Ellen Degeneres, the Catholic Bishops, and Losing Control of the Conversation about Spirituality

I feel pretty sure I've mentioned to readers more than once that part of my normal daily routine is to slog, slog away at a treadmill (on days when the weather or our schedule doesn't permit us a long walk) while I watch the Ellen Degeneres show on t.v.


Last fall, I got myself hooked on reruns of "3rd Rock from the Sun" after I realized that 1) the reruns were playing daily on a channel we get, and 2) we had never watched the series through to its end, when we took jobs working for a boss who turned out to be a certifiable psychopath, and who thought nothing of calling either or both of us at 2 A.M., 5 A.M., or midnight, and demanding that we either listen to her bark orders or rant over the phone, or even come immediately to her house or our offices to deal with the whims and rants du jour.

That period of several years of exceedingly hard work for Ms. Crazy put a bit of a crimp in our television watching lives, and we missed a chunk of "3rd Rock" in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  And so I forwent Ellen for "3rd Rock" for much of the past fall and winter, while taping Ellen, and am only now catching up on Ellen's Thanksgiving and Christmas shows, as I make my way forward to the present.

And here's something that strikes me as I watch and slog (and meditate, because I tell myself that's what I'm doing as I tread on the mill): almost daily in the latter months of 2011, Ellen features someone out of work, someone desperately in need of a job.  She has those constant segments in which she identifies someone out in the heartland who has lost a job, sends a team to them, and gives them money, cars, and so forth to tide them over.

Or she brings families whose parents are out of work to her show and has them tell their stories.  She also issues pleas to the general public to help the unemployed finds jobs.  She wheedles and cajoles employers to make more jobs available for the many people who are now out of work.

She's an equal-opportunity advocate when it comes to helping people in need.  More than most talk-show hosts about which I know much at all, Ellen invites guests who run the racial gamut.  She's as likely to have an African-American family in need (or African-American friends) on her show as she is to have a white guest.  

And as I think about all of this and how it affects me to take it in while I'm exercising each day, here's what's beginning to occur to me: I receive far more spiritual benefit, far more inspiration, from watching the "Ellen Degeneres Show" daily than I do from listening to anything--to anything at all--that any pastoral leader of my Catholic church has to say right now.  With Ellen, I'm in a world of spiritual and moral values familiar to me: pay attention to those in need; if you can help, by all means help in every way you can; be kind to one another (her sign-off motto); reach across the boundary lines that divide you from others and befriend those on the other side of those lines.

That's what I hear from Ellen.  By contrast, what I hear from the pastoral leaders of my Catholic church on a daily basis is something like the following: I won't give you communion at your mother's funeral because you're a lesbian; no, I can't bless your mother's coffin because it makes me sick to listen to you and your lesbian rhetoric; you have no right to contraceptives or marriage--because I say so; Christ chose all men to be apostles because he wanted his church to be ruled by men; Satan is taking over the U.S. through the feminists, homosexuals, and secular humanists, and we need to put God back into the public square and exorcise the demon-possessed; make your voting choices on the basis of abortion, because that's all that counts in the long run when we assess a political leader.

And on and on.

Do you see the picture?  What I used to imagine as the special province of my faith community and of other faith communities that exist to keep the memory of Jesus alive in the world--be kind to one another, reach across social dividing lines and make friends with those on the other side, help the poor in every way you can--is now the special province of a much-admired out lesbian television talk-show host.

While my faith community in the person of its chief shepherds has not only to a significant degree abandoned those moral imperatives, but actually does all it can to work against them as it conflates my faith tradition with hostility towards those on the social margins, overt discrimination, male domination and abuse of women, and callousness towards the poor.

Something significant has happened in American culture in recent years.  And it accounts for the finding of Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their book American Grace that large numbers of American young people are leaving the churches as fast as their feet can carry them out the door.

What choice do those young people have, I wonder, when the choice confronting them in American culture right now is the choice between a compassionate, spiritually compelling lesbian who daily advocates for those out of work, and Christian pastoral leaders whose vocabulary seems to be limited to the word no?  Who can only condemn, slam, hurt, and demean in the name of Christ . . . .

I've said repeatedly on this blog that, to my mind, the U.S. Catholic bishops have lost control of the public conversation about matters of faith and morals.  They've lost their ability to be compelling witnesses to the gospel in public conversations about those matters.

As I think about Ellen and what she represents to me and many other viewers of her show--and as I think about the mean-spirited attack of "a network of Christian moms" against Ellen and J.C. Penney's which argues that Ellen doesn't represent "traditional" Christian values--I've come to the following conclusion:

The U.S. Catholic bishops and the religious right with whom the bishops have been so eager to climb into bed haven't just lost control of the public conversation in general.  They've lost control of the conversation in a quite specific way: for entirely justifiable reasons, many American citizens no longer see the Catholic bishops and the religious right as representing spirituality that makes any sense at all from the standpoint of the various religious traditions of the world.

And as a result many of us are now turning to the riffraff of the world--to out gays and lesbians, for instance--for our spiritual training and inspiration.  Because the bishops and their religious right bed-fellows have given us no alternative.

If it's Ellen or the bishops, and priests refusing communion to a lesbian at her mother's funeral, give me Ellen.  Please.