White Eyelet Lace: Florida UMC Annual Conference, Day Two

I knew she was trouble the minute I saw she had a bible cover with white eyelet lace on it.

Thus saith one of the people I love most in the world, whose identity I won’t reveal here for two reasons. First, she lives in a big-small city/town where everybody knows everyone else, everybody talks about everybody else (while smiling in the face of those they talk about), and everybody will punish you, all in one collective huddle locking arms against you, if you tell the truth they do not want to have spoken.

I know. I live in such a place.

Second, I want my friend to keep making these pithy observations. Too many of my friends are already leery of me because they say that 1) I never forget anything they say or do, and 2) I’m liable to report what they have said or done in something I write. Comes from growing up among many Southern ladies who never missed a beat, as they pretended to socialize with each other, eyeing the other mercilessly all the while, in order to give a cold-eyed detailed report once the lovefest had ended.

And so to the Southern state of Florida and its United Methodist Annual Conference, which is now in its second day. (Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this: white eyelet lace bible covers do have something to do with the Florida UMC Annual Conference—at least, in my mind they do.)

The Florida Conference has helpfully uploaded its workbook to the conference website. Anyone who wishes can read the workbook at www.flumc2.org/page.asp?PKValue=1339.

Yesterday, I read it carefully, searching for any indicator that this annual conference will follow up on the unfinished work of the recent General Conference to keep praying about, talking about, and working for the full inclusion of gay brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church.

I was not surprised to find—not really—that the workbook has not a single mention of this topic. The words “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual” are entirely absent from the workbook.

This is not surprising because the 2006 essay on homosexuality and the church by Florida’s UMC bishop (a copy is on the same website) argues for eliminating terms such as “homosexual” and “gay” from the vocabulary of the church, as it deals with people who are, well, gay and lesbian. What is not spoken does not exist. There is no problem, where there is no language to identify a problem.

We can go about our business with cheerful hearts and smiling faces when we do not have to confront those we cannot see, since we do not give them even a linguistic place at our table. Without linguistic structures to frame the problem for us—the problem that the Other exists—we can talk about radical hospitality while practicing radical inhospitality.

This sometimes seems to me to be the Methodist way. The way of the churches of the radical middle, of Main Street USA. The hug-smack way. It is easy to continue doing business when our business is not disrupted by the presence of intrusive, meddlesome, demanding Others.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I often get the impression, when I look at the way the churches of Main Street USA do business, that doing business is pretty much what it’s all about. It’s about impression management and keeping up morale in precisely the same way that the corporate world deals with these marketing issues.

When our brand is sinking, we find a new way to market it. How about big screens in the sanctuary? Clowns for the children? A new logo would be nice, one with flames to show that we are on fire with love, having been snatched from the flames of damnation.

No gloom and doom for us. That would be a turn-off, and we want our brand to sell. We need it to do so. How else can we compete with those big megachurches that sell their own brand of coffee, have gym classes, snack bars, dating services, clubs of every kind a body could wish, all on huge sparkling “campuses” suggesting that God does, in the final analysis, really prosper those who believe in God?

The gays make things difficult because their very presence is a downer. Bring them in, and who knows who might leave in a huff (and take their money with them)? As a priest Steve knows once said in a discussion of how to deal with the gays in the Catholic seminary in which they both taught, “There’s no theological reason to keep them out. But they bring all these problems with them!”

They bring all these problems with them. They bring dirt with them, because being gay is being dirty. Just like the Samaritan lying bleeding by the side of the road. It was so much easier for the priest to pass the wounded man by. Remember the story? The one inside the pretty lace-covered bible? The priest was on his way to worship (to engage in salty worship, as the new Florida Methodist brand would have us say). Touching a bleeding man would make the priest ritually impure. It would interfere with his worship.

The lawyer couldn’t stop, either. After all, who knows what kind of legal tangles might ensue, if we pick up a person lying bleeding by the roadside? Better not to get involved. If he's lying there bleeding, he must have done something to deserve his lumps. Getting involved might end up implicating us—and our money.

The unexpected person is the one who notices, stops, and helps, in Jesus’s parable. Remember that the story inside the pretty bible cover was Jesus’s answer to the question, Who is my neighbor? The one who stopped was a Samaritan, a people considered racially and ritually impure by their orthodox Jewish neighbors. They had (it was alleged) intermarried with non-Jews. They worshiped on the hilltops and not in the temple.

