Holy Conferencing as Love Building: The Witness of Mary McLeod Bethune

Thinking today about angry white men, stupidity, and malice. Steve and I have an ongoing conversation about the latter.

Having grown up in the great heartland of America, where one can cherish mightily the illusion that one is innocent, Steve ever sees the glass as half-full when I see it as half-empty. He’s quick to recognize stupidity and the effect of its heavy hand in social institutions, including the church. He is loath to see outright malice in much of the bungling that passes for leadership in church and society.

With my crazy, tormented Southern family tree, I’m more inclined to spot evil. I more often grant people the benefit of the doubt re: their ability to understand what’s happening around them. I see many of the blockages in building a better world as willfully evil, willfully malicious and self-interested, rather than fed by stupidity.

And so (naturally) to angry white men: I’m one of them. But what angers me most of all, I think, is something other than what seems to make the “typical” angry white male tick. What angers me has to do with the confluence of stupidity and malice in the thought patterns of so many people who want to resist necessary social changes at all cost.

The current U.S. federal election has resurrected the angry white male—as if he had ever gone away. Powerful currents in our culture resistant to progressive change continue to feed resentments of the angry white man around issues of gender and race. A politics of stupid, venal obstruction, which is never removed from the power centers of our culture, is playing a key role in the current political debates.

And it will probably continue to play a key role when the two candidates are finally selected and voters line up behind one or the other. The question—one of the fundamental questions—we face as a culture (and in our churches of the radical middle, which so closely mirror the culture) is whether we want to stand on the side of the stupid and malicious, or on the side of those who have, at least, the intent to move our culture towards the key ideals for which we claim our nation was founded.

So, anger, yes: my anger as a white male tends to focus on those who seem (to me) intent on willfully thwarting the coalescence of movements of progressive change around our foundational ideals. I could, if I wished, nourish resentment against women or people of color. Some of my most painful experiences in recent years, as a white gay man, have been at the hands of black women—women whom I expected to know better, and knowing better, to do better. Those experiences cut deeply, precisely because I suffered them at the hands of people representing two groups with which I commit myself to stand in solidarity.

But what is to be gained by singling out two social groups that struggle with crushing historic oppression, and venting all my rage about the venality and stupidity of the world on those groups, as if they (and not my demographic) stand for all that is evil in the world? In my view, LGBT people have everything to gain by standing in solidarity with our brothers and sisters across racial and gender lines. Our society as a whole stands to gain—and all of us as marginalized groups pitted by triangulating white-male “managers” against each other—by forming strong bonds of solidarity with each other. When a woman or an African American breaks through the barriers of the triangulating power center, I gain as a gay white man.

I offer these reflections today as I focus my reflections about holy conferencing on an enormously influential African-American leader of the 20th century, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. I want to focus today’s critical analysis of Wesleyan holy conferencing, as it is currently practiced in the United Methodist Church, on the following claim of Dr. Bethune in her moving Last Will and Testament:

Love builds. It is positive and helpful….Our aim must be to create a world of fellowship and justice where no man's skin, color or religion, is held against him. Loving your neighbor means being interracial, interreligious and international.

Love builds: love is constructive; its opposite is not. This is the leitmotiv of Mary McLeod Bethune’s thought. It is far easier to tear down in a moment something that has taken many years to be built up, than it is to build. It is easier to destroy than create. Chaos beckons everywhere around us, constantly. The choice to move against chaos is one that pulls against the grain, that forces us to muster imagination, trust, creativity, strength of mind and heart, in a world where it is much easier to go along, to become a witting or unwitting agent of all-encompassing chaos.

One of the rare privileges I was given at my last academic job was the charge to immerse myself in the thought of Dr. Bethune (though, strangely enough, I was later reproached for fulfilling this assignment; I was told that it was inappropriate for me as a white man to be analyzing the thought of Mary McLeod Bethune, and that the hard work I did—to research, write, and disseminate information to the university community—was not “work” but “talking” . . .).

My reading of Dr. Bethune has led me to the conviction that this 20th-century figure has something of crucial importance to say to those of us who struggle to keep holy conferencing alive in a 21^st-century postmodern context. In church institutions, including church-affiliated academic institutions that are in danger of losing their souls because the leaders of those institutions have acceded to the pressures of those skilled at triangulation, Mary McLeod Bethune points a way forward.

