The Health Care Debacle and The Possibility of Hope: Fragments from One Spiritual Diary

Yesterday was a remarkable day. Quietly remarkable, in a way that wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone living outside my circle of experience.

I’ve felt lately the pull of a spiritual tide that I can’t quite identify. It’s an impulse—a leading might be a more accurate and traditional description—to create some space for what’s really important to come inside and live there. I have a strong tendency to fill every minute with busywork, a workaholic tendency that militates against the spiritual life.

Which requires a certain amount of emptiness. Because we can’t be filled with spirit unless we have some empty space inside for spirit to fill.

So, without being very intentional about it, I find myself slowing down lately, leaving some empty spaces in the day, letting mind and heart rest a bit. That’s not easy for me to do, because my mind whirs along all the time, jotting notes of articles to read or write, reminding me of birthday cards to send, the mint bed to check in these days of hot weather with no rain, household chores unfinished and supper menus to plan.

One reason, I feel sure, that this tide is running through my soul these days is that, due to the kindness of a number of friends, I have recently had, for the first time in several years, a number of nibbles for at least part-time work to carry us through a time of straitened circumstances to which I've alluded on this blog before. But the very opening to new possibilities provokes in me a need to listen more deeply—in part, because I'm intently aware that in places like Arkansas, which is one large overgrown neighborhood, those who wish to torpedo hopeful new possibilities for someone they regard as beyond the pale can do so very easily, with a phone call here and an insinuation there. And we who are openly and unapologetically gay do continue to be beyond the pale in places like Arkansas, as much in self-professed liberal circles as in reactionary ones.

Yesterday, I woke thinking that I’d simply use the day as a rare retreat day—listening, reading, waiting. And I did that, much of the day, without much systematic attention to doing “spiritual” things, all the while “hearing” a kind of refrain inside: Throw out what’s weighing you down; open space for the unpredictable new.

Nothing much happened as I listened to that refrain. And yet, as the day ended, I realized that something of importance had happened. And that it constituted a quiet lesson to me about the rhythm of emptying-receiving, of giving and being given to, that is at the heart of spiritual life.

First the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and a neighbor from across the street was standing there, holding in her hands a basket of vegetables. She had been to the farmers’ market on the weekend and wanted to share her finds with me—summer squash, cucumbers, new potatoes, and tomatoes.

I had cooked all the potatoes in the house on the weekend, and needed the new potatoes for a dish of goulash I had made for our friend Mary on Sunday as part of my ongoing soup-of-the-week birthday gift to her this year. And I enjoyed the opportunity to visit with a neighbor whom I ought to think about more often, since she has suffered a number of major losses in her family in the past several years.

As I washed the vegetables and put them away, cubing the potatoes for my goulash, the phone rang. It was my aunt, calling to tell me she had baked cranberry-nut bread on the weekend and wanted to bring Steve and me some of it. She takes the daily paper and we don’t, and I had intended to call and ask her for Sunday’s paper, since there was an article I needed to read in it. So her visit brought two gifts at once—the nut bread and the paper I needed to read.

A second surprise gift and a second surprise visit with someone whom Steve and I constantly challenge ourselves to keep in mind and heart, my feisty, independent aunt, who resists depending on anyone but who, like all of us, increasingly needs small favors and assistance as she ages.

Then the mail arrived, and in it was a letter from a friend. With a check in an astonishing amount made out to me. The letter tells me my blogging makes a difference. I suppose the check is a statement of support for the blog.

There’s not a chance I would accept this gift, though I am deeply touched by it—and that’s an even better gift than the check itself. This is a friend who has been kind beyond all measure to Steve and me in the past. When we were forced to leave North Carolina after losing our jobs at the wretched right-wing Catholic school there that effectively ended our careers as theologians, he showed up on our doorstep the night before we moved, a check in hand—in the same amount that he sent yesterday.

On that occasion, we accepted the gift, since moving was stretching us beyond the limit, and those were the years when we had the added responsibility of taking care of my mother, with additional expenses I didn’t track in our budget, because who tracks the flow of money to and from family members at times in which caregiving is taking place?

We took the money on that occasion, that is, with the understanding that when we were able, we’d repay the gift in some way. And we were very happy a few years ago when, after our lives were turned upside down yet again by another faith-based university that also regards gay people as subhuman, we could bring our friend the furniture we’d bought to furnish a new house when we accepted an invitation to come to that Methodist institution, only to have the promises our friend made to lure us there broken within a year.

He had just moved into a new townhouse and had little furniture to fill the rooms. He gives. Constantly. He is a former Methodist who takes seriously John Wesley’s injunction to do all the good we can in all the ways and places we can for as long as we can, though he’d never dream of setting foot inside a Methodist church today, given what his childhood church is doing to gay people while claiming to follow Wesley’s example.

Because he gives without counting the cost, our friend has not set aside many things for himself. It did our hearts good—tremendous good—to be able to bring a truckload of new furniture, dishes, pots and pans, garden things, to him, to help him clean and set up the new place.

And now he is trying to give again, far more lavishly than he should be giving, and I can’t accept such a lavish gift, knowing his situation. But I am moved powerfully by this kindness, and by the vote of confidence in my blog.

And by that third confirmation, in a day of gifts, that life is, as I seem to be intuiting lately, all about giving and receiving, opening spaces inside us for spiritual energy—for love—to fill. This is a message I need to hear in these dark days in which people openly carry assault weapons to political rallies at which the president is appearing. We are in a bad place, as a nation. And things are going to get worse. I feel it in my bones.

When Bob Herbert notes the intent anxiety the health care debacle is causing American citizens, I know he’s right. Because I feel that anxiety in my own body and soul. It weighs me down these days, like some heavy stone appended to my heart.

I can’t think of a time in the recent past when I have felt less hopeful about the future of my country than I do now. When Mr. Obama was elected, an Irish friend of mine who is exceptionally wise—he has more than 90 years of living, studying, teaching, and gardening behind him to fund his wisdom—wrote to say that he and many other Irish people were delighted at what the new president symbolized. To my friend, Obama stands for the hope that the United States will one day awaken from the foolish adolescent dreams that sustained the Reagan and Bush presidencies, and damaged the whole world while Mr. Bush was in power.

But my friend cautioned me: don’t hope for too much. What Mr. Obama can change will be only what the real rulers of the U.S. (and of the world) permit him to change. What he can change will be only what the Wall Street executives, the bankers, the heads of major corporations, the insurance executives allow him to change. Nothing more.

I think about that letter a lot these days. Because it turns out that my Irish friend was right. And, as a result, I feel rather hopeless about the possibility of substantive, meaningful change in the U.S. The reins of power are not in the hands of the people who elected Mr. Obama and gave a Democratic majority to Congress. They are not in the hands of the 72% of Americans who want a public option in health care. They are in the hands of the men my Irish friend’s letter names as our real rulers. Firmly in those hands.

I continue to agree with thinkers including Paul Krugman who argue that the president’s lack of leadership is a serious obstacle to progressive change at this troubled point in our nation’s history. Krugman continues to lament Mr. Obama’s lack of passion for the moral imperatives he articulated so courageously and clearly during his campaign. And I share the lament.

But I’m also aware that the president is up against some serious obstacles (though his temerity about leading makes those obstacles more serious): he’s up against the treachery of members of his own party who belong lock, stock, and barrel to big business and the religious right; he has to face racism so endemic and toxic in this nation that we the people willingly permit gun-toting hooligans to dog his steps, when even a peep of protest at gatherings held by Mr. Bush was immediately and ruthlessly suppressed. He has also surrounded himself with soulless pragmatists who care more about playing cynical beltway political games that are all about winning, than they care about the mandate for progressive change this president (and Congress) was given in the last election.

And he’s up against Republicans that mumble about morality and scream about religion while belying everything the major religions stand for at their core, in their most cherished convictions. Above all, he’s up against powerful economic interests that simply will not relent, will not relinquish the control they have gained in several decades of neoconservative dominance that were, in the final analysis, all about consolidating that control.

And it may simply be too late to change things, when the mechanisms of that control are now so firmly in place and so omnipresent, especially in the mainstream media. And not just in the United States, but around the globe.

9/11: Do Good, Avoid Harm--In Memoriam

My memories of September 11, 2001, will forever be intertwined with the death of my mother on September 15 the same week. September 11 was Tuesday. The 15th was Saturday.

And I certainly mean no disrespect to the thousands who died on the 11th, and their families, by remembering the week as I do. It’s just that when a huge tragedy intersects with a personal loss, the two become part of a single memory in one’s heart.

