Frederick Clarkson on Christianity in the Religious Freedom Debates: Highly Recommended

Another hot-off-the-press article I'd like to recommend to you today: Frederick Clarkson's "When the Exception Is the Rule: Christianity in the Religious Freedom Debates" at Political Research Associates' Public Eye. Fred's article is  very well-researched, and I think many readers will find it valuable for the bibliography alone. 

Moving Dialogue Forward: Obama and a New Post-Racial (Postmodern) Politics

Reading lately about the persistent refusal of some fellow citizens to entertain the possibility of an African-American president makes me wonder how, when, whether the “problem” of race in American society can be resolved. I’m feeling frankly hopeless as the campaign rolls on and some voters become less coy about their hidden racism. Given the dismal performance of Mr. Bush measured against any scale of values imaginable, I had hoped that churched voters, in particular, would turn away from the party whose “values” this president has been exemplifying—for the sake of the very values they claim to hold so dear.

It doesn’t seem to be happening. Though what happened with Hurricane Katrina decisively exposed the current administration’s total lack of commitment to “pro-life” values,* there’s growing evidence that many Catholics will once again vote Republican in the coming election. That stalwart (and moribund) organization of graying middle-American Catholic businessmen, the Knights of Columbus, just met in Québec, and its Supreme Knight gave a rousing speech that stopped only a whisker short of endorsing Mr. McCain.

The speech of Carl Anderson, the Supreme Knight, reiterated the tired old talking points that have many heartland Catholics voting Republican in recent years: talking points about how Catholics must vote on the basis of a handful of “non-negotiable” stances such as resistance to abortion and gay marriage. These talking points have been adroitly manipulated by right-wing political leaders (and by many bishops) in recent years to give Catholic voters the impression that their only morally justifiable option is to vote Republican. Anderson’s speech is already being touted on Christian right websites as a call for a Catholic revolt against Obama (see, e.g., www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/aug/08080703.html).

And the strategy seems to be working. Last week, Zogby International reported that Obama’s previous lead over McCain among Catholic voters has now been reversed. McCain is leading among Catholics by a margin of 50 to 34% (see www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=13455).

Though those interpreting the trending of Catholic voters towards Obama are stressing in particular the influence of McCain’s commitment to “non-negotiable” values—and that influence certainly should not be discounted—I think that another factor needs to be considered, to account for the trending of voters of churches of the radical middle towards McCain. This factor is racism, plain and simple. And it needs to be discussed, though media analysts are doing all they can to sing and dance around the ugly reality that racism persists in American culture, including American churches, and that the response of churches of the radical middle to the sin of historic racism is all too often faint, equivocal, and useless.

Last Sunday’s New York Times ran an outstanding op-ed piece by Charles Blow entitled “Racism and the Race,” in which Blow argues that we see the race between Obama and McCain in a dead heat for one reason and one reason alone: this is race (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/opinion/09blow.html). As Blow notes, though many voters are ashamed to acknowledge how much race skews their political choices, strong empirical data predict that even among voters who will not admit being swayed by race, the choices voters make in the privacy of the voting booth have everything to do with the skin color of the candidate for whom they are voting.

It’s high time we acknowledge this. And do something about it. And in my humble opinion, though our churches ought to be leading the way in the process of social healing, they are not doing so, for the most part, and will never do so. With notable exceptions (I think, for instance, of the current initiative of the United Church of Christ for a nationwide Sacred Conversation on Race: see www.ucc.org/sacred-conversation), the churches of Main Street USA simply do not want to deal with issues that make their adherents uncomfortable.

Issues like race. Issues like sexuality. Issues like bullying of gay teens in schools. Issues like the shadow side of family life in mainstream America, a shadow side that includes wife abuse, sexual abuse of children, etc. Issues like how we treat illegal immigrants. Issues like what people really mean when they say that they believe in God and follow Jesus.

It is so much easier to talk in glossy platitudes about love and peace and healing than it is to address specific social wounds that call for real love, real peace, and real healing. It is easier to maintain the placid surface of church life (and to maintain uncontested pastoral control in churches) when one assumes that churches are not like newspapers in being called to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It is easier to preserve the untroubled peace of church life when we do not probe into the causes of the social ills we claim to deplore—when we do not study, talk together, and learn about (and confront) our own complicity in these ills.

