The bishop’s untethered empathy

While celebrating his second inauguration, President Donald Trump, along with Vice President J.D. Vance and their families, took time to attend the National Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral. What might have been simply one more event in a busy week turned into a viral moment, thanks to the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde.

In the halting and syrupy tone of a schoolmarm, Bishop Budde concluded her sermonette by pleading with President Trump to “have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” singling out gay, lesbian, and transgender children who fear for their lives, as well as illegal immigrants who fear deportation.

Budde’s words brought out the vice president’s inner Jim Halpert (last seen during his debate with Tim Walz) as he looked to his wife, Usha, with an expression that said, “Can you believe this?” President Trump responded with a post on Truth Social, calling the “so-called Bishop” a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” who was “nasty in tone” and owes “the public an apology.”

Budde’s attempt to “speak truth to power” is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness. And for Christians, it’s a reminder of how destructive the feminist cancer is in the Church.

Feminism’s destructive nature is owing to two basic facts.

First, women are more empathetic than men, a fact that, in its proper place, is a great blessing. God designed women to be life-givers and nurturers, and the feminine ability to intuit and share emotions serves such care and compassion. When a baby is crying or a person is hurting, female empathy enables women to be first responders, moving toward the hurting with comfort and welcome.

But, second, what is a blessing in one place becomes a curse in another. When it comes to upholding strict standards of justice, empathy is a liability, not an asset. It’s why in certain circumstances involving gross error and high-handed sin, God’s law forbids empathy and pity. If someone—even a close family member—enticed Israel to commit idolatry and abandon the Lord, God told them that “you shall not yield to him, or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him” (Deuteronomy 13:6–10). It’s why some of us have taken to warning about “toxic empathy“ and “the sin of empathy.”

Make no mistake, compassion and mercy are virtues but only when anchored in truth and tethered to justice. C.S. Lewis described the relationship well: “Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice: transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety.”

Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy, untethered from what is true and good. And it was enabled by the feminist denial of the complementary design and callings of men and women.

For, while God has designed women to be life-givers, he has designated men as guardians and protectors. Men are called to set the perimeter, establish boundaries, and build walls and defend them. Therefore, God has given them greater strength and a mindset that draws clear lines and polices them for threats. And this is true not only of physical threats but spiritual ones as well. The Levites were commissioned as the priestly tribe in Israel because of their willingness to slay their idolatrous brethren after the incident with the golden calf (Exodus 32). Likewise, Phinehas was given a perpetual priesthood for driving a spear through an Israelite who was flagrantly violating the law of God through intermarriage with pagans (Numbers 25). In both cases, zeal for God’s holiness and the protection of God’s people drove the priests to eschew pity and guard the perimeter.

All of these considerations lie behind the Biblical prohibition on women teaching and exercising authority in the Church (1 Timothy 2:12–13). Rather than attempting to usurp and undermine masculine authority in God’s household, Paul encourages women to learn in quietness and submission. Elsewhere, he says that “women should keep silent in the churches … for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” In context, it’s clear that Paul is not referring to simple conversations after the service but public speech in the assembly, the kind that Bishop(ess) Budde delivered on Tuesday. Instead, God appoints qualified men to guard the doctrine and worship of the Church for the glory of God and the good of His people. In other words, Budde’s exhortation reminds us that we must reject feminism and all its works and all its ways.

C.S. Lewis once warned of the coming “managerial age” in which evil is done in “warmed and well-lighted offices,” rather than “dens of crime.” In light of Budde’s sermon, we might say, “We live in the feminist age, in a world of equality. The greatest evil is not now done in the sordid bathhouses of San Francisco. It is not even done in abortion facilities and hospitals that castrate and mutilate children. In those, we see its final result. But it is conceived and supported (preached, defended, and agitated for) in grandiose cathedrals, by earnest women with rainbow robes and closely cropped haircuts who do not need to raise their voice.”