They Gave a Schism and Nobody Came: Commentary on Christian Right's Loss of Culture War vs. Gays in Europe and America, Transfer of Battle to Africa

This tells me that discussion of the anti-gay politics of the U.S. religious right has gone mainstream (and thank God for that development): for ABC's "Top Line" and Yahoo News this past week, Olivier Knox and Rick Klein interview Roger Ross Williams about his new movie, "God Loves Uganda." Williams tells Knox and Klein,*

Churches and Gays: Stephen Fry on Ex-Gay Therapy, Becca Morn on Exporting of Anti-Gay Hatred, Rowan Williams on Appalling Anti-Gay Violence of Many Christians

It's worth watching Stephen Fry's stylish, humane look at ex-gay therapy* for his observation (at about the 8.24 mark) that Joseph Nicolosi could well pass for a gay man, a metrosexual. The look on Nicolosi's face as Fry delivers the observation is priceless.

Anglican African Bishops Meet to Fight Western Pansexualism: Anglican Version of Theology of the Body

Here's the polite Anglican version of right-wing Catholic rhetoric about keeping African men men and African women women: this is David W. Virtue reporting on the current Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa's All Africa Bishops' Conference (CAPA): the Anglicans are fighting "Western pansexualists" who do "not hold fast to a biblical view of Christian morality."

NCR on Uganda: The Scandal of Catholic Silence

News analysis of the ongoing deliberations about the fate of gay citizens in Uganda has died down in the holiday season, though Box Turtle Bulletin continues to do outstanding work in monitoring the situation. Because there has been a lull in reporting on the Ugandan story, I was particularly happy to see National Catholic Reporter devoting its 23 December editorial to the Ugandan story.

NCR offers an interesting take on what’s occurring in Uganda. The editorial contrasts the Ugandan legislature’s consideration of a bill that would make homosexuality a capital crime with Houston’s recent election of an openly lesbian mayor. In one case, we see “a growing civility toward and acceptance of” those who are gay or lesbian.

In the other case—in parts of Africa today—we see “the extremes to which some can take the homophobic theology of major religions.” NCR notes that though some analysts “contend that anti-homosexuality in Africa is a cultural matter and that Ugandans resist the outside world’s horror at the proposed laws because they see it as one more act of oppressive imperialists,” Western societies and churches have had not hesitated to name some long-accepted (and church-endorsed) cultural practices as abhorrent and contrary to gospel values.

We once burned witches and enslaved those with dark skin. We no longer do so, because we have come to the consensus that these practices are aberrations, rather than authentic expressions, of religious values and the civic values necessary to build a humane society.

I read NCR’s statements here as a response to the thesis advanced by their own writer, John Allen, that the rise in homophobia in some parts of Africa today is an “equal-and-opposite reaction” to imperialistic pressure from Western societies to repudiate homophobia. I appreciate NCR’s insistence that some cultural norms—e.g., recognition of the full personhood of women and of LGBT folks, rejection of slavery and of execution of “witches”—should transcend particular cultural settings, because they are sine qua non for any humane society, anywhere in the world.

I also find the NCR editorial’s frank recognition that what is happening in Uganda today is a direct result of the involvement of some American right-wing religious groups refreshing. As I’ve noted in previous postings, John Allen’s reporting on the African church never alludes to this significant and incontrovertible fact about the Ugandan situation.

And, finally, I take heart from NCR’s unambiguous conclusion that “[i]t is a scandal that the Catholic church has not spoken out more forcefully against the proposed legislation.” Pope Benedict’s homily at his Christmas midnight Mass called for resolution of conflict and social healing in a number of nations in the world. Conspicuously missing from the list was Uganda. Benedict chooses to remain silent.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Archbishop of Uganda, Cyprian Lwanga, did address the legislation before his nation’s legislature in his own Christmas homily. However, as Jim Burroway has noted at Box Turtle Bulletin, Archbishop Lwanga framed his denunciation of violence against LGBT persons with doublespeak that has become typical of official Catholic statements about the human rights of gay persons.

While denouncing outright physical violence against gays, Archbishop Lwanga did not denounce the manifold forms of social and legislative violence against gay persons that occur in both African societies and elsewhere in the world. His omission of any statement condemning the criminalization of homosexuality—indeed, his homily appears to support laws that already criminalize homosexuality in Uganda—undercuts his condemnation of violence against those who are gay.

And this is the rock and hard place between which official Catholic teaching now finds itself, as a result of its adamant refusal to reconsider its biologistic natural-law teachings about human sexuality. Because Rome has chosen to hinge its claim to teach universally binding, unchanging truth on its refusal to reconsider what it says about issues like artificial contraception and homosexuality, the church finds itself caught between its obligation to defend human rights consistently, and its determination to deny human rights to those who are gay.

The tragic silence of the pope, as a nation that is over 40% Catholic now considers the death penalty for those who are gay, is the end result of this determination. This silence completely undermines anything the church wishes to say about human rights anywhere in the world. It is impossible to defend the human rights of all oppressed minorities while denying the rights of a particular oppressed minority.

The approach that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has taken to the Ugandan situation stands in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Benedict. In my view, one approach points to models of what Christian pastoral behavior should be about. The other models the antithesis of Christian pastoral behavior.

As Jim Burroway has noted, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s press secretary has stated that Rowan Williams is “very clear that the private Member’s Bill being discussed in Uganda as drafted is entirely unacceptable from a pastoral, moral and legal point of view.” Entirely unacceptable from a pastoral, moral, and legal point of view: though it would be impressive if the Archbishop of Canterbury made such a statement publicly and not through his press secretary, and if he went on to urge resistance to the impending legislation on the part of Anglican clergy in Uganda, even so, he has at least spoken unambiguously here. And with pastoral clarity.

And that is, unfortunately, more than one can say for the leader of the world’s Catholic community, who has not spoken at all. NCR is correct to call this silence scandalous. The silence of Christian pastoral leaders in the face of deliberations to execute a stigmatized minority is a skandalon, a stumbling block, to anyone who seeks to encounter God through the ministry and teaching of the church.

Some Manhattan Signatories Critique Ugandan Legislation (and in Doing So, Give Away Their Game)

Various news sites (e.g., the Pew Forum’s Religion News site) are reporting that the death penalty for gays is back on the table now in Uganda. It’s still in the bill before the Ugandan parliament because the bill's author David Bahati, identified by Jeff Sharlet as a member of the powerful secretive American right-wing evangelical group the Family, refuses to remove the death penalty from the bill. If Uganda passes this law, people will be susceptible to the death penalty solely because they are gay.

Rowan Williams has now spoken out, faintly, noting the “shocking severity” of the proposed legislation and how it makes (surely the understatement of the century) pastoral care of gay folks by Christian churches impossible. As Chris Bodenner at Daily Dish suggests, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement underscores yet again the deafening silence of Benedict. As major world political leaders, including President Obama, and major religious figures of the world including Rowan Williams, voice concerns about the legislation before the Ugandan legislature, Benedict continues to say nothing. Nothing at all.

Jim Burroway reported at Box Turtle Bulletin on Saturday that three authors of the Manhattan Declaration—Chuck Colson, Robert George, and Timothy George—have now also condemned aspects of the legislation, while remaining silent (as Rowan Williams was in his condemnation of the bill) about the criminalization of homosexuality in general—something Rick Warren has explicitly condemned. I find the statement of the three gentlemen of the Manhattan Declaration remarkable for what it gives away about the ultimate game plan of both the Ugandan legislation and of the various anti-gay initiatives in which they are involved in the U.S., including the Manhattan Declaration itself.