About the 11th, I have—as almost everyone who recalls that day will have—sharp memories. The clear blue skies as we drove to work, when the first plane was already careening into the first building, though we knew nothing of that at the time.

The faculty who came to my office (I was academic dean at Philander Smith College in Little Rock at the time), frightened, uncertain what to do, when the news broke. To my shame, I actually thought they were joking when they told me the twin towers had been hit by a plane and that the Pentagon was on fire.

The sudden recognition that this was no joke, and my own fright: why are they coming to me, when I have no more clue than they do about what to do? The prayer assembly that ensued, which made the drama so much worse for some of us unused to such piety, since some students wailed, shouted, spoke in tongues, fell out with religious emotion.

And the week of endless arrangements to try to assist students whose lives had been directly touched by the tragedy, who had family involved, who knew someone in the towers, who were traumatized (as I was, as we all were) simply by the images on the t.v. screen, the planes crashing into the buildings, people jumping out of windows, women with purses streaming along, the collapse of the towers. I went to bed night after night as though plugged into an electric charger, unable to exorcise those pictures from my head, unable to sleep, rigid with shock.

The president of Philander Smith at the time, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, was a good Methodist who rose to this occasion admirably by taking to heart John Wesley’s dictum that we must live in such a way that we do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, as long as ever we can. She mandated that my office set up counseling-support groups for students comprised of faculty and staff with experience in this area.

I spent much of the week coordinating those arrangements and participating in a group. Many students were, indeed, traumatized, and it was good that the president anticipated their needs—a demonstration of what being a faith-based community should be all about in practice and not merely in proclamation.

At this time, my mother was in a care facility suffering from advanced dementia. She had not known me for several years. Her oldest sister, a maiden aunt I loved dearly, who exemplified selfless love within our family, was also in a nursing home, severely impaired physically by a series of strokes, though mentally sharp.

I spent much of each week when I wasn’t working going from nursing home to nursing home, checking on my mother and aunt, seeing to their comfort and needs. I was, as we say in the South, frazzled. My work has always received full attention, such that I take it home, work long into the night and before office hours in the morning, as well as on weekends and holidays. Not a virtue but a vice, since life is more than work.

But my parents taught me a strong work ethic, and I have worked always in church-based colleges with a strong work ethic, where many folks are also adroit at playing the I-work-harder-than-you game. I noticed this game early on in each church-based school at which I have worked: some folks would show up early in the day and again as office hours ended, to spend time in their offices after hours, to make it appear that they were working harder than those who are continuously in their office from the time the workday begins until it ends.

I knew the game. I knew that the game players kept tabs on those of us who left when the workday ended, and reported this, as though it were an indicator we were sloughing off. I believed that anyone with sense and integrity who received such a report would see how false it was, and the malice motivating it. I protected myself against such games the best way I knew how, by working and not pretending to work, trusting that my record and output would demonstrate my hard work in an environment of faith-based game-playing.

By Friday of the week of September 11, I was exhausted—emotionally, physically, mentally. Since we expected my aunt to die soon, my mother’s youngest sister, Steve, and I had attended a seminar on the 11th designed to help family members make the transition of a loved one to hospice care.

So when the nurse from my mother’s gerontologist’s office called on Friday evening to say that my mother had a slight fever, I did not go to the nursing home to check on her. I asked the nurse if the fever were serious. She said it wasn’t: it was slight. She was calling because they had a rule that they must call whenever a patient was running fever.

With the seminar on hospice in my mind, I asked the nurse if she thought we were nearing a point at which my mother needed hospice care. “Absolutely not,” the nurse said. “She’s strong and stable.”

I went to bed somewhat worried, but with the thought in mind that I would see my mother tomorrow. She did not know when I came or went, in any case. She had no idea who I was.

Early the next morning, I had a call from the nursing home staff member who took most loving care of my mother, a deep-souled, compassionate African-American woman named Stephanie Smith. “Come immediately,” she said.

I asked no questions. Steve and I threw on our clothes and went. During the night, my mother had lapsed into a semi-comatose state. Stephanie had not been scheduled to work that day. Something had nudged her to come to work. It was she who found my mother nearing death.

I had a precious hour or so—I really don’t recall the length of time; time becomes meaningless under these circumstances—with Steve and my mother’s youngest sister to stand beside my mother’s bed as she died. To hold her hand and stroke her forehead. To pray with her and talk to her.

Do all good, by all means, in all ways, in all places, at all times, to all people: Wesley’s saying, with its final reminder that our time for doing good is always limited by the time we have left, unfailingly puts me in mind of something that happened in the first several years I began teaching, at Xavier University in New Orleans.

While I was teaching at Xavier and chairing its theology department, a chaplain, Brother Jim, died suddenly. He had had a stroke in the night, was found beside his bed.

I identified with Jim. Like me, he tended to gain weight. Like me, he went on binge diets and lost significant amounts of weight, only to gain the weight back. Both of us had what my family calls the “red Irish face”—complexions that never allow us to hide embarrassment or stress, since we are, as my father’s sister often said, “flushers.” People even sometimes mistook me for Jim, addressing me as Brother Jim.

Jim’s sudden death hit home. It was one of those reminders that come all too frequently in our lives, of how sudden the going home can be. The moral lesson of this death was underscored for me—and remains vivid in my mind more than twenty years later—because of something a colleague in the theology department, Sr. Mary Ann Stachow, said when Jim was found dead.

“Do good. Avoid harm,” Mary Ann said, quoting Thomas Aquinas and his ultimate formula for how we are to live our moral lives. Do good. Avoid hurting others—anyone. Do good all the time, everywhere, in every way possible, to everyone: do good and avoid harm.

Because life is limited: do good as long as ever you can, since our time for doing good (and avoiding harm) will one day end. It is a facile truism to say that those whose loved ones head off to work on any given day, never to return, will inevitably ask themselves what more might have been said and done—what breaches might have been mended—had one only known when the end would come.

I certainly ask myself that regarding my mother’s death. What if I had put aside my own tiredness on Friday night and gone to the nursing home then, when the call about her fever came? Though she would not have known me or have known that I was there, some part of me wants to think it might have made a difference to her, on the night she began her passage from life to death, for me to be there.

But I didn’t go. And she did die. And I must now live with the thought that perhaps I could have done more. And with the hope that, if another such occasion arises in my life, I will respond more readily than I did that night.

Do good. Avoid harm. Life ends. If there are those whose rights we have trampled on; if there are those to whom and about whom we have lied; if there are those whose lives we’ve disrupted out of malice or jealousy or prejudice: there is time, while we are still living, to set things right.

There is time to ask forgiveness. There is time to mend broken bonds. There is time to accord the justice we have denied. There is time to realize that when we practice to deceive, we weave webs that eventually ensnare us. There is time to recognize that in doing violence to others in the manifold ways in which human beings can assault others, we set in motion spirals of violence that eventually bring the violence back to our own doorsteps.

There is time to recover our mere humanity by acting like a human being again.

It is never too late. Except, of course, when the clock ticks down.

That is, after all, what doing good and avoiding harm means. And I say this as a lesson to myself, hoping that the words I am writing today will write themselves on my heart.

All That You Profess at the Lord's Table

In a world where there is so much to be done, where do we focus our energies?

I’ve always been drawn to religious expressions that stress our obligation (and invitation) to love where we are. The far-away needs beckon. That’s undeniable. And we’d dehumanize ourselves if we turned our backs on them and became willfully blind to them.

But the ones on which we can have the most effect are right here, in our own back yards, on our streets, in the cities in which we live. And it seems futile (to me, at least) to say that we can love those at a distance while shunning those beside us—those who kneel with us at the Lord’s table on Sunday.

I think I’m inclined to this spirituality of loving here and now, in small ways in our small lives, for a variety of reasons. Long ago, I read and re-read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, and was captivated by his piety of loving the difficult neighbor within our own household—the querulous voice demanding toast a shade darker each morning.

There’s something via media in that piety, something that eschews the Baroque excess of mystical flames and lambent ecstasy in which one dissolves into the divine. There’s a hard-headed earthiness about via media piety which insists on our finding the divine in the most mundane aspects of our daily lives.

At its best, this piety elevates everything to the sacramental level—or, rather, it recognizes the sacramentality of everything in our daily existence. Breaking bread at our supper tables is not isolated from breaking bread at the table of the Lord. All bread is the bread of the Lord. At our family tables, we celebrate communion just as sacramentally as we do in church.

