Ruth Krall, Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion (2)

Vasily Polenov, Le droit du Seigneur (1874), in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow

The essay below is the second part of Ruth Krall's essay entitled "Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion." The first part was published on Bilgrimage several days ago. As the introduction to the essay at the link I have just provided explains, the essay is one of a series of essays Ruth has published on Bilgrimage, under the series title "Recapitulation: Affinity Sexual Violence in a Religious Voice." Links to the previous essays in this series appear at the link I've just given you above. The common theme binding these essays together is the endemic natural of religious and spiritual leader sexual abuse of followers. The current essay explores this theme by arguing that clergy sexual abuse is a global public health issue whose noxious presence can be found inside multiple language groups and national identities. The secong part of Ruth's essay, "Historical Meandering," follows (note that footnotes begin with xiii because this essay is a continuation of the first part published previously):

Why They're Furious About Bishop Michael Curry: Worldwide Platform to Proclaim "Ferociously Political Faith in the Radical Power of Christian Love"

Stepped into the hallway of my Chicago hotel this morning for a moment during the #RoyalWedding and through the closed doors of every single room I could hear Michael Curry preaching on love. ❤️

— Diana Butler Bass (@dianabutlerbass) May 19, 2018

The RNS article to which I pointed you yesterday, discussing Bishop Michael Curry's presence at the royal wedding: its title is "American bishop brings human rights focus to royal wedding." Here's a response to that title from a U.S. "pro-life," Latin Mass-promoting Catholic: 

At last! We’re focusing on the human rights of the unborn.

Recommended: Joe Biden on LGBT Rights, Catherine Wallace on Gay Marriage and Anglican Anxiety, Patricia Miller on What Pope Benedict Knew When

God bless Joe Biden (the section I've transcribed from his recent remarks at the World Economic Forum begins at about the 1.55 mark):

When Tea and Sympathy Are No Longer Nearly Enough: A Response to Archbishop Justin Welby's Apology to LGBT Community

On Sunday, at his Winsome, Lose Some blog site, Anglican priest Reverend Richard Haggis published an open letter to Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Here's its conclusion:

Defining Christianity by Exclusion of LGBT Human Beings: "If This Is the Christianity They Want, Perhaps It Is Time for That Christianity to Die"

Thinking back this morning to Kaya Oakes's post-Obergefell essay last November: as she points out, anti-LGBT right-wing Christians have really lost the battle to exclude LGBT people from the circle of humanity and the church. But the more they recognize the futility of continuing this losing battle, the angrier — and more exclusionary — they become. 

Anglican Communion Sanctions Episcopal Church, Presiding Bishop of ECUSA Responds: Commitment to Be an Inclusive Church Based on Outstretched Arms of Jesus on the Cross

As Chris Morley has reported to us in several comments, at its Primates 2016 meeting in Canterbury, the Anglican Communion chose yesterday to sanction the Episcopal Church USA for supporting same-sex marriage. For Episcopal News Service, Matthew Davies reports what the presiding bishop of ECUSA, Michael Curry, told his fellow bishops as they moved towards sanctioning ECUSA for supporting LGBT people and their rights:

Fruitcake Making, Home, and LGBT Folks in the Church: An Advent Meditation Noting the Total Silence of Pope Francis About LGBT People in Uganda

A brief report to all of you on a dreary post-U.S. Thanksgiving weekend in which we've had enough rain to warrant two arks instead of the single one that Noah built: I've made the weekend brighter by remaining true to my grandmother's tradition of baking her Christmas fruitcakes on or by Thanksgiving weekend. Her rule of thumb was that fruitcake for Christmas needed to be baked by the last week of November, since it required a month in a sealed tin in a dark closet, wrapped in cheesecloth and laved repeatedly with sherry or bourbon, to mature it for eating at Christmas time.

Readers Write and I Respond: "The Whole Idea of Ordinary Church Gives Me the Hives" and "The Walls Are the Problem: They Enclose, Hamper, Restrict Conversations"

In what follows, I want to catch up on some "personal" sharing — to pick up threads of previous discussions that have been left dangling due to my lack of time to pick them up as we were traveling recently. I also want to tell you that I'll be away from blogging again for the coming two weeks. More about that in a moment . . . .

The Story of the Refusal of the Episcopal Cathedral in Orlando to Baptize the Son of a Gay Couple: My Reflections

For a variety of reasons, I've been following with some interest the story of the refusal of Anthony Clark, dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Orlando, St. Luke, to baptize the baby of a married gay couple, Rich and Eric McCaffrey. I first became aware of the story a few days ago when Faithful America sent out an email asking people to sign a petition calling on the bishop of the diocese, Greg Brewer, to assure that no priest in his diocese refuse baptism to a child on the basis of the sexual orientation of the parents. The petition states,

Amicus Brief of Catholic Bishop of Arkansas Calling for Continued Ban on Right to Same-Sex Civil Marriage vs. Amicus Brief of Former Episcopal Bishop of Arkansas

I had promised some time ago (to Chris Morley, in particular, and Chris has kindly reminded me of this promise) to share something about the amicus curiae brief that the Catholic bishop of Arkansas, Anthony Taylor, has submitted to the Arkansas Supreme Court as he calls on the court to uphold the ban on marriage equality that Judge Chris Piazza declared unconstitutional earlier this year. I had promised to compare and contrast Bishop Taylor's statement with that of retired Episcopal bishop Larry Benfield, who also wrote an amicus brief to the state Supremes (in collaboration with the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, Mormons for Equality, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and Jewish Reconstructionist Communities, Union for Reformed Judaism, Unitarian Universalist Association, United Methodist Affirmation, Covenant Network of Presbyterians, Friends for LGBTQ Concerns of the Religious Society of Friends, Methodist Federation for Social Action, More Light Presbyterians, Presbyterian Welcome, Reconciling Ministries Network of the UMC, Reconciling Works: Lutherans for Full Participation, and the Religious Institute).

Blog Talk: A Serving of Appetizing Bites from Around the Blogosphere

Once again, with a bow to Fred Clark's wonderful Slacktivist blog, from which I'm shamelessly borrowing, a serving of savory mezes to whet your appetite for the entire piece to which the meze bite links . . . . One of the following links points to Fred's blog.  If you can spot it cold, without clicking on the links below, you win the I'm Correct prize of the day.

Mark Silk to Ross Douthat: What about the "Nones" and the Growth of Non-Denominational Churches?

At his Spiritual Politics blog, Mark Silk engages Ross Douthat's argument that liberal churches are withering on the vine--and his presumed contention that, by contrast, right-wing churches like his Catholic church under the last two papacies are thriving.  I blogged yesterday about Douthat's latest statement in this vein.

Ross Douthat's Catholics Win, Episcopalians Lose Meme: Let Us Make-Believe Together

The Episcopal Church USA holds its triennial convention, at which it approves the use of rituals to bless same-sex unions, and within days, New York Times talking head Ross Douthat offers readers a hand-wringing analysis of how liberal Christianity is failing to save Christianity.  That analysis focuses--surprise!--on the Episcopal church.