They were not the practitioners of orthodox, right, true religion. They practiced a mixed (read: dirty) religion, not the pure religion of Judaism. And yet it was one of these—someone who was himself the Other—who deigned to stop and pick up the bleeding man, to staunch his wounds (thus contracting ritual impurity), and then to go the extra step of taking the man to a hospice to be treated. It was one who knew himself to be considered unclean who actually saw the Other we would prefer not to see, since out of sight is out of mind.

An article by Steven Skelley on the Florida UMC website today says that a workshop at the Annual Conference yesterday focused on “radical hospitality” as a mark of Wesleyan discipleship (www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000048/004841.htm). The article notes that participants thought about how congregations have to live discipleship collectively, if they expect to make a difference. The whole congregation has to practice radical hospitality, if it wants to live the Methodist way as a congregation.

And it has to reach out into its own community, where many people are removed from church. It has to take risks to “step out with Jesus” into the surrounding community.

I’m trying to get my head around these statements, given the total silence of this Annual Conference’s workbook about gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Who do those talking about radical hospitality imagine the alienated Other of their community to be?

Who is more excluded than those we make invisible by denying even linguistic structures to allow these invisibilized Others to make their presence known?

Will the Wesleyan brand convince others that it is a good brand, if it will not even talk about the group most clearly and obviously excluded by its church today? It is, after all, so easy to love the sanitized Other, the good, the approved, minority.

It is so much harder to step out with Jesus and notice that bleeding man by the wayside, whose presence raises troubling questions about the validity of our worship, when we will not even touch his wounds because we must keep our hands clean for the sanctuary.

We like our bibles, we Southern folks. We like them covered.

We’ll even cover them in white eyelet lace.

When we do that, perhaps we don’t have to peek inside them to see what they really say.

It’s so much easier to look at the pretty cover.

Good Gays, Bad Gays Continued: The Smack-Hug Violence of Churches

I’m trying something different today.

Yesterday, my friend Colleen (check out her “Enlightened Catholicism” blog, linked to mine) left a great comment on my posting about good gays, bad gays, and the churches of the radical middle.

In what follows, I want to engage Colleen’s comments. They are so thought-provoking that I can’t really do justice to them by replying in the comment slot. And maybe if this dialogue is in the main thread of the blog, it will bring some light for other readers who are struggling with the churches’ stances towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

So here goes:

Colleen,

You address some key points in my perambulations yesterday. I value the incisive comments, which help me focus my own thinking.

You say,

I'm not so sure the hate isn't a product of jealousy, of an unstated sense of inadequacy. A number of the things gays seem to do very well are create artistically, love with no strings attached, and have definite spiritual gifts . . . . I think gayness is defined by much more than sexual attraction. It's defined best by the concept of balance between creation and chaos and male and female. That tension of that balance is very often expressed in creative or spiritual works.

These are significant points. They touch right on the heart of the dynamics I was trying to describe yesterday—better than I was able to do.

First, the hate issue. Yesterday, after posting, I asked myself, “Are you sure that hate is the word you really want?” Is what the churches do to us really hate, or is that word too strong to describe the antipathy, exclusion, and malicious dissemination of misinformation about us?

Asking these questions draws attention to the word “homophobia” itself, with its “phobia” root. That root can mean both fear and hate, or hate driven by fear.

Some people object to the term “homophobia” precisely on this ground: that hate is a word too strong to describe what is often going on when folks resist or despise gay folks.

I tend to think it’s accurate, though, in exposing the roots of homophobia. Like the various forms of violence, which I analyzed in a previous posting on this blog, hate can manifest itself in both hot and cold ways.

The hot form of violence or hate is not too hard to detect. It’s the kind that happened recently in Sacramento right after the gay marriage ruling in California, when three young men out to beat up a fag to protest the court decision asked a man sitting in a car at a gas station if he were gay.

When he said he was, they dragged him out of his car and beat him up (www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/05/16/state/n143918D86.DTL) And yet the social network webpage of one of the alleged gay bashers, Micah Jontomo Tasaki, at BlackPlanet.com (www.blackplanet.com/jontomo) has this young man saying, “CHILVARY DOES STILL EXIST. Im honest, open, and caring.... very compassionate, and a great listener.”

Jarring, isn’t it? Chivalry exists. I’m honest, opening, caring, very compassionate. And, oh, by the way, if I run across a fag sitting in a car minding his own business, I’m liable to kick the stuffing out of him while I’m going about my chivalry-compassion business.

