Speaking Truth to a Wannabe Fuhrer

A Critical Appreciation of Bishop Budde's Sermon to the Trump

I want in this piece to dig into the national “debate” about the Episcopal Bishop Episcopal of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde’s comments to the malignant RepubliNazis Donald Trump and JD Vance (and their families) at the National Cathedral yesterday.

Four Good Quotes

First, however, I want to paste in four quotations that articulate moral, intellectual, and political positions with which I strongly agree:

· “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters….This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

- Frederick Douglass, 1857

· “Speaking truth to power makes no sense. There's no point in speaking truth to Henry Kissinger, he knows it already. Instead speak truth to the powerless. Or better, with the powerless. Then they'll act to dismantle illegitimate power…. Power knows the truth already and is busy concealing it.”

- Noam Chomsky, 2006, 2010

· “When Trump comes out with some of his fascist diatribes and rabid attacks, you’ll hear these Democratic Party hacks complain: ‘He’s not uniting us, he’s dividing us’—as though everybody could be united if the president, instead of raving in a rabid fashion, were to say the right honeyed words. And (going back to Locke, for example) this is all part of attempting to act as if everybody in society is just an individual. Of course people are individuals, but they are not just individuals—they are, beyond that, part of social relations and, most fundamentally, production relations, and this has real consequences in how they live, how they perceive things spontaneously, and how they act, to a significant degree. These things are built into this society, and you can’t just supersede them or wave them away by saying honeyed words ‘to unite us instead of dividing us.’”

- Bob Avakian, Breakthroughs, 2019

· “The United States is not and never has never been a democracy, defined by freedom and equality for all.”

- The Zinn Education Project, 2020

“I Ask You to Have Mercy Upon the People in Our Country Who are Scared Now”

The Avakian quote above comes after a long section in which he breaks down VI Lenin’s analysis of the three core components of class division and oppression under capitalism-imperialism: private ownership of the means of production, the capitalist social division of labor, and inequality in the distribution of social wealth.

Now, if you read these four quotations closely and understand them and the fact that I strongly approve of each one, you should not be surprised to hear me say that I did not fall over in effusive praise for Bishop Budde’s comments to Mein Trumpf and his vicious Vice President.

In her eloquent sermon, the prelate implored the newly re-inaugurated fascist president to honor someone or something she called “God” by being decent and merciful towards the people he has put in the crosshairs of his nativist, sexist, and gay- and trans-phobic “Them and Us” political and policy agenda

“Millions have put their trust in you. 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,” Budde said. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in both Democratic, Republican and independent families who fear for their lives.”

Budde also asked for mercy for immigrants, rightly referring to them as people who “pick our crops,” labor in our meatpacking plants and “work the night shift in hospitals…They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” Budde said. “They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara and temples.”

Budde asked the orange-sprayed fascist maniac to “have mercy … on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.”

The Bishop added: “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.”

Budde mistakenly referred to the openly plutocratic capitalist class dictatorship the United States as a “democracy.”

Budde also spoke repeatedly against the political sowing of “division” in the United States, arguing for “true [national] Unity” -- “unity in this country” (go to 6:45 in the video of her sermon for one of at least ten times I heard the Bishop call for “unity”). She did not explicitly or directly blame the open Hitler-channeler Donald “Illegals Can No Longer Hide in Churches” Trump and JD “Haitians are Eating the Pets in Springfield” Vance for “dividing us” along lines of class, race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual identity, and nationality, but the suggestion of their transgression against “God’s” command of “unity in this country” was clear. She was, after all, addressing the monumentally divisive fascist POTUS – the noxious “Divider-in-Chief,” who was sitting in the front row of a religious service all about his sickening and ill-auguring second inauguration.

Budde’s eloquent and I think (see below) useful sermon was an exercise in doing what Chomsky has repeatedly said says “makes no sense” – “speaking truth to power.” In this case, she was speaking truth to a wannabe Fascist Fuhrer.

Budde herself has subsequently noted that, contra the great Christian abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “I wasn’t demanding anything of [Trump]. I was pleading with him, like, can you see the humanity of these people? Can you acknowledge that there are people in this country are scared? … If not him, if not the president, could others?” (emphasis added)

And, as I just said, Budde repeatedly conveyed the (I think) dangerous theme of national “Unity,” which mucks up our understanding of the underlying social, historical, and material forces behind the remarkable divisions that exist in the United States and the world --- divisions that Trump exploits but has hardly created and which will remain in force for detestable capitalist politicos to manipulate until those divisions are abolished under communism.

There’s three other questions that keep me from joining in the broad celebration of the Bishop’s sermon but that I’m not going to get into here in any depth: (a) who and/or what exactly is this “God” to which she refers (“our God”); does believing in this “God’s” openly unproven existence really help us emancipate ourselves and humanity from unnecessary suffering and oppression?; is it really true that Christianity is aligned with the “mercy” that Budde wants Trump and others to show for the marginalized and oppressed people? (The core foundational Christian text is jam packed with “God”-approved genocide, slave, rape, femicide, kidnapping and general holocaust-ing, for God’s sake!).