The Lutherans Come Through: Why the ELCA Decision Matters

As many of you know, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted on Friday to remove impediments to ministry for gay church members living in committed long-term relationships. Openly gay ministers who commit themselves to celibacy have been permitted to serve for some time now in ELCA churches.

Predictably, almost all mainstream media coverage of this historic ELCA decision has overlooked the fact that the ELCA—and most mainline Protestant churches—created a second-tier, second-class system for gays in ministry only recently, and only after those churches began to face the fact that some gays in ministry would no longer remain in the closet as it became increasingly possible to come out in the culture at large.

In many churches, as gays in ministry became open (we have always been there, always ministering; the question is now whether we can be open about our presence in the churches and the ministry), churches responded by relegating gay ministers and ministry candidates to second-class status. Many churches added to their disciplinary regulations statements that gays choosing to enter the ministry had to do something not demanded of straight people entering ministry. We were asked to choose lifelong celibacy before we could serve in ministry.

This historical background, and the clear injustice of a two-tier system that relegates one group of human beings to second-class citizenship, are unfortunately nowhere to be found in most mainstream media coverage of what has happened in the ELCA this week. The mainstream media are predictably parroting the religious and political right in treating the ELCA decision as yet another concession to a gay pressure lobby demanding “special rights” in the churches, or as yet another sign that some churches are abandoning orthodoxy and the bible to condone immoral lifestyles.

What is overlooked in that kind of coverage, of course, is how very recently the longstanding “tradition” the churches are “abandoning” actually is. And what is significantly overlooked is that the choice to abolish a discriminatory two-tier system of qualifications for ministry is about justice and fairness—that is to say, it’s about choosing rather than abandoning core moral values.

Why should this story matter to LGBT citizens, regardless of their views about religion? And why should it matter to those who stand in solidarity with us, and to Americans in general, with our historical commitment to create a society in which equality and justice are core values? My e-friends Terry Weldon at Queering the Church, Colleen Kochivar-Baker at Enlightened Catholicism, and Michael Bayly at Wild Reed have all written (here and here and here) outstanding wrap-up commentary on the ELCA decision in the last two days. I offer the following remarks as complementary observations that echo their conclusions.

Why should the ELCA decision matter to all of us? In my view, it should matter because

1) it demonstrates that there is a powerful trend moving in the direction of full equality for LGBT persons in church and society; 2) what the churches do matters; 3) the ELCA decision will make it harder to scapegoat the Episcopal Church; and 4) the ELCA decision has important real-life practical consequences for LGBT persons.

▪ The ELCA decision demonstrates that there is a powerful trend moving in the direction of full equality for LGBT persons in church and society.

The attempt to combat full equality for LGBT persons in both church and society is well-funded and supported by strong, highly placed interest groups who have the ear of the media, and who still largely determine mainstream media representation of the relationship between churches and the gay community. Despite the money these groups have spent and continue to spend to keep equality for LGBT persons at bay, there is an even more powerful impulse towards justice running through many churches and in society at large.

That impulse demonstrates the validity of Martin Luther King’s observation that, while the arc of the moral universe may be long, it bends toward justice. What is at work in churches like the ELCA—despite the huge amounts of money, the string-pulling, the lies and underhanded maneuvers of the political and religious right—is justice. And when faith communities place themselves on the side of justice and move along that moral arc, they can be forces to reckon with.

Within a short space of time, the Episcopal Church USA chose to move against well-nigh determinative forces both within its own communion and in the culture at large, to do exactly what the ELCA has just done: to strike down barriers to ministry by gay persons that were created exclusively for openly gay ministers, and which did not apply to straight ministers. Shortly after that, the Quakers opened the door to same-sex marriage, noting that their religious body could not refuse to recognize God’s presence and God’s work in gay people and gay relationships.

The ELCA joins a trend in what it has just chosen to do. And that trend will now become more powerful, though not ineluctable, since the opposition will grow more vociferous in direct proportion to the movement of some churches along the moral arc of justice. What the ELCA chose to do in the face of fierce opposition will give hope to those within the Presbyterian and Methodist churches working for justice. But it will also give renewed determination to those opposing justice for LGBT persons in those churches, who will step up their battle against full inclusion of gays in their churches—with the mainstream media’s complicity.

▪ What the churches do matters.

Whether we like it or not, or whether we agree with their influence or not, communities of faith—churches, in particular, in the American context—continue powerfully to inform social attitudes about LGBT persons. This is precisely why the religious and political right are so fiercely determined to paint church decisions to treat gay persons with mere human decency and to accord gay persons equality and justice as abandonment of the gospel. When that whip can no longer be used to beat gay people and our families and friends—when the churches themselves take the whip out of the hands of the religious-political right—the battle to stigmatize gay people and use us as despised objects in unholy political games will largely have been lost.

▪ The ELCA decision will make it harder to scapegoat the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church has taken quite a beating for its decision to ordain Gene Robinson and its recent decision to abolish barriers to ministry for those who are openly gay. Because of these decisions, the Episcopal Church has attracted the maleficent attention of strong, highly placed interest groups who have the ear of the media and who are intent on representing the Episcopal Church as the sole, marginal ecclesial representative of a handful of believers' capitulation to immorality.

Because it has taken courageous steps in the direction of justice, the Episcopal Church has been subject to relentless attack from the right (and in the mainstream media), with claims that it has uniquely and single-handedly departed from an orthodoxy all other churches cherish. Claims have been made that the Episcopal Church has doomed itself by doing what is right, when it comes to justice and equality for gay persons.

These slanders will be harder to sustain now that both the Quakers and the Lutherans have followed suit. The Lutherans are particularly important as a symbolic group, since they represent the Protestant impulse itself in the popular imagination. They are the “original” Protestants, if you will. Their decision will reverberate through many other churches, and will help put the lie to defamatory statements about the Episcopal Church in right-wing media outlets and in the mainstream media. The right and the media will now have to admit that those trying to depict the bible, Christianity, and orthodoxy as all about patriarchy and homophobia have an increasingly steep climb as they try to make that argument.

▪ Most of all, the ELCA decision has important real-life practical consequences for LGBT persons.

Whenever churches create or support discriminatory two-tiered systems that relegate one group of human beings to second-class status on the basis of inborn traits over which those human beings have no control, people suffer. Real people. Real people with real hearts, real lives, and real bodies. Who live someplace in the world.

Those turned into second-class citizens suffer when they experience such injustice. Their families and friends suffer.

The churches have caused (and, in some cases, continue to cause) manifold suffering among gay persons. One of the reasons I began this blog and continue blogging here through thick and thin, whether I feel like writing or not, is because I myself and a life partner whom I dearly love have experienced that unique, exceedingly painful form of suffering the churches impose on the lives of gay persons. Just because we are gay.

When churches create a second-class system for a select group of persons, they lay the groundwork for treating those persons—even within the house of God and within church-owned institutions—cruelly, unjustly, and capriciously. Because we are theologians and have been called to that particular teaching ministry within the churches, but because we also happen to be gay, a couple, and unwilling to apologize for this, Steve and I have experienced life-altering discrimination within church-owned institutions.

