Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "In Our Christian Heritage We Received from the Missionaries, There Is Nothing of That Inclusive Language"

David Gibson writing for Religion News Service today:

"In our Christian heritage we received from the missionaries, there is nothing of that inclusive language," Archbishop Thomas Msusa of the East African nation of Malawi told National Catholic Reporter.

Book Notes: Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year

Ronan Bennett, Havoc, in Its Third Year (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004):

Same-Sex Marriage and Families of Gay Couples: Two Theological Perspectives (and a Poem)

The video: poet Alvin Lau declaiming his poem "Full Moon" at the opening round of individual finals at the 2006 National Poetry Slam.  The poem reflects on the marriage of Lau's sister to another woman.

The Mormon Church's Shift on Gay Rights: Lessons for the Nation

There was a point I intended to make when I discussed the recent Mormon shift about gay rights a few days ago. And then I forgot to make it.

Friends who live in Utah tell me that there’s an interesting immediacy about ensuing actions, when the leaders of the LDS church make a decision about matters like the church’s response to a gay rights ordinance. When the church instructs its members to adopt a position, they tend to do so immediately and with seeming unanimity. Or so my friends who have lived in Utah for many years, some of whom are Mormon, observe.

This behavior is probably at least in part an expression of the communitarianism of the Mormon tradition about which I blogged when I talked about the shift in the church’s stance on gay rights. As a persecuted minority with beliefs regarded by the mainstream as peculiar, Mormons have tended to draw together and hold a united front.

My friends tell me the sudden response when the church makes a decision about almost anything can be astonishing. When it was decided, for instance, that the word “genealogy” is off-putting to many Americans because it is academic-sounding, and when the LDS Genealogy Library changed its name to the LDS Family History Library, my friends tell me the change was immediate.

One day, people were saying “genealogy.” The next, they were using the phrase “family history.” There was not a grandfathering-in stage. It had been decreed, and people responded accordingly.

And here’s the point I want to make about this pattern of behavior and gay rights: I seriously doubt that a majority of Mormons have suddenly developed new minds and hearts vis-à-vis their gay brothers and sisters. But they have shifted their behavior externally through their support for the Salt Lake City gay rights ordinance. And that’s significant.

I’ve noted before that a lesson which growing up in the Civil Rights movement taught me—this lesson is carved into my bones now—is that people will not alter their viewpoints about deeply held convictions with moral and religious overtones, until outside forces, shifts legislated by governing bodies and courts, demand that they change. And even then, what will change is not the internal disposition of people about the issue re: which they’ve been truculent. What will change is their external behavior.

You cannot decree or legislate morality. But you can decree and legislate that people adhere to canons of justice and decency, which are grounded in the public morality of civil society and essential to the well-functioning of civil society. You cannot legislate changes in how people choose to read their holy books. But you can legislate and hand down judicial decisions about what people are permitted to do on the basis of those holy books within the context of civil societies based on canons of just and decent behavior towards all citizens.

I suspect that many Mormons will take a long time to reassess what they think about and how they treat those who are gay. I also think that the implementation of a decision by the church, acting with the city, which forbids discrimination is extremely important—and that this model provides an instructive lesson to the rest of American society, at a time in which people have conveniently forgotten that almost every time the rights of a targeted minority have been subjected to popular vote over the course of American history, people have predictably attacked those rights.

This is, unfortunately, simply how people behave, given the chance. It is important to many people—many people have built their entire self image around this presupposition—to have the “right” to attack and demean those tagged as other. Something fundamental to the human psyche predisposes people, if they’re given the chance, to identify minority groups as other in a threatening way, and then to savage and exclude those groups.

I’ve noted before on this blog that, when it comes to theological positions on civil society, I lean in an Augustinian direction. I am convinced that Augustine was essentially correct when he called human societies, in the City of God, dens of thieves and thugs, latrocinia.

Augustine believed that, given the sway of sin in human nature and human life, social groups left to themselves inevitably permit the powerful to oppress the weak. In his view, the state exists primarily to mitigate the effects of original sin in the behavior of human beings in social groups. The state’s primary function is to assure that society not degenerate to the level of a latrocinium in which the powerful will be permitted to treat the weak as despised objects.

As Reinhold Niebuhr (a strong Augustinian) once said, the doctrine of original sin is the one empirical doctrine in the church’s teachings. There is abundant empirical evidence that Augustine was absolutely right when he noted that, left to our own devices, we will invariably build societies in which the wealthy and powerful are permitted to treat the poor and powerless like despised objects.