Indeed, if we fail to celebrate communion at home—to live in unity with those around us, to mend broken fences in our relationships—we make a mockery of the communion we celebrate in the sacral space of church. In a famous sermon on Communion, John Wesley says,

For all that you profess at the Lord's table, you must both profess and keep, or you cannot be saved. For you profess nothing there but this,-- that you will diligently keep his commandments. And cannot you keep up to this profession? Then you cannot enter into life.

This is why—this sacramental perspective linking the everyday to the sacred action, which forms my own piety in deep ways—I find those experiences of sharing the bread of the Lord with fellow Christians who then refuse to acknowledge any connectedness to me as a human being so exceedingly painful. These experiences drive me from church.

How can one believe in the sacrament at all, and belie what communion means every day except Sunday? I don’t get it. It is my very belief in the sacredness of partaking of the Lord's bread that makes it impossible, now, for me to kneel with others who profess the same belief, but whose behavior towards me as a gay Christian seems to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator ethic, an ethic of because I can: I exclude and demean you, and continue to kneel at the Lord's table, because I can. No law of church or society forbids me such savagery.

I’m sure that in my own way, I am among those who have profaned the Lord’s table in this way, kneeling with a friend on Sunday, only to stick the knife in his back on Monday. If I did so, though, I’d hope that my heart would burn within me with shame, so that I’d find it impossible to live with myself until I had mended what I had broken. That would be, for me, a precondition to kneeling ever again at the table of the Lord.

I know that I am the querulous voice demanding toast a shade darker each morning. Ask Steve and my family, and you’d no doubt get an earful. Oh wad some gift the giftie gie us . . . .

The homely piety of the everyday that frames the via media’s approach to living the religious life: it requires that our love not only begin at home. It requires that we learn to love ourselves, to bear with our crotchitness, our stunted imaginations and shriveled hearts. No one is harder to live with, in the end, than oneself.

I’m drawn to the piety of the via media as well, because of Julian of Norwich’s homely images of God. If Julian’s mysticism is correct, we do not find God anywhere, if we fail to look for God right in our own homes, in our daily lives, in the lives of those around us.

Love, then, the practical love demanded of us as believers, is not heroic at all—not in the sense that God calls us to leave everything behind, sail the seas, and minister to the needy masses across the globe. And love is utterly heroic—in the sense that God calls us to love those closest to us, on a daily, grinding basis in which we continue to seek divine significance where we are least prone to see it.

Not that some of us aren’t called to mend the wounds of those around the earth from us (and to be open to the possibility that those to whom we feel called to minister may end up ministering to us; those to whom we feel called to bring the gospel may bring the good news to us, from their own religious traditions). But the love that extends outwards—to the ends of the earth—doesn’t mean anything, unless it begins here and now, in our own midst.

There simply is no sermon more persuasive than the life lived. The Christian churches can convince no one that God’s love encompasses every living creature in the world, that God desires the healing of the whole world, as long as the churches themselves do not exemplify the love they proclaim.

And the only way to exemplify this love is to love the Other in our midst, the one we travel the globe to find, only to discover that she is right beside us in the pew, the inexplicable outsider whose face is so similar to our own, but who is so different from us that we feel tempted to shun him for the way in which his difference troubles the placid surface of our lives.

Until we can invite that Other to our own table—and mean it, in that we refrain from all acts of violence against that Other when the sacred meal has given way to the meal of daily bread—all our preaching to the unwashed masses around the world will be mere dryasdust braying that means nothing.

Holy Conferencing as Soul Work: Witness of Johnetta Betsch Cole (#2)

My fourth reason for pointing my discussions of holy conferencing to Johnetta Betsch Cole’s “touch the soul” image has to do with the conflicted way in which African-American women today are addressing issues of homophobia—an issue I intend to address in more detail in a subsequent posting. For now, what I want to note is that in a very real sense, the disparity of viewpoints among African-American women today about this issue mirrors and reflects the disparity of viewpoints in churches of the radical middle that currently experience gridlock as they try to negotiate these issues, a gridlock resulting from their inability to come to any accord on the reality of LGBT brothers and sisters in their lives.

The various ways in which African-American women today are choosing to deal with the reality of LGBT brothers and sisters in our midst illuminate the options facing churches today. They also underscore the importance of developing methods of holy conferencing and sacred conversation that allow people of varying viewpoints to talk, study, and pray together about these issues—without harming those already harmed by social structures.

This principle of not doing harm is, in my view, a guiding principle of conferencing or conversation that wants to call itself holy or sacred. It is a principle rooted in the theology of John Wesley himself. It is also a significant stumbling block for the current practice of holy conferencing in the United Methodist Church.

In the aftermath of the remark at this General Conference that our LGBT brothers and sisters are the spawn of the devil, I have done as much research as possible to try to understand how any conferencing that calls itself holy can permit—can what is permitted is also elicited—such an attack on an already marginalized group of human beings.

Here’s what I find: there is a plethora of ground rules for United Methodist holy conferencing out there. Delegates to General Conference are enjoined to be nice, to think about the effect of their words on others, to listen, to avoid getting heated before responding, and so forth.

These are, of course, admirable norms for any conversation that wants to aim at sacred discernment. They are not, however, enough.

The ground rules that I can discover for United Methodist holy conferencing, as it is currently practiced, lack critical norms to sort clear fiction from clear truth. They lack critical norms that offset the tendency of a cultural group with overweening power in its hands to ride roughshod over other groups. The ground rules for holy conferencing, as it is currently practiced in the United Methodist Church, are not capable of creating a safe space in which LGBT persons can reveal themselves, their real, human lives, their struggles within the church, without fear of stigmatization and reprisal.

The culture at large has made it unthinkable to identify people of color or women as spawn of the devil. Because cultural discourse rules now widely recognize this kind of language as a vicious unmerited attack on groups of human beings who struggle with prejudice (that is, to be precise, as hate speech), church gatherings for holy conferencing do not legitimate—they do not permit or elicit—such language.

Anyone using this kind of discourse about women or people of color in the context of holy conferencing would quickly be ruled out of order. More precisely, this kind of language would not even be brought to the floor in holy conferencing at present, because of cultural developments that make it impossible to utter in church contexts.

It is, however, still possible to speak of LGBT human beings as the spawn of the devil, because society itself still legitimates a discourse of contempt for and hostility to LGBT persons: terms like “pansy” can still be bandied about with impunity even by prominent political leaders in our culture, because the culture itself legitimates the use of these terms, and churches do not raise their voices in protest. With regard to what may be said about (and therefore done to) LGBT human beings, the morality of “because we can” still prevails.

And in a church context, it is still possible (because the attitudes and discourse of churches incorporate unreflective cultural bias, unless there are critical norms to expose and eradicate such bias) not only to imagine the possibility of hearing LGBT persons called the spawn of the devil in holy conferencing. It is also possible, in the church context, to see gay and lesbian persons who call on the churches to make such hate speech unthinkable in the context of holy conferencing reproached for being “angry,” “bitter,” or “hurtful,” when they combat discourse that would not be permitted by the churches at all, if its object were women or people of color!

In the aftermath of the most recent General Conference, I have read several online statements from LGBT United Methodists apologizing for expressing dismay, hurt, or anger at how these brothers and sisters were treated at General Conference—as if they are the source of the problem the United Methodist Church now faces in its holy conferencing. As if they elicit the scornful discourse—the hate speech—that is permitted and elicited by this "holy" conferencing . . . I have not noticed similar apologies or commitments to refrain from being hurtful on the part of the large number of delegates who held the line at the recent General Conference.

The right wing of the American political landscape, including its church representative the religious right, has been very adroit about setting the terms for conversation, including holy conversation, regarding our LGBT brothers and sisters. When it is an African or a Latin American making the charge that a gay or lesbian brother or sister is the spawn of the devil, the right wing immediately cries foul if anyone seeks to rule such language off-limits.

Flabby and nebulous love-everyone language—language that lacks critical tools to establish boundaries for discerning the truth—about holy conferencing provides a wide door through which the religious right is perfectly willing to ride in order to disrupt holy conferencing and to gridlock the discernment process (and the future) of the churches it targets. Though most mainstream churches have long since recognized that defending cultural diversity does not mean accepting every attitude or norm in any culture anywhere in the world, the religious right (and its allies in the media) are adroit about suggesting that attempts to challenge homophobia in cultures of the global South represent the imposition of elitist cultural norms of the global North on other cultures.

