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 21st 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.
Brilliant series of essays. I think the point you make in this essay needs to be re-emphasised. For some sectors, getting nowhere is gettin somewhere. Gays may not be getting somewhere, but some other interests are certainly getting somewhere.
ReplyDeleteUntil the average person begins to understand how brazenly the right has used their fears, our democracy is in the cross hairs of
becoming class stratified. It's only the truly homophobic who refuse to get this because their homophobia lets them think they are part of the upper class. What a prefabricated joke. Peace, love, and joy Colleen
Colleen, thank you for bearing with my "verborhea." Writing (for me) is like following a lighted torch up a steep hill in pitch-black night: you go where it leads, even though the path is non-existent, because you have no other choice.
ReplyDeleteI have been pouring my heart out because I feel there is so much to be said these days, and that "so much" intersects with important conversations going on in our culture. The churches should be involved in these conversations, rather than letting themselves be gridlocked (silenced) at this point in history.
I appreciate both your feedback and your kind words about what I am writing these days.