Just as there is abundant evidence that, given the “right” to vote away the rights of targeted minorities, the majority will predictably exercise its “right” to do precisely that. There is even abundant empirical evidence, sadly, that minorities that have previously been subjected to this excruciating humiliation will turn around and subject another vulnerable minority to exactly the same treatment, given the chance to exercise their “right” to bash. Until someone with the authority to demand that the majority adhere to the fundamental norms of justice and decency essential to civil society comes along and stops the exercises in minority-bashing.

I argued the other day that the Mormon church may well have supported Salt Lake’s gay rights ordinance not only because doing so is good for the gay community. I noted that the LDS church may have taken this step because it recognizes that building a society in which the humanity and rights of all are respected is good for everyone—and that building such a society is fitting for a religious group that believes it is building Zion in the world.

American society in general could learn a lot from the step the Mormons have just taken. Unfortunately, those in whose hands power resides at the federal level—those with the power to spur legislative and judicial regulations that prohibit the continued (and atrocious) public referendum about the rights and humanity of gay citizens—seem oblivious to their responsibility to challenge such behavior.

Augustine and Croaking Frogs: America Magazine on Sectarian Catholics

America has just uploaded to its website an editorial entitled “Sectarian Catholicism” (here), and it’s a fine statement—a powerful one. It notes the strong parallels between the situation of U.S. Catholicism today and African Catholicism in the period in which Augustine confronted a purist group, the Donatists, who declared themselves the only right and true church, and implicitly excommunicated the rest of the church.

Augustine strongly opposed the notion that a group of ideological purists who refused a place in their church to anyone outside their small circle constituted the church. He notes that the church is to be like Noah’s ark, with representatives of every species brought inside. (This is an idea that, by the way, ought to compel churches and their pastors to assure the presence of gay and lesbian persons in the churches.)

In City of God, he also writes (here and here) that none of us will know with certainty whether we are among the saved or the unsaved until God’s final winnowing at the end of history. In fact, he says, some of those now most confident that they alone are the saved may well discover in the end that they have not been among the saved at all.

Augustine stressed the catholicity of the church: its obligation to reach out to and include everyone, its welcome to sinners and not merely to the pure and the righteous. As America suggests, while claiming to be more authentically traditional and more truly Catholic than anyone else, some contemporary American Catholics have constructed a tiny, defensive little shell of church that is very much like what Augustine decried in the Donatists, while he sought to defend the notion of catholicity.

And, for these smaller-purer church types, what seems to count in the final analysis, even more than doctrine, is political loyalty—loyalty to their party, and to their ideological interpretation of what that party stands for:

For today’s sectarians, it is not adherence to the church’s doctrine on the evil of abortion that counts for orthodoxy, but adherence to a particular political program and fierce opposition to any proposal short of that program. They scorn Augustine’s inclusive, forgiving, big-church Catholics, who will not know which of them belongs to the City of God until God himself separates the tares from the wheat. Their tactics, and their attitudes, threaten the unity of the Catholic Church in the United States, the effectiveness of its mission and the credibility of its pro-life activities.

These sectarian Catholics have radically impaired the American Catholic church and now threaten its viability by attacking, in particular, those called by the Spirit to help the community remember, understand, and transmit its beliefs and core values to subsequent generations. They have targeted Catholic thinkers, theologians, and universities that foster careful study and interpretation of our beliefs and core values. They have selected a handful of rigid, intellectually bankrupt Catholic colleges and universities as the only "truly" Catholic schools left in the nation, because these schools have been willing to sell themselves lock, stock, and barrel to the Republican party and its wealthy promoters.

In the view of the editors of America, the Vatican itself is now concerned about the damage these politicized sectarians are doing to the American church. America notes that, while some bishops and a significant proportion (though by no means a majority) of American Catholics wish to punish Notre Dame for inviting the president to its commencement, Pope Benedict has twice reached out to Obama, met with and maintains ties to Nancy Pelosi, and participated in a ceremony to honor New Mexico governor Bill Richardson after he abolished the death penalty, though Richardson does not toe the official Catholic party line about the politics of abortion.