After having stated that they deplore all sexual sin and leave sinners in the hands of a merciful God, Colson, George, and George offer the following strange, backhanded defense of the Ugandan legislation, and, implicitly, of the criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda and elsewhere:

We recognize that the scourge of AIDS has been devastating to the people of Uganda. Measures must be taken to encourage faithful marital love and to discourage sexual immorality of every type. It is critical, however, that these measures be shaped in a just and Christian manner, and not in a punitive spirit. Harshness and excess must be avoided. Those who experience homosexual desire and yield to it should not be singled out for extreme measures or for revulsion.

These three American anti-gay activists are arguing here that we in the West need to understand the urgency with which Ugandans feel compelled to curb homosexuality, because of the gravity of the AIDS epidemic in Uganda. Think for a moment about what their argument implies, what it wants us to suppose, when we consider why Ugandans are moving so brutally against the gay citizens of their nation.

The implication is that we in the West don’t realize how strongly and quickly Ugandans (and other African nations) need to move to deal with the AIDS epidemic, because that epidemic is nowhere nearly so severe in the United States as it is in Africa. But here’s the glaring problem with this argument, what it elides, the sleight of hand it wants to play to get us to sympathize with the move to impose harsh penalties on all who are gay in Uganda:

AIDS in Uganda isn’t a gay disease. It’s far and away a disease afflicting “normal” families, man-woman families and children born to these families. It’s a disease of families in much of the world, not because of homosexual promiscuity, but because of heterosexual lapses in marriage.

These three American authors want to take an argument that has long fueled homophobia in the United States, one that the organizations and people with whom they are affiliated in the Manhattan Declaration have long used to work up anti-gay sentiment—the belief that gay men are diseased and are, by their very presence in society, a social illness—and to apply this American argument to the African context. Where it doesn’t work. Where the facts point precisely in the opposite direction.

They want to take an American argument (and an American prejudice) and impose it on the social situation in Uganda, where AIDS is a terrible scourge, where people are dying in droves from AIDS, because heterosexual rather than homosexual people are spreading the illness—and to lay blame for this scourge on the group least responsible for the epidemic in the African context. Unwittingly, in advancing such an argument, the three Manhattan Declaration gentlemen are exposing for anyone who thinks—who wishes to move beyond prejudices and scapegoating—what's really going on with their anti-gay agenda in the U.S., which they and others have successfully exported to Africa. Think for a moment about how this dishonest argument actually undermines the rationale for the Ugandan legislation:

If the real motive of the Ugandan anti-gay legislation is to stop the spread of AIDS, the penalties this legislation is seeking to impose unilaterally on the gay population would obviously need to be applied to all citizens. Promiscuity of any kind would need to be harshly punished, and, above all, promiscuity that breaks the marriage bond, since it is in the context of everyday “normal” marriages that AIDS has spread rapidly across the continent. Any lapse in marital decorum ought to be subject to imprisonment and capital punishment, if the real object of those trying to apply such penalties solely to the gay citizens of the country is to stop the AIDS epidemic.

The utterly dishonest argument centered on AIDS advanced by Messrs. Colson, George, and George here reveals what is really at the heart of the Ugandan agenda—and of their own agenda: they want, anywhere that it is possible, to stigmatize gay folks, to make gay citizens appear to be unique threats to social morality and Christian civilization. To criminalize homosexuality itself, and to drive all who are gay and refuse to “confess” their “sin” into the shadows.

Those chest-beating confessions of sin in the Manhattan Declaration and the statement of Colson, George, and George about their failure to deal with heterosexual promiscuity and to move as strongly against it as against all homosexual behavior (and all homosexual people)? Absolutely insincere. There is and never has been an agenda, in these circles, to go after heterosexual sinners, to criminalize any kind of heterosexual activity, to acknowledge that the lapses of heterosexuals are far and away a more serious threat to the sanctity of marriage than same-sex marriage is.

It’s all about bashing the gays. To distract us from their real and ultimate agenda, which is to front for powerful economic interest groups with whom they and the church factions they represent are quite cozily in bed, who need to keep us worked up about the dirty, disease-ridden, evil gays as they continue picking our pockets.

Lutherans Play Fair: ELCA Rejects Supermajority Maneuver for Vote on Gay Ministers

Some fascinating developments are taking place these days at the churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA). The meeting is happening right now in Minneapolis.

Monday night, ELCA delegates defeated a motion that would have required a two-thirds majority to pass a resolution permitting openly gay clergy in partnered relationships to serve ELCA congregations. The motion to require a supermajority rather than a simple majority to pass this resolution was defeated by a vote of 57 to 43 percent (and see here).

What I want to say about this vote links to what I wrote several weeks ago about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s new procedural rules for changing the mind of churches about gay issues. As I noted in my postings commenting on those rules (here and here), Rowan Williams’s procedural rules for changing the church’s moral mind about homosexuality effectively create insuperable obstacles for those who think the Anglican church can and should reassess its views about homosexuality.

Rowan Williams now holds (a departure from his previous position) that the scriptures are unambiguous in their condemnation of homosexuality, and that the church has always and universally condemned homosexuality. He proposes that the church can change its mind about gay people and gay lives only as a result of ongoing study, more dialogue, and, finally, widespread consensus supporting such a change.

As my postings about Rowan Williams’ procedural rules argue, these rules are a formula for stasis. They set the bar so impossibly high that the church will not ever revise its teaching about gay people and gay lives, no matter how strong the calls for change are within church and society. These rules lock the church into an endless round of futile discussion, debate, and study of issues about which most people have long since made up their mind, and regarding which they want the church to make an unambiguous, clear statement. One way or the other.

The rules also overlook the historical evidence about how churches change their moral mind (and the fact that churches have often changed their moral mind after holding an unambiguous position on a moral matter for centuries). Churches shift their moral consensus only when groups, both within and outside churches, catch sight of a new way of viewing things that is more consistent with the fundamental values of Christianity, and then begin to pressure (and shame) the church into admitting that its traditional stance belies its core values—and central aspects of scriptural teaching.

Churches don’t change their moral minds as a result of majority votes. They certainly don’t change their moral minds as a result of supermajority votes. The requirement that a church shift its understanding of a moral issue (and of the lives of those affected by that issue) on the basis of majority votes—let alone supermajority votes—implicitly places power in the hands of those who already wield power, and who usually have a vested interest at keeping change at bay.

I have been sensitized lately to the mechanisms by which churches continue to keep gay people and gay lives in a holding pen through manipulation of procedural roles by a book I’ve mentioned previously on this thread. This is Grif Stockley’s study of the history of race relations in Arkansas, Ruled by Race.

Stockley’s picture of what happened in Arkansas (and throughout the South) in the Jim Crow period is horrifying. It is a reminder of how procedural rules and the ballot box can be used—often systematically and ruthlessly—to reduce entire groups of people to the status of despised objects.

As Stockley notes, with emancipation and Reconstruction, African-American citizens of Arkansas began to vote and to serve in public office. Even as Reconstruction ended, some white citizens worked with black citizens to develop a “fusion politics” (p. 92) that continued to open doors for black enfranchisement and public service, though those doors were not so numerous following the end of Reconstruction as they had been just after emancipation.

And then all doors slammed shut—decisively and violently. All over the South, African-American citizens entered a long nightmare of disenfranchisement and violence that was totally dependent on legal enactments pushed through state legislatures by white majorities, which were then upheld by courts as the will of the majority. In 1891, election “reforms” were enacted that used literacy tests in draconian ways to disenfranchise large numbers of black voters (p. 125).