She points to another possibility than accepting the managerial techniques of triangulating power centers who would like us to assume that such techniques are inevitable, if we wish to be preserved from chaos. She points to the possibility of building, not holding the line as if stasis is the single option left if we do not wish chaos to ensue.

Mary McLeod Bethune’s commitment to progressive social change—to constructive building—led her to found a United Methodist HBCU, Bethune-Cookman College. One of Dr. Bethune’s significant innovative practices was her development of town-hall meetings on the campus of the college she founded. It is this development to which I want to draw attention today, as I reflect on how holy conferencing has come to be practiced in the United Methodist Church (as opposed to its prophetic possibility in Wesleyan tradition).

Because Dr. Bethune believed that students learn most effectively when involved in hands-on work with the social challenges of their communities, she made the walls of her college permeable: she linked her campus to the surrounding community, such that the college became an educational presence in the community at large, while the community itself became a privileged locus for her students’ education in social transformation.

I am pointing to Dr. Bethune as a pioneer of a participatory democratic process that has much to offer the United Methodist Church today, as the church examines what it means to engage in sacred conversation. I want to draw attention to Dr. Bethune for another reason, as well.

Her town-hall meetings have gained the attention of progressivist thinkers not only because of their innovative pedagogical interface of town and gown. These meetings also blazed the way for a dialogic process of participatory democracy that brings everyone to the table. At a time and in a place in which the seats of honor were saved in any gathering for those with white skin, Dr. Bethune deliberately assigned no seats to anyone on the basis of power or privilege (which is to say, on the basis of race and socio-economic privilege).

Seating at her town-hall meetings was first-come, first-served. Everyone was welcome. But the meetings comprised a safe space in which the powerful were not permitted to rule over the powerless. They were a safe space in which the voice of the powerless was not only permitted to be heard, but actively solicited.

In other words, at the United Methodist College she founded, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune modeled one of the key principles of Wesleyan holy conferencing, in her town-hall meetings: she actively worked against cultural patterns that gave privilege and voice to a select few on the basis of race, gender, economic status, and so on. She protected those who are ruled out of the conversation and dismissed from the table at most gatherings in the society in which we live (and the churches we attend in Main Street USA).

Like her sister Johnetta Betsch Cole, Dr. Bethune offers the United Methodist Church some important insights into what holy conferencing is all about, when it is practiced authentically and intentionally—with fidelity to core Wesleyan insights. Just as Dr. Cole’s image of soul work is a useful foundational metaphor for holy conferencing, Dr. Bethune’s image of constructive love, love that builds (with its echoes of Wesley’s injunction to do good constantly and avoid causing harm), offers an important critical insight into what holy conferencing can be when it is practiced with fidelity to Wesley’s spirituality.

From their experience of double marginalization as African-American women (and from their experience leading United Methodist colleges), Johnetta Betsch Cole and Mary McLeod Bethune represent radical inclusiveness, coupled with a critique of institutions that thwart the participation of any marginalized group in the structures of participatory democracy. The United Methodist Church, with its practice of holy conferencing, has much to learn from such prophetic leaders.

Dr. Bethune’s understanding of a radically inclusive participatory democracy that brings everyone to the dialogic table, and undercuts attempts of the powerful to silence the marginal, derives from deeply rooted theological beliefs that echo Wesleyan principles. Throughout her writings, she insists that authentic democracy is founded in the conviction that non-essential inborn traits including race, gender, or national status do not define human beings in the essential core of their being.

In Dr. Bethune’s view, what defines a human being and human worth is, starkly put, our common origin in one creator God. As she states in her 1954 “Address to a World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament”:

I listened to God this morning and the thought came to me, “Any idea that keeps anybody out is too small for this age—open your heart and let everybody in—every class, every race, every nation.” We must remake the world. The task is nothing less than that (in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], p. 58; emphasis in original).

Late in her life, as she drafted her Last Will and Testament, Dr. Bethune declared, “All my life I have been stirred by the idea of one God creating one world” (as cited in ibid., p. 259).

