Holy Conferencing as Soul Work: Witness of Johnetta Betsch Cole (#2)

My fourth reason for pointing my discussions of holy conferencing to Johnetta Betsch Cole’s “touch the soul” image has to do with the conflicted way in which African-American women today are addressing issues of homophobia—an issue I intend to address in more detail in a subsequent posting. For now, what I want to note is that in a very real sense, the disparity of viewpoints among African-American women today about this issue mirrors and reflects the disparity of viewpoints in churches of the radical middle that currently experience gridlock as they try to negotiate these issues, a gridlock resulting from their inability to come to any accord on the reality of LGBT brothers and sisters in their lives.

The various ways in which African-American women today are choosing to deal with the reality of LGBT brothers and sisters in our midst illuminate the options facing churches today. They also underscore the importance of developing methods of holy conferencing and sacred conversation that allow people of varying viewpoints to talk, study, and pray together about these issues—without harming those already harmed by social structures.

This principle of not doing harm is, in my view, a guiding principle of conferencing or conversation that wants to call itself holy or sacred. It is a principle rooted in the theology of John Wesley himself. It is also a significant stumbling block for the current practice of holy conferencing in the United Methodist Church.

In the aftermath of the remark at this General Conference that our LGBT brothers and sisters are the spawn of the devil, I have done as much research as possible to try to understand how any conferencing that calls itself holy can permit—can what is permitted is also elicited—such an attack on an already marginalized group of human beings.

Here’s what I find: there is a plethora of ground rules for United Methodist holy conferencing out there. Delegates to General Conference are enjoined to be nice, to think about the effect of their words on others, to listen, to avoid getting heated before responding, and so forth.

These are, of course, admirable norms for any conversation that wants to aim at sacred discernment. They are not, however, enough.

The ground rules that I can discover for United Methodist holy conferencing, as it is currently practiced, lack critical norms to sort clear fiction from clear truth. They lack critical norms that offset the tendency of a cultural group with overweening power in its hands to ride roughshod over other groups. The ground rules for holy conferencing, as it is currently practiced in the United Methodist Church, are not capable of creating a safe space in which LGBT persons can reveal themselves, their real, human lives, their struggles within the church, without fear of stigmatization and reprisal.

The culture at large has made it unthinkable to identify people of color or women as spawn of the devil. Because cultural discourse rules now widely recognize this kind of language as a vicious unmerited attack on groups of human beings who struggle with prejudice (that is, to be precise, as hate speech), church gatherings for holy conferencing do not legitimate—they do not permit or elicit—such language.

Anyone using this kind of discourse about women or people of color in the context of holy conferencing would quickly be ruled out of order. More precisely, this kind of language would not even be brought to the floor in holy conferencing at present, because of cultural developments that make it impossible to utter in church contexts.

It is, however, still possible to speak of LGBT human beings as the spawn of the devil, because society itself still legitimates a discourse of contempt for and hostility to LGBT persons: terms like “pansy” can still be bandied about with impunity even by prominent political leaders in our culture, because the culture itself legitimates the use of these terms, and churches do not raise their voices in protest. With regard to what may be said about (and therefore done to) LGBT human beings, the morality of “because we can” still prevails.

And in a church context, it is still possible (because the attitudes and discourse of churches incorporate unreflective cultural bias, unless there are critical norms to expose and eradicate such bias) not only to imagine the possibility of hearing LGBT persons called the spawn of the devil in holy conferencing. It is also possible, in the church context, to see gay and lesbian persons who call on the churches to make such hate speech unthinkable in the context of holy conferencing reproached for being “angry,” “bitter,” or “hurtful,” when they combat discourse that would not be permitted by the churches at all, if its object were women or people of color!

In the aftermath of the most recent General Conference, I have read several online statements from LGBT United Methodists apologizing for expressing dismay, hurt, or anger at how these brothers and sisters were treated at General Conference—as if they are the source of the problem the United Methodist Church now faces in its holy conferencing. As if they elicit the scornful discourse—the hate speech—that is permitted and elicited by this "holy" conferencing . . . I have not noticed similar apologies or commitments to refrain from being hurtful on the part of the large number of delegates who held the line at the recent General Conference.

The right wing of the American political landscape, including its church representative the religious right, has been very adroit about setting the terms for conversation, including holy conversation, regarding our LGBT brothers and sisters. When it is an African or a Latin American making the charge that a gay or lesbian brother or sister is the spawn of the devil, the right wing immediately cries foul if anyone seeks to rule such language off-limits.