Then, when black voters could no longer vote because of the 1891 “reforms,” legislatures passed a poll-tax amendment that further disenfranchised some black voters who had passed the bar of the literacy test (ibid.). The predictable outcome of these political machinations by a white majority intent on returning African-American citizens to quasi-servitude was violence. As Stockley notes, “Suddenly it was open season on Arkansas blacks” (p. 127) and by 1892, lynchings peaked both in the South and the nation at large (pp. 117, 126)—and they continued well into the 1930s in many places.

Deprive people of the power to vote; manipulate a political system so that, if their vote has the power to change things (lynchings were worst in black-majority counties in Arkansas), a vote is not permitted: violent repression is the only possible next step, particularly when those people have tasted liberation and know things can be otherwise. And that repression (with carefully crafted acts of violence) will go on as long as a “majority” has the right to make the rules, bend them to keep itself in power, and turn for support to courts and legislators that happen to be—you guessed it—the same folks as those who constitute the “majority.”

And now segue back to what has just taken place at the ELCA assembly. On Friday, delegates will vote on a task-force recommendation that, if it passes, will permit individual ELCA churches and synods to recognize and support lifelong committed gay relationships, and to call to ministry those living in such relationships.

As Phil Soucy notes on the Goodsoil Central blog, on Friday, delegates will vote on both this recommendation and another on human sexuality, which discusses the theological basis for the current ELCA understanding of that topic. Since the latter recommendation—the Social Statement on Human Sexuality—is what the ELCA calls a “social” statement, it requires a two-thirds majority to pass. It does so because that is one of the procedural rules of ELCA assemblies vis-à-vis social statements.

The ministry recommendation is not a social statement, and requires only a simple majority to pass. So some delegates who are opposed to this recommendation—that is, to the acceptance of openly gay clergy in lifelong committed same-sex relationships—proposed a change in the rules. They wanted not a simple majority vote but a supermajority vote to be applied to this recommendation, in order for it to pass.

It was that change in the rules that the ELCA delegates defeated by a 57-43 percent vote on Monday evening. When the bishop of the Allegheny Synod, Gregory Pile, proposed that the ministry issue is so “serious” that it requires a supermajority vote, Ronald Pittman, a delegate of the Oregon Synod, noted in response that previous votes to bar openly gay candidates from ministry had required only a majority vote, not a supermajority.

In other words, as long as those opposed to changes in the ELCA’s position about gay people and gay lives had a clear and predictable majority, a simple majority was fine. When they appear to be losing turf to their opponents, suddenly these issues require a new, higher bar, in order for change to be considered: they require a supermajority.

Which is in itself a fascinating admission—a very telling one—on the part of many of those in the churches who oppose opening the doors to gay people and gay lives. For ever so long, we’ve been told that the will of the majority needs to hold sway and rule, that it’s all about respecting what the majority wants.

Now that a shift is occurring in society at large and within the churches, such that those opposed to full inclusion of gay people and gay lives in the churches are beginning to be in the minority, suddenly these issues become “serious” and demand a supermajority if we intend to entertain change. In light of that societal (and ecclesial)* shift, it’s fascinating to read the headlines of Archbishop Chaput’s influential Catholic News Agency reporting on the ELCA vote: CNA is reporting that the Lutherans have now established a “low threshold” for changes in their stance on gays in ministry.

A majority vote is now a low threshold? In whose universe and on what planet, I wonder? As Michael Bayly insightfully notes on his Wild Reed blog, Catholics could stand to learn something of value about catholicity from watching our Lutheran brothers and sisters engaging in dialogue at this ELCA assembly.

As Emily Eastwood of Lutherans Concerned points out (here and here), this procedural vote does not necessarily presage a majority vote on behalf of the ministry recommendation. Even so, it’s an important vote to note for two reasons.

First, the attempt to change the rules after years of simple majority votes were used to exclude openly gay ministry candidates in the ELCA provides a striking illustration of how procedural rules—and plain old Machiavellian treachery—have long been used in deliberations of church assemblies to stack the deck against those who call for decent treatment of gay and lesbian human beings. It’s time for those fighting against full inclusion of gays and lesbians to stop employing deceitful procedural tricks (and arguments) to support their cause. They are undermining the moral persuasiveness of their cause.

Second, the vote indicates that increasing numbers of Christians are becoming fed up with those deceitful tricks, and want open, respectful dialogue in their churches—not political maneuvers to keep dialogue at bay. I take heart from the ELCA vote, and I tip my hat to my Lutheran brothers and sisters for insisting that, whatever the outcome of this battle happens to be, it will at least be fought honorably and in the light.

Meanwhile (and as a counterpoint to this story), there’s the situation of the United Methodist Church. As a good friend of mine, an ordained minister and theologian with a foot in both the Presbyterian and the United Methodist Church emailed me to say this week, the UMC is actually moving backwards, when it comes to gay people and gay lives. I share that perception, and this development concerns me because 1) it’s at such variance with the Wesleyan tradition and the history of Methodism, and 2) Methodists exert great influence in American culture because they are the church of Main Street USA. As go Methodists, so goes the nation.

The homepage of the well-funded right-wing Institute on Religion and Democracy has a scrolling headline right now which is crowing that the Methodists have just defeated a “gay-related” membership policy. This links to an article by Daniel Burke at Christianity Today which notes that 27 of 44 UMC regional conferences rejected an amendment that would have prevented individual churches from denying membership to people simply because they are gay.

That amendment, which would have declared that membership in Methodist churches is open to "all persons, upon taking vows declaring the Christian faith, and relationship in Jesus Christ," was approved by delegates to last year’s UMC General Conference. Approval of it required a two-thirds vote by annual conferences. Of those annual conferences using the supermajority mechanism to continue telling gay people we are not welcome in Methodist churches, the large majority are in Southern states.

The same states that bent every rule possible in the 19th century to disenfranchise black voters and return African-American citizens to quasi-servitude. I’d like to encourage my Methodist brothers and sisters to take a good look at what just happened among their Lutheran brothers and sisters. Perhaps we can all learn valuable lessons from what the ELCA did on Monday evening.

* 61% of ELCA clergy recently reported to pollsters that they think the churches have a moral obligation to work for full inclusion of LGBT people in society.

Quakers Endorse Same-Sex Marriage: A Challenge to Rowan Williams re: How Churches Change Their Moral Minds

Yesterday, I wrote that churches change their moral minds when cutting-edge groups of prophetic believers take the risk of speaking out, needling, prodding, challenging, and opening doors to the marginalized that the churches themselves wish to keep closed, when powerful interest groups that benefit from marginalizing some groups in society exert strong pressure on a church to preserve the status quo.

I wrote this to challenge the insistence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that churches can validly change moral positions based on how “the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years” only after a “strong . . . consensus” has been achieved, based on “painstaking biblical exegesis” and “solid theological grounding” regarding which there is “wide acceptance” within a church.

As I noted, this understanding of how churches change their moral minds is historically incorrect. The churches changed their moral minds about slavery and the place of place of women in church and world despite what had been the consistent, longstanding theological and exegetical consensus regarding slavery and the role of women. The churches changed their moral minds about slavery and women’s place in the world not because a majority of church members agreed to these theological and moral shifts, but despite the opposition of large numbers of Christians to this theological and moral shift. There was not widespread consensus on these issues when the churches finally decided to do what was right, only after prophetic groups succeeded in needling and shaming the churches into doing what was right.