Though the religious right is deeply committed to keeping women in a position of subordination to males in all cultures, and though the religious right came to power on the coattails of Nixon’s Southern strategy and Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton campaign, no one charging Christians of the North with elitism when they call on Christians of the South to critique homophobia would defend female circumcision or any other grotesque expression of misogyny in a culture of the global South.

An important theological starting point for effective holy conferencing is the critical recognition that the gospel critiques all cultures—those of the North and the South equally. From a gospel standpoint, no culture anywhere in the world at any point in history fully embodies the ideals of the kingdom of God. No political party or platform absolutely encapsulates the vision of the kingdom of God. The gospel critiques all cultures and all ecclesial expressions of faith. From a theological standpoint, Africans (or Latin Americans or Asians) are subject to the same critical expectations of the gospel vis-à-vis cultural transformation as are North Americans or Europeans. The gospel transforms all cultures.

What I want to propose here is that the religious right has tamed—and ultimately, gridlocked—the sacred conversation of churches it has targeted by setting false parameters for that conversation. The ultimate agenda of the religious right in the churches it has targeted is gridlock, pure and simple—the kind of gridlock with which the most recent UMC General Conference ended.

As the religious right’s influence wanes, its attempt to gridlock the holy conferencing of churches will grow ever more feverish. Now that the religious right can no longer control the conversation as effectively as it has in the past, it will seek instead to bring the conversation to a halt. By setting a spurious boundary for the conversation that comprises holy conferencing, and by assuring that all attempts to name that boundary as false are attacked as unloving, the religious right hopes to use gridlock tactics to keep the status quo in place within churches that it targets, but can no longer control.

Gridlock is an unenviable place for a church to find itself in. Churches are in danger when they arrive at the point where they have nothing left to say to the world—nothing viable, nothing life-giving, nothing that reaches into the soul of culture and lifts out salvific strands that represent the presence of God there. The church should never arrive at the point where its only word to culture is no, any more than where its only word to the world is yes.

In conclusion, the gridlocking with which the latest UMC General Assembly ended derives, in part, from the lack of stringent “ground rules” for effective discourse holy conferencing. As currently practiced by the United Methodist Church, the Wesleyan tradition of holy conferencing is long on mercy but short on justice. It is long on dialogue but short on resolution. It is long on love and niceness, but short on determining the truth and insisting that truth be spoken in love in holy conferencing.

One might well ask if the ground rules for discourse in the current practice of Wesleyan holy conferencing are long on image but short on substance. These are claims I hope to flesh out in subsequent postings.

Holy Conferencing as Soul Work: Witness of Johnetta Betsch Cole

I’ve taken my title for this series on the United Methodist practice of holy conferencing from a statement by Johnetta Betsch Cole. Dr. Cole is president of Bennett College, a United Methodist college in Greensboro, NC.

Johnetta Betsch Cole is a supporter of the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program. This program, which assists historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in dealing with LGBT issues, was founded in 2002 following a series of attacks on gay and lesbian students at several HBCUs that elicited concern about the apparent rise of anti-gay violence on HBCU campuses.

The HRC program helps HBCUs deal forthrightly with the plain social reality—the undeniable fact—that all HBCU campuses have LGBT students, professors, employees, and administrators. The program helps create safe spaces in HBCUs in which students, faculty, staff, and administrators can feel comfortable about revealing their identity and discuss the challenges they face on HBCU campuses.

In an address to students gathered from around the nation at an HRC HBCU Program seminar to study ways to head off homophobic violence on HBCU campuses, Johnetta Betsch Cole told students, “You’re now preparing to take on the responsibility to help other students touch their soul – and to help institutions touch their soul” (www.hrc.org/news/5087.htm).

For a variety of reasons, I want to focus my critical reflections on Wesleyan holy conferencing on Johnetta Betsch Cole’s “touch the soul” image. In the first place, this image arises out of the experience of a group subject to double marginalization by power structures around the world: it arises out of the experience of an African-American woman. This is a group from whom we might expect powerful insight into the mechanisms of marginalization and ways to address those mechanisms effectively.

In the second place, Johnetta Betsch Cole heads a United Methodist institution of higher learning. Unlike some United Methodist institutions of higher learning (including some other United Methodist HBCUs), Bennett College has chosen to deal head-on with homophobia as a problem internal to all college/university campuses, including HBCU campuses, as well as a problem in society at large that demands the attention of church-affiliated colleges/universities which seek to train students to be agents of transformative social change.

Almost all HBCUs were founded by and are currently affiliated with churches. As do other church-affiliated colleges and universities, these institutions struggle to deal with the internal politics and strictures of the churches with which they are affiliated. These institutions typically have a high percentage of ministers and members of the sponsoring church on their governing boards. Those ministers and church members have a critical role to play in enabling or hindering attempts of the institution to deal with gay issues.

As with many other church-affiliated institutions of higher learning, HBCUs have often found it difficult to be open about the presence of LGBT persons in their campus communities. Some HBCUs—along with many non-HBCU church-affiliated schools—have chosen to deal with this social reality by not dealing with it at all, by pretending that no one on their campus is LGBT, even as it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see that there are many closeted LGBT students, faculty, staff, and administrators. On these campuses, it can sometimes even be dangerous for members of the campus community, including faculty, staff, and administrators, to be open about their sexual orientation.

These campuses are dominated by a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” mentality that allows prejudice to grow, and that can, at worst, result in acts of violence ranging from the “hard” violence of physical assault to manifold acts of “soft” violence including verbal assault, exclusion of gay students and employees from rights and privileges including freedom from unjust termination or the ability to have partner benefits, or subtle forms of persecution and discrimination in how a supervisor treats an LGBT employee (or a faculty member an LGBT student).

Such “soft” violence towards LGBT brothers and sisters on a college campus can create an environment so toxic that it erodes the psyche and soul of those brothers and sisters, who are provided no forum in which even to speak of the reality of the prejudice they face, let alone challenge it. Any attempt on their part to identify and challenge the prejudice is quickly met with ugly blame-the-victim tactics of managerial triangulation that name the LGBT person himself or herself as the source of the problem: he/she is too “sensitive,” is paranoid, is a professional trouble maker, is “angry,” is given to temper tantrums and pouting, wears his/her feelings on the sleeve, is corrupt, is a potential sexual predator, is given to lying (since “those people” always lie), is vicious and resentful: you name it.

He or she is, in short, “the spawn of the devil.” And nothing the LGBT brother or sister does will ever permit her or him to escape that tag, since this is the social space accorded by such institutions to their LGBT brothers and sisters, and the price of remaining in the community is to occupy that constricted space or to face expulsion.

At their worst, some church-affiliated HBCUs (including some United Methodist ones) invite overtly anti-gay speakers and ministers to address their college or university community. This pattern continues, sadly, at some United Methodist HBCUs where I continue to have contacts, even in the aftermath of the recent condemnation of homophobia by the latest General Conference. Despite the UMC Social Principles' insistence that anti-gay discrimination is insupportable, some of these United Methodise HBCUs still lack official policy statements prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

My third reason for highlighting Cole’s “touch the soul” image as a fruitful prism through which to examine the Wesleyan practice of holy conferencing is that it recognizes that the work that needs to be done in institutions—above all, in church-sponsored ones—to confront and eradicate homophobic violence of all sorts is work at the level of the soul. Combating homophobia is soul work.

Creating a safe public space in which to discuss the complex, emotion-laden issue of homophobia—which is to say, the presence in our midst of LGBT brothers and sisters with complex real lives, hearts, minds, and souls—is soul work. It demands courage, commitment, intellectual rigor, honesty, compassion, and a commitment to change when change is incumbent on us.

Not facing problems that require soul work is certainly easier. But not facing problems that require soul work is neither an ethically defensible option, nor one permitted to any church (or church-affiliated institution) that professes to deplore homophobic discrimination and violence.

Unsolicited Theological Reflections about the UMC and IRD

Note that this is part of a double posting following one I just made. That posting summarizes my recent research on the IRD and the United Methodist Church.

Unsolicited Suggestions about the UMC and the IRD in Future

No one has asked me for these. I offer these unsolicited theological reflections as 1) someone with many autobiographical connections to Methodism (have I mentioned, in addition to all I’ve said previously, that my father graduated from a Methodist college?); 2) as a theologian; 3) as someone sympathetic and indebted to Wesleyanism; and 4) as someone who has had an insider’s chance to observe (and, in some cases, be deleteriously affected by) how business is done in United Methodist institutions.