This religious conviction fed Dr. Bethune’s desire to inculcate a global perspective in African-American youth, and, in particular, in those youth she was cultivating for leadership. As she notes in a 1952 essay entitled “The Lesson of Tolerance,”

The essence of Democracy is the concept that no one group or individual is all-wise or has a monopoly of all the virtues. Training ourselves and our children to have both tolerance and respect for opinions diverging from our own, is one of the best possible ways to promote brotherhood—among the peoples of the world, and among our neighbors in our block! (“The Lesson of Tolerance,” Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in ibid., p. 267).

Dr. Bethune came to the conviction that the college she was founding was to be a “sacred place” in which the world might come to discover the world-changing possibility of interracial, cross-gender, radically inclusive dialogue in which all addressed one another as children of the same God. As her 1954 document “My Foundation” states,

So I want this to always be kind of a sacred place—a place to awaken people and to have them realize that there is something in the world they can do; and if they try hard enough, they will do that thing….I think we need leaders now so much. I thought that we would hold conferences, interracial conferences with women of all classes and creeds that we might sit together, think together, and plan together how we might make a better world to live in (Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in ibid., p. 271).

In my view, just as Johnetta Betsch Cole has recognized that the preceding principles of radical inclusivity and radical welcome must apply not only to women or people of color but also to LGBT persons in the structures of a healthy participatory democracy, were she living in our postmodern cultural context, Mary McLeod Bethune would—I have no doubt of it—welcome and include LGBT people at her table, too. Just as Dr. Bethune brought to her leadership table not only people of color but Caucasians, not merely men but women as well, in a contemporary context she would—I have no doubt of it—incorporate in her college’s leadership team openly gay and lesbian academic leaders.

And she would protect these valuable children of God from attack by members of the “entrenched male hierarchy” of the United Methodist Church, against which she constantly did battle as an African-American female leading a college (cited in ibid., p. 13, citing Clarence G. Newsome, “Mary McLeod Bethune and the Methodist Episcopal Church North: In but Out,” Journal of Religious Thought 49, 1 [1992], pp. 7-20). She would do so because her thought opens to the conviction that all human beings have intrinsic worth and a place at the table of participatory democracy because all come from the hand of the same Creator God.

It is difficult to imagine Dr. Bethune characterizing any children of God as the spawn of the devil. It is difficult to imagine that she would have rested easily with such discourse even if it were implicitly elicited by the ground rules for holy conferencing of churches in Main Street USA—by those with power to make or break her as the leader of a church-affiliated college.

These are important considerations to lift up as we consider what holy conferencing is all about today. They are important because other voices that side with entrenched male hierarchical structures in both church and society continue to echo the “spawn of the devil” rhetoric of those structures—and African-American women can be found as well (and sadly) among those using such rhetoric.

It is interesting to note that, just as the recent General Conference got underway, several news stories broke, all involving African-American women recently called to accountability for pushing homophobic positions in their workplace. One of these is a 2 May report about Crystal Dixon, Associate Vice-President for Human Resources at the University of Toledo. This report states that Dixon was put on leave following an op-ed piece she wrote on 18 April for the Toledo Free Press (see www.towleroad.com/2008/05/ohio-college-ad.html and www.toledofreepress.com/?id=7609).

This opinion statement entitled “Gay Rights and Wrongs: Another Perspective,” purports to articulate the black woman’s perspective on gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Dixon expresses “great umbrage” at the thought the quest for gay civil rights should in any way be equated with her quest for civil rights as an African-American woman.

Dixon states that, whereas she goes to bed at night black and wakes up black, gay persons can freely decide whether to “leave the gay lifestyle.” Dixon rehearses the familiar (and widely discounted) arguments that her gay and lesbian brothers and sisters have chosen a “lifestyle”; that this “lifestyle” choice can be cured by prayer and “a transformative experience with God”; that the gay “lifestyle” is injurious to the health of individuals and society. She also advances an argument that gay and lesbian households are not in any way economically deprived, but that these households experience economic benefits unavailable to African Americans.