What this story underscores for me is that the hot form of hate goes hand in hand with cold forms of hate, which are less easy to detect—and of which we may even be unconscious. I would submit that it’s the cold form of hate that inhabits so much of the thinking (and behavior) of church folks in Main Street USA.

This cold form of homophobia is what’s at work in so much that goes on with the churches. This is the behavior analyzed in Harry Knox’s article “Methodist Schizophrenia on Gays” at the Casting Stones blog on Beliefnet (http://blog.beliefnet.com/castingstones/2008/05/methodist-schizophrenia-on-gay.html?bt=polmashup).

Knox is a former United Methodist pastor from a family with deep Methodist roots. He now heads the Religion and Faith Program for Human Rights Campaign. His article is commenting on the recent UMC General Conference.

Knox characterizes the Methodist approach to LGBT persons as schizophrenic “smack-hug behavior”: we love you; we don’t want you; we welcome all sinners; we don’t welcome you; our doors are open; no gays need apply; we promote and defend your civil rights; don’t expect us to respect your rights if you work in our institutions.

Some folks have objected to the use of the term “schizophrenic” in this article. I think it’s a precise description of how the churches of Main Street USA actually behave towards us. Their behavior is insane. And they don’t even seem aware of it.

It’s unrecognized insanity because it’s masked in religious rhetoric about love that doesn’t permit those engaging in this abusive behavior (Knox calls it “spiritual violence” as well) even to admit or know that they are assaulting the very souls, the personhood, of a particular group of human beings. Hate masquerades as love in the way the churches of the radical middle think about and act towards LGBT persons, and it’s very difficult to tease out or address the hate for this reason. It’s disguised. It’s cold hate.

But I know your point here is not to challenge the use of the word "hate." You’re making a point that goes way beyond the analysis of this word, and it’s an excellent point. You say that hate—the cold form of homophobic violence in which the churches engage—may well be a form of jealousy or a sense of inadequacy.

And you go on to identify the psychological nexus from which the jealousy and sense of inadequacy often springs. You say, “Main stream churches understand they have a proportional misrepresentation of gays in their structures. They just can't deal with the underlying talent issues this represents so gays must be vilified.”

These are extremely insightful comments, it seems to me, ones that reflect your background as a therapist. If, as you say, gay people bring the churches talents that have everything to do with our accepting that we are gay—specifically, if our struggles to accept ourselves create a creative tension or balance inside us of male-female principles—then our very being there, with those talents, seems to threaten some folks, or make some folks feel inadequate.

The puzzle to me is your right-on-target conclusion that, because the churches can’t deal with the “underlying talent issues” that gay contributions to churches represent, “gays must be vilified.”

I think this is exactly right. It also seems insane to me—insane, that is, that churches would recognize an abundance of talent for spiritual insight and creativity in a particular group of people, whom they then expel! Precisely for offering talent, spiritual insight, and creativity to the churches . . . .

I know in my bones that you are right. I just find it hard to understand that human beings behave in such self-defeating ways.

I know you’re right, because what you say fits my own experience, my own spiritual journey. I’ve spoken of my brother’s death in 1991 as a kind of catalyst for my self-acceptance as a gay man.

But what happened in my journey in that part of my life is actually more complex. Prior to my brother’s death, I had a sabbatical semester to do research while I was on fellowship. I spent that semester writing a book and several articles, teaching a seminar, but, perhaps most significant of all, doing therapeutic work with a spiritual counselor.

The counselor was a Jungian analyst. Since I have always dreamed profusely and kept track of my dreams, his approach made sense to me.

From the start of my semester’s work with him, I told him I was gay, and needing to figure out what to do with that, given my vocational path to teaching theology in church-affiliated universities. I was some six years into my teaching career.

The tension of being someone inside that I had to disguise outside was eating me up. It was not the creative tension of holding something in balance. It was the deadly tension of living a public persona that doesn’t match the private self, so that you begin to fear you’ll simply lose your private self and become the walking, talking parody of the persona you’ve adopted.

I worked hard with the counselor in that semester. I can remember, towards the end of my time with him, he put his finger on something that helped me reframe the personal identity-vocational struggle in a creative new way. He noted that, again and again, in describing my dreams, I had used words like “upwelling,” “springing forth,” “streams,” “energy,” “light.”

He told me that, in his view, the hard work I was doing to try to bring together the gay self and my public life as a theologian in a church-affiliated school had much to do with releasing springs of creative energy. The more I was able to hold these two together, to claim my identity as a gay man while continuing on my vocational path as a theologian, the more the creativity was springing forth.