As I noted, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s formula for change in the church’s moral mind regarding gay human beings is a formula for stasis. It is not a formula for the informed, conscientious change in the church’s attitudes for which Rowan Williams professes to hope. It is, instead, a formula designed to keep change at bay, through endless study, discussion, and negotiation—even when many people within the churches, including the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, already know that there is no compelling theological, scriptural, or moral reason for continued discrimination against gay persons.

It is, then, an unjust formula, one that deliberately wishes to continue discrimination against gay persons within the Anglican communion by putting off indefinitely the moment of decision at which the church must either choose to discontinue discrimination in a thoroughgoing and decisive way, or continue to discriminate, while trying unsuccessfully to convince us that everyone is welcome at its table.

As I was writing the preceding analysis of the moral conundrum facing the Anglican communion (and liberal Christians in general, insofar as they wish to be viewed as tolerant, inclusive, and loving while they refuse to make solidarity with their gay brothers and sisters), I did not know that British Friends were holding their yearly meeting this week at York. And that yesterday at this meeting, British Quakers decided to perform same-sex marriages within Quaker communities.

The decision of Friends to perform same-sex marriages is deeply rooted in traditional Quaker theology, which is informed by founder George Fox’s teaching that there is something of God in everyone in the world, an inner light that links each human being to God. From their beginnings as a religious movement, Quakers have emphasized the obligation of all believers to respect and look for that spark of God within others—Friend and non-Friend alike, Christian and non-Christian alike, believer and non-believer alike.

The decision of the British Friends to perform same-sex marriages rests on the discernment of this religious body that God chooses to marry people of the same sex, and those attuned to God’s will ought not to stand in the way of that divine choice, but to celebrate it. This decision is, in other words, an outgrowth of the Quaker belief that God lives within each human being, and one of our most fundamental religious obligations is to find and witness to that divine presence in others.

This decision to honor what God is accomplishing through the love and marital union of people of the same sex now puts the Quakers in a ticklish position vis-à-vis the British government, which recognizes civil unions for same-sex couples but not same-sex marriages. The Quaker decision to marry same-sex couples means that Quakers will begin reporting same-sex marriages to the government on the same footing that they now report opposite-sex marriages.

British Friends are choosing, in other words, to make no distinction at all between the religious status of an opposite-sex and a same-sex marriage performed at a Quaker meeting. Quakers believe that they can no longer support such a decision. To do so would be to deny that God is accomplishing in same-sex relationships precisely what God is accomplishing in opposite-sex ones: loving unions that build families and society, particularly when these unions are publicly recognized and supported by a society. The Quaker insistence on paying attention to what God is doing even, or especially, within a despised marginalized group, is in line with the longstanding Quaker tradition of looking for the inner light, the presence of God, wherever it dwells, even (or particularly) among those overlooked by the social mainstream.

To my mind, what British Friends have just decided to do, and the theological rationale they advance to justify their decision, strongly supports the argument I offered yesterday against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s understanding of how churches change their moral minds. When social attitudes begin to show churches that certain practices they have long taken for granted are no longer morally defensible, churches usually change their moral minds not because they have reached wide agreement about a new moral consensus, or as a result of ongoing study and discussion about the new consensus.

They change their moral minds because prophetic, cutting-edge groups within the churches and outside the churches needle the churches into rethinking their complicity in practices that can no longer be justified on theological, biblical, or moral grounds. Quakers have a very important history of needling and challenging the social mainstream, when the mainstream insists on taking for granted (and justifying) longstanding practices of unjust social marginalization. This Quaker tendency has caused Friends again and again to come up against strong norms within mainstream Christian churches, which support the social status quo and refuse to reconsider and reject discriminatory practices long taken for granted by mainstream churches and by society itself.

The Quakers led the battle against slavery, for instance, when all mainstream churches, including the Church of England, were heavily invested in that practice and did not want to critique it, for fear of alienating powerful interest groups within their society and their church. With their belief that there is something of God in everyone, the Quakers recognized the right of women to preach and engage in ministry centuries before the mainstream churches, including the Anglican church, changed their minds about these matters.

At a time in which the mainstream churches, including the Churches of England and Ireland, were largely oblivious to the suffering of the poor in Ireland in the 19th century, the Quakers were actively working to create jobs for and to feed the Irish poor. During the terrible years of the Famine, the Quakers set up soup kitchens to keep starvation at bay for many poor people in Ireland, while the mainstream churches remained silent about the suffering of the Irish poor, and even justified it as the will of God manifested in the lives of those who did not work and thus did not deserve to eat.

Quakers and their history, and the decision they have just made to perform same-sex marriages, illustrate, then, precisely the point I hoped to make in my critique of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s understanding of how the churches change their moral mind when longstanding tradition supports discriminatory practices that a shifting social consensus has begun to call into question. When a growing consensus begins to reveal traditional Christian practices as morally questionable, changes in the moral minds of churches, do not begin at the top, with archbishops, who have everything vested in maintaining the status quo and not rocking the boat.

Nor do they begin with the majority of believers within a church communion, who will inevitably resist having to rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about the bible and religious authority, and having to revise their practices as they reassess those assumptions. Changes in the moral minds of churches do not begin, either, with powerful interest groups that hope to keep the church on their side as they continue the oppression of a targeted minority for their own benefit.

Changes in the moral mind of churches begin with cutting-edge groups such as the Quakers, who retrieve powerful prophetic strands of the scriptures that are fundamental to Christianity, but are always being lost sight of as the church settles down comfortably within history and strikes deals with the rich and powerful at any given moment in time. Changes in the moral mind of churches begin with prophetic groups like the Quakers that are willing to risk something in order to do what is right.

As Symon Hill, associate director of the theological think-tank Ekklesia (and a Friend himself) notes re: yesterday's decision,

As with other churches, this has not been an easy process for Quakers. I hope that others will have the courage to follow this lead and speak up for the radical inclusivity of Christ. As Christians, we are called to stand with those on the margins who are denied equality.

I hope the Archbishop of Canterbury is listening.

Poor Rowan Williams: The Moral Conundrum Facing the Churches Today, Through Gay Lives

Two days ago, I challenged the poor-Rowan Williams meme now developing in centrist Catholic circles (and in centrist Christian circles in general, among liberal Christians who want to appear tolerant while refusing to risk anything by actually supporting the cause of gay rights in the churches).

The Poor-Rowan Conundrum

The poor-Rowan meme wants us to see the Archbishop of Canterbury as a thoughtful, sensitive man caught in an impossible conundrum. The conundrum itself is not entirely clear to me. Either it’s the conundrum of holding a communion together when some of its members regard the full inclusion of gay human beings as an issue worth dividing the church over, or it’s the conundrum of doing the impossible balancing act of trying to keep the church on track biblically by preaching that gays are sinners, while proclaiming that the church is, as it ought to be, welcoming of all.

The Conundrum Facing Churches: How to Preach Love While Practicing Hate

If it’s the latter conundrum for which we ought to pity poor Rowan, then it’s important to note that this is a conundrum facing the Christian churches in general today. It’s the conundrum of trying to profess what a church has to profess in order to be church at all—and that’s love—while practicing the opposite of love. It’s the conundrum of trying to present oneself as loving when one is, in fact, hateful in one’s deliberate decision to treat gay humanity as less than the humanity of everyone else. It’s the conundrum of saying that one is just and inclusive when one is, in fact, unjust and excluding in one’s institutional life as a church.