In my view, contemporary Methodism has both weaknesses and strengths that have made it susceptible to IRD infiltration, and also capable—in theory, at least—of combating those influences, if it chooses to do so. Choosing to do so will require a willingness of Methodist leaders to welcome critical reflections on the part of those working within United Methodist institutions--including outsiders to Methodism--who have gained a feel for what is happening in the Methodist church at a concrete level, from their work in Methodist institutions.

The strengths/weaknesses on which I want to focus are as follows:

▪ The Methodist tradition of seeking the “radical middle”;

▪Democratic polity, with the tradition of holy conferencing;

▪ A strong spirituality and tradition of practical social witness, coupled with a less-strong theological tradition, particularly in the area of ecclesiology.

Methodism is to be admired for its tradition of the radical middle. At best, this tradition discounts the wisdom and voice of no one. At best, it brings everyone to the table before decisions affecting the whole communion are made. Ideally, it fosters a discernment process in which all believers seek holy wisdom together, to guide church decision making as new challenges arrive at new points in history. Ideally, the tradition of the radical middle holds disparate groups together to allow the church to be authentically inclusive, authentically catholic—as church should be.

There are, however, some serious downsides to the tradition of the radical middle—as it is currently practiced by many Methodist institutions, at least. I saw and was adversely affected by those downsides in almost a decade of work in Methodist institutions of higher education.

When practiced in isolation from a theologically informed attempt to discern the path of holy wisdom within a Methodist institution, the tradition of the radical middle can easily become mere culture Christianity. When the radical middle is envisaged as some compromise between a bogus “truth” determined by right-wing operatives of the ilk of the IRD, and the Wesleyan tradition’s wisdom about social justice, it all too commonly turns into the path of least resistance—the path of cheap, rather than costly grace. The path of the radical middle can easily become plain conformity to culture.

I have made this argument in previous postings on this blog, citing my experiences in UMC institutions as well as other aspects of my life journey. I won’t try readers’ patience by belaboring those points again. What I would like to note here, though, is that, ironically, many of those now chiding the UMC to avoid becoming a church of culture rather than a countercultural church are, in their appeal to the radical middle, actually reflecting cultural norms.

Those norms make it easy to be a disciple of Jesus. They make us as followers of Christ comfortable. They do not require us to make hard decisions that set us at odds with our own cultural contexts—especially in the areas of gender and sexual orientation, or in the areas of fiscal stewardship and resistance to dirty money, insofar as our institutional purse strings are tied to holding the line on “traditional” teachings about gender and sexual orientation.

As I have said previously, my own thinking about these issues is highly influenced by my experience growing up in the American South during the Civil Rights struggle. This was a period in which I saw almost no white churches departing from the “radical middle” of Southern culture—and that consensus of the radical middle was racist. Instead of leading society at a time in which the church might have exercised prophetic countercultural leadership, the churches all too often merely mirrored social norms, citing scripture to justify their behavior.

I am therefore not conspicuously impressed by the professed repentance of these churches today for either their previous racism or misogyny. I cannot be impressed by this professed repentance when the leaders of these churches now behave towards LGBT members precisely the same way they did previously towards people of color and women.

Repentance means little when it costs nothing, now that cultural norms have made it easy to repent. Countercultural witness requires walking in costly grace in the here and now, within the cultural contexts in which we now live—and paying the price for such witness.

And when this repentance is attended by deceitful attempts on the part of these new defenders of people and color and women to promote token representatives of such groups--carefully tailored token representatives who do not rock the boat--I am even less impressed. This is a dishonest use of pretend-inclusivity and pretend-cultural sensitivity to combat the current outsider group, the LBGT children of God.

The Methodist emphasis on democratic polity and holy conferencing is admirable, an emphasis I would like very much to see adopted within my own Catholic tradition, with its tragically outmoded monarchical structures of leadership. At its best, gathering everyone around the table to discern the Spirit and make decisions together provides secular culture, in which bigger and better tables are always set for the rich and powerful, a powerful countercultural witness.

The tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing can have a very strong downside, however—one of which I have had to become crucially aware in my work for United Methodist institutions. At its worst, rather than being a tool for holy consensus-building, democratic polity and holy conferencing can degenerate into a tool of control, in which those who have power over others abuse that power by suppressing alternative (and possibly prophetic) voices, and by playing one interest group against another with no consideration for competing claims of justice.

Some of the worst leadership I have ever witnessed in my entire life has been in UMC institutions. Those exercising this leadership were not merely terrible leaders. They were leaders who were well-schooled in UMC polity and the tradition of holy conferencing. And they were aided and abetted by Methodist bishops and Methodist ministers as they abused their leadership roles.

In the name of gathering everyone around the table and listening to every voice, some of these leaders practice outrageous, blatant triangulation. They abuse religious language and references to the Methodist way of doing business to pit one member of their team against another, claiming that only by setting one member against another can a true and truly comprehensive perspective be maintained.

I want to emphasize that this technique of triangulating managerialism within the United Methodist institutions in which I have worked is not an aberration of the UMC tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing. Those practicing this blatant triangulation constantly reference the United Methodist tradition of democracy and holy conferencing, and their own training in that tradition (and in leadership) within the structures of the UMC.

In my experience working in United Methodist institutions, I have seen exceedingly ugly things done by leaders under the cover of this religious justification. I have seen leaders constantly dig for dirt on each person reporting to them, such that they could then use this negative data to try to keep team members in their place. When no dirt was to be found on some team members, I have seen leaders couple team members who were seriously trying to do their jobs with integrity to incompetent and unethical watchdog members of their teams. Those watchdogs, about whom the leader had damning information, were used to harass, report on, and try to rein in members seriously seeking to do their jobs with integrity.

I have seen leaders in United Methodist institutions, who claim that their goal in pitting one team member against another is to allow the full picture to be discerned, resort to top-down hierarchical models of leadership when their use of triangulation was challenged. In one institution, after proclaiming to her leadership team that her democratic style of leadership arose out of her experience working in the United Methodist Church, a leader immediately presented a flow chart of institutional authority depicting a triangle, with herself at the top. As she did so, she declared, “We are not a democracy.”

This experience has led me to conclude that leadership in the United Methodist Church actually often exercises top-down control techniques while talking the talk of democracy to cover over the lapses of democratic representation in leadership decisions. Effective leadership in any democratic institution requires who profess democratic ideals to hold these in creative tension with managerial goals.

In the Methodist context, church leaders and leaders of Methodist institutions need to be intentional and clear about how the Wesleyan tradition of democracy and holy conferencing informs their leadership style, even when they are adopting a managerial approach. Otherwise, not only can they betray the Wesleyan tradition in their leadership styles, but they can also end up committing the even worse sin of abusing religious language to justify leadership techniques that are imperious, insensitive, and in some cases, downright cruel and unethical.

Ultimately, the goal of managerial triangulation is always to maintain the status quo, in which those currently in leadership remain in leadership. Triangulating leaders have a vested interest in setting those they lead against each other, insofar as they want to retain their power. When the valuable Methodist tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing is allowed to degenerate into managerial triangulation, and when such triangulation is attended by abuse of religious language, the institution remains stuck. It cannot move forward.

It cannot do so because the triangulation being practiced by its leaders disempowers those within the institution most capable of moving it forward. It disempowers prophetic voices—particularly those who speak from the margins—while lending credence to voices that do not have the best interest of the religious tradition and its institutions at heart, who should lack legitimacy in an institution that practices careful discernment. The triangulating technique of managerial leadership promotes carefully selected and sanitized examples of the disempowered to power, when it can be certain that these token representatives of the disempowered will behave in a way that does not call the status quo into question.

When the status quo is shaped by unequal distribution of power—and it always is—the church belongs unambiguously on the side of those with less power. Democracy-as-triangulation can become a smokescreen for serving the powerful of the world, when it refuses to give serious consideration to questions how power is justly to be distributed. Democracy-as-triangulation can be a smokescreen that legitimates the abuse of power (and enslavement to dirty money) when it treats the voices of mendacious apologists for unjust power as if they are just as compelling and deserving of attention as the voices of those delineating hard-earned critical truth from the margins—truth an institution needs in order to be faithful to its mission and to have a viable future.

These observations bring me to my final point: at its best, the warm-hearted Methodist spirituality derived from Wesley issues in a powerful tradition of practical social witness. At its worst, however, Methodism lacks carefully developed theological tools agreed on by the entire church to analyze and discuss its ecclesiology and whether its institutions mirror that ecclesiology authentically. Methodism at its worst often prescinds from much-needed critical questions about how Methodist institutions practice fidelity to and faithfully enact the Wesleyan tradition.