The subtext of the America editorial is that the church in the U.S. is in serious trouble, unless it can disengage itself from the highly politicized, sectarian, ideological purists who have dominated it for some decades now. This group of Catholics, who have come to believe that they alone own the church and that it must conform to their narrow agenda, refuse to relinquish control even after the most recent elections showed that they are by no means in the majority in the American Catholic church. They continue their use of destructive slash-and-burn political tactics designed to drive thoughtful, non-ideological fellow Catholics away from the church.

And if they continue unchecked, the handwriting on the wall is clear: the American Catholic church will not have a bright future. As my posting on this theme yesterday notes (here), one in ten American adults is now a former Catholic, and four times as many Catholics are leaving the church as are now entering it.

This is a church in crisis, and that crisis will only deepen in years to come. What those who take heart in the finding that 68% of American Catholics remain Catholic do not note—and apparently do not wish to note—is the sharp demographic gap in the current Catholic population. The 68% remaining Catholic are aging Catholics.

And they are not being replaced by younger Catholics. The decline among younger Catholics continuing their affiliation with the Catholic church even into early adulthood is precipitous. And it is growing. And it will grow rapidly, if the Catholic church in the U.S. continues to permit itself to be identified with the Republican party, and, even more, with the right wing of that party.

The internet has been abuzz the past several days with articles noting that Republican groups are meeting to address the decline of the Republican party. Some of these articles state that Republicans are perplexed that they have so quickly achieved minority status and appear now headed to an even more marginal place in the nation’s political life.

I’m perplexed in turn when I read that. Just as I’m perplexed by the seeming inability of some of the pastors of the American Catholic church for some time now not to see where the church is headed: to demise. How can people not see what is right before them, and how can they not adapt when their present course is clearly leading to their annihilation? To my eyes, it has been very clear that the future of the nation does not lie with right-wing political and religious extremists, and that the future of the American Catholic church does not rest in the hands of those groups, either.

I’ve always thought that true pastoral acumen and real religious insight gives the pastor or the believer a feel for the future, an ability to see the direction in which the Spirit is moving. To my way of thinking, the inability of many of the leaders of the American Catholic church to see the cul-de-sac into which they have been leading the church for some time now is a strong indicator of lack of pastoral acumen, and/or a failure to listen carefully to the Spirit.

And the upshot is now that, through their blind captivity to people who have not sought to and are incapable of building a viable future for our nation, the leaders of American Catholicism have already alienated millions of us who once thought we might find a spiritual home in the church. As a postscript here, I'd like to add a note for readers who may be picking up the conversation on this blog only in recent days, and who may think I'm an active, practicing Catholic who is arguing that it is possible for one to remain Catholic while accepting oneself as a gay or lesbian person.

I'm adding this postscript because of some questions readers have sent me by email—very welcome questions. To those new to the blog, I'd like to note that I'm someone who has found himself pushed outside the Catholic church by the sectarian process the America editorial is describing.

This has much to do with the fact that I'm gay and have lived my adult life with another gay theologian. The church has not made a place for us, and does not intend to make a place for us. We have been made to know we are unwelcome in a number of ways, but most clearly of all by the refusal of any Catholic institution to provide us with a place in which to pursue our vocation as theologians. People have to eat in order to live. The church cannot tell people it welcomes them when, at the same time, it excludes them from economic life.

As numerous postings on this blog indicate, I have come to the conclusion that it is almost impossible for any openly gay person to remain in healthy contact with the Catholic church today. I do admire those who manage to maintain that contact, and I think that they are doing a valuable service both to the gay community and to the Catholic church by struggling to exist within an institution that is, on the whole, destructive of gay souls and gay lives.

I have also become aware, through my experiences in a United Methodist institution, that the dynamic of exclusion and destruction I am describing is not limited to the Catholic church. It runs through many Christian churches today, in their approach to gay and lesbian persons. The churches are, on the whole, the least safe place in American culture today for those of us who are gay and lesbian. To their shame . . . .

I do, however, continue to write about the churches, their ties to the political realm, and gay issues, because I think that it is impossible for anyone who is gay or lesbian in the U.S. to ignore the churches and their effect on our culture. In this nation with the soul of a church, that effect is considerable, and for the LGBT community, it is often horrendous. We ignore churches and church life at our peril.