Flabby and nebulous love-everyone language—language that lacks critical tools to establish boundaries for discerning the truth—about holy conferencing provides a wide door through which the religious right is perfectly willing to ride in order to disrupt holy conferencing and to gridlock the discernment process (and the future) of the churches it targets. Though most mainstream churches have long since recognized that defending cultural diversity does not mean accepting every attitude or norm in any culture anywhere in the world, the religious right (and its allies in the media) are adroit about suggesting that attempts to challenge homophobia in cultures of the global South represent the imposition of elitist cultural norms of the global North on other cultures.

Though the religious right is deeply committed to keeping women in a position of subordination to males in all cultures, and though the religious right came to power on the coattails of Nixon’s Southern strategy and Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton campaign, no one charging Christians of the North with elitism when they call on Christians of the South to critique homophobia would defend female circumcision or any other grotesque expression of misogyny in a culture of the global South.

An important theological starting point for effective holy conferencing is the critical recognition that the gospel critiques all cultures—those of the North and the South equally. From a gospel standpoint, no culture anywhere in the world at any point in history fully embodies the ideals of the kingdom of God. No political party or platform absolutely encapsulates the vision of the kingdom of God. The gospel critiques all cultures and all ecclesial expressions of faith. From a theological standpoint, Africans (or Latin Americans or Asians) are subject to the same critical expectations of the gospel vis-à-vis cultural transformation as are North Americans or Europeans. The gospel transforms all cultures.

What I want to propose here is that the religious right has tamed—and ultimately, gridlocked—the sacred conversation of churches it has targeted by setting false parameters for that conversation. The ultimate agenda of the religious right in the churches it has targeted is gridlock, pure and simple—the kind of gridlock with which the most recent UMC General Conference ended.

As the religious right’s influence wanes, its attempt to gridlock the holy conferencing of churches will grow ever more feverish. Now that the religious right can no longer control the conversation as effectively as it has in the past, it will seek instead to bring the conversation to a halt. By setting a spurious boundary for the conversation that comprises holy conferencing, and by assuring that all attempts to name that boundary as false are attacked as unloving, the religious right hopes to use gridlock tactics to keep the status quo in place within churches that it targets, but can no longer control.

Gridlock is an unenviable place for a church to find itself in. Churches are in danger when they arrive at the point where they have nothing left to say to the world—nothing viable, nothing life-giving, nothing that reaches into the soul of culture and lifts out salvific strands that represent the presence of God there. The church should never arrive at the point where its only word to culture is no, any more than where its only word to the world is yes.

In conclusion, the gridlocking with which the latest UMC General Assembly ended derives, in part, from the lack of stringent “ground rules” for effective discourse holy conferencing. As currently practiced by the United Methodist Church, the Wesleyan tradition of holy conferencing is long on mercy but short on justice. It is long on dialogue but short on resolution. It is long on love and niceness, but short on determining the truth and insisting that truth be spoken in love in holy conferencing.

One might well ask if the ground rules for discourse in the current practice of Wesleyan holy conferencing are long on image but short on substance. These are claims I hope to flesh out in subsequent postings.

Holy Conferencing as Soul Work: Witness of Johnetta Betsch Cole

I’ve taken my title for this series on the United Methodist practice of holy conferencing from a statement by Johnetta Betsch Cole. Dr. Cole is president of Bennett College, a United Methodist college in Greensboro, NC.

Johnetta Betsch Cole is a supporter of the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program. This program, which assists historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in dealing with LGBT issues, was founded in 2002 following a series of attacks on gay and lesbian students at several HBCUs that elicited concern about the apparent rise of anti-gay violence on HBCU campuses.

The HRC program helps HBCUs deal forthrightly with the plain social reality—the undeniable fact—that all HBCU campuses have LGBT students, professors, employees, and administrators. The program helps create safe spaces in HBCUs in which students, faculty, staff, and administrators can feel comfortable about revealing their identity and discuss the challenges they face on HBCU campuses.

In an address to students gathered from around the nation at an HRC HBCU Program seminar to study ways to head off homophobic violence on HBCU campuses, Johnetta Betsch Cole told students, “You’re now preparing to take on the responsibility to help other students touch their soul – and to help institutions touch their soul” (www.hrc.org/news/5087.htm).