And he was right.

Within months after my return home, my brother died. It was the combination of my own Spirit-led journey to self acceptance as a gay man and my brother’s death, a life-changing event for me, that brought me to that decision I described yesterday: that I would never again do my work as a theologian while denying my personhood (and gifts) as a gay man.

This bringing together the pieces I hadn’t been able to bring together as long as I played the game of don’t ask, don’t tell released tremendous energy in me. Not only had I just written one book, but out of the blue, I suddenly got requests to publish another, as well as articles based on my research. I wrote an essay that got selected for publication in a national essay contest. I got several job offers totally unsolicited, because of my publications.

But here’s the kicker: when I turned down tenure at my home university and took another job following my brother’s death, with the intent of expressing my new-found creativity in a new setting where I was told I was wanted and needed, the experience proved to be disastrous.

My experience has been that the resistance we encounter as self-accepting gay persons with much to offer in church institutions is in direct proportion to our self-acceptance, and to the talents we bring to the table. We’re welcome as long as we are self-hating, silent, dismissable: good gays.

The minute we claim our identities as God-given, and acknowledge that the love inside ourselves and in our relationships also springs from God, we become personae non gratae in the churches: bad gays The hard struggle (in a homophobic society) to accept ourselves as God’s good gifts to ourselves and others, a struggle that releases in us creative energies the churches sorely need, disqualifies us from a place at the table in the churches.

In fact, in my last disastrous experience, where Steve and I were told that we were welcome as an openly gay couple in a United Methodist institution that sorely needed our talents (hug), and then were constantly upbraided for coming to work together and "putting our lifestyle into the face of colleagues," the experience was even grimmer (smack).

You’re painting a totally accurate picture. And yet something is so wrong with this picture. I need your further reflections, Colleen, to help me figure out precisely what is at work in such smack-hug behavior on the part of the churches of the radical middle.

When Doing the Right Thing Means Not Playing It Safe: Christians of the Radical Middle and LGBT Human Beings

I continue to read blog discussions dissecting what happened at the United Methodist Church General Conference. I find the “voice” of these discussions much more compelling than the news accounts (and essays) about General Conference appearing on UMC websites, both at the international level and at the level of various regional conferences.

These official news accounts are glitzy. They skim the surface—of what happened, of thought itself. They bruise gospel meaning with lots of breezy (and ultimately vapid) rhetoric about global connections, concern for women and people of color.

On many UMC websites, side-by-side with the gut-wrenching announcement of the 30 April decision to hold the line on homosexuality—that is, against our LGBT brothers and sisters—are happy-clappy news releases showing beaming natives smiling and singing.

I use the term “natives” deliberately. I know it’s condescending. The approach of the UMC to people of color and women is itself condescending. The approach of all churches of Main Street USA to the peoples of the global South and to women is condescending. People of color and women are being used today in disreputable games, in which the white male power structures that still determine the conversation in the churches of Main Street USA play preferred outcasts against disdained outcasts.

This is despicable. It is hurtful. How can our LGBT brothers and sisters not feel pain, when they read these self-congratulatory news stories about how the UMC is full of such compassion towards the suffering, the outcast, the poor and despised: except, “No gays need apply”?

How can our LGBT brothers and sisters look at the pictures of smiling and singing people of the global South and not remember what happened on 30 April with gnawing hurt in the pit of the stomach? How can the church itself—its white male leaders—not see that the game they are playing with talk of globalization and of promoting the rights of women and people of color is transparent and ugly? It is a game that will bring shame on the heads of these leaders of the churches of Main Street USA down the road, when society at large eventually recognizes how cruel is the accepted treatment of LGBT people in much of our culture at present.

Better to admit, frankly, that there’s no strong intent to bring anyone to the table except white men and representatives of approved minorities who have been vetted to assure that they’ll play the white-male power game and not upset the apple cart.

There is, in other words, not just a tiny bit, but a large helping, of prevarication in what the churches of Main Street USA say and do today to our LGBT brothers and sisters, and what they say and do to other sanitized minority groups. To get the real picture beyond prevarication, one has to set aside the glitzy self-congratulatory news stories, the official Comintern-like rhetoric of essays on local UMC conference websites (the two that have appeared on the Florida Conference website, authored by

are especially illuminating), and listen to authentic testimony on blogs.