I have chronicled some (but not all) of those experiences on this blog. I won’t repeat those chronicles here. What we say about our experience could equally well be said about many other gay believers, with a few alterations depending on the unique circumstances within which those persons live.

It’s time for this cruelty done in the name of God and in the house of God to stop. It’s time for churches and church institutions to stop firing people solely because we are gay, to stop making gay people’s lives living nightmares when we work hard, achieve much, but cannot keep jobs because of who we are, to stop making us feel as if life itself is a burden because we are out of work and have no way to contribute and to give, to stop placing us outside health-care systems because we are unemployed, even as the churches themselves proclaim that they want to see everyone having access to health care.

One of the persistent refrains of some delegates who spoke against the ELCA decision to abolish unjust barriers to ministry for partnered gays is that abolishing those barriers would create suffering for these delegates, their churches, and their families. I can appreciate the struggles of Christians who have become convinced that orthodoxy hinges on keeping the gays at bay as many of their fellow Christians move along the arc of justice. I can appreciate that, when one's theological imagination has been shaped by such erroneous presuppositions, it is difficult to move in new directions.

What baffles me, however, is the apparent blindness of those same Christians to the considerable suffering they have been inflicting for years on their brothers and sisters who happen to be gay and lesbian. We who are gay or lesbian have gone to church meeting after church meeting like the recent ELCA meeting, had our hearts broken, and have been expected to go home and mourn and let the church go about its business without hearing of our pain. Where were those brothers and sisters then, as they expected us to walk away in silence, bearing our pain?

That expectation is not adequate for those who follow the gospel. It is not a Christ-like expectation. As the ELCA social statement on human sexuality notes, though Christians may validly disagree about the morality of homosexuality, it is impossible to call ourselves Christian—and to profess to be church—when we do not welcome, affirm, and love everyone. Regardless. Because God makes everyone.

The ELCA decision will make a world of difference to many LGBT Christians, in many churches, who continue to experience unjust and cruel treatment within their churches. It will also make a significant practical difference in society itself, since what the churches do in this arena has important reverberations throughout society.

When the churches choose to untie cords used to bind selected groups of people and lift yokes used to keep those people in painful subjugation (Isaiah 58:6-8, Matthew 11:30), what a light can sometimes shine forth in the world. And that light will be fearsome perhaps only to those who, for whatever reason, prefer darkness to light.

Poor Rowan Williams: The Moral Conundrum Facing the Churches Today, Through Gay Lives

Two days ago, I challenged the poor-Rowan Williams meme now developing in centrist Catholic circles (and in centrist Christian circles in general, among liberal Christians who want to appear tolerant while refusing to risk anything by actually supporting the cause of gay rights in the churches).

The Poor-Rowan Conundrum

The poor-Rowan meme wants us to see the Archbishop of Canterbury as a thoughtful, sensitive man caught in an impossible conundrum. The conundrum itself is not entirely clear to me. Either it’s the conundrum of holding a communion together when some of its members regard the full inclusion of gay human beings as an issue worth dividing the church over, or it’s the conundrum of doing the impossible balancing act of trying to keep the church on track biblically by preaching that gays are sinners, while proclaiming that the church is, as it ought to be, welcoming of all.

The Conundrum Facing Churches: How to Preach Love While Practicing Hate

If it’s the latter conundrum for which we ought to pity poor Rowan, then it’s important to note that this is a conundrum facing the Christian churches in general today. It’s the conundrum of trying to profess what a church has to profess in order to be church at all—and that’s love—while practicing the opposite of love. It’s the conundrum of trying to present oneself as loving when one is, in fact, hateful in one’s deliberate decision to treat gay humanity as less than the humanity of everyone else. It’s the conundrum of saying that one is just and inclusive when one is, in fact, unjust and excluding in one’s institutional life as a church.

The conundrum facing the Christian churches at this moment in history is the conundrum of having to make a choice, when one event after another has definitively revealed the traditional teaching of the churches, held always and everywhere, grounded on a consistent reading of the scriptures throughout history, as indefensible. As immoral. As a betrayal of what the scriptures are really all about, at their most fundamental levels.

And so it’s not a conundrum at all, really. It’s a question of either doing what we know is right, or of continuing to do what we know is wrong when we actually know better, and while we proclaim that we’re trying to do right. It’s the age-old conundrum that has always faced people aspiring to an ethical life: bridging the gap between theory and practice; doing what you know is right, particularly when the doing requires that you pay a price.

It’s easy to theorize, analyze, and preach. It’s much harder to practice.

But the preaching of the church about love will make sense to people only when the church practices and stops preaching—stops preaching, that is, until it begins to practice. The preaching of the church about love will make sense to people only when the church listens carefully to Francis of Assisi when he tells his followers to preach all the time, but use words only when absolutely necessary.

In this final sense—the conundrum of doing what you know is right, when there is a price to be paid for doing right—the conundrum that the Archbishop of Canterbury is now facing does seem poignant. And it’s one worth analyzing, because it’s one that Christians in general now find themselves facing.

The Biblical Face of the Moral Conundrum Facing the Churches

Homophobia is being so decisively exposed within the culture at large as unjust and immoral, that many Christians are now having to reassess their attitudes towards gay persons at a fundamental level. And this pushes Christians towards something they do not like to do: that is to reassess their entire tradition, including how they read the bible and how they find absolute certainty and absolute authority in the bible.

If we might have been spectacularly wrong about the gay issue, the reasoning of many Christians goes, then what else might we have been wrong about? Where do we find absolute authority and certainty, when our reading of biblical texts appears to be affected and even normed by cultural developments that challenge the traditional reading?

Real-World Context of Reading the Bible: Pressure and Threats from Powerful Interest Groups

It is important to note, too, that discussions of how to read the scriptures and apply them to the life of the church never take place in a theological vacuum, apart from the real world. The decisions churches make about how they choose to interpret the bible have real-life effects. And many groups, including some that have no real interest at all in religion, but a vested interest in placing religion on their political and economic side, work very hard to assure that the churches’ reading of the bible does not change, where they do not want it to change.

How we read the scriptures affects how we do business. Ultimately, what stands in the way of change in Christian churches, when it comes to repenting of homophobia, is not really the bible itself and how we choose to read it. It is economic self-interest that stands in the way, the self-interest of church leaders who know that they will pay a price in the real world, an economic price, if they permit new readings of the bible to inform the viewpoint of their churches about gay issues.

At the very heart of the churches’ (self-made) conundrum about how, whether, when, to include gay human beings in the churches’ life, how to treat us as fully human, is fear. Fear runs deep inside all Christian churches and the institutions they sponsor when they consider what otherwise seems to be a theological issue: the question of how to read the scriptures regarding gay people, and of how to apply those texts to the life of the church today. There is tremendous unacknowledged fear around these issues within the Christian churches. It is fear of economic reprisal, fear of reprisal if they choose to do what they know to be right . . . .

Time and again, when churches, church leaders, and church institutions admit that the traditional approach of the churches to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people is just not theologically and morally defensible, they face serious reprisal. Wealthy church members routinely hold churches hostage by withholding funds from churches that do the right thing vis-à-vis gay human beings. They withdraw their funds from such churches and move them to gay-excluding churches.