Finally, as with many LGBT persons though not all of us, I think that spirituality is a component of a healthy human life. I do not think that spirituality is confined or has to be confined to any particular religious expression. I understand those who turn their backs on religion altogether, when the face that religious groups persistently show us is a cruel, demonic one. I also think it is possible to find within the religions of the world, and within the Christian churches, authentic expressions of spiritual life that can nurture us as gay persons, though we have an obligation to sift through much of the heritage of religions and churches and combat whatever is destructive to us and others in that heritage, as we seek the authentic components.

Jindal on Obama: A Betrayal of Catholic Tradition about the Role of Government

Returning for a moment to Andrew Sullivan’s blog today (here): Sullivan links to a discussion by David Brooks at Direct Democracy of Bobby Jindal’s response to President Obama’s speech last night (here):

Brooks argues against Jindal, and for government—and in doing so, he demonstrates the deep fissures developing these days between the hidebound ideologues of the intransigent right, and more moderate conservatives like himself who realize that the intransigence is a manifestation of intellectual bankruptcy on the right.

Brooks states (re: Jindal’s response),

But to come up at this moment in history with a stale "government is the problem," "we can't trust the federal government" - it's just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we're just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say "government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending," it's just a form of nihilism (my emphases).

Precisely. This is why I’ve drawn attention to the rich strand of thought within some Christian traditions, including the Catholic tradition, about the necessity of government in a fallen world. As I noted some time back when I compared Mike Huckabee’s use of the two-cities metaphor of St. Augustine, Huckabee does not have a clue re: what Augustine was talking about in his classic City of God (here).

Augustine argued that, in a fallen world, the powerful will always try to lord it over the weak. In his view, the only safeguard against that tendency is to create strong governmental structures that hold in check the arrogance, greed, and inhumanity of the powerful, and that defend the weak.

The story I told in my first posting today, about how people of color were treated throughout the American South in the Jim Crow period, as the majority trampled on the rights of the minority and used law to justify its abuse: that’s a story about what happens when there is not a strong central government structure in a society committed to defending the rights of the weak against the powerful. It was not until the federal government stepped in and forced the Southern states to accord civil rights to black citizens and to integrate schools that things began to change.

In key respects, Catholic conservatives of the right who have bought into neoconservative ideology about government as the problem in recent years have betrayed Catholic tradition, though they frequently paint themselves as the only authentic Catholics left in the nation. Jindal is Catholic. He is a Catholic who would, it appears, refuse resources provided his state by the federal government to help those in need in his state, to prove an ideological point.

This is obscene. It is morally indefensible. It is a form of idolatry, a worship of a bloody idol who asks us to sacrifice the lives and future of those in need to uphold the claims of the ideological figure we worship.

It is not what the gospels are about, or what Christian tradition is about, at its best. As David Brooks says, only the federal government is big enough to get us out of the mess that several decades of hidebound neoconservative ideology have gotten us into, with the foolish claim that government is the problem, and the fatuous trust in the rich that this claim implies. It's a pity, indeed, that it has taken some of us so long to see this, while well-nigh irreparable damage has been done to our democracy and its institutions.

Hucktown and Yourtown: Mike Huckabee Rewrites The City of God

Read some of the classical writers of the formative period of Christianity—say, Augustine of Hippo—and then read some of the folks who claim to represent those classical authorities today—say Mike Huckabee—and tell me you don’t come away from that exercise asking yourself what damn'-fool school ever credentialed those contemporary defenders of orthodoxy and tradition. Mike Huckabee has written a book. Yes, Mike Huckabee has written a book! It’s called Do the Right Thing (for a review, see www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=e39dc08a-ba73-403b-80e6-41675d686a41). And it ever so coyly walks in the footsteps of a distinguished ancestor, Augustine, with his famous City of God.

Augustine’s City of God employs an imaginative framework of two cities to analyze the challenge believers face as they pass through history. Building on biblical texts such as the book of Hebrews with its insistence that here we have no lasting city, Augustine argues that the journey of believers through history is a journey towards a never-realized city in which God’s ways prevail. Believers live in both a here-now and a not-yet moment: Christians announce a salvation that has already entered history in Christ, but which has not fully arrived in history and will not do so until the final coming of Christ at the end of history.

Augustine wisely advises Christians to live in the here and now, even as they journey towards the eschatological completion of the world: to live in the city of men while aspiring to the city of God. What is yet to be in history—the city of God—does not negate what is here and now—the city of man. The city of God is formed from the city of man through the diligence of believers who take the world as it is and seek to reshape it through their faith.