Ultimately, Dixon notes that her argument hinges on her theological belief that “[t]here is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose . . . . It is base human nature to revolt and become indignant when the world or even God Himself, disagrees with our choice that violates His divine order.” (For my critique of the rhetoric of “divine order,” see my posting “The Church’s One Foundation” at http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/churchs-one-foundation-homosexuality.html).

Critics of Dixon’s statement have noted that it is especially troubling, given that her position at UT requires her to adjudicate claims of job harassment and discrimination and to enforce professional codes that prohibit discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The second report I noticed as General Conference was underway is a 30 April report that the ACLU had sent a letter to the Memphis City School system, charging Daphne Beasley, principal of Hollis F. Price Middle College High School, with discrimination against gay students. Beasley is an African-American woman, and Hollis F. Price is affiliated with LeMoyne-Owen, an HBCU.

The ACLU alleges that Beasley had gathered a list of students who were dating, including gay students, and had posted this list in a public place, essentially outing gay students who had not yet revealed their sexual orientation to their own families. A gay student at the school, identified as Andrew, claims that Beasley called his mother to inform her that her son was gay, telling the mother that she does not like gay persons and does not want them on her campus.

The Memphis City Schools system has responded to the ACLU letter by upholding Principal Beasley’s right to keep order and discipline on her campus. The school system finds nothing inappropriate in her behavior (see www.towleroad.com/2008/04/aclu-slams-tenn.html and www.towleroad.com/2008/05/memphis-city-sc.html).

The third report is a 26 April posting on Chris Crain’s Citizen Crain blog entitled “DNC’s ‘Talk to the Hand’ Outreach” (see http://citizenchris.typepad.com/citizenchris/2008/04/dncs-talk-to-th.html).

Crain summarizes recent initiatives of Leah Daughtry, an African-American woman who is chief of staff to Democratic Party leader Howard Dean. In Crain’s view, Daughtry “has garnered a reputation for inciting rivalry between African American and gay constituencies within the party.” Crain notes that Daughtry had “tried to help unseat the first-ever duly elected lesbian to the Alabama state legislature, in favor of a black candidate.” He also notes that, “Later, she (and closet case Donna Brazile) pitched a fit when gay Democrats proposed that gays be included in the same quota system for selecting state convention delegates as other minority groups.”

Given this history of contention in which, Crain believes, Daughtry has sought to sow seeds of discord and contention between the LGBT community and the black community, he finds her recent image-management attempts to patch up the rift she has worked to create too little and too late, a form of impression management to cover over triangulating procedures she herself has set in motion in the DNC office.

Clearly, there is work to do. The question is whether the United Methodist Church and other churches of the radical middle will take their cue from Dixon, Beasley, and Daughtry, or from Johnetta Betsch Cole and Mary McLeod Bethune. The time for sitting on the sidelines is rapidly vanishing as our political culture moves away from a politics of triangulation designed to create stasis to a politics of constructive building that welcomes the contributions of all God’s children.

Preceding my current series of postings on the United Methodist practice of holy conferencing is a series of open letters to the United Methodist bishop of Florida, Bishop Timothy Whitaker, under whose pastoral jurisdiction Bethune-Cookman University now currently functions. In previous postings, I have also noted the troubling violence against LGBT persons Florida has recently experienced. Daytona Beach, where Bethune-Cookman University is located, is as well the recent locus of some of the most horrifying acts of violence against homeless persons in the nation—acts often committed by teens. Florida was recently named the leading state in the country for acts of violence against the homeless.

Florida is now divided over an anti-gay marriage amendment that specifically targets LGBT citizens for no reason other than their sexual orientation.

There is clearly much pastoral work, much educational work, much healing to be done in Florida. One cannot imagine John Wesley or Mary McLeod Bethune standing aside from these glaring social needs.

Since the recent General Conference passed resolutions condemning homophobia and discrimination against LGBT persons, as well as calling for educational initiatives on the part of the church to help understand (and combat) all forms of social violence, wouldn’t it be amazing if Bishop Whitaker undertook to see that the university founded by Dr. Bethune became a force for reconciliation, education, and social transformation around issues of violence and homophobia—in a state where such reconciliation, education, and transformation are clearly needed?