The Power Exerted by Right-Wing Political Watchdog Groups to Keep Homophobia Alive in Churches

Powerful political watchdog organizations also get into the act and assure that churches choosing to alter their gay-excluding stances pay a steep price for that choice. These organizations target such churches, publicize their choices, and call on people both inside and outside the church to make the church pay for its choice. These groups are capable of raising hell for churches that do not dance to their reactionary tune. They have strong ties to the mainstream media, and they control the dominant media text about the churches’ response to gay people, depicting every move to inclusion within the churches as a move away from the bible and longstanding Christian tradition—an abdication of Christian belief and values for cultural norms.

These powerful political watchdog groups are adroit about assisting reactionary groups within any church that chooses to repent of homophobia. They encourage these splinter groups to split the church—to preach that the church’s choice to welcome gay brothers and sisters is a church-dividing choice, one that demonstrates that their church has repudiated the bible and longstanding tradition. They not only help these groups to create splinter churches claiming to represent the tradition in all its purity, but they also assist these splinter groups in filing lawsuits that try to damage the mother church financially by taking its property away when a split has occurred.

Rowan Williams's Conundrum as the Conundrum Facing the Churches Today

So, yes, I can well imagine that Rowan Williams does face a conundrum right now. But I would frame that conundrum differently than right-wing groups with a strong presence in the mainstream media want to frame it when they promote the poor-Rowan meme.

To frame the conundrum facing the churches today as gay people ask to be treated as fully human in the churches, it’s important to look at what has happened in the past, when the church has been confronted with similar requests from other groups long marginalized by the churches, as the churches claimed sanction for their oppression of these groups in the bible and in tradition.

Similar Conundrums for the Churches in the Past: Slavery and Women's Rights

This is not the first time in history that the churches have chosen to split over issues of inclusion or exclusion, of full or partial humanity of marginalized groups of people. And it’s not the first time in history that churches choosing to do the right thing have been faced with economic reprisal by those with a vested interest in maintaining a status quo based on discrimination.

In the United States, the churches split over the issue of slavery in the 19th century, and throughout the 20th century, as churches that once made women second-class citizens have opened their doors to full inclusion of women in church life and in the ministry, there have been splits, with economic reprisals, in churches that have chosen to do what is right in this area—despite long-held interpretations of the bible throughout Christian history that have justified the exclusion of women from ordination and have regarded women's humanity as flawed and inferior to the humanity of males.

Just as churches that supported slavery and the continued subordination of people of color to white people preached in the 19th century that they were simply doing what the bible had always told Christians to do—hold slaves, but treat slaves with Christian kindness . . . . In all the churches that chose to split over the issue of slavery—in the churches that took the pro-slavery tack—the argument was consistent: the patriarchs of the Old Testament held slaves; Jesus never condemned slavery, but took it for granted; Paul upheld the right to hold slaves. Tell us that we’re reading the bible wrong about slavery now, and you challenge the entire history of Christian biblical interpretation. You undermine the whole authority of the bible, in changing what Christians have long held to be the correct biblical interpretation of slavery.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's Justification for Resisting Change re: Gay Issues

So it’s interesting to read now the Archbishop of Canterbury’s justification, published three days ago on his website, for punishing the Episcopal Church USA after that church has abolished bans on the ordination of openly gay clergy. I’m interested in particular in the Archbishop’s argument that “the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years” makes the decision to abolish bans discriminating against gay clergy candidates problematic. The Archbishop’s statement reads,

6. However, the issue is not simply about civil liberties or human dignity or even about pastoral sensitivity to the freedom of individual Christians to form their consciences on this matter. It is about whether the Church is free to recognise same-sex unions by means of public blessings that are seen as being, at the very least, analogous to Christian marriage.

7. In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years, it is clear that a positive answer to this question would have to be based on the most painstaking biblical exegesis and on a wide acceptance of the results within the Communion, with due account taken of the teachings of ecumenical partners also. A major change naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding.

“In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years”; “painstaking biblical exegesis”; “wide acceptance” within the communion; “solid theological grounding”: what the Archbishop of Canterbury is offering here is an impossible process of indefinite delay, before the churches ever act on the growing culturally-grounded consensus that homophobia is morally indefensible. Rowan Williams is arguing that issues which I believe he himself has long since regarded as settled—in favor of a full welcome of gay human beings in the churches—need further study, as a prelude to further dialogue to build futher consensus among Christians who are, in many cases, determined to resist any opening to gay people within the churches.

Further, further, further, which essentially means never, never, never.

Rowan Williams' Argument That Anti-Gay Biblical Texts Are "Very Ambiguous"

What’s fascinating about this argument—and here is where I find the poor-Rowan meme apt—is that prior to his election as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams wrote theological essays that reject precisely the argument he now wants to impose throughout the Anglican communion, as a way of dealing with the divided mind of his church regarding the humanity of gay persons. In 1989, Rowan Williams wrote an article entitled "Theology and Sexuality" which he presented as the 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.

In that article, he argues,

In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.

Interesting, isn’t it? In 1989, for Rowan Williams the theologian and pastor, the biblical texts condemning same-sex relations were “very ambiguous,” and the attempt to impose them on the entire church in the name of longstanding tradition was “fundamentalist.” Now, in 2009, for Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury, the church has consistently read the bible to condemn same-sex relations for 2000 years, and the attempt to impose that viewpoint on the entire Anglican communion is not fundamentalist at all.

The burden of proof is now, in 2009, on those who want to challenge that longstanding interpretation of the scriptures. They must now convince even the most fundamentalist of their brethren who hold views in other areas—e.g., re: the treatment of women—that not even fundamentalist Anglicans in many regions can support. They must now convince those espousing a fundamentalist reading of the bible which is not even consonant with the Anglican tradition, and not imposed in any other area of Anglican life except when it comes to gay human beings.

Nor has Rowan Williams really recanted what he wrote in 1987. In 2007, he was asked by Time reporter Guilhelm Alandry precisely that question: whether he stills stands by the position he defended in 1987. He replied as follows:

Yes, I argued that in 1987. I still think that the points I made there and the questions I raised were worth making as part of the ongoing discussion. I'm not recanting. But those were ideas put forward as part of a theological discussion. I'm now in a position where I'm bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It's not for me to exploit my position to push a change.

The Heart of Rowan Williams' Conundrum: Doing Right When One Knows What Is Right

And so we see here with utter clarity precisely where the conundrum lies for poor Rowan Williams: “It's not for me to exploit my position to push a change.” I have my personal viewpoint: I regard the biblical texts long thought to condemn same-sex relations as “very ambiguous.”

But as Archbishop of Canterbury, on behalf of the Anglican communion, where there are many Christians (with powerful economic and political elites backing them) who promote what I know personally to be an indefensible fundamentalist reading of these scriptures, I have to act as though those scriptures which I know to be very ambiguous are binding on the whole communion and represent the longstanding tradition of the church. That tradition must be defended and cannot be changed without wide consensus throughout the whole church.