Augustine also argues that God alone knows who belongs to what city, and that this will become apparent only at the end of history. In Augustine’s theology, some of us who are quite certain we live exclusively in the city of God here and now will be shown to occupy a very different location at the end of history. And some of those we are intent on excluding from the city of God now will turn out to have been living there all along, when history is complete.

The job of believers is, in Augustine’s view, to live in the tension of history, in the ambivalent, murky circumstances of history, while moving towards the goals faith shows them. Believers are called to get their hands dirty, to work, to recognize the complexity of a world that is full of grace but not yet re-fashioned according to grace. Believers live in a fallen world and must spin strategies for living in and making the most of that fallen world, even as they aspire to the city of God, Augustine believes.

In his modern-day retelling of Augustine’s profound meditation on living the Christian faith in a fallen world, Rev. Mike Huckabee also tells a story of two cities—Hucktown and Yourtown. Hucktown is the World According to Huck. It is the world in which Christians rule. It is Rev. Huckabee’s world. It will be your world, if you let Rev. Huckabee rule.

Hucktown is full of righteous believers living righteously, eschewing liquor and drugs, attending church on Sundays, obeying traffic laws: think Mayberry with the 10 commandments on every wall. Think the grand city of God transformed into a cramped small-town Southern WASP paradise: think limited options for limited minds, defined as the only possible options for righteous believers. Think of that small world of limited options policed by limited minds, posturing as the world as it should be for everyone.

Yourtown is, well, the opposite. It is that old wicked city-trope so beloved of American ruralists; it is that venerable trope sporting new theocratic clothes. The city as imagined for generations by frightened American ruralists who seek to draw invidious comparisons between corrupt urban America and God-fearing rural America, between the coasts and the heartland . . . . Yourtown is American culture gone hog-wild with freedom from theocratic restraints: drinking, experimenting with sex, watching picture shows and painting up faces, doing the shim sham and sleeping in on Sunday with a feckless heathen never-no-mind.

Yourtown is, in short, what most folks call the real world, the world in which most people around the world live on a daily basis. It is most anyplace in the world, the fallen world that doesn’t dance to the rarefied tune of saviors from the small-town South like Rev. Huckabee who are oh so confident that they model salvation for the rest of us. Yourtown is the city of Man. Hucktown is the city of God. In Huck's dreams.

As this brief sketch of how Augustine and Huckabee propose that the believer is called to live in history suggests, in their transmission to contemporary saviors of orthodoxy, something has happened to the grand ideas of the formative period of Christian history. That something is akin to what might happen if, say, the classic French recipe for boeuf bourgignon appeared on a can of Campbell’s soup, with the suggestion that one can recreate the classic recipe niftily with the help of a can of Campbell’s onion soup and a package of dried gravy mix. Something—flavor, perhaps? subtlety? authenticity? the real thing, for godsake!—has gotten a wee bit lost in the transmission.

The gap between what Augustine thought and what Huckabee proposes is nowhere so apparent as in their views on the place of government in this fallen world. Huckabee glibly repeats the mindless mantra of neoconservatism, the mindless self-serving mantra of a neoconservatism that does not wish to be encumbered with moral obligations in the economic sphere: “When self-government works, it's about the only government one needs.”

Augustine, by contrast, could not have been clearer about the need for government—for strong and effective government—in the fallen world we inhabit as we pass through history. City of God suggests that the world in which we find ourselves often functions as a latrocinium, a den of thieves. It is in the nature of a fallen world filled with fallen people to degenerate into a den of thieves in which the powerful prey on the weak—unless some higher authority checks the predictable tendency of the powerful to lord it over the weak.

In Augustine’s view, fallen people need government—good government, strong government—precisely because they are fallen. Government exists to check the sad human tendency of the powerful to oppress the powerless. Government is there to assure that the powerless have an advocate, structures to shield them from the oppression of the powerful. Government is necessary in a fallen world to mitigate the effects of sin.

No one can pursue the city of God in a world in which the powerful have unchecked power to do what they will. Such a world—Huckabee’s world, the world of neoconservative ideologues and their “Christian” apologists—will always degenerate into a den of thieves in which those who have will prey ruthlessly on those who do not have. Government—good government, strong government—builds toward the city of God by permitting the have nots to fulfill their destinies, claim their personhood, offer their talents.