To get the real picture, one has to delve into first-hand accounts, particularly reflections by those who were actually there and whose lives were yet again determined, without their input, by what one blog has characterized as acts of hate and deceit on the floor of General Conference.

Strong words, hate and deceit. But words I’m inclined to believe. I’m inclined to give credence to these words because I know some of the key players in the 30 April actions that told our LGBT brothers and sisters they aren’t welcome in UMC churches (yes, that’s what the action meant; that’s what it said, beyond the glitzy rhetoric about happy-clappy inclusion). And I know these players are capable of all kinds of deceit, in the name of Christ, to keep our LGBT brothers outside, to hold the line.

I also know this deceit is a manifestation of hate, even when the face speaking the official Comintern words to an LGBT believer is the face of a smiling white man who vaunts his achievements at bringing women and people of color to the table of power and privilege. Hate is hate, and those who feel its cutting edge know what it feels like, even when it’s enshrouded in rhetoric and hidden inside chatter about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and campaigns to revive the church.

An interesting recurring theme in the blog accounts of some General Conference delegates who voted to hold the line against our LGBT brothers and sisters is how “tough” the decision was, how “anguished” they felt in making it.

I don’t doubt this testimony in the least. But I’d like to expose it to some analysis, to ask some critical questions about what it really means, about what it means at the level of fundamental reality to say that decisions to keep our LGBT brothers and sisters away from the table are tough and anguishing.

The first critical questions I'd like to ask are, Really? Why? If we know that what we are doing is right, then why anguish? If we have listened for the voice of the Spirit in holy conferencing and have discerned that it is the Spirit Herself who moves us to exclude brothers and sisters, then why do we find the decision tough?

I’d like to propose that these admissions of how tough and anguishing the decision to exclude our LGBT brothers and sisters was contain a revelatory nugget of truth about just what really is at stake in the continued shoving of LGBT people away from the Lord’s table in the churches of Main Street USA.

What’s really at stake is not, as many delegates want to propose, a tough, anguishing decision to hold the line of doctrinal and moral purity, of orthodoxy, of biblical inerrancy. What’s really at stake is exclusion, pure and simple: stark, hate-fueled, fear-filled, Spirit-denying decisions to keep LGBT brothers and sisters outside, to define LGBT human beings as people whose humanity doesn’t count—at least, not the way my own humanity counts.

One blogger (again, someone I know, in that I grew up in the same town as did this General Conference delegate: flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood) who speaks of the tough, anguishing decision she had to make on 30 April actually notes that the focus of concern has shifted in recent years in the UMC from excluding openly gay people from ordination, to excluding openly gay people. Period.

That's quite an admission. I find it a refreshing admission, an honest one, all the more so because it is coming from a theologically trained United Methodist who proclaims herself to be a feminist theologian, but who represents what she clearly sees as the radical middle of the church. This admission has the ring of authenticity about it.

I can appreciate, then, that this delegate’s decision to hold the line was tough and anguishing, because she knew precisely what she was doing in holding the line: she was holding the line against LGBT brothers and sisters, not against doctrinal error or heterodoxy. She was telling these brothers and sisters that, sorry, the door is closed just for now. Come back later. Perhaps we’ll have a crumb or two for you then, when we've fed everyone else and assessed our resources. Only one table—can't feed everybody, you know.

In fact, how about coming back four years from now? Perhaps by then, we delegates will pay a less taxing price if we rethink the tough, anguishing decision to exclude you. Maybe then our fellow church members will no longer punish us so severely if we finally decide to stand up for inclusion.

Because the churches of Main Street USA are, at heart, culture churches, this is really the underlying logic of what is going on in the exclusion of LGBT persons, isn’t it? It’s too risky right now to stand against the radical middle. Many of us have careers to make, after all. We don’t get to one of the big “first” churches of urban areas—the power pulpits where our voice is beamed out across an entire state as "the" Methodist voice of the area—except by playing it safe.

We don't get the power pulpit unless we become skilled at calculating the next step in the radical middle and assuring that we're in line with that step. That's what the radical middle means, for goodness' sake! It means walking lockstep and never stepping out of line, baptizing our conformity as a holy tactic for holding the church together.

We don’t get those coveted episcopal appointments if we step out of line. We would have headaches to deal with if we came back to Main Street USA and told the folks of the radical middle that we had let the gays inside: battles to fight, letter-writing campaigns to combat, dwindling donations, threats of power mongers to make our lives miserable.