How Churches Change Their Moral Minds

This is definitely a conundrum, and it’s one that calls for our compassion: as Rowan Williams' own argument in 1987 noted, the church can and does change its moral and theological mind. It has done so throughout history. It does so, in many cases, when cultural developments cast an entirely new light on how the church has always and everywhere read the bible, and shows that a certain interpretation of the bible is fundamentalist, morally undesirable, less ethically insightful than the viewpoint of the culture at large.

In 1987, Rowan Williams referred to the case of artificial contraception. He admits that the church has changed its mind about this practice, and he admits that longstanding Christian tradition and biblical interpretation view the practice as immoral. He takes for granted that the church was right to change its moral and theological mind about artificial contraception, and right to ditch the longstanding, traditional reading of the scriptures to outlaw the practice—even though many Christians still do not buy into this new viewpoint, and there is not complete consensus about this issue within the Christian churches.

What I think the Archbishop of Canterbury knows, and what makes his current conundrum poignant, is that his analysis of how churches change their moral and theological minds is fundamentally wrong. And it’s wrong because he appears unwilling to take the only morally defensible side he can and must take in the current controversy about gay issues, though he may pay a strong price for doing so.

The Archbishop of Canterbury knows full well that the churches changed their moral minds about slavery and about the place of women in church and world despite what had always been the theological and exegetical consensus in the churches. And the churches changed their moral minds regarding these issues despite the opposition of large numbers of Christians to this theological and moral shift. There was not widespread consensus on these issues when the churches finally decided to do what was right.

The churches changed their moral minds in these instances because cutting-edge groups of prophetic believers within the churches took the risk of speaking out, needling, prodding, challenging the status quo, opening doors to women and people of color when the church itself refused to open those doors. Significant shifts in the moral minds of churches do not occur because churches have built a consensus around a new reading of the scriptures. The shifts are driven by prophetic minorities who then precipitate a shift that eventually creates a new consensus in a recalcitrant body bent on keeping change at bay.

Invariably, when such new readings arise—from the margins of churches, and often in collaboration with secular human rights movements—the majority of church members kick and scream against change. And those with the strongest vested interests in maintaining the status quo—who also often happen to be the wealthiest and most powerful members of the churches—do all they can to resist, as they maintain that accepting the new reading of the scriptures will undermine all religious authority in the world and make everything relative.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is, I believe, faced with a significant moral conundrum today. It is the same conundrum that faces many Christians, who are slowly becoming aware that how their churches have chosen to treat gay human beings throughout history, while quoting the bible, is no longer morally desirable.

It is the conundrum of choosing to do right, once one has attained the intellectual insights that precede a shift in moral awareness. Knowing what is right to do is often not the biggest problem in the ethical life. It's actually doing right that's difficult, and choosing to do so when we know we will pay a price for making that choice.

But when the ability of the church to convince others that its message is worth hearing depends on doing what we know is right, rather than on talking endlessly about what is right, while we remain aloof from the world of choice and action, what a steep price the church pays, in terms of its credibility and ability to be a sign of salvation in the world.

The Poor-Rowan Williams Meme and Catholic Centrists: Unearned Superiority

I have to get something off my chest. I’m irritated, frankly, by the poor-Rowan Williams meme developing in centrist Catholic circles, in the wake of the decision of the Episcopal Church USA to accept openly gay persons as ministry candidates.

I blogged about this recently. As I noted, while the Anglican communion struggles with questions about how the church ought to respond to the expectation of gay persons to be treated as fully human, many Catholics are looking on with a smug sense of superiority. Many of us believe that we hold higher standards, and have set ourselves apart more successfully from a culture headed to hell in a handbasket.

And so the poor-Rowan meme, with its sad laments about the poignant struggles of a thoughtful and intelligent man confronted with an impossible conundrum: how to hold a church together when some of its members want to split over the question of whether gay human beings are human in the same way that other human beings are human.

Please. A conundrum? A poignant struggle? A problem that thoughtful people can’t resolve?

What’s so perplexing about the question of whether churches ought to accept every human being as fully human? And to treat every human being with the same dignity and respect, as a result of that fundamental theological affirmation?

We Catholics haven’t earned the right, frankly, to stand aside from this battle with such smug superiority. The price we’ve paid in order to call ourselves united and superior is horrific.

It’s the price of admitting, tacitly or otherwise, that we regard gay humanity as less than ordinary humanity. It's the price of ongoing repression of gay and lesbian Catholics, of firing anyone working in Catholic institutions who comes out of the closet, of denying health care and a living income to gay people working in our institutions when they ask for the simple right to be who they are, proudly.

In centrist Catholic circles, it’s the price of remaining totally silent about the legitimate claims of our gay Catholic brothers and sisters to a place at the table.

It’s the price of continuing—smugly and with a totally unfounded sense of our superiority—to natter about inclusion and tolerance and human rights, when we simply ignore those on the outside looking in if they’re gay. We don’t invite them to the table. We don’t give them a voice—not even in our conversations about tolerance and inclusion. Not even in our rare conversations about them!

It's the price of talking about communion as our central value, when our own actions belie our claim to value communion. It's the price of refusing to talk about the slow bleeding out of American Catholicism, as one in three American adults who were raised Catholic have left the church, and as one in ten American adults is a former Catholic.

We don’t want, we centrist Catholics who are so concerned about communion, to talk about why that’s happening. Or to hear the voices of those who’ve left. Including our many gay and lesbian brothers and sisters who have walked away, while we’ve remained totally silent about what is done to them in the communion we claim to value so much.

While we keep talking about human rights and justice. And tolerance and inclusion. And communion.

We’re not so far apart, ultimately, we Catholics of the center in the U.S., from those of our Catholic brothers and sisters on the far right who taunt anyone who disagrees with them—on a daily basis—and urge them to leave the Catholic church and join the Episcopalians. That liberal bugbear group which, the mainstream media has succeeded in convincing us, is headed to hell in a handbasket.

Because it has chosen to treat gay human beings with mere human decency. While we claim to be the superior ones.

Bedford, Texas or Anaheim, California: The City of God vs. the City of Man in Contemporary Anglican Orthodoxy

Wow. Little did I know when I was blogging earlier today about the Christ-vs.-culture debate in the Anglican communion that the Most Reverend Robert William Duncan, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, had just upped the ante in this debate. Considerably so. Archbishop Duncan has just written an open letter (H/T to Clerical Whispers) to his Episcopalian brothers and sisters, setting them straight about who owns God. And who doesn’t. Decisively so.

Archbishop Duncan (who leads one of the splinter groups that has developed in the U.S. to resist gay rights in the Anglican communion) makes no bones about it: his group and groups like it represent God. The rest represent, well, hell.

In stark Manichean dichotomies that mistakenly claim Augustinian provenance, the Most Reverend Robert Duncan tells us it all comes down to Bedford, Texas or Anaheim, California. To Jerusalem or Babylon. To received values and behaviors or revolutionary tastes. To the City of God or the City of Man.

To Archbishop Duncan’s Anglican Church in North America or the Episcopal Church USA. To Archbishop Robert Duncan or Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori. To God or the devil. To blessing or curse, life or death.

To church or culture, and to gay exclusion/holding the line or gay inclusion/giving in to godless demonic culture.