Brother Huckabee’s theology betrays core values of classic Christianity. It glibly discards core values, even as it claims to be the only possible representation of orthodoxy today. It does so by cozying up shamelessly to political ideologies centered on economic ruthlessness, ideologies that are all about the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Huckabee and his bedfellows of the religious right want to give those ideologies a free pass, and to call that free pass divine sanction.

This is why, in the final analysis, those unschooled but powerful spokespersons of the religious right, who betray the tradition they vociferously claim to represent in an exclusive way, have the ear of the mainstream media in the United States (on this, see yesterday's posting at http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/questions-that-wont-die-vatican-and.html). They do so because that media is owned, lock, stock, and barrel by those economic overlords the Bro. Gov. and his bedfellows serve so faithfully. As long as they provide religious rationales for the ruthless exploitation of the poor—well, of almost everyone in our economically lopsided society—by the rich, they will continue to pop up on every talk show imaginable, spewing their unorthodox nonsense in the name of saving orthodoxy.

As long as the media continue to permit their consciences to be lobotomized by those who have overweening economic clout in this nation, Rev. Huckabee and Rick Warren and countless other grinning theocratic chimps in the employ of the mighty will continue to look downright cute to the mainstream media. Lovable. Harmless (they only target the gays, after all). As Huckabee does to A.J. Jacobs of Esquire: “He’s the most likable politician I’ve ever met . . . . [H]e's so damn folksy and kind and self-deprecating that the liberal media (i.e., me) just want to hug him” (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2009/01/the_mighty_huck_1.aspx#comments).

Aw pshaw. Well, at least in Huckstertown, we’ll be blessedly free of sodomy: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/12/huckabee-not-pro-gay. Well, of the kind of sodomy that involves actual anal sex, that is—if not of the kind that involves figurative (and forcible) anal rape of most of us by those who have in abundance. Huckabee and Huckstertown are concerned, you understand, about the really important moral challenges facing people of faith today . . . .

Theological Reflections on Gay Marriage: Prologue

Yesterday the Huffington Post blog site posted a link to a Ruth Gledhill article in the Times (London), which publishes some of Rowan Williams’ 2000-2001 letters to a member of his former diocese in Wales (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4473814.ece). The current Archbishop of Canterbury wrote the letters while Archbishop of Wales.

In the letters, Rowan Williams states that after two decades of study and prayer, he had reached a “definitive conclusion” about gay marriage: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.”

It is hardly accidental that this correspondence is being released now, as the Lambeth Conference has just closed. There are incredible, terrible pressures from all quarters for the Anglican communion, and, in particular, its American Episcopalian branch, to “repent” of its welcome of gay* persons. Media coverage during the conference noted that some members of the Anglican communion are taunting other members for allowing the Anglican church to be known as the gay church—as if any church standing in solidarity with Jesus should find it embarrassing to be ridiculed for standing with any despised and marginalized group.

As I have noted before, in my view, future generations of believers, as well as historians, will look back on this period of history in bafflement that this issue above all—the need to define gay human beings as the despised and excluded others—should have energized the Christian churches at the turn of the 21st century. Believers of the future and historians will surely ask how it was possible for large numbers of those who claim to follow Jesus to have imagined that excluding anyone—in ugly, obtrusive, taunting, demeaning ways—could be not merely the prerogative but the holy duty of a follower of Jesus.

If civilization perdures beyond the current period, then civilized people will have to ask, as Rowan Williams himself does in his 2000-2001 correspondence, why Christians ever thought it possible to make persecution of gay human beings “the sole or primary marker of Christian orthodoxy”—when Jesus himself never once mentions homosexuality. And when Jesus himself preaches constantly that practical compassion, the kind he practiced by sitting at table with despised sinners, is the hallmark of true religion.

Reading about Rowan Williams’ honest, carefully and painfully discerned, assessment of gay unions (as opposed to the official stance he is pressured to take as an archbishop trying desperately to hold the Anglican communion together) encourages me to try to capture some theological reflections about gay marriage that I have been developing since the recent California Supreme Court decision. These musings reflect ongoing discussions at the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) blog café, in which some contributors defend the traditional hard line of Catholic teaching that all homosexual acts are intrinsically evil because they are not ordered to procreation, and others propose that marriage exists primarily to resolve social issues that arise when couples have children (see http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1046, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1968, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1919, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1816).