Now that the Supreme Court of California has knocked down that state’s ban on gay marriage, it’s interesting to compare the underlying logic of this civil rights decision with the logic underlying the choice of churches of the radical middle to continue excluding our LGBT brothers and sisters.

Yesterday, Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times published an interview with California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George (www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gay18-2008may18,0,4272300.story). George, a Republican who voted with the majority in the recent gay-marriage decision, speaks about how tough and anguishing the decision was for him to make.

Dolan notes that, as George pondered the decision, he kept returning in his memory to a trip he and his parents made to the segregated South years ago:

As he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

George’s conclusion about his decision to grant gay Americans civil rights, just as African Americans have been granted civil rights, is fascinating: "I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."

“I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe.”

Churchmen (and churchwomen formed in the churchman's image) of the radical middle, do you hear what the California Supreme Court Chief Justice is saying? When African Americans were told that they were unwelcome at your table in the Jim Crow South, what did you do then?

Did you provide prophetic witness about how the church of Jesus Christ always welcomes everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast?

Or did you play it safe? Did you play it safe while talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church?

Now that you have another opportunity to provide prophetic witness, how will you behave? How will you behave now, when you have confessed to the world the sin of your previous racism and misogyny?

Will you continue talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church, while belying that rhetoric with your ugly treatment of your LGBT brothers and sisters? Will you reverse the discrimination you currently practice only when society itself makes such discrimination unthinkable?

Or will you demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit, conversion, and how new life is brought to the church by welcoming everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast? Will you demonstrate this now when it still not entirely safe to make such courageous (Spirit-inspired) decisions?

Or will you once again repent only when it’s safe to do so?

What would Jesus do?

The Radical Middle: Better Angels and Main Street USA

Observers of American churches have concluded that the United Methodist Church represents the middle—the radical middle—of the religious consciousness (and conscience) of our nation with the soul of a church. For that reason, many of us concerned to see how the churches are responding to various issues—including the positive acceptance of LGBT human beings—in American society are keeping a close watch on what happens in the United Methodist Church.

In what just happened at UMC General Conference, we get a crystal-clear picture of where our nation with the soul of a church stands vis-à-vis homosexuality—which is to say, where it stands in relation to LGBT human beings and our cries for full inclusion.

On the one hand, the church “held the line” (as many press accounts and quite a few Methodists themselves are saying) on the issue of homosexuality (that is, the church held the line against gay brothers and sisters who have been asking that the church cash in its promises about its open heart, open mind, and open door).

On the other hand, it passed noble resolutions condemning discrimination against its gay brothers and sisters and violence fueled by homophobia in a society in which many hearts, minds, and doors are resolutely closed to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered human beings. (Question for further consideration: can the church call society at large to accountability when it does not call itself to accountability; can the church condemn homophobic discrimination and violence in society when it practices these in its own life and institutions; if the church is sincere in wanting to condemn such social violence, how do those of us who are gay and who have suffered injustice in Methodist institutions gain a hearing for our stories?)

In making these choices, the United Methodist Church professes to be saving the “radical middle” of the church’s conscience about its LGBT brothers and sisters. The decisions it made at General Conference are already being framed by right-wing driven soundbites in the mass media as an attempt to hold the church together, to keep it united in the face of schismatic forces that call on it to speak with one voice, rather than duplicitously, about its stance towards LGBT human beings.

Can the radical middle, the center, hold?

In what follows, I am focusing on the case of the UMC as an icon for the nation as a whole, and for American churches in particular. My focus is in no way intended to isolate the United Methodist Church as if it is a singular example of the tragic inconsistency, the divided mind, of American Christians about their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters. I am focusing on the UMC because it professes to value the radical middle as a manifestation of the mind of God for contemporary culture (even though Christians throughout history have had to admit again and again that social consensus—the radical middle—has been downright wrong, unholy, and at variance with the gospel time and again, e.g., when Christians burned witches and Jews at the stake, held pogroms to destroy Jewish lives and appropriate Jewish property, held human beings in chattel bondage, told women that they are the possession of men, and so on).

The radical middle of American churches, then—here’s a sharp snapshot of what it offers its LGBT brothers and sisters today, insofar as it responds to our cries:

On the One Hand:

Our Mission Statement:

Every Member a Minister:
Inviting, Nurturing, Sending

IT IS OUR PURPOSE
to proclaim the gospel,
to invite all peoples into the church,
to nurture them in the Christian faith and life,
and to send them forth
as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ,
making our community and world
more caring, more loving, and more just,
all for the GLORY OF GOD.