And so now we know: it all comes down to Bedford, Texas or Anaheim, California—the whole, tortuous, fascinating, complex course of Christian history—to the absolute, certain, unquestionable identification of Bedford, Texas with the City of God, and Anaheim, California with the headed-for-hell-in-a-handbasket City of Man. Bedford happens to be, you see, where the Anglican Church of North America just met to elect one Robert William Duncan their archbishop.

Who’d a-thunk it was so simple? God and Archbishop Duncan or the devil and Bishop Schori? The City of God incarnate in Texas, the corrupt City of Man skulking about California. Gays in and blessed or out and damned. Christ or culture.

Archbishop Duncan cites St. Augustine as the source for his black and white analysis of things that neatly places God on Archbishop Duncan’s side and against his Episcopalian brothers and sisters. The only problem is, this is not what Augustine said in his City of God. And it’s not the reason he wrote that work.

Augustine was an opponent of the Manicheans, you see, and a critic of their simplistic, black-white worldview that divides everything into good and evil, light and darkness. And allows us to know, short of the final winnowing and judgment that belong to God alone, who fits where.

Just as he was an opponent of the Donatists, with their puffed-up certainty that their little group and theirs alone had captured Christian truth and virtue for all time. In Augustine’s view, they were like frogs sitting around a tiny pond croaking that their little bit of water was the Mediterranean.

In Augustine’s view, only God knows who belongs to the City of God and who to the City of Man, and it’s God’s business and God’s alone to make that judgment. And when God does make it, Augustine maintains, many of us will be mighty surprised at who’s in and who’s out: many of those who are oh so certain they are in the City of God and oh so certain that their enemies are out will find that the opposite is the case, on that final day when sheep and goats are separated.

Bedford or Anaheim. The tiny pond or the big wide sea. Augustine would, I think, be very surprised (and perhaps not entirely amused) to see where the “orthodox” of our day have ended up, while claiming as their authority works he wrote to defend a very different orthodoxy, one far bigger than the one they wish to promote in his name. Having tussled with the Manicheans and the Donatists over precisely the question of separating the sheep from the goats and the tiny pond vs. the big wide sea, he’d perhaps find it terribly ironic that the church has now come to reside in all its countercultural and doctrinal purity only in little old Bedford, Texas in this year of our Lord 2009.

Christ or Culture: Framing the Anglican Debate about Gay and Women's Rights

Recent commentary (e.g., here) about what’s happening in the Episcopal Church asks whether it’s church or culture: do churches stand against and hope to lead the cultures in which they live; or do they cave in to the culture around them and go along with cultural trends antithetical to the gospel?

This stark either-or understanding of the complex dialectic relationship between church and culture is simplistic in the extreme. It ignores the reality of how church and culture have always related to each other throughout history: at some points, the culture leads, developing insights, norms, and trends that challenge the church to be more acute in its reading of the gospels and more faithful to the gospels; at other times, the church calls on culture to abide by the culture’s own norms of fair play, justice, and decency.

As the question has been framed in the American mainstream media for some time now, the church appears to have only one choice: either to stand doggedly against culture when culture moves in directions the church condemns; or to give in to culture and lose its soul. The question has been framed that way because this is how the religious right chooses to see the church’s options vis-à-vis women’s rights, abortion, and homosexuality, each of which has been made by the religious right a litmus test of orthodoxy and a test case for the church’s willingness to preach against or capitulate to the culture at large.

This simplistic either-or way of framing the church’s options at this point in history completely overlooks the significant classic work of H. Richard Niebuhr, which found a variety of options for churches as they confront the cultures in which they live. Niebuhr offers five typologies: the church can stand over against culture; it can succumb to culture; it can seek to place itself above culture; it can view its relationship to culture as paradoxical; or it can concern itself primarily with transforming culture. As an accomplished student of Christian history, Niebuhr found all these options running throughout Christian history. And he noted that churches can incorporate several of these tendencies simultaneously at any given point in history.

Though the dependence of H. Richard Niebuhr and his brother Reinhold Niebuhr on the social gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th century is often not acknowledged because the Niebuhrs were critics of the social gospel, both accepted key principles of the social gospel theology even as they critiqued this theology. One of these principles—which strongly underlies Richard Niebuhr’s work on Christ and culture—is that the kingdom of God (and, consequently, the church) and culture co-exist in a constant dialectic relationship throughout Christian history.

This approach to the question of Christ and culture, which is central to the thought of leading social gospel theologians including Walter Rauschenbusch and Shailer Mathews, assumes that the church exists primarily to proclaim the reign of God and to prefigure the reign of God in its own life, over the course of history. Social gospel theologians followed German biblical exegetes who, by the latter part of the 19th century, became aware that Jesus’s life and ministry were focused on proclaiming the imminent arrival of the reign of God in history, not on founding and building a church.

The concept of church is nowhere to be found in Jesus’s thinking. This concept, and the structures that flow from it, are later developments in response to Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God, and to his death and resurrection. The church is an attempt to institutionalize the memory of Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and his proclamation of the reign of God.

Out of these biblical findings—which have long been accepted by both Protestant and Catholic scripture scholars and theologians, and are resisted only by marginal fundamentalist groups within the churches—the social gospel developed a theology focused on the church’s obligation to respond to the culture around it in dialectical fashion, as both the world and the church move towards the consummation of history that Christian faith identifies as the reign of God. Social gospel theology recognizes that both the secular and the sacred realms can prefigure the reign of God through their moral insights, their vision of the possibilities of human existence, and their pursuit of justice for all.

Social gospel theology thus provides an important optic through which Christians can view some cultural developments as challenges to the church itself, because those developments more adequately realize the notion of the kingdom of God that Jesus set forth in his life and preaching than the church has yet realized the notion. This is the insight Martin Luther King—who was influenced in important respects by the social gospel and the Niebuhrs—was articulating when he said that the church ought to be the headlight of movements for justice, but often finds itself the taillight.

The church has found itself challenged throughout the course of history by secular developments that are more adequate expressions of the reign of God than are to be found in the church’s own life and teaching. Conversely, there have been times in the course of Christian history when the church has played a prophetic role in calling cultures to accountability to their secular notions of justice and fair play.

From an historical standpoint, the church’s relationship to culture is always dialectical. It is more complex than any one typology can capture. It is a dance, a give and take in which the culture often leads, and the church follows, or the church leads, with the culture following.

It would be fatuous for anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of Western history to deny that the churches have often been capable of shocking, grotesque cruelty and injustice: the churches have again and again betrayed Jesus’s notion of the reign of God in their behavior and institutional life. The churches have blessed and helped to foment wars, even calling wars “holy.” They have tortured and burned “heretics” and “witches.” They have fostered pogroms against the Jewish community, and in the Holocaust, many believers and many church leaders turned a blind eye to the mass murder of Jewish people. The churches long accepted and even practiced slavery. The churches have historically oppressed women and sought to subject women to second-class status as human beings.