At its worst, such questions are dismissed in an anti-intellectual way as distractions from the warm-hearted piety that Methodism should really be all about, or as a critical breach with the radical middle. Methodists are strong on promoting justice. They are weak at talking about what justice actually is.

Methodists are good at listening to the voices of everyone. What the Methodist tradition often lacks, however, is a theological wisdom tradition to undergird its discernment process, so that the voices of impostors, opportunists, and poseurs can quickly be detected and will not distract the holy assembly from its deliberations.

And this makes Methodism susceptible to groups like the IRD, who know how to exploit these theological lacunae in the Methodist tradition very adroitly . . . .

Unfortunately--and more's the pity--some of the key members of the IRD are members of my own religious communion, whom I oppose as vociferously within the Catholic context as I do when they seek to meddle in the internal affairs of the United Methodist Church. For that reason, too, I feel it is important that Catholics concerned that Methodism be permitted to live its tradition authentically speak out against members of our communion who are trying to thwart the practice of authentic Wesleyan discipleship.

The IRD and Its Connection to the UMC: Research Conclusions

So, I can’t yet relinquish the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) and its attempt to control the United Methodist Church’s path in the 21^st century. This subject fascinates me for all kinds of reasons—autobiographical, theological, scholarly.

And so, more ruminations and research . . . . In what follows, I want to offer two sets of reflections on the IRD and its attempted takeover of the future of United Methodism:

1. Some conclusions about IRD and its connection to contemporary Methodism;
2. And some totally unsolicited suggestions, from a theologian sympathetic to but outside the Wesleyan tradition, whose life experience has multiple connections to Methodism, about how the United Methodist Church might better withstand such attacks from political pressure groups in the future.

I’ll offer these in a diptych of postings, so that readers who have the patience to wade through either of them won’t be worn out or forced to read material that doesn’t capture their attention, in case they are interested in one rather than the other topic.

IRD and Its Connection to Contemporary Methodism

As I continue researching the IRD and its attempt to control the conversation within contemporary Methodism, I find that researchers repeatedly confirm a pattern I tracked (also citing research) in my two previous postings. The IRD employs techniques including the following to try to infiltrate worldwide Methodism and eliminate the social witness of the United Methodist Church:

▪ Stealth and behind-the-scenes manipulation;

▪ Attempts to co-opt the progressive social agenda of United Methodism, to represent itself as genuinely concerned about inclusivity and social justice (when it’s not), as a divide-and-conquer way of setting Methodist progressives against those resisting the Social Principles;

▪ Disingenuous profession of support for token representatives of some marginalized groups, coupled with unethical use of money to consolidate the loyalty of those groups (e.g., Christians of the global South, people of color, women), while setting these groups against other marginalized groups (e.g., LGBT people) to produce a schism that the IRD seeds, at the same time that it predicts schism if the UMC becomes truly inclusive of LGBT people;

▪ Illicit use of dirty money to play hard-ball political games within UMC institutions by bullying institutions that try to fulfill the Social Principles with threats of cutting off funding sources influenced by IRD and its donors;

▪ Deliberate dissemination of lies and misinformation to seed and exploit discontent among groups who have or believe that they have marginal status within the UMC—in particular, dissemination of lies and misinformation in well-funded stealth campaigns targeting Methodists of the global South, to engender suspicion of and contempt for LGBT believers and their allies in the global North, as well as resistance to women’s leadership in the church;

▪ Through this well-funded disinformation campaign, an attempt to create a poisonous intra-ecclesial climate in which the truth is systemically distorted, such that plain truth is so consistently pitched against outright lies, that people both within and outside the church are led to believe that the truth is somewhere between the lie and the plain truth;

▪ Adroit dissemination of media soundbites to ill-informed (and sometimes either lazy or corrupt) media sources to aid and abet the creation of a climate of systemic distortion of the truth within the church;

▪ Attempts to poison the traditional Wesleyan method of democratic consensus in decision making and of holy conferencing via such systemic distortion of the truth, in which outright lies set a spurious boundary for conversation, so that the church is kept forever in a situation of stasis between a false alternative and a viable one—and so that the UMC cannot move forward with its mission and ministry in the 21^st century.

The following are some useful sources I’ve just discovered, documenting the points above:

Andrew J. Weaver, et al., “IRD/Good News: How the Right Wing Targets United Methodist Women” (17 Nov. 2005), noted that the IRD has made adroit use of United Methodist church membership mailing lists sent to it over the years (often illicitly) by members of individual churches (see www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=93, citing D. Stanley and M. Tooley, 1999 “Letter to United Methodists,” UMAction).

In 2004, when Republican Party operatives used this technique in the presidential campaign, it was roundly criticized as unethical by 10 leading professors of ethics, including evangelicals such as the Rev. George G. Hunter III of Asbury Theological Seminary and Richard V. Pierard of Gordon College (citing A. Cooperman, “Pastors Issue Directive in Response to Reelection Tactic, Washington Post, 18 August 2004).

IRD claims, in fact, to have the largest mailing list in the UMC, with a declared goal of eventually obtaining a million church member addresses (citing M. Tooley, “UMAction Briefing,” Spring 2005).

An exceptionally useful resource site maintained by a United Methodist minister, Rev. Steven D. Martin, who is Executive Director of Vital Visions Incorporated, at www.ird-info.com, further documents the use of unethical stealth tactics by the IRD to take over local and international structures of the UMC.

Rev. Martin reports that his concerns about the activity of the IRD within local Conferences stems from an incident that occurred at an Annual Conference meeting of his own Conference, the Holston Conference, at which the IRD sought to elect slates of candidates sympathetic to it and its goals to control the Conference. On one occasion a Sunday School class within the Conference presented the Holston Conference with resolutions lifted verbatim from the IRD website—but with no acknowledgement of their source.

Martin also notes that the Coalition for United Methodist Accountability (CUMA), an organization comprised of the IRD, Good News, and the Confessing Movement, has joined to finance legal expenses for five individuals who are seeking to control the General Board on Church and Society’s (GBCS) use of the United Methodist Building Endowment Fund. This follows a vote at the 2004 General Conference that defeated a resolution “to cripple the financing and mission” of GBCS.

According to Martin, the five individuals filing suit have only a tenuous connection to the GBCS, and all were recruited and are being funded by Mark Tooley, Director of the IRD’s UMAction, and/or his law firm in Arlington, Virginia, Gammon and Grange—though several of the litigants have stated that they do not know how their legal action is being financed. One of the litigants, John Patton Meadows, has admitted in a deposition that he had received confidential legal documents belonging to the GBCS prior to or during the 2004 General Conference.

Martin concludes that the IRD functions as a strategy center, not as a renewal group; in Weaver’s view, the “IRD is a secular-funded right-wing political organization unaffiliated with any church.”

Martin’s site contains links to resolutions of two Annual Conferences about the IRD and its activities, both of which appear to have been brought to the 2008 General Conference. One of these resolutions was passed by the 2007 NY Annual Conference.

Based on its assessment of the activities of the IRD within the United Methodist Church, the NY Annual Conference concludes that the IRD agenda is “to effectively eliminate the UMC’s social witness,” and the IRD distorts and is not grounded in authentic Wesleyan theology and its vision of the church.

Based on its observation of the activities of IRD, the NY Annual Conference Resolution judges that IRD uses “hardball tactics” within the UMC to accomplish the following: using controversial issues, including homosexuality, as wedge issues; seeking to drive out persons they do not agree with, including calls for liberals to leave the church; misrepresenting their distorted, inflammatory, sensationalized, and sometimes deceptive commentaries as factual news accounts of issues and events in the Church in a way intended to mislead and manipulate their audience; and using a piece written by Mark Tooley to attack the 2006 session of the New York Annual Conference and characterize it as “more like a MoveOn.org rally than a church convention.”

Condemning “the hardball, deceptive and divisive tactics of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and its UMAction Committee,” the NY Annual Conference resolution calls on “all United Methodists not to support the IRD and to reject the agenda it works to impose on the UMC and the tactics it uses to advance them.” The resolution also asks the “IRD to disband its UMAction committee and cease its efforts to impose its agenda on the UMC.”

In similar fashion, based on its dealings with and observation of the IRD, the Desert Southwest Annual Conference asks the 2008 General Assembly to accept a report prepared for its 2003 Annual Conference, which found that “the agendas of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and its subcommittee UM Action, were inconsistent with the mission, nature, and theology of the United Methodist Church.”