The conundrum facing the Christian churches at this moment in history is the conundrum of having to make a choice, when one event after another has definitively revealed the traditional teaching of the churches, held always and everywhere, grounded on a consistent reading of the scriptures throughout history, as indefensible. As immoral. As a betrayal of what the scriptures are really all about, at their most fundamental levels.

And so it’s not a conundrum at all, really. It’s a question of either doing what we know is right, or of continuing to do what we know is wrong when we actually know better, and while we proclaim that we’re trying to do right. It’s the age-old conundrum that has always faced people aspiring to an ethical life: bridging the gap between theory and practice; doing what you know is right, particularly when the doing requires that you pay a price.

It’s easy to theorize, analyze, and preach. It’s much harder to practice.

But the preaching of the church about love will make sense to people only when the church practices and stops preaching—stops preaching, that is, until it begins to practice. The preaching of the church about love will make sense to people only when the church listens carefully to Francis of Assisi when he tells his followers to preach all the time, but use words only when absolutely necessary.

In this final sense—the conundrum of doing what you know is right, when there is a price to be paid for doing right—the conundrum that the Archbishop of Canterbury is now facing does seem poignant. And it’s one worth analyzing, because it’s one that Christians in general now find themselves facing.

The Biblical Face of the Moral Conundrum Facing the Churches

Homophobia is being so decisively exposed within the culture at large as unjust and immoral, that many Christians are now having to reassess their attitudes towards gay persons at a fundamental level. And this pushes Christians towards something they do not like to do: that is to reassess their entire tradition, including how they read the bible and how they find absolute certainty and absolute authority in the bible.

If we might have been spectacularly wrong about the gay issue, the reasoning of many Christians goes, then what else might we have been wrong about? Where do we find absolute authority and certainty, when our reading of biblical texts appears to be affected and even normed by cultural developments that challenge the traditional reading?

Real-World Context of Reading the Bible: Pressure and Threats from Powerful Interest Groups

It is important to note, too, that discussions of how to read the scriptures and apply them to the life of the church never take place in a theological vacuum, apart from the real world. The decisions churches make about how they choose to interpret the bible have real-life effects. And many groups, including some that have no real interest at all in religion, but a vested interest in placing religion on their political and economic side, work very hard to assure that the churches’ reading of the bible does not change, where they do not want it to change.

How we read the scriptures affects how we do business. Ultimately, what stands in the way of change in Christian churches, when it comes to repenting of homophobia, is not really the bible itself and how we choose to read it. It is economic self-interest that stands in the way, the self-interest of church leaders who know that they will pay a price in the real world, an economic price, if they permit new readings of the bible to inform the viewpoint of their churches about gay issues.

At the very heart of the churches’ (self-made) conundrum about how, whether, when, to include gay human beings in the churches’ life, how to treat us as fully human, is fear. Fear runs deep inside all Christian churches and the institutions they sponsor when they consider what otherwise seems to be a theological issue: the question of how to read the scriptures regarding gay people, and of how to apply those texts to the life of the church today. There is tremendous unacknowledged fear around these issues within the Christian churches. It is fear of economic reprisal, fear of reprisal if they choose to do what they know to be right . . . .

Time and again, when churches, church leaders, and church institutions admit that the traditional approach of the churches to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people is just not theologically and morally defensible, they face serious reprisal. Wealthy church members routinely hold churches hostage by withholding funds from churches that do the right thing vis-à-vis gay human beings. They withdraw their funds from such churches and move them to gay-excluding churches.

The Power Exerted by Right-Wing Political Watchdog Groups to Keep Homophobia Alive in Churches

Powerful political watchdog organizations also get into the act and assure that churches choosing to alter their gay-excluding stances pay a steep price for that choice. These organizations target such churches, publicize their choices, and call on people both inside and outside the church to make the church pay for its choice. These groups are capable of raising hell for churches that do not dance to their reactionary tune. They have strong ties to the mainstream media, and they control the dominant media text about the churches’ response to gay people, depicting every move to inclusion within the churches as a move away from the bible and longstanding Christian tradition—an abdication of Christian belief and values for cultural norms.

These powerful political watchdog groups are adroit about assisting reactionary groups within any church that chooses to repent of homophobia. They encourage these splinter groups to split the church—to preach that the church’s choice to welcome gay brothers and sisters is a church-dividing choice, one that demonstrates that their church has repudiated the bible and longstanding tradition. They not only help these groups to create splinter churches claiming to represent the tradition in all its purity, but they also assist these splinter groups in filing lawsuits that try to damage the mother church financially by taking its property away when a split has occurred.

Rowan Williams's Conundrum as the Conundrum Facing the Churches Today

So, yes, I can well imagine that Rowan Williams does face a conundrum right now. But I would frame that conundrum differently than right-wing groups with a strong presence in the mainstream media want to frame it when they promote the poor-Rowan meme.

To frame the conundrum facing the churches today as gay people ask to be treated as fully human in the churches, it’s important to look at what has happened in the past, when the church has been confronted with similar requests from other groups long marginalized by the churches, as the churches claimed sanction for their oppression of these groups in the bible and in tradition.

Similar Conundrums for the Churches in the Past: Slavery and Women's Rights

This is not the first time in history that the churches have chosen to split over issues of inclusion or exclusion, of full or partial humanity of marginalized groups of people. And it’s not the first time in history that churches choosing to do the right thing have been faced with economic reprisal by those with a vested interest in maintaining a status quo based on discrimination.

In the United States, the churches split over the issue of slavery in the 19th century, and throughout the 20th century, as churches that once made women second-class citizens have opened their doors to full inclusion of women in church life and in the ministry, there have been splits, with economic reprisals, in churches that have chosen to do what is right in this area—despite long-held interpretations of the bible throughout Christian history that have justified the exclusion of women from ordination and have regarded women's humanity as flawed and inferior to the humanity of males.

Just as churches that supported slavery and the continued subordination of people of color to white people preached in the 19th century that they were simply doing what the bible had always told Christians to do—hold slaves, but treat slaves with Christian kindness . . . . In all the churches that chose to split over the issue of slavery—in the churches that took the pro-slavery tack—the argument was consistent: the patriarchs of the Old Testament held slaves; Jesus never condemned slavery, but took it for granted; Paul upheld the right to hold slaves. Tell us that we’re reading the bible wrong about slavery now, and you challenge the entire history of Christian biblical interpretation. You undermine the whole authority of the bible, in changing what Christians have long held to be the correct biblical interpretation of slavery.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's Justification for Resisting Change re: Gay Issues

So it’s interesting to read now the Archbishop of Canterbury’s justification, published three days ago on his website, for punishing the Episcopal Church USA after that church has abolished bans on the ordination of openly gay clergy. I’m interested in particular in the Archbishop’s argument that “the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years” makes the decision to abolish bans discriminating against gay clergy candidates problematic. The Archbishop’s statement reads,

6. However, the issue is not simply about civil liberties or human dignity or even about pastoral sensitivity to the freedom of individual Christians to form their consciences on this matter. It is about whether the Church is free to recognise same-sex unions by means of public blessings that are seen as being, at the very least, analogous to Christian marriage.

7. In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years, it is clear that a positive answer to this question would have to be based on the most painstaking biblical exegesis and on a wide acceptance of the results within the Communion, with due account taken of the teachings of ecumenical partners also. A major change naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding.