In many cases, the churches only gave up these inhumane, cruel practices when secular movements began to challenge the church to recognize that its way of dealing with particular groups of people was immoral and antithetical to the Christian gospels. In many cases, secular societies have had to make laws to force the churches to adhere to even the most fundamental moral principles inherent in the gospels that the church proclaims as its foundational documents.

The debate now underway about the role of women and gay people in church and world cannot be reduced to a simplistic church-vs.-culture analysis, in which many churches’s anti-gay and misogynistic stances somehow have the blessing of the gospels, and the culture’s willingness to accord rights and freedom to women and gay persons represents an abdication of Christian principles. The debate cannot be reduced to that simplistic text, that is—the text the Christian right wants to continue seeing throughout the mainstream media—if we are honest about what is going on in this debate, and what the debate entails.

One of the grand ironies of the either-or church-vs.-culture analysis is that the very groups within Christianity who now want to claim that they and they alone are standing stalwartly against culture in resisting women’s rights and gay rights are themselves deeply enculturated—and enculturated precisely in their misogyny and homophobia. Misogyny and homophobia are every bit as much historically developed cultural patterns as racism and slavery are.

In defending racism and slavery in the 19th century, the predecessors of those Christian groups now claiming to be saviors of the church against corrupt gay-affirming mainstream culture constantly maintained that they alone had maintained the doctrinal purity of the church throughout history, with its blessing of slavery. In defending racism and slavery in the 19th century, the predecessors of Christian groups now defending misogyny and homophobia claimed to stand on orthodox ground and perennial “truth,” while they were actually fighting to maintain historically developed cultural practices that have nothing at all to do with the gospels and the reign of God, and everything to do with the power of select groups over groups on whose backs that illicit power rests.

As the Anglican communion struggles with questions about how the church ought to respond today to the legitimate demands of women and gay persons to be treated as fully human, many Catholics are looking on with a smug sense of superiority founded on an illusion: this is the illusion that the Catholic church somehow holds to higher standards, which set it apart from culture more successfully than is the case with the Episcopal church.

What we really need to ask ourselves, we Catholics, as we watch the fray with those smug grins on our faces is whether our superiority, our resistance to cultural captivity, means then that we stand against women and gay persons, in their battle to be accorded full humanity and to be treated as persons with the full range of human rights accorded to all other persons. If not—if we do stand with misogyny and homophobia because we stand for orthodoxy and perennial "truth"—then can we truly claim to be standing with the gospel and Jesus, even as we stand proudly against culture?

When Us Doesn't Mean Us: The Archbishop of Canterbury on the Place of Gays in the Episcopal Church

In a recent NY Times article about the meeting of the Episcopal Church USA now underway in Anaheim, Laurie Goodstein quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, cautioning the Episcopal church not to make decisions that will further fragment the Anglican communion.

According to Goodstein, Williams stated in a preliminary address to the ECUSA conference, “Along with many in the communion, I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that will push us further apart.” Goodstein reads this statement as a caution against decisions by the ECUSA to move ahead to integrate gay and lesbian persons fully into the life of the church.

And, in fact, on Tuesday the ECUSA voted to affirm that “any ordained ministry” is open to gay and lesbian church members. This ends a moratorium on the ordination of openly gay bishops following the ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson several years ago—a moratorium to which the ECUSA agreed in response to pleas from some sectors of the Anglican communion to avoid making decisions that might lead to splits in the communion.

I’m intrigued by Rowan Williams’s statement. In particular, I wonder what he means by “us,” when he says, “I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that will push us further apart.”

The “us” in that sentence can hardly mean gay and lesbian persons, can it, since the decision to exclude openly gay persons from ordination is a decision that pushes gay people away—away from their other brothers and sisters in Christ, away from the church, away from the experience of faith and life in the Christian community.

Decisions to exclude gay persons from ordination simply because they are gay are decisions that single out and isolate those who happen to be made gay by God, as if their humanity is not equal to that of the rest of “us.” Such decisions create a kind of reservation, a gated and policed community, within the church on which those deemed inferior are expected to live peaceably, while they recognize that their exclusion is merited, merely because their humanity is less than that of the humanity of “us.”

Rowan Williams’s statement, “I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that will push us further apart” seems designed to keep the special reservations for gays alive in the Anglican communion. Essentially, the Archbishop of Canterbury is implying by this statement that gays aren’t “us.” Gays are less than us, less than the rest of us who make the decisions on behalf of the defective, subhuman gays who deserve compassion. But not all the rights accorded to “us.”

I like Rowan Williams. I admire him. He’s a good theologian. He’s a thoughtful man and an inspiring writer.

I haven’t found him inspiring as a church leader, however. I don’t find those who ask others to accept second-class status merely because of who they happen to be—who they've been made by God to be—especially inspiring. I don’t find those who refuse to do the right thing when the right thing has a price tag, but remains the right thing to do, particularly inspiring.

I find it hard to listen with enthusiasm to religious or political leaders who tell me that gay persons should be treated with full human dignity, but who then propose compromises designed to place gay people in reservations designed for the subhuman while the question of how to respect gay humanity is discussed and further discussed by everyone but those being dehumanized. My heart and mind don’t expand when I hear religious and political leaders talk about the need for everyone’s rights to be protected, but who do not then put their rhetoric into action—who, in fact, issue warnings about what might happen if we move too quickly to overturn the injustice with which some citizens live, simply because of who God has made them to be.

I find it appalling when church leaders imply that only heterosexual people are fully “us,” and that gay and lesbian people should be expected just to sit by in silence on our reservation, while those who are the real “us” in the Christian community, mostly heterosexual males, make decisions that radically affect our lives but give us no voice in the deliberations that radically affect us.

I wonder how anyone imagines that his humanity is more than that of others, and then willingly assumes a position of religious authority in any Christian church. I wonder how one imagines that he can dehumanize others, reduce others to silence, expect others to be content with crumbs from the table and with continuing injustice, without dehumanizing himself.

Above all, I wonder how anyone thinks we can talk about church—talk effectively, convincingly, and honestly—and exclude others in this insulting, dehumanizing way. Creating special reservations for the subhuman, for those who are not quite “us,” is the antithesis of church—as the presiding bishop of the ECUSA, Katherine Jefferts Schori, reminded those gathered at Anaheim in a powerful opening statement that offers a very different vision of church than the one implied in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s caution about decisions that might divide “us.”

Church either invites everyone into the circle of “us,” or it forfeits the right to call itself church—just as democracy either invites everyone to the table of human rights or it fails to be democracy. It’s time for the game-playing that asks gay and lesbian human beings to accept subhuman status in both church and society to stop, before the institutions that mean so much to many of us damage themselves irreparably through their continuing betrayal of core human values in their ongoing dehumanization of gay and lesbian human beings.

Recent News: Prop 8, Church of Scotland, Mainline Clergy and Gay Issues, and Obama and Human Rights

Because of the long weekend and yesterday’s holiday in the U.S., many readers may have taken a temporary break from reading the news and their favorite blogs. So I thought I’d offer today a smorgasbord of commentary from several recent news or blog articles, which touch on themes I’ve discussed in previous postings.