On the Other Hand

This is some of the best news I've seen from the General Conference in many years. This means that the UMC affirms the sanctity of marriage as being only between a man and a woman, consistent with our statement in the discipline which prohibits our clergy from doing weddings for homosexual couples, and the use of UM facilities for homosexual weddings. The UMC General Conference has made stronger and stronger statements every year they have met concerning the sin of homosexual practice and its incompatibility with the Christian Faith. It's time for them to finally "put their foot down" and refuse to consider the questions any more.

The preceding statements appear side by side on the blog of a United Methodist Church somewhere in America yesterday. The precise location is not important. The name of the church is not important. If the author of the second statement reads this blog and wants credit for his statement, I will gladly give it. I am not doing so here because I do not want to single him out.

The church is in Main Street USA. It could be almost any church anywhere. Along with its mother church, it hews to the radical middle in its message to the world.

If I were teaching an introductory class in logic for college undergraduates, I would be tempted to take these two statements, put them side by side, and then ask students to spot the logical inconsistencies that make it impossible to make the two statements simultaneously.

On the one hand, the United Methodist Church tells us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered that its mission is

▪ To invite us, nurture us, and send us forth;

▪ To invite all peoples into the church;

▪ To nurture all peoples in Christian faith and life;

▪ To build a more caring, loving, and just community and world

On the other hand, the very same church blog announcement that can make that glorious proclamation—with a straight face, I have no doubt—can say in the same breath that it is proud of its church for “putting its foot down” when it comes to its gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. The commentary appearing side by side with that glorious, warm-fuzzy mission statement can encourage the church making the mission statement to tell LGBT human beings to shut up from now on.

▪ Stop dividing the church.

▪ Stop making things difficult for the rest of us.

▪ Stop diverting us from the important business of inclusion—of inclusion of non-sinful, deserving minorities such as people of color and women.

▪ Stop rubbing our noses in it, asking us to face it.

▪ Stop whining and staging demonstrations.

▪Stop pointing out our inconsistencies and challenging our honesty when we make statements of Christian practice that, on the face of it, are impossible to hold together.

Just go away. Find a church that is actually tolerant and inclusive—not like our church. Yes, I read just that statement, in so many words, on another blog yesterday, which was discussing the decisions of General Conference. It was a response to a gay brother in Christ who had spilled his guts out about how the decisions at General Conference deeply disappointed him, cut him to the core of his being.

The statement was made by a white Southern Methodist man who proudly proclaimed himself a heterosexual, who is tempted in his “thought world,” but doesn’t submit to sin and can’t endorse homosexual brothers and sisters who ask to have their actual sins excused because of their sexual orientation.

In other words, the statement emanates from the power center of Methodism (and the white male heterosexist power center of society). It is, in some sense, a core statement of the church (and of culture), from those who have traditionally held the reins of power in the church (and in the culture at large).

If I were using the preceding two side-by-side statements in a class in elementary logic, to examine how people can profess one thing while practicing another, I would expect students to note some of the following points:

▪ It’s impossible to say that you invite and want to nurture people when you also talk about holding the line against them and goad them to leave your community;

▪ You can’t invite and nurture people you don’t let in the door;

▪ Not recognizing people’s full human rights (not giving them any legal protection from discrimination in hiring and firing in your church and its institutions, for instance; not ordaining openly gay and lesbian ministers; etc.) is actually a way of not inviting and not nurturing “all peoples”;

Since the church making these two simultaneous statements to its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters also professes to root its teachings in the gospel, I would expect my students to ask about whether the two statements mirror the teaching and practice of Jesus. Logical consistency demands such conformity to the tradition one professes to draw upon in one’s statement to contemporary society.

For instance, I’d expect them to ask if statements like “hold the line” and “put your foot down” echo sayings of Jesus. I’d want my students to comb the gospels for evidence that Jesus told anyone who came to him that he was putting his foot down and holding the line against them.

I’d hope that my students would read the gospels carefully for any evidence that Jesus disinvited people (why not leave and find a church that’s really tolerant and inclusive?), at the same time that he invited them.

I’d expect my students to conclude the following: Something’s wrong with this picture. Something's radically wrong with the picture that the church of the radical middle wants to project to the world.