“In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years”; “painstaking biblical exegesis”; “wide acceptance” within the communion; “solid theological grounding”: what the Archbishop of Canterbury is offering here is an impossible process of indefinite delay, before the churches ever act on the growing culturally-grounded consensus that homophobia is morally indefensible. Rowan Williams is arguing that issues which I believe he himself has long since regarded as settled—in favor of a full welcome of gay human beings in the churches—need further study, as a prelude to further dialogue to build futher consensus among Christians who are, in many cases, determined to resist any opening to gay people within the churches.

Further, further, further, which essentially means never, never, never.

Rowan Williams' Argument That Anti-Gay Biblical Texts Are "Very Ambiguous"

What’s fascinating about this argument—and here is where I find the poor-Rowan meme apt—is that prior to his election as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams wrote theological essays that reject precisely the argument he now wants to impose throughout the Anglican communion, as a way of dealing with the divided mind of his church regarding the humanity of gay persons. In 1989, Rowan Williams wrote an article entitled "Theology and Sexuality" which he presented as the 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.

In that article, he argues,

In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.

Interesting, isn’t it? In 1989, for Rowan Williams the theologian and pastor, the biblical texts condemning same-sex relations were “very ambiguous,” and the attempt to impose them on the entire church in the name of longstanding tradition was “fundamentalist.” Now, in 2009, for Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury, the church has consistently read the bible to condemn same-sex relations for 2000 years, and the attempt to impose that viewpoint on the entire Anglican communion is not fundamentalist at all.

The burden of proof is now, in 2009, on those who want to challenge that longstanding interpretation of the scriptures. They must now convince even the most fundamentalist of their brethren who hold views in other areas—e.g., re: the treatment of women—that not even fundamentalist Anglicans in many regions can support. They must now convince those espousing a fundamentalist reading of the bible which is not even consonant with the Anglican tradition, and not imposed in any other area of Anglican life except when it comes to gay human beings.

Nor has Rowan Williams really recanted what he wrote in 1987. In 2007, he was asked by Time reporter Guilhelm Alandry precisely that question: whether he stills stands by the position he defended in 1987. He replied as follows:

Yes, I argued that in 1987. I still think that the points I made there and the questions I raised were worth making as part of the ongoing discussion. I'm not recanting. But those were ideas put forward as part of a theological discussion. I'm now in a position where I'm bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It's not for me to exploit my position to push a change.

The Heart of Rowan Williams' Conundrum: Doing Right When One Knows What Is Right

And so we see here with utter clarity precisely where the conundrum lies for poor Rowan Williams: “It's not for me to exploit my position to push a change.” I have my personal viewpoint: I regard the biblical texts long thought to condemn same-sex relations as “very ambiguous.”

But as Archbishop of Canterbury, on behalf of the Anglican communion, where there are many Christians (with powerful economic and political elites backing them) who promote what I know personally to be an indefensible fundamentalist reading of these scriptures, I have to act as though those scriptures which I know to be very ambiguous are binding on the whole communion and represent the longstanding tradition of the church. That tradition must be defended and cannot be changed without wide consensus throughout the whole church.

How Churches Change Their Moral Minds

This is definitely a conundrum, and it’s one that calls for our compassion: as Rowan Williams' own argument in 1987 noted, the church can and does change its moral and theological mind. It has done so throughout history. It does so, in many cases, when cultural developments cast an entirely new light on how the church has always and everywhere read the bible, and shows that a certain interpretation of the bible is fundamentalist, morally undesirable, less ethically insightful than the viewpoint of the culture at large.

In 1987, Rowan Williams referred to the case of artificial contraception. He admits that the church has changed its mind about this practice, and he admits that longstanding Christian tradition and biblical interpretation view the practice as immoral. He takes for granted that the church was right to change its moral and theological mind about artificial contraception, and right to ditch the longstanding, traditional reading of the scriptures to outlaw the practice—even though many Christians still do not buy into this new viewpoint, and there is not complete consensus about this issue within the Christian churches.

What I think the Archbishop of Canterbury knows, and what makes his current conundrum poignant, is that his analysis of how churches change their moral and theological minds is fundamentally wrong. And it’s wrong because he appears unwilling to take the only morally defensible side he can and must take in the current controversy about gay issues, though he may pay a strong price for doing so.

The Archbishop of Canterbury knows full well that the churches changed their moral minds about slavery and about the place of women in church and world despite what had always been the theological and exegetical consensus in the churches. And the churches changed their moral minds regarding these issues despite the opposition of large numbers of Christians to this theological and moral shift. There was not widespread consensus on these issues when the churches finally decided to do what was right.

The churches changed their moral minds in these instances because cutting-edge groups of prophetic believers within the churches took the risk of speaking out, needling, prodding, challenging the status quo, opening doors to women and people of color when the church itself refused to open those doors. Significant shifts in the moral minds of churches do not occur because churches have built a consensus around a new reading of the scriptures. The shifts are driven by prophetic minorities who then precipitate a shift that eventually creates a new consensus in a recalcitrant body bent on keeping change at bay.

Invariably, when such new readings arise—from the margins of churches, and often in collaboration with secular human rights movements—the majority of church members kick and scream against change. And those with the strongest vested interests in maintaining the status quo—who also often happen to be the wealthiest and most powerful members of the churches—do all they can to resist, as they maintain that accepting the new reading of the scriptures will undermine all religious authority in the world and make everything relative.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is, I believe, faced with a significant moral conundrum today. It is the same conundrum that faces many Christians, who are slowly becoming aware that how their churches have chosen to treat gay human beings throughout history, while quoting the bible, is no longer morally desirable.

It is the conundrum of choosing to do right, once one has attained the intellectual insights that precede a shift in moral awareness. Knowing what is right to do is often not the biggest problem in the ethical life. It's actually doing right that's difficult, and choosing to do so when we know we will pay a price for making that choice.

But when the ability of the church to convince others that its message is worth hearing depends on doing what we know is right, rather than on talking endlessly about what is right, while we remain aloof from the world of choice and action, what a steep price the church pays, in terms of its credibility and ability to be a sign of salvation in the world.

The Poor-Rowan Williams Meme and Catholic Centrists: Unearned Superiority

I have to get something off my chest. I’m irritated, frankly, by the poor-Rowan Williams meme developing in centrist Catholic circles, in the wake of the decision of the Episcopal Church USA to accept openly gay persons as ministry candidates.

I blogged about this recently. As I noted, while the Anglican communion struggles with questions about how the church ought to respond to the expectation of gay persons to be treated as fully human, many Catholics are looking on with a smug sense of superiority. Many of us believe that we hold higher standards, and have set ourselves apart more successfully from a culture headed to hell in a handbasket.

And so the poor-Rowan meme, with its sad laments about the poignant struggles of a thoughtful and intelligent man confronted with an impossible conundrum: how to hold a church together when some of its members want to split over the question of whether gay human beings are human in the same way that other human beings are human.

Please. A conundrum? A poignant struggle? A problem that thoughtful people can’t resolve?

What’s so perplexing about the question of whether churches ought to accept every human being as fully human? And to treat every human being with the same dignity and respect, as a result of that fundamental theological affirmation?

We Catholics haven’t earned the right, frankly, to stand aside from this battle with such smug superiority. The price we’ve paid in order to call ourselves united and superior is horrific.

It’s the price of admitting, tacitly or otherwise, that we regard gay humanity as less than ordinary humanity. It's the price of ongoing repression of gay and lesbian Catholics, of firing anyone working in Catholic institutions who comes out of the closet, of denying health care and a living income to gay people working in our institutions when they ask for the simple right to be who they are, proudly.