Today’s the day on which the California Supreme Court will hand down its verdict about proposition 8, the voter initiative that amended the state constitution to turn back gay marriage in the last round of elections. Most political analysts are expecting the California Supremes to uphold prop 8. But it’s less easy to know what the court will decide to do about the some 18,000 same-sex couples who married in California prior to prop 8.

Courtesy of Pam’s House Blend, I read an alarming article from Orcinus this weekend, predicting a violent right-wing backlash in the hinterlands, if the court should decide to void the prop 8 vote. This analysis ties into my caution in a number of previous blog postings (see e.g. here) about concluding that the power of the political and religious right has been decisively checked in our culture—particularly in areas in which it has long dominated political life.

Some thought-provoking reflections from Sara Robinson at Orcinus:

Yes, the right wing is losing on gay rights issues. That is, very precisely, why they’re more dangerous now than they have been in the past. Their impending irrelevance is not a reason to worry less; it’s a reason to worry more. And getting Prop 8 overturned in the courts would ignite the situation, because it will hit absolutely every angry-making right-wing button there is . . . .

It’s a sad irony that the best possible outcome for America’s gay movement could also turn out to be the tipping point for the biggest anti-gay, anti-liberal backlash we’ve seen yet. Tomorrow, we’ll know one way or another which way this will go – and whether a new court-ordered opportunity for America's gay community could also turn out to be a potent new source of danger from the right as well.

About a month ago, I noted an interesting editorial in the official journal of the Church of Scotland, Life and Work, which challenges the selectivity with which many Christians of the right quote the bible to challenge acceptance of gay persons. What I did not note at the time is that this editorial reflects an important conversation now underway among Scottish Presbyterians about gay people and gay issues.

In January 2009, after its then pastor had retired in June of the previous year, Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen chose to call as his replacement Rev. Scott Rennie—an openly gay minister, one whom the congregation knew to be gay and in a committed relationship. This action precipitated a lively discussion among Scottish Presbyterians about the propriety of appointing openly gay ministers.

An organized movement to block this appointment and the ordination of any openly gay ministers in the Church of Scotland got underway. A group of ministers within the Presbytery of Aberdeen filed a complaint about the appointment, precipitating deliberation by the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly in May 2009. A group calling itself the Fellowship of Confessing Churches formed and organized an online petition to consolidate opposition to Rev. Rennie’s appointment.

On 22 May, at its General Assembly, the Church of Scotland voted to uphold Rev. Rennie’s appointment as minister of Queen’s Cross Church. And now, Clerical Whispers is reporting today that opponents of this move are vowing to hold back contributions from the Church of Scotland.
And this is the point I want to emphasize, as I wend my way through this story. In February, I noted that the Presbytery of Arkansas had voted 116-64 in favor of striking down statements in the Book of Order of the Presbyterian church that prohibit the ordination of openly gay clergy. Though this initiative (which requires a two-thirds vote of approval from presbyteries throughout the country) failed, it came closer than ever before to succeeding in this year’s round of votes.

What I did not mention at the time I blogged about this issue was that, at the same time that the Presbytery of Arkansas voted in favor of abolishing barriers to ordination of openly gay clergy, a Presbyterian church in Little Rock, Second Presbyterian, ordained an openly gay deacon. I’ve followed the story of this ordination with some interest, since I have a number of friends who attend this church.

They tell me that the day on which the vote to ordain this deacon took place, one of their ministers reminded them of how their church has always been at the forefront of movements to defend human rights. The congregation sent participants to the Selma march in 1965. It also sent representatives to protests against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Its commitment to gay rights is an extension of its longstanding commitment to protect and defend human rights in many areas.

My friends tell me that the decision to ordain a gay deacon took place without rancor and with very little opposition in the congregation. However, following the vote, a number of well-heeled families informed the church (or so I am told) that they are withdrawing their membership and going to a more “biblically-correct” church.

This is, unfortunately, an all-too-common story. The primary reason many churches do not do what they know is right in the case of gay brothers and sisters has to do with money: fear of financial reprisal, if they put their words into action, in the case of gay brothers and sisters, holds many of our churches captive. It will be interesting to see how right-wing groups twist the screws, as they apply their financial blackmail to the Church of Scotland now—and whether they are successful in holding the church hostage to well-heeled interest groups that oppose gay rights.

Dirty business . . . .

And speaking of debates within the Presbyterian church about gay persons and gay rights, I should note the Clergy Voices Survey of Public Religion Research. This survey was conducted last year, and its results were recently released.

The survey polled clergy from seven mainline Protestant denominations in the U.S.—the United Church of Christ, Episcopal Church USA, United Methodist Church, American Baptist Church, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian Church USA, and Evangelical Lutheran Church. The survey finds strong support among mainline clergy for laws prohibiting discrimination against gay and lesbian citizens. Two-thirds of mainline clergy support hate crimes legislation and workplace protections for gay and lesbian persons. A majority supports adoption rights.

However, on the issue of same-sex marriage, the survey notes some stark differences among mainline denominations. While 67% of UCC clergy and 49% of Episcopal clergy support gay marriage, only 25% of United Methodist clergy and 20% of American Baptist clergy do so.

I find the response of United Methodist and American Baptist clergy to questions about whether the churches should refuse to work actively to make homosexuality acceptable particularly disappointing. While 51% of all mainline ministers agree that the church should not work to thwart society’s acceptance of gay persons (this includes 81% of UCC clergy, 77% of Episcopal clergy, and 61% of ELCA clergy), among United Methodist and American Baptist ministers, fewer than 4-in-10 agree.

And finally, I want to mention a persuasive article asks about what seems to be going wrong with the Obama administration, when it comes to issues of civil liberties. Bromwich focuses in particular on the president’s national security speech on 21 May, which simultaneously repudiates Bush-Cheney policies while appearing to accept some of that administration’s infringement on constitutional rights in times of perceived danger to the American public.

A provocative quotation:

Let us say it: something is seriously wrong in this administration -- though we are not yet in a position to judge the cause. We do not know who the lawyers are that gave Barack Obama advice that goes against a long career of ostensible commitments. And it is too early yet to say at what point a new president, confused by the depth of his burdens and uncertain how much even now he believes of what he used to say, becomes instead a man we are compelled to see as lacking in convictions. It cannot be a virtue that he sheds the Constitution with a gentler demeanor than George W. Bush. . . .

A misjudged statesmanship has allowed Obama to think himself magnanimous when he declines to expose the wrongs he has come to know. The way to right a wrong is not to install a somewhat reformed version of the wrong. People, by that means, may be spared embarrassment, but their instinct for truth will be corrupted. It is a false prudence that supposes justice can come from a compromise between a lawful and a lawless regime. On the contrary, the less you tell of the truth, the more prone your listeners will be to commit the next barbarous act that is proposed to them under the cover of a national emergency or a necessary war.

On the whole—and sadly—I agree. I agree, in particular, with Bromwich’s insistence that they way to right a wrong is “not to install a somewhat reformed version of the wrong,” and that “the less you tell of the truth, the more prone your listeners will be to commit the next barbarous act that is proposed to them under the cover of a national emergency or a necessary war.” And this is why a href="http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-truth-commissions-parallels-between.html">I support the call for a national truth commission