The Desert Southwest Conference also calls on the GBCS to create and distribute study materials on the IRD, its agenda and tactics, for the use of all United Methodist Annual Conferences, as well as the Council of Bishops, the Commission on the Status and Role of Women, the National Council of Churches of Christ, and the World Council of Churches.

The unholy financial alliances of IRD and its affiliates are well-researched by Andrew J. Weaver et al. in an article I cited in a comment on my blog yesterday--the 11 Aug. 2006 "Neocon Catholics Target Mainline Protestants" (see www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=142). Weaver notes that the founders of IRD are “paid political operatives who work ceaselessly to discredit mainline Protestant leaders and their Christian communions” (my emphasis; citing S. Swecker, Hard Ball on Holy Ground, 2005; and Weaver et al., “The Radical Right Assault on Mainline Protestantism and the National Council of Churches of Christ,” Talk to Action, 2005).

Weaver notes that prominent Catholic leaders who have had key leadership roles within IRD—including Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel, Mary Ellen Bork, and Mary Ann Glendon—“confer their prestige and considerable power to encourage right-wing donors to finance IRD" (my emphasis). In his assessment, these neoconservative political leaders are “key links to the patrons of IRD,” who include Richard Mellon Scaife, Howard Ahmanson, and the Bradley, Coors, Smith-Richardson, Randolph, and Olin Foundations (citing (Media Transparency, “The Money Behind Conservative Media: Funders,” 2006).

As Weaver points out, Michael Novak, who is a co-founder of IRD, has been “a well-paid activist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for more than two decades” (my emphasis). Other influential figures at AEI include Lynne Cheney and Newt Gingrich. According to Weaver, between 1985 and 2004, AEI received $42,342,101—largely from right-wing funders. In the same time frame, Novak received $1,527,397 from the Olin and Bradley foundations (citing Media Transparency, “The Money Behind the Media: American Enterprise Institute,” 2006).

According to Weaver, between 1985 and 2004, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where George Weigel is a key player, received $12, 535, 574—largely from the same people who fund IRD (citing Media Transparency, “The Money Behind the Media: Ethics and Public Policy Center,” 2006).

In Weaver’s judgment, “All of these benefactors have a common political aim, which is to neutralize and overturn the social justice tradition of mainline Protestant churches because they are in tension with unfettered capitalism” (citing National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Conservative Foundations Prevail in Shaping Public Policies,” 1997; Swecker, Hard Ball, 2005; and F. Clarkson, “The Battle for the Mainline Churches,”Public Eye Magazine, Spring 2006).

Dirty money, dirty goals, and dirty tactics: Weaver notes that the IRD has used its power, its influence with wealthy right-wing donors, and its media connections, to smear and disseminate rumors about (among others) Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Rev. Jim Wallis; Rabbi Michael Lerner; Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams; Bishop Mark Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, etc.

Weaver’s “IRD/Good News: How the Right Wing Targets United Methodist Women” (cited above) documents the IRD’s dissemination of outright lies about gay people—a tactic that has earned the IRD “the endorsement and encouragement of a terrorist group, the American White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan”(my emphasis; citing “KKK kkk Ku Klux Klan jew Jew kkk KKK Judaism,” Queers on Fire, 2005; F. Clark, “Krusaders for Krist’s Kingdom, Slacktivist Weblog, 2005; and C. Currie, “Ku Klux Klan Joins Republican Party, Aligned with Institute on Religion and Democracy in Protesting Church Conference,” 2005).

Weaver notes as well that the website of the IRD-affiliate Good News/RENEW links to the website of the Un-Official Confessing Movement (which invites disgruntled United Methodists to leave the church and take UMC property with them), on which materials making bogus claims linking Nazism to homosexuality appear. Specifically, the Confessing website cites the Pink Triangle, which falsely claims that the Nazi party was controlled by gays (though Nazism executed thousands of gay people).

These claims are characterized by Stephen Feinstein, Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, as akin to flat-earth science. Feinstein attributes these lies about the connection of Nazism to homosexuality to “a right-wing Christian cult” (citing S. Feinstein, “Letters from Readers,” Star Tribune, Minneapolis, 20 March 2003).

An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker (#3)

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

Having given you my testimony, and, in particular, having sketched the ways in which Methodism informs my religious commitments and value judgments, today I would like to offer a response to your essay of 13 July 2006 entitled “The Church and Homosexuality.”

Thank you for having placed this essay on the website of the Florida UMC Conference at www.flumc2.org/page.asp?PKValue=967, and for having invited responses to it. I understand that the essay arises, in part, out of what occurred at the 2006 Florida statewide UMC conference assembly.

Interestingly enough, that conference ended the very day Dr. Schafer and I arrived in Florida to take positions at a United Methodist college under your pastoral jurisdiction, and on whose board of trustees you serve. Though the fact that we are openly gay and living in a longstanding committed relationship was discussed by your college’s board prior to our coming to this college, and though the board approved our hire, we were not told of the bitter conflict that emerged in the Florida UMC just at the time of our arrival to serve at your college.

If I understand correctly, this conflict centered around a controversy in Virginia, in which an openly gay man asked to join a United Methodist church and was turned away by its pastor. He was told he was not welcome. Interestingly enough, I happen to have a personal connection to this story, in that a cousin of mine is married to a close relative of the person around whom this controversy centered, and I know of the man’s experiences from that context.

From what I learned after it became evident to Dr. Schafer and me that

, your 2006 statewide conference ended with bitter divisions in the Florida UMC church. If I am informed correctly, those divisions were over the question of whether openly gay and lesbian believers can be welcomed by Methodist churches.

Your essay responds to this question by providing an overview and defense of the current position of the UMC that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian faith. At the same time, your essay makes a plausible and thoughtful argument for reasoned, inclusive dialogue about the church’s response to gay and lesbian human beings. Your essay ends with a warning about what might happen if the United Methodist Church revised its current prohibition against the “practice” of homosexuality or the ordination of (openly) gay and lesbian persons or blessing of gay unions. You state,

If The United Methodist Church changes its basic position on homosexuality, then it will be making a move toward modern Western culture, but against a historic and global ecumenical consensus. Some would justify this move as the prophetic action of a church in the vanguard of enlightenment. However, the fact is that such a move would change the way The United Methodist Church would be viewed by the rest of the ecumenical Christian community, which, by a vast majority, adheres to the traditional teaching of Christianity. It is not far-fetched to envision the rest of the Christian community viewing The United Methodist Church as a “culture church” that would have some historic connection to the Christian faith and community, but that had wandered away from the substance of the Christian tradition in order to offer a Christian interpretation of the ideas and values of its culture. One could even imagine a future ecumenical council to which United Methodists might be allowed to send official observers, but in which we would not be allowed to participate with vote because of our status as “culture Christians.”

Finally, what is needed now is an environment in the church for a calm consideration of all of the complex issues in this debate, civil discourse, responsible theological reflection, and above all, prayer for discernment of the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

Your argument regarding the dangers of becoming a “culture church” is provocative. As you may be aware, since you participated in the process by which I was hired at your college, my doctoral dissertation was a study of a social gospel theologian, Shailer Mathews, who was accused by neo-orthodox theologians such as the Niebuhrs of having been a culture-Protestant.

My reading of Mathews’s theology convinces me that this charge is inaccurate. In my view, in Matthews’s work, the social gospel exhibits far more critical acumen about culture than its neo-orthodox critics gave it credit for having. I wrote a dissertation that was published as a book entitled Shailer Mathews’s Lives of Jesus to study Mathews’s social gospel theology. The dissertation concludes that the charge that Mathews was a culture-Protestant is not accurate.

My work on this topic was preceded and informed by a master’s thesis that studied the early roots of Methodism. Given my family’s historic ties to Methodism and the way these informed my own religious upbringing, I wanted to research and understand how Methodism dealt with questions of social justice from its inception among the working classes of the British Isles.

That research flowed naturally into my study of the social gospel. In my Christian journey, the Methodist strand in my family’s background has led to a constant concern to see the churches do justice. I see Jesus as one who always reached beyond barriers in his society that defined some human beings as less human than others, that defined some human beings as more deserving of power and privilege than others. In my reading of the gospels, Jesus constantly transgresses social and religious lines that define one group as the righteous and the other as the unrighteous.