In centrist Catholic circles, it’s the price of remaining totally silent about the legitimate claims of our gay Catholic brothers and sisters to a place at the table.

It’s the price of continuing—smugly and with a totally unfounded sense of our superiority—to natter about inclusion and tolerance and human rights, when we simply ignore those on the outside looking in if they’re gay. We don’t invite them to the table. We don’t give them a voice—not even in our conversations about tolerance and inclusion. Not even in our rare conversations about them!

It's the price of talking about communion as our central value, when our own actions belie our claim to value communion. It's the price of refusing to talk about the slow bleeding out of American Catholicism, as one in three American adults who were raised Catholic have left the church, and as one in ten American adults is a former Catholic.

We don’t want, we centrist Catholics who are so concerned about communion, to talk about why that’s happening. Or to hear the voices of those who’ve left. Including our many gay and lesbian brothers and sisters who have walked away, while we’ve remained totally silent about what is done to them in the communion we claim to value so much.

While we keep talking about human rights and justice. And tolerance and inclusion. And communion.

We’re not so far apart, ultimately, we Catholics of the center in the U.S., from those of our Catholic brothers and sisters on the far right who taunt anyone who disagrees with them—on a daily basis—and urge them to leave the Catholic church and join the Episcopalians. That liberal bugbear group which, the mainstream media has succeeded in convincing us, is headed to hell in a handbasket.

Because it has chosen to treat gay human beings with mere human decency. While we claim to be the superior ones.

When Us Doesn't Mean Us: The Archbishop of Canterbury on the Place of Gays in the Episcopal Church

In a recent NY Times article about the meeting of the Episcopal Church USA now underway in Anaheim, Laurie Goodstein quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, cautioning the Episcopal church not to make decisions that will further fragment the Anglican communion.

According to Goodstein, Williams stated in a preliminary address to the ECUSA conference, “Along with many in the communion, I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that will push us further apart.” Goodstein reads this statement as a caution against decisions by the ECUSA to move ahead to integrate gay and lesbian persons fully into the life of the church.

And, in fact, on Tuesday the ECUSA voted to affirm that “any ordained ministry” is open to gay and lesbian church members. This ends a moratorium on the ordination of openly gay bishops following the ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson several years ago—a moratorium to which the ECUSA agreed in response to pleas from some sectors of the Anglican communion to avoid making decisions that might lead to splits in the communion.

I’m intrigued by Rowan Williams’s statement. In particular, I wonder what he means by “us,” when he says, “I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that will push us further apart.”

The “us” in that sentence can hardly mean gay and lesbian persons, can it, since the decision to exclude openly gay persons from ordination is a decision that pushes gay people away—away from their other brothers and sisters in Christ, away from the church, away from the experience of faith and life in the Christian community.

Decisions to exclude gay persons from ordination simply because they are gay are decisions that single out and isolate those who happen to be made gay by God, as if their humanity is not equal to that of the rest of “us.” Such decisions create a kind of reservation, a gated and policed community, within the church on which those deemed inferior are expected to live peaceably, while they recognize that their exclusion is merited, merely because their humanity is less than that of the humanity of “us.”

Rowan Williams’s statement, “I hope and pray that there won’t be decisions in the coming days that will push us further apart” seems designed to keep the special reservations for gays alive in the Anglican communion. Essentially, the Archbishop of Canterbury is implying by this statement that gays aren’t “us.” Gays are less than us, less than the rest of us who make the decisions on behalf of the defective, subhuman gays who deserve compassion. But not all the rights accorded to “us.”

I like Rowan Williams. I admire him. He’s a good theologian. He’s a thoughtful man and an inspiring writer.

I haven’t found him inspiring as a church leader, however. I don’t find those who ask others to accept second-class status merely because of who they happen to be—who they've been made by God to be—especially inspiring. I don’t find those who refuse to do the right thing when the right thing has a price tag, but remains the right thing to do, particularly inspiring.

I find it hard to listen with enthusiasm to religious or political leaders who tell me that gay persons should be treated with full human dignity, but who then propose compromises designed to place gay people in reservations designed for the subhuman while the question of how to respect gay humanity is discussed and further discussed by everyone but those being dehumanized. My heart and mind don’t expand when I hear religious and political leaders talk about the need for everyone’s rights to be protected, but who do not then put their rhetoric into action—who, in fact, issue warnings about what might happen if we move too quickly to overturn the injustice with which some citizens live, simply because of who God has made them to be.

I find it appalling when church leaders imply that only heterosexual people are fully “us,” and that gay and lesbian people should be expected just to sit by in silence on our reservation, while those who are the real “us” in the Christian community, mostly heterosexual males, make decisions that radically affect our lives but give us no voice in the deliberations that radically affect us.

I wonder how anyone imagines that his humanity is more than that of others, and then willingly assumes a position of religious authority in any Christian church. I wonder how one imagines that he can dehumanize others, reduce others to silence, expect others to be content with crumbs from the table and with continuing injustice, without dehumanizing himself.

Above all, I wonder how anyone thinks we can talk about church—talk effectively, convincingly, and honestly—and exclude others in this insulting, dehumanizing way. Creating special reservations for the subhuman, for those who are not quite “us,” is the antithesis of church—as the presiding bishop of the ECUSA, Katherine Jefferts Schori, reminded those gathered at Anaheim in a powerful opening statement that offers a very different vision of church than the one implied in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s caution about decisions that might divide “us.”

Church either invites everyone into the circle of “us,” or it forfeits the right to call itself church—just as democracy either invites everyone to the table of human rights or it fails to be democracy. It’s time for the game-playing that asks gay and lesbian human beings to accept subhuman status in both church and society to stop, before the institutions that mean so much to many of us damage themselves irreparably through their continuing betrayal of core human values in their ongoing dehumanization of gay and lesbian human beings.

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.

Under the Magnifying Glass: Domestic Spying, Churches and Gay Employees, Faith-Based Programs

Interesting echoes of points I’ve made in previous postings, in a number of online articles I’ve read in the last few days. Today’s AlterNet carries an article by Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive entitled “Bush's Secret Army of Snoops and Snitches” (www.alternet.org/rights/90829).

As I did in my posting yesterday entitled “And Another Thing” (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-another-thing.html), Rothschild maintains that “[t]he full scale of Bush's assault on our civil liberties may not be known until years after he's left office. At the moment, all we can do is get glimpses here or there of what's going on” (my emphasis).

Rothschild notes that Bruce Finley of the Denver Post recently reported on a federally sponsored program employing private citizens as “terrorism liaison officers.” Said officers report on any “suspicious activity” they see among unsuspecting fellow citizens. Said reports then end up in secret government databases.

As Rothschild observes (and as I noted yesterday), “What constitutes ‘suspicious activity,’ of course, is in the eye of the beholder. But a draft Justice Department memo on the subject says that such things as ‘taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value’ or ‘making notes’ could constitute suspicious activity, Finley wrote.”

So that explains the creepy museum guide I encountered on my last museum visit, who followed me around looking over my shoulder as I carried around my journal making notes about some of the paintings I was studying?

States in which zealous terrorism liaison officers are now hard at work include Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C.

As Rothschild notes, citing Mark Silverstein of Colorado ACLU, this program is certain to cast doubt on the completely innocent activities of thousands and thousands of completely innocent people, all of whose names will end up in secret government databases. And as I asked in my posting yesterday—which notes the same probability—to what end is this information being gathered? How will it be used?