Sparking an Instructive Response

All this said, I am glad that the very likeable Bishop Budde gave her sermon for three basic reasons:

1. The flagrant fascistic response it elicited from the tyrant Trump and his backers is richly instructive regarding his malignant nature for people who need to understand how truly sociopathic and evil he and his movement are.

After the homily, Trump looked straight ahead and refused eye contact with the Bishop as she walked by him and his little club of RepubliNazis. He then put up this sickening tirade on his Orwellian Truth Social platform:

“The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart…She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions…It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one.”

What a fucking asshole.

Herr Donald is dead wrong and fascist here on multiple counts:

* Bishop Budde is not a “so-called Bishop,” she’s an actual Episcopal Bishop.

* The Bishop is not at all “a Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” she’s a liberal prelate who tried (contra the famous “left anarchist” and “libertarian socialist” Chomsky) to speak truth to power (“Radical Left hard- line Trump-haters]” like the present writer want Trump removed from power and thrown in prison for the rest of his life as soon as possible!)

* There was nothing remotely “nasty” in the Bishop’s tone or words

* The Bishop’s address was gracious and in fact compelling to millions who have seen, heard, and read it.

* There is no “giant crime wave” underway on the part of so-called illegal immigrants. This is a complete myth. Mein Trumpf’s claim here is a blatantly racist, xenophobic, and nativist lie meant to justify his white nationalist political and policy agenda.

* The claim that other countries are sending people from their jails and asylums to the United States is another brazen and fascist fabrication.

It’s important I think to call out the hate-filled maniac Trump’s despicable, lie-packed response to Bishop Budde’s attempt to gently recommend a shred of basic human decency on his part as he and his fascist juggernaut launch one attack after another on immigrants, trans folk, women, livable ecology, Sanctuary Cities, Democratic mayors, and….(the list of Trump’s targets goes on and on).

“More Courage and Principles Than the Slimy Fawning Democrats”

2. Tame and conservative as the Bishop’s so-called “call out” of Trump was (from my actually Radical Left and, yes, Trump-hating perspective), it is far superior to the pathetic nothingness of the dismal Weimar-to-Vichy Democrats. As a revolutionary communist friend in Chicago recently wrote on so-called social media, “She showed more courage and principles than the slimy fawning Democrats who joined in congratulating a fascist’s installation.” Yes indeed – and more courage than the many Congressional Democrats who voted for the nativist Laken-Riley Act, which, as Refuse Fascism’s brilliant commentator Samantha Goldman says, “follows the tried-and-true script of racist moral panic going back centuries.” As Goldman elaborates on this updated panic:

“Seize on or make up one instance of a violent crime against a young white woman and use it to paint entire sections of society as intractably evil. It is strikingly reminiscent of the Willie Horton racism panic of the 80s. Even deeper than that, it seems to plagiarize almost word for word, in some cases, from Birth of a Nation, America’s cinematic blockbuster, a movie based on the novel actually titled The Klansman, a historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan. It is a call to arms for xenophobic vigilantes, making clear that immigrants and anyone suspected of being an immigrant have no rights a white man is bound to respect. This will justify, in advance, hate crimes and mob violence against brown people and push undocumented people further into the shadows.”

“Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?”

3. As critical as I may be of the Bishop’s sermon for reasons explained above, its deliverer deserves serious credit for saying anything at all on behalf of people Trump and his domestic fascist Blitzkrieg are viciously targeting. As The New York Times reported yesterday:

“Standing in the storied Canterbury Pulpit above the president on Tuesday, Bishop Mariann E. Budde was a little afraid. The leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, she had planned for months to preach on three elements of unity — dignity, honesty and humility. But just 24 hours earlier, she had watched President Trump proclaim his agenda from the inauguration stage, as conservative Christians anointed him with prayer. He was no longer just campaigning — he was governing, she thought. His nascent presidency and flurry of executive orders had so far encountered little resistance. She felt called to add a fourth element to her sermon: A plea for mercy, on behalf of everyone who is scared by the ways he has threatened to wield his power.

‘I had a feeling that there were people watching what was happening and wondering, Was anyone going to say anything?’ she explained quietly in an interview on Tuesday night. ‘Was anyone going to say anything about the turn the country’s taking?’

So, she took a breath and spoke. President Trump, seated seven feet below and some 40 feet to her right, made eye contact. One representation of American Christianity began speaking to another, and the most powerful man in the world was arrested by the words of a silver-haired female bishop in the pulpit. Until he turned away.”

Make no mistake: that took guts! [1] In a stunned nation enduring a domestic Shock and Awe campaign choreographed by malignant fascist sociopaths and their infernal media and Internet enablers, she took a deep breath, looked the Republifascist Dear Leader in the eyes, and spoke up on behalf of so-called illegal human beings and others targeted by contemporary in-power Christian white nationalism.

“Was anyone going to say anything?” she wondered.

It was a damn good question! In the well-known words of Marin Niemöller, a prominent German pastor who regretted his own early complicity in Nazism:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

Note

1. We can be quite sure that fascist Amerikaner death threats have been sent in large numbers to Bishop Budde since she tried to gently instruct Mein Trumpf on human decency.