▪ The churches cannot profess one thing and practice another—not, that is, and expect to be believed;

▪ All the beautiful words in the world—wonderful words of life—don’t mean a hill of beans when they are belied by practices that undercut the beautiful words;

Among the critical questions I’d expect my class to ask as it concluded its exercise in logical inconsistency would be the following:

▪ How and why do human beings profess to invite and nurture, while excluding and demeaning?

▪ Can flowery religious language turn into demonic language when it is used as a smokescreen for actual practices that are anything but flowery?

▪ Is the impulse in the radical middle of American Christianity today to hold the line—and to disinvite gay brothers and sisters from the table—really about keeping ourselves in the radical middle comfortable: comfortable with the way things are, or how we wish to imagine that they are?

▪ Is the besetting sin for which we in the radical middle want to exclude our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters ultimately that they make us uncomfortable: that they raise troubling questions about gender lines and gender roles that we do not want to face in the radical middle?

▪ Should churches be about making people comfortable or uncomfortable?

▪ Which did Jesus aim at in his own ministry?

▪ When agendas of demonization and exclusion can be tracked to political activist groups whose ultimate agenda is protecting the powerful and wealthy from the demands of the gospel, do churches that capitulate to those agendas serve or violate the gospel?

▪ Can churches preach justice (or inclusion, or mercy) in any area of human life, when they practice injustice, exclusion, and savage cruelty in their own intraecclesial life?

Again, these are not merely questions for Methodists. They are questions I press in my own communion, the Catholic Church, which has repeatedly proven itself capable of precisely the same duplicity General Conference has just endorsed while “holding the line” and “putting its foot down” against gay human beings and simultaneously decrying discrimination.

And the same time, groups that try to divide the Methodist church are also fiercely active in my own church, like roaring lions seeking to devour. They are roaring now about giving the Eucharist to brothers and sisters in Christ who do not toe their political party line. They are ravenously hungry following the recent papal visit, to punish selected bishops who, in their mind, did not hold the line. They are doing all they can to coerce those bishops to say they were wrong for not denouncing the ill-favored brothers and sisters who went to communion while the pope was here. Money is changing hands behind the scenes, dirty money. Midnight phone conferences are being held. The media are being bought, when they are willing to sell themselves for dirty money.

The battles going on in the UMC are going on in all the American churches. They divide the nation at its very heart, asking us to examine our heritage and decide whether we are a people who welcome or repudiate the Other.

We are both. We have been both from our inception. The question before the churches is whether, in our divided soul, in our radical middle, we will be governed by the better angels of our nature, or by the ravenous, devouring-lion angels.

And as the battle rages, those of us caught in the crossfire grow weary. We do so in the very marrow of our bones. Unlike many of my UMC brothers and sisters, I had no hope at all that the United Methodist Church would radically revise its position on homosexuality—its approach to its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters—at this General Conference.

I knew in my bones otherwise. These are my people, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. I know them. I have also worked in Methodist institutions and have an outsider’s perspective on the huge disparity between the noble rhetoric, the wonderful flowery words of life, and what they actually mean in practice.

I bear the stripes of that disparity on my back. As in my dealings with my Catholic brothers and sisters, I have been told in Methodist institutions that I am corrupt and dishonest—when I would rather have my tongue plucked out than dishonor myself and my family by knowingly telling a lie.

When we refuse to vanish, when we keep on using the tongues God gave us to speak the truth and witness to God's grace in our lives, this is what we must expect. This is what we who are gay and lesbian, and who retain faith, must expect at the hands of the radical middle in the churches. This is why the very idea of church grows ever more distant and repugnant to many of us.

Not the idea of Jesus, of course. But the idea of church.

And that’s where I’ll end for today: Jesus, not the church. When I read the gospels, I discover that who I am in my inmost being is who God made me to be. The gospels convince me that I count in God’s eyes, though I do not count in the eyes of the men who rule the church (or the monied men who rule them). The gospels convince me that, no matter what those churchmen or monied men do to me or say about me, nothing will ever change who I am in God’s eyes: one who counts, one who is called as much as any other believer in Christ to walk the journey of faith and testify to the faith I find on that pilgrimage.

Not all the money in the world, nor all the flowery or abusive church proclamations that can be drafted, nor all the pretend sympathy accompanied by demonstrative scorn on the part of the radical middle, nor the accusations of dishonesty made against us by churchmen bought off by utterly dishonest political operatives: none of these can stop me from reading the gospels and discovering there the certainty that God loves me, unambiguously, with open arms, no matter what the church does or says.

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.