How is it already being used? Who may already have been a victim of such unsupervised spying in areas in which it is taking place? In states that permit at-will firing by employers, how would an employee ever know that his/her job had been terminated on the basis of a pack of lies gathered by terrorism liaison officers and then shared secretly with his/her employer?

The possibilities for abuse and injustice with this secret spying program are enormous. Secret reports gathered on innocent people, who never see the reports and cannot defend themselves against the slander contained in them; unscrupulous bosses who may wish to can employees who have made themselves personae non gratae by blowing the whistle about abuses in the workplace; bosses willing to receive and use secret information from illicit government programs to make their management of refractory employees easier: the mind boggles at the ways in which this program can be—and perhaps already is—abused to shut down free speech and curb whistle-blowing activities.

Rothschild also notes, as I did yesterday, that these spying programs operate in tandem with the private sector, and that Justice Department guidelines shield the private sector from uncomfortable disclosures about its illegal spying on American citizens.

Rotten to the core. This needs to stop. I will be extremely disappointed with Barack Obama, whom I have supported and to whose campaign I have repeatedly donated, if he does not reconsider his position on FISA.

+ + + + +

Another fascinating article I ran across yesterday at the British Medical News Today website is an article entitled “Research Reveals Clergy Find NHS Better Employer Than Church of England” (www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/114222.php).

This article reports on a recent study by researchers at Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS (National Health Services) Trust. The study finds that a significant proportion of Church of England clergy have left parish work to serve as hospital chaplains. The report further indicates that these hospital chaplains find that “NHS is a better employer of clergy than the Church of England - especially if you are gay” (my emphasis).

The Leeds study finds that large numbers of clergy who have a partner in ministry decide to work as hospital chaplains. Over 20% of male full-time hospital chaplains in England are ordained clergy in same-sex partnerships.

Of those surveyed, 25% of chaplains found that the Church of England had valued and respected them in parish ministry, whereas 75% reported that healthcare employers had treated them with respect and shown gratitude for their contributions.

The bottom line for these clergy in same-sex relationships is quite simple:
“The reason for the disparity in employment conditions is the church's exemption from employment law . . .” (my emphasis). This is a point I have made over and over again in postings on this blog—most recently, in my postings expressing reservations about government funded faith-based social service programs (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/obamas-faith-based-announcement-faith.html; http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/faith-based-social-programs-ending.html).

Quite simply, churches and church-sponsored institutions do routinely discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. They do so because they can do so. In many places, no law requires a church or church-based institution to refrain from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring and firing decisions or in how it treats an employee.

As I have noted a number of times in previous postings, the experiences that my partner and I have had working as theologians and administrators in church-affiliated institutions have been almost uniformly horrific, for this simple reason. Despite faint protests about the injustice of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, the churches of the radical middle still all too frequently do what they can legally get away with, in their treatment of gay employees.

This will change only when shifting cultural consensus leads to legal changes that then force churches—which always bring up the rear in movements to accord greater justice to despised minorities—to move from the ugly ethic of because-I-can to because-I-must.

The British Medical News article quotes Rev. Richard Kirker, Chief Executive of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, as follows, re: the Leeds study:

His research provides convincing evidence that gay clergy, and especially those in stable relationships, are being driven away from parish ministry. In terms of paid staff the NHS employs as many Anglican clergy as the 10th largest diocese in England.'

The Church cannot go on ignoring the reality of a "diocese" where over 20% of male staff are not only gay, but actually in same-sex partnerships. On the eve of the Lambeth Conference it is time for the Church of England to affirm the gifts and calling of gay people and to stop living in denial.

Without the basic protection of health and safety legislation and employment rights, many are feeling very vulnerable at this time (my emphasis).

The churches must no longer be allowed to bask in the glow of self-righteous (and empty) proclamations about their commitment to justice for despised minorities, while they permit themselves the right to discriminate freely against gay and lesbian employees. There is nothing daringly countercultural in the least about the church’s commitment to homophobic discrimination.

+ + + + +

The preceding point is made very strongly in a 3 July op-ed piece of the Times (London) by George Walden entitled “Time to Come out of the Liberal Closet on Gay Clergy, Archbishop” (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4257699.ece). Walden’s editorial is an appeal to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to bite the bullet and advocate total inclusion of gays in the Church of England, rather than continuing his liberal dance around this issue.

As I noted in my recent posting about the prophetic civil rights witness of Bayard Rustin (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/freedom-is-always-unfinished-business.html), effective leadership is moral leadership. It is leadership in which the leader exemplifies the moral principles she proclaims to those she leads.

Walden notes that Rowan Williams consistently pushes precisely that definition of leadership when he confronts political leaders. But in how he chooses to deal with his LGBT brothers and sisters, he abdicates moral leadership and undermines his claim to be an effective transformative leader:

Where is the conscience of a man who habitually denounces the Philistine politician for expediency and lack of moral leadership while himself pretending to be someone he is not, for political reasons?

“The more politics looks like a form of management rather than an engine of positive and morally desirable change,” he intoned a year ago, “the more energy it loses.” As Dr Williams seeks to resist change that he almost certainly believes in, his Church presents a pretty good spectacle of energy-leaching entropy itself.

Walden lambasts the silence of Rowan Williams on the subject of LGBT Christians—a silence that speaks volumes about his unwillingness to exemplify precisely the kind of courageous leadership he enjoins political leaders to demonstrate in other areas:

The oblique way that he addresses the subject suggests that he finds it as difficult as many others to see how the Church can continue to discriminate against practising homosexuals in an age in which scientific knowledge tells us that sexuality is rarely a question of choice. Sacred texts can be disputed, but all that matters is what the Bible would have said had it been known that homosexuality is largely genetic. How Christian can it be to deny men and women a sexuality that is, in Christian terms, God-given?

Why does the Archbishop not say out loud what we all suspect that he believes? His views on everything from Israel to Afghanistan via a third runway at Heathrow airport are as forthright as they are predictable. To listen to the Archbishop, the infamy of US imperialism is unparalleled in human history, yet on gays in the Church he marches, if not shoulder to shoulder, in perilous proximity to the American Right. Besides seeking to avoid schism he perhaps fears that an openly liberal stance could damage the CofE's image even among the modern-minded, and that the pews would be emptier than ever. However rational these fears, they are based on calculation, not conviction (my emphasis).

Again, this is a point I have made repeatedly in previous postings, as I reflect on the curious lacunae in many current church leaders’ statements about key social justice issues of our time—see, for instance, my 16 June comments on a roundtable discussion sponsored by United Methodist Bishop of Florida, Timothy Whitaker, which notes the deafening silence about the place of gay persons at the table in this church-sponsored discussion of key issues affecting the human community (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/place-of-gay-human-beings-as-church.html).

Equality is a moral imperative. I applaud Mr. Walden for reminding the Archbishop of Canterbury that the most compelling witness to the values of justice will ultimately be how the church behaves, not what it says. And yet, when it refuses even to address these issues—to create a safe place for honest discussion of them—how can it arrive at a position of justice? When churches are bleeding good clergy to other forms of ministry, because churches and church institutions cannot promise even basic forms of justice to clergy in same-sex relationships, can the churches convincingly preach justice to the world?

+ + + + +

And, finally, in the two postings cited above re: government faith-based social service programs, I raise questions about the lack of stringent guidelines to assure that funds provided to churches and church institutions engaged in social ministry are being used properly. I continue to push this concern. In that light, I recommend Stephanie Strom’s article “Funds Misappropriated at 2 Nonprofit Groups” in today’s NY Times (www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/us/09embezzle.html?th&emc=th).