Why I'm Done With Emotional Manipulation Framed as 'Love' and 'Mercy'

Bishop Budde's self-righteous sermon about "trans children' was a case study in this tactic

As an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I have a visceral response to emotional manipulation.

My abuser was a grown man who made me feel like I hung the moon. He took me to fun places and bought me pretty things and gave me candy and told me I was pretty and that he loved me very much. He nicknamed me “Special Kay” and walked me down to the corner store to buy me grape soda and nail polish. He was one of my favorite people because I was too young to recognize that his brand of love was abusive and that it was actually going to cost me way more than I would ever willingly agree to pay.

In our relationship, when my abuser wasn’t getting the desired response from me, he would say asinine things like, “Don’t you love me anymore?” And he would pair the question with actual tears designed to make me believe his world would absolutely crumble if I did not drop whatever I was doing to solve his emotional crisis.

By the time I was probably 5, I was carrying this massive burden—the knowledge that it was my personal responsibility to make sure a grown man did not fall apart. The price tag, of course, was my innocence, but when you’re little and compassionate, you don’t necessarily have the tools to understand that the only appropriate response to this perversion is “Hell no. What you’re doing isn’t love. It’s hurting me. You need to stop.” You just go along to get along and hope for the best.

The best, it turns out, will require a lot of struggle, a lot of prayer, a lot of therapy, and more tears than you knew you could cry in a lifetime. You limp away from the situation even 30 years later, sadder but infinitely wiser about the dynamics of emotional manipulation and sabotage.

And I’ve got to tell you that watching Bishop Mariann Budde’s “sermon” at the Inaugural Prayer Service this past Tuesday put me right back to that headspace. I felt instant rage to a degree that may be hard to explain to those unfamiliar with my personal journey out of abuse. I guess in order to explain this, we would have to start by examining what the bishop actually said:

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you… In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives…”

“Well what’s so bad about that?” you might ask. “All she did was ask for mercy. Doesn’t God love even marginalized people? Isn’t He merciful? Doesn’t He want us to love them, too?”

One need only spend a few minutes familiarizing herself with the entire body of Bishop Budde’s work to realize that what she was really asking for is not mercy, but capitulation. She wasn’t asking him to use softer words. She was asking him to pump the brakes on necessary policy changes that protect the greater good, a course of action completely absent in true mercy for any who indulge it.

Jesus loves people. He loves you. He loves me. He loves illegal immigrants. He loves kids who are confused about their gender. His heart is merciful toward us. But loving every person does not mean He loves every idea or every action. Mercy doesn’t look like capitulating to ideologies that lead to harm. Mercy looks like intervening to stop the harm from happening, and it’s precisely that intervention that Bishop Budde was standing staunchly against in her speech. She framed the whole thing as love, of course, but the brand of love she was peddling wasn’t love at all, and that’s why it vexes me.

You SHOULD be able to step foot in a Christian church and find that the leaders are pointing you toward Jesus and the truth that can save.

Jesus says, “Come as you are,” not “Stay as you are.” Faithful Christian leaders lovingly encourage their congregants to surrender their sin to Jesus and allow Him to transform them from the inside out. To be a Christian is to be willing to change. It means your identity is in Him, not your sexual preferences or rebellion against the material reality of your sex. But false leaders like Bishop Budde encounter this necessary shepherding and shout, “Have mercy! Don’t tell people they need to change! That’s hateful.” And in so doing, they circumvent the very repentance that could bring the healing we all claim to desire.

Bishop Budde’s speech perpetuated both the myth of the “transgender child” and the histrionic belief that children will die if we don’t indulge their delusion about their bodies. There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Mercy and compassion for kids who are confused about their sex looks like lovingly helping them make peace with the immutable nature of it. It does NOT look like forcing the rest of society to play make believe with the cult ideology that’s harming them. The price tag here is just too high. Kids are not dying because we refuse to tell them lies about their bodies. The suggestion is preposterous and harmful.

In her defense of her remarks, she appealed to the misguided belief that trans identified people are powerless, when, in fact, the opposite is true. The trans lobby is not “powerless.” Until very recently, they’ve had ALL the institutional power. All of it. They’ve had a death grip on the entirety of the mainstream media, on big tech and big pharma, on the whole of the medical industrial complex, on all of academia, on the Hollywood elite, and, increasingly, on vast percentages of the now largely apostate church.

They have not been “powerless.” Women have been powerless to stop them. How do you think female inmates who’ve been raped by men in their prison cells feel when they watch people who claim to be abuse survivor advocates champion their rapists in the name of God?

What does “mercy” look like to a physically castrated young man like Ritchie Herron who will never be a father because people like Bishop Budde encouraged his cult belief that he could be born in the wrong body? What does “mercy” look like to grieving parents whose children have committed suicide after the medical interventions experts promised would make them happy failed to deliver?

I’m focused heavily on the trans element of her speech for obvious reasons; it’s been my own personal soapbox for the past 10 years, and I’m so completely inundated with the stories of harm perpetrated by the gender cult that it sometimes keeps me up at night. But the same logic could be applied to Budde’s obvious opposition to Trump’s border patrol policies. What would mercy have looked like for Laken Riley’s family? It’s not “unloving” to restore law and order where abuse and chaos have been running rampant.

Imagine someone came up to you and demanded that you remove all the locks from your house. “There are people who need your help,” they shout. “Let them live in your house and eat your food. Let them use your credit card to buy their clothes and pay their bills.”

So you start to ask questions: “Well how many people are we talking about? Who are they? What are their names? Have we conducted criminal history screenings on any of them?” You’re willing to help, but you’ve got your own kids to feed and your own bills to pay, and the money has to come from somewhere, so your assistance must be reasoned and measured. You don’t want to accidentally put a convicted rapist in the same room as your daughter, so you ask for some reasonable boundaries and protective measures.

“Hateful self-centered white supremacist bigot!” they cry. “I thought you were supposed to be a Christian.” And here, folks, we have a pretty accurate representation of the national conversation around border security.

And I get it. I have a VERY hard time with the callous and sometimes dehumanizing way these issues are often discussed on the right. It’s a problem. There’s legitimate hatred in our camp. There’s actual racism. There’s cruelty to people who are different. It needs to be confronted, not ignored. I would be inclined to agree with Budde on this point.

But based and reasonable policy positions like “Only women give birth” and “You need to enter the country legally” are not the problem, so suggesting that Donald Trump is somehow in need of a lecture about mercy for having the audacity to pass them? Emotional manipulation. I’m not having it.

You guys, I am just so very weary of watching ideas that lead to harm be framed as compassion. It’s a grand reversal of reality, a form of DARVO that many, many Americans are just flat out tired of pussyfooting around. And it’s even more insidious and hard to stomach when it’s coming from the pulpit, from people who claim to represent God.

People on the right (including the chauvinistic theobros who are cackling at this speech and employing it as Exhibit A in their campaign against female preachers) have been warning about the harms of “toxic empathy” for years now, and I hate to say it, but they aren’t entirely wrong. (They’re wrong about the female preachers bit but not about the weaponization of empathy against truth.) It’s gotten out of hand. And the great irony is that if we ACTUALLY care about mercy, we have to be clear thinking about this stuff and able to identify it when we encounter it.

It’s not a new problem. It’s just been repackaged and rebranded in recent history. But people have been observing it for quite some time. Perhaps Flannery O’Connor said it best:

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

If we desire mercy, we must hold unflinchingly to truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.