For a variety of reasons, I want to focus my critical reflections on Wesleyan holy conferencing on Johnetta Betsch Cole’s “touch the soul” image. In the first place, this image arises out of the experience of a group subject to double marginalization by power structures around the world: it arises out of the experience of an African-American woman. This is a group from whom we might expect powerful insight into the mechanisms of marginalization and ways to address those mechanisms effectively.

In the second place, Johnetta Betsch Cole heads a United Methodist institution of higher learning. Unlike some United Methodist institutions of higher learning (including some other United Methodist HBCUs), Bennett College has chosen to deal head-on with homophobia as a problem internal to all college/university campuses, including HBCU campuses, as well as a problem in society at large that demands the attention of church-affiliated colleges/universities which seek to train students to be agents of transformative social change.

Almost all HBCUs were founded by and are currently affiliated with churches. As do other church-affiliated colleges and universities, these institutions struggle to deal with the internal politics and strictures of the churches with which they are affiliated. These institutions typically have a high percentage of ministers and members of the sponsoring church on their governing boards. Those ministers and church members have a critical role to play in enabling or hindering attempts of the institution to deal with gay issues.

As with many other church-affiliated institutions of higher learning, HBCUs have often found it difficult to be open about the presence of LGBT persons in their campus communities. Some HBCUs—along with many non-HBCU church-affiliated schools—have chosen to deal with this social reality by not dealing with it at all, by pretending that no one on their campus is LGBT, even as it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see that there are many closeted LGBT students, faculty, staff, and administrators. On these campuses, it can sometimes even be dangerous for members of the campus community, including faculty, staff, and administrators, to be open about their sexual orientation.

These campuses are dominated by a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” mentality that allows prejudice to grow, and that can, at worst, result in acts of violence ranging from the “hard” violence of physical assault to manifold acts of “soft” violence including verbal assault, exclusion of gay students and employees from rights and privileges including freedom from unjust termination or the ability to have partner benefits, or subtle forms of persecution and discrimination in how a supervisor treats an LGBT employee (or a faculty member an LGBT student).

Such “soft” violence towards LGBT brothers and sisters on a college campus can create an environment so toxic that it erodes the psyche and soul of those brothers and sisters, who are provided no forum in which even to speak of the reality of the prejudice they face, let alone challenge it. Any attempt on their part to identify and challenge the prejudice is quickly met with ugly blame-the-victim tactics of managerial triangulation that name the LGBT person himself or herself as the source of the problem: he/she is too “sensitive,” is paranoid, is a professional trouble maker, is “angry,” is given to temper tantrums and pouting, wears his/her feelings on the sleeve, is corrupt, is a potential sexual predator, is given to lying (since “those people” always lie), is vicious and resentful: you name it.

He or she is, in short, “the spawn of the devil.” And nothing the LGBT brother or sister does will ever permit her or him to escape that tag, since this is the social space accorded by such institutions to their LGBT brothers and sisters, and the price of remaining in the community is to occupy that constricted space or to face expulsion.

At their worst, some church-affiliated HBCUs (including some United Methodist ones) invite overtly anti-gay speakers and ministers to address their college or university community. This pattern continues, sadly, at some United Methodist HBCUs where I continue to have contacts, even in the aftermath of the recent condemnation of homophobia by the latest General Conference. Despite the UMC Social Principles' insistence that anti-gay discrimination is insupportable, some of these United Methodise HBCUs still lack official policy statements prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

My third reason for highlighting Cole’s “touch the soul” image as a fruitful prism through which to examine the Wesleyan practice of holy conferencing is that it recognizes that the work that needs to be done in institutions—above all, in church-sponsored ones—to confront and eradicate homophobic violence of all sorts is work at the level of the soul. Combating homophobia is soul work.

Creating a safe public space in which to discuss the complex, emotion-laden issue of homophobia—which is to say, the presence in our midst of LGBT brothers and sisters with complex real lives, hearts, minds, and souls—is soul work. It demands courage, commitment, intellectual rigor, honesty, compassion, and a commitment to change when change is incumbent on us.

Not facing problems that require soul work is certainly easier. But not facing problems that require soul work is neither an ethically defensible option, nor one permitted to any church (or church-affiliated institution) that professes to deplore homophobic discrimination and violence.