Perhaps Bishop Whitaker and Bethune-Cookman University will respond to the resolutions of this General Conference by rehabilitating Dr. Bethune’s town-hall meetings with their practice of radical inclusivity. Perhaps Bishop Whitaker and this HBCU under his jurisdiction will follow Dr. Bethune’s lead by incorporating and acknowledging the contributions of all members of the campus community, black and white, gay or straight, in the leadership teams of the university, and by modeling inclusive leadership that crosses racial lines and lines of sexual orientation.

One can hope. As M. Paz Galupo notes in an article entitled “Advancing Diversity Through a Framework of Intersectionality: Inclusion of LGBT Issues in Higher Education” (Diversity Digest 10,2 [2007], 16-17), though the modern academy commonly pays lip-service to diversity and inclusion of all voices and perspectives, it lacks systematic or thoughtful strategies for integrating lesbian-gay concerns under the rubric of diversity. The academy still resists first-person testimony by its gay-lesbian members, and disallows such testimony as biased, self-interested, or distasteful.

Galupo (who is bi-racial) speaks expressly of HBCUs. She notes that HBCUs “typically have no institutionally recognized LGBT student groups” and that “structural barriers” in HBCUs prevent the successful integration of lesbian-gay persons into the academic community.

Galupo calls on the academy (and the HBCU in particular) to ask the following “hard questions” about such structural barriers, if the academy wishes to be truly inclusive:

Why do we advocate for LGBT inclusion in general, but remain afraid to challenge homophobia within our racially diverse communities? How can a dialogue about the experiences of LGBT persons of color inform…our work within the larger African American and LGBT communities? How can our successes in advancing racial diversity and gender equity inform our advocacy for LGBT inclusion? And conversely, how can arguments for LGBT inclusion be used to shift our discussions about race and gender to creative and more effective directions?

One can hope . . . . In the world coming into being in the 21st century, too much is at stake for the church and its institutions to choose triangulation and stasis over the prophetic witness of people such as John Wesley and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Holy Conferencing as Soul Work: Advancing the Conversation

Yesterday’s postings focus on the witness of a contemporary African-American educational leader (and president of a United Methodist college), Johnetta Betsch Cole. I am using Cole’s phrase “soul work”—work to mend the soul of human beings and institutions when hatred threatens to erode soul—as a metaphor for what happens in holy conferencing, when such conferencing is authentic (that is to say, when it is holy).

I am assuming that church conferencing is not necessarily holy in and of itself. I am proposing that, in order to safeguard itself from influences that seek to taint or even subvert its discernment process, it needs to develop critical norms to allow it to determine when it is moving in the direction of holiness, and when it is tending to a fraying of sacred conversation that pits some children of God against others in martial conflict that militates against the fundamental notion of holy conferencing.

In yesterday’s posting, I suggested that the holy conferencing or sacred conversations of the churches of Main Street USA has been deliberately nudged in such a martial direction. I place the responsibility for this assault on the very substance of holy conferencing in American churches squarely at the feet of the religious right—ultimately, that is, at the feet of those funding this political movement, who wish to control the influence of the churches of Main Street in the public sphere by gridlocking the holy conferencing and sacred conversations of such churches.

Because we are a nation with the soul of a church, because religious ideas and attitudes have powerful influence on our public life, those who fear that this influence could in any way undercut a status quo that serves the interests of the religious right and the interests of its funders are eager to see the churches move to a gridlock that prevents the churches from discerning the voice of the Spirit for their future or for the culture at large—that prevents the churches from speaking a salvific and life-giving word to the world.

Simply put, my critique of Wesleyan holy conferencing as it is currently practiced by the United Methodist Church depends on the conviction that churches and their institutions cannot touch the soul when their sacred conversations are so engineered that it is safe to express hatred but not safe to speak of love in holy conferencing. To the extent that the churches of Main Street USA have allowed the religious right (and its funders) to set the parameters of their sacred conversations, the churches are in danger of abdicating their responsibility (and historic mission) to provide sound witness to the gospel in the public sphere.