My concern to see the churches challenge social norms permitting some people to be treated as less human than others led me out of my childhood church, the Southern Baptist church of my paternal grandmother, and into the Catholic church when I was a teen. My decision to join the Catholic church had everything to do with the fact that my family’s church was deeply entrenched in the system of segregation. Our church found itself unable to speak a prophetic word against racism during the Civil Rights struggle, because to do so would require costly grace. The Catholic church in my south Arkansas town attracted me because it was the sole “white” church in our town in which black and white Christians were worshiping together in the mid-1960s.

Watching the feeble foot-dragging responses of almost all white churches in Arkansas to the historic Civil Rights movement led me as an adolescent to conclude that churches often take their cue from culture, particularly when there is a price to be paid for speaking courageously against injustice. This experience, coupled with the strands in my family history that pointed to different possibilities in which churches move against and not with currents of injustice in their social context, led me to my calling as a theologian.

This calling has framed my entire approach to academic life. I have brought the concern to do justice, to critique injustice, and to form communities of solidarity resisting injustice to all of my academic work, including my work as an academic dean at one United Methodist college and then as an academic vice-president at another United Methodist college—your Florida college (now a university).

Given this academic, theological, and faith commitment running through my life as a teacher, scholar, and administrator, I read the history of the United Methodist church and its relationship to gay and lesbian human beings quite differently than you do in your 2006 essay. It is, of course, crucial to acknowledge that I read this history differently as well because I am gay, and have paid a price for being gay and honest about my life. I have paid that price particularly in Christian institutions. Since you are a heterosexual male, I would suggest that you may read Methodist history and teachings through a different optic, even if you share my commitment to social justice.

I would like respectfully to ask you to consider what happens when one takes the paragraph I cite above from your essay “The Church and Homosexuality,” and substitutes the word “slavery” for “homosexuality” in the first sentence. The sentence reads, “If The United Methodist Church changes its basic position on homosexuality, then it will be making a move toward modern Western culture, but against a historic and global ecumenical consensus.”

You are aware, are you not, that there was a time in Christian history—and a time not so very long ago, in terms of history—in which the Methodist church and the vast majority of churches taught that slavery is not only compatible with Christian practice and with scripture, but is mandated by scripture? When some Christians began to challenge that deeply entrenched cultural presupposition and the use of the bible to justify cultural norms supporting slavery, most white Christians in the American South—including most Methodists—bitterly resisted the critique of their traditional support of slavery as a distortion of the scripture.

In fact, many white Southern theologians prior to the Civil War charged churches in the North with having succumbed to culture, in challenging the longstanding practice of slavery within Christianity and the use of the bible to legitimate slavery. These theologians saw the churches of the American South as the sole bastions of orthodoxy in a world determined to alter the historic faith.

And they were right, insofar as their argument was based on the fact that slavery had always been taken for granted in Christianity, for some 1800 years, and had been approved by the churches. These theologians and churchmen resisting the historic shift to abolition of slavery were right insofar as they noted that the scriptures had been used throughout Christian history to justify slavery.

The churches of the American South have had a strange penchant, have they not, for defending the “historic faith” even when that faith includes practices that society, acting under impulses of justice, has gradually begun to recognize as unjust? We white Christians of the South defended slavery to the bitter end. When slavery was abolished, we then made a mighty noise about women’s suffrage and women’s rights.

Substitute those terms for “homosexuality” in your paragraph above, and again, I think you will see that the case you are making is precisely the wrong way around: rather than capitulating to culture in its defense of slavery, and then misogyny, and then segregation, and now heterosexist patriarchy, the churches have been captive to culture in defending these insupportable social practices. They have had to revise their support of unjust practices, to whose injustice they have been blind, insofar as prophetic movements within the churches themselves, acting in solidarity with secular movements for justice, have pushed and prodded the churches to reconsider their defense of the indefensible.

I am sorry to have to tell you this, but mainstream American churches already are—to a great extent—“culture churches.” It is captivity to culture that they must combat in ceasing to discriminate against gay and lesbian persons. Our churches often have a lamentable tendency to follow culture in justice-oriented directions only after culture has moved to accord civil rights to disenfranchised groups. Rather than leading the way, our churches all too often echo and support culture—and, in particular, cultural injustice—until necessary, justice-oriented cultural changes force the churches to take a belated look at their unjust practices and presuppositions.

To say that, in according full human status to gay and lesbian persons, the United Methodist Church would be in danger of becoming a “culture church” is to fracture logic, to twist sociological data so that they say precisely they opposite of what they actually say. The sordid reality is, Bishop Whitaker, that in a culture in which prejudice against gay and lesbian persons is still normative (though this is gradually shifting), the church pays no price at all in refusing to defend gay and lesbian persons against injustice. It is the path of cheap grace, rather than costly grace, to continue to discriminate against gay and lesbian persons in the name of the gospel.

Costly grace, the kind of grace that would motivate the churches to stand up and to speak out at all cost, would (and we all know this, do we not?) threaten the pocketbook of mainstream churches. As during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s, when I saw wealthy churchgoers with power in the business community and local government threaten pastors who condemned racism, today, any church speaking out against oppression of gay and lesbian persons is likely to risk loss of donations.

As an example, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, lavishly funded by foundations headed by several extremely wealthy neo-conservative Americans, has specifically targeted the United Methodist Church and several other mainstream churches, to try to prevent those churches from highlighting the social principles in their historic faith statements. It is no secret that the IRD has adroitly used prejudice against gay and lesbian persons—which is to say, it has used gay and lesbian human beings—to drive political wedges into the hearts of mainstream churches, to pit Methodist against Methodist, Presbyterian against Presbyterian, and Episcopalian against Episcopalian.

When these churches and their leaders speak out against unjust, discriminatory treatment of gay and lesbian persons, they pay a high price. They lose funding from wealthy interest groups. They also court highly-funded media attacks sponsored by these groups. You yourself may know this well, since the IRD has frequently reprinted some of your articles and sermons on its websites and other websites that it funds.

Much is at stake here, Bishop Whitaker, and I respectfully ask that you and other United Methodists listen more carefully to the voices of gay and lesbian believers who ask to talk with you about precisely what is at stake. To know the mechanisms of injustice in society at large (and in your own institutions), you must first and foremost ask to hear the voices of those who experience injustice. Only then will your deliberations about issues such as homosexuality be fully informed, and only then will your voice be credible.

Your essay ends with a call for calm consideration, civil discourse, responsible theological reflection, and prayer for discernment regarding the churches and their stance towards gay and lesbian persons. I second this call.

But how is it to happen when you do not even permit openly gay persons to address your assemblies? How can any discourse really be civil, when those being defined by a Christian group are not even brought to the table, but are treated as objects to be talked about while they are given no voice in the discussion?

Does your “responsible theological reflection” in the United Methodist churches include openly gay and lesbian theologians? Are these theologians invited to your General Conferences? If not, how can your words be anything more than rhetoric?

Above all, how can your conversations be inclusive (and thus fully representative of the richness of your tradition and fully open to God’s voice in all the people of God) when your institutions still sometimes make it impossible for openly gay and lesbian persons to have job security, to do productive work, to use their gifts while being forthright about their lives?

It was an experience of harsh exclusion, of punitive behavior that continues to the present.

As you prepare for General Conference, please refamiliarize yourself with what happened to Dr. Schafer and me when we responded to the invitation of the president

We did so at great cost to ourselves, because we believed that we could make a difference. Your president told us that we would be welcome and were needed, and that we would have secure jobs up to our retirement. Though we are in our late fifties and had to make sacrifices to come to your college, we stepped forth in faith and accepted the invitation. We were repaid for our sacrifice with brutally unjust and deeply hurtful treatment that was entirely premised on prejudice.

To my knowledge, neither you nor any other minister on the board of this United Methodist University

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-letter-to-united-methodist-church.html.

Can the United Methodist Church maintain that it is a prophetic church standing for historic Christian values when it participates in and covers over such atrocious injustice? Can the United Methodist Church stand against any injustice in society, when it permits any of its institutions and their leaders to behave this way towards any marginalized group?

Much hinges on the church’s willingness to give careful consideration to the testimony of gay and lesbian believers, even when we must tell painful stories of discrimination against us by church institutions. You live in a state in which violence against gay and lesbian persons has begun, in some areas, to reach epidemic proportions.

Can the United Methodist churches of Florida stand against this violence, can they offer healing and redemption to their communities, if they engage in homophobic discrimination that is intimately related to homophobic violence? I cannot imagine John Wesley encouraging the church to ignore these social needs. Nor can I imagine him standing on the side of discrimination within the institutions of his own church.