history of our Judeo-Christian Western Civilization, to help young people to understand our shared heritage, values, and identity.
This involves trying to understand the often fraught relationships between Church, State, and Culture. Each of these three is a distinct world unto itself, with its own Natural Laws. In our lived human experience these always intrude into one another. This has always been the case.
But this Woke Bishop was not at all humble in her demeanor. She hectored the Presidential party. Her pride in her own ideas was unmistakable, as was her criticism of the policies that Trump was elected to enact. No doubt she thought that she was speaking truth to power, when in fact she abused her trust. Sadly, her attitude is all too common.
In each mainline Christian denomination here in the West, the same basic path was taken; movement away from tradition and toward an unbridled Modernism, for example, the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council. Every Protestant and Reformed denomination made the same change at about the same time.
The “Social Gospel” supplanted Jesus’ Good News. Liberation Theology combined Marx with the Bible to deconstruct churches centered on saving souls to build churches trying to save the poor. Common cause was made across the world between leftists within these churches and anyone who claimed to be fighting for some variant of liberation.
For example, for nearly twenty years the Presbyterian Church USA has openly partnered with Hamas terrorists by proclaiming a moral equivalence between those bloodstained murderers and the civilized people that they prey upon. They have also transferred much money to Hamas.
Vocations from Americans in all mainline denominations are in rapid decline. Church membership has not replenished itself. These activists happily told people who dissented from their new orientation that they were free to depart and worship elsewhere. So many people did that these denominations are dying a slow death.
Today’s believing Christians are faced by the twin horns of a secular dilemma. Mainline denominations are afflicted by the Heresy of Liberation Theology. They seem more motivated to normalize all forms of deviant sexuality and socialist governance than they are to try to bring the Word of God into the lives of their members.
The largely new churches where many former mainline Christians have flocked are often tainted by the Fundamentalist Heresy, with its focus on Legalism, outward compliance, and a willingness to claim to know with certainty who shall be saved or damned.
Both contemporary Heresies draw power from the political and social conflict between groups. Both seem more interested in signaling their virtues than they seem to be in living lives in imitation of Christ. Both seem to lack any interest in the complex compassion of a Jesus who wept at the suffering He encountered so often in His ministry.
Jesus lived and died to save individual human beings, not groups. Jesus was able to rebuke the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Temple Priests without losing His focus on teaching and healing the most common of people. Jesus spent time with sinners, hoping for the prodigal to return to a real relationship with their Creator. He knew anger, but was motivated by an absolute commitment to loving salvation.
Today’s believing Christians need to rebuild Christianity amidst the wreckage of mainline churches who have abandoned their primary mission. In a society that has so dramatically de-Christianized since the early 1960s, Christians face challenges not seen since the time of the Emperor Constantine 1,700 years ago.
By God’s grace, we can reform Christianity yet again and proclaim Christ’s Great Commission into a future beyond failed anachronisms like Bishop Budde.