My musings also reflect the predictable, but nonetheless disappointing, decision of the California Catholic bishops to release a statement on 1 August calling on Catholics in that state to throw their weight behind Proposition 8—the amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage (www.cacatholic.org/news/proposition-8-on-californias-november-ballot.html). (Can conferences of bishops be wrong, even immoral in their conclusions? The Austrian bishops’ endorsement of Hitler in 1938 certainly proves that they can be spectacularly wrong—even defending morally indefensible positions.

When conferences of bishops are spectacularly wrong, and defend immoral positions, can faithful Catholics reject those positions? Franz Jäggerstätter certainly thought so—and paid the ultimate price for following his conscience against the moral advice of the priests and bishops who advised him to serve the Nazis.)

Before I launch into the theme of gay marriage, a proviso: I may very well be offering thoughts here that have been worked through a lot more systematically by other theologians, including other openly gay ones. I need to confess that I simply don’t read a lot of theology these days—haven’t done so for some time.

This has everything to do with the experience of marginalization, with feeling pushed beyond the boundaries of what is considered right and proper within the church and the theological academies that continue to dance to the church’s tune. But it also has to do with what feeds my theological imagination and my heart: truth be told, that never has been theology, except in the case of a few classical authors whose prose I find irresistible, including Augustine and John Henry Newman.

No, I’m not much of a theologian. I am, though, a reader. Always have been; always will be. I read indiscriminately—history, novels, poetry, drama, blogs, diaries, cookbooks, the backs of cereal boxes. And many of those sources fire my theological imagination far more than does any theological work I’ve ever read. I’ve learned more theology from Jane Austen than I’ll ever learn from Lonergan.

There was a time in which I read a few gay theologians—notably John McNeill. I did so during the period in which I was struggling to decide how to deal with the brute and immovable fact that my first, and decisive, experience of falling in love was not “right”—it was oriented to the direction of intrinsic disorder, and nothing I sought to do could change that direction.

Yet the direction resulted in such gifts in my life that it seemed downright ungrateful to the Creator to reject those gifts—and myself—when the gifts were precisely what Paul calls the fruits of the Spirit: the love I experienced brought me joy, peace, a generosity of soul that I did not have when I cramped myself into the self-hating box the church calls sanctity for gay people. And the more I came to terms with myself and the recognition that God was the giver of these gifts, the more the gifts seemed to abound—though, at the same time, the more the outright rejection and scorn of many in the Christian community also seemed to grow, in direct proportion to my struggle to claim my identity and my love as God-given.

I did read John McNeill in this period, and benefited greatly from his work. My ignorance of other gay theologians has nothing at all to do with disdain for their work. It has more to do with my inability to find much that feeds my spirit in a great deal of the theology published today. It also has something to do with a kind of test I set myself during that coming-out struggle: a test to find my own path without allowing the arguments of openly gay theologians to sway my conclusions, should those conclusions be flat wrong, and should the church be right in its condemnation of me and my ilk.

(I have always deplored ghettoization. I resisted the label of ‘gay theologian’ for a long time, not because I wanted to remain closeted, but because, at some level, it simply shouldn’t make a difference, one’s sexual orientation. I’m a theologian who happens to be gay. Just as I happen to be Southern, Anglo, a pretty good cook, an exceedingly impatient human being, and so on. Nonetheless, if part of the price the mainstream makes me pay for claiming and celebrating who God makes me and the love God has given me, then I am happy to be known as a gay theologian.)

Finally, I haven’t really read other openly gay theologians carefully in recent years, because Steve and I donated our entire theological library—which did include quite a few books by gay theologians that I had bought without ever reading—to Philander Smith College a few years ago. Philander Smith is a small, struggling Methodist HBCU. It needed to build its library in the years in which we worked there, because its accrediting body had cited the library’s weakness on a previous accreditation visit.

Since Steve and I collaborated with several other faculty members on an NEH grant that resulted in a hefty gift to the college to buy books in the field of humanities, it began to seem right and just to us that we put our own money where our mouth was, and give our cherished theology books to the library. For Steve, this was a more painful sacrifice than for me, because he had collected very good books systematically over a period of years.

For me, the sacrifice came more from losing a few books that were old friends—in particular, the social gospel collection I had gathered for my dissertation work, in the margins of which I had made copious annotations I’d like one day to see again.

And here I think I’ll break this lengthy posting into two, so that my reflections on gay marriage form the second part of the posting . . . .

* Generic use of the term to include LGBT persons in general.