When the parameters of the conversation provide a false polarity between a love that cannot be spoken and a hate that allows itself to speak while posturing as biblical truth or orthodoxy, something is wrong at a very fundamental level with how holy conferencing is being practiced. A love ethic alone—the love ethic of cheap grace that is rather alluring to the churches of the radical middle—will not allow this false polarity to be named as such and ruled out by ground rules for holy conferencing. To safeguard holy conferencing from manipulation by hate groups, there have to be critical norms that identify some parameters of the sacred conversation as anything but loving. Among these ground rules is a simple determination that espousing, speaking forth, putting on the table any position that feeds social hatreds radically undercuts holy conversation. Entertaining hate speech—making it possible at all in holy conferencing—departs from the gospel.

Speaking of our gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered brothers and sisters as the spawn of the devil is an extreme example of hate speech. However, what should not be overlooked in my analysis is the underlying contention that this hate speech surfaces in contemporary Wesleyan holy conferencing because the will of the majority—the radical middle—makes it possible to continue speaking of LGBT persons as diabolical.

Though many of us in the radical middle would instinctively recoil from such extreme expressions, we continue to hold attitudes towards our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters that frame these children of God as the despised Other. We continue to view these members of the family of God and our own human families as Other in an implicitly demonizing way. We continue to think about and speak of these brothers and sisters as those who disturb the peace of “our” churches of the radical middle, who keep clamoring for attention when we prefer to hold the line, shut the door, put our foot down.

We continue to use terms such as “pansy” with glib abandon. We laugh when such terms are used, though our LGBT family members tell us that the words we sling around so carelessly often contain a razor’s edge that cuts deep into their psyches. We support structures of marginalization, demonization, and exclusion in church and society because we need to remain comfortable; we need to remain convinced that we are holy, righteous, loving, fair, and impartial. Our LGBT brothers and sisters hold up a mirror to us into which we do not wish to look: we want to keep the mirror away because we know that it shows us to be someone other than who we claim to be.

We want to continue professing that we deplore discrimination and stigmatization of minorities while we fire our LGBT brothers and sisters simply because they are gay and have crossed invisible lines we have set in place in our churches and church institutions to keep us from being aware of their presence in our midst. We preach mercy. We do not practice justice.

Our LGBT brothers and sisters, by their very presence in our midst, by their very lives, make us uncomfortably aware of this anti-gospel dichotomy in our religious lives. We want to engineer the ground rules of our holy conversation to keep ourselves unaware of this dichotomy, so that we can continue to profess ourselves to be loving, kind, merciful, righteous, and fair.

As if he were writing in deliberate counterpoint to what I have been saying on this blog, political analyst Jeffrey Feldman echoes many of these themes today in a blog posting on the Alternet news site. The posting is entitled “The Violent Language of Right-Wing Pundits Poisons Our Democracy” (www.alternet.org/mediaculture/84490).

Feldman notes that the right-wing (including prominent figures of the religious right) has deliberately sought to introduce “violent logic, language and arguments” into the linguistic structures of American deliberative democracy. Feldman notes that this strategy of subverting the conversation that grounds our deliberative democracy is rather new—at least, the attempt to skew the ground rules of the conversation in a direction of overt violence is relatively new. He traces its rise (in its current form of direct espousal of violent hate speech) to the elections of 2004 and 2006, when, he argues, this kind of violent hate speech began to be mainstreamed both in right-wing political discourse and in media soundbites that take their cues from the right wing.

Feldman maintains that this strategy is designed to subvert the participatory dialogic process on which deliberative democracy depends. When a group wishing to control the conversation assures that it cannot move forward, because the attention of dialogue partners is constantly drawn to a false dichotomy between hate and love, between falsehood and truth, between destroying or building, the conversation stalls. And along with it, the process of participatory democracy itself stalls.

As with the democratic process in general, so with the brilliant democratic process crafted by the churches of Main Street USA, one of their choicest contributions to the religious life of Christianity: if we continue allowing the religious right to determine what can be said and how it will be said in our holy conferencing, should we be surprised that we cannot move forward in discerning what the Spirit is saying to us at the dawn of the 21^st century? The world awaits a clear salvific word from us, while we participate in engineered conversations designed to get us absolutely nowhere—unholy conversations that radically diminish our ability to address the culture around us in a coherent, reasoned, gospel-centered way.

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.