Talking about race makes us uncomfortable. Facing the deep roots of racism in our society (and inside ourselves) is tough work. Churches all too often prescind from such tough work in favor of magical-mystery cures. And in doing so, they all too often make themselves extrinsic to important political conversations in the world today . . . .

If the churches won’t provide a forum for such values-oriented discussions, then where are we to turn for forums? I’ve talked before on this blog—a number of times—about what I like to call “safe spaces.” In my view, the key to preserving our democracy is to create safe spaces for the dialogic interaction of those who absolutely must sit together at table, if we intend to build a truly vibrant participatory democracy.

Our society has far too few such safe spaces for the serious interaction and serious work necessary to hold a democratic society together. The civic ties that bind us are fraying because we do not have places in which those who construe each other as Other can interact—safely, respectfully, with the intent to hear each other’s stories, and, in hearing, to commit ourselves to do something about what we hear, to involve ourselves in the Other’s life.

In previous postings, I’ve proposed that the historically black college/university (HBCU) has the potential to provide such safe spaces for the interaction of those who are Other (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/hate-crime-in-daytona-beach-continuing.html; and http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/soul-work-holy-conferencing-in_05.html). I’ve noted the premier opportunity of HBCUs to bring together, for instance, openly gay persons with members of churched communities that resist including gay brothers and sisters. I’ve also noted the important historic role HBCUs have always played in building a racially inclusive society, by bringing together faculty, students, staff, and leadership teams that cross racial boundaries.

Because of their histories, because of the concern of most of their founders to build bridges between racially alienated communities, because of the concern of most of these founders to address mechanisms of marginalization that create inequity in democratic societies, HBCUs have tremendous potential to make an important contribution to American society today—in a presidential election period in which the need for such cross-racial bridge building is more crucially apparent than ever. HBCUs have a significant opportunity in this postmodern moment, when our nation may well elect its first African-American president, to model the post-racial, post-liberal politics this presidential candidate represents to many voters.

After having given almost two decades of my life to HBCUs, I would be disingenuous if I suggest here that I truly believe HBCUs are, on the whole, creating such safe spaces for respectful interaction of various communities to discuss issues of race (and gender and sexual orientation, along with the mechanisms of marginalization that trouble all minority communities). On 3 June, I posted an excerpt from an essay I wrote on 23 May 2006, at a time when I was working at an HBCU and was asked to summarize my reflections regarding a workshop I had recently attended on the topic of transformative leadership (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.html).

In that essay, I note the potential for HBCUs to create safe spaces for soul-searching conversations that would provide an important service to our democratic society. I note as well, however, the following:

Though HBCUs should be premier dialogic safe spaces for soul-searching conversations about race (and gender, and poverty, and sexual orientation), I have found that discussions of race (and the other topics) are often even more hedged about with taboos in the HBCU setting than in majority-culture institutions. We seldom put our cards on the table. We seldom dare to speak from the places in which we live, move, and have our being.

As a result, we are impoverished, and much of the energy inside all of us—which could become synergy to build a new university within the framework of the old—is thwarted and bottled up…..

While HBCUs have strong potential to make important contributions to our culture today through the creation of such safe spaces, I have found that HBCUs are often the last places in the world in which people are willing to talk freely across racial lines about issues of race and marginality. The faculty of many HBCUs live in fear of leaders they perceive as sometimes capricious and cruel, as lacking a strong commitment to academic freedom and to humanistic values.

Though some HBCUs have a longstanding commitment to creating racially inclusive leadership teams (I think, for instance, of Xavier University, where I began my HBCU work, where academic vice-presidents have been variously Caucasian and African-American over the years), others have resisted the creation of leadership teams that model racial inclusivity. Some HBCUs with a tradition of racially inclusive leadership teams have moved to a racially monolithic model that no longer models the core values of the founder. The pressures to move in such a direction can be very strong; they often come, for instance, from alumni who do not understand the need for the institution to model racial inclusivity either as an expression of its historic character, or in order to transmit its core values to a new cultural context. When HBCU presidents lack the fortitude and integrity to resist such pressures, HBCUs sometimes move in a self-ghettoizing direction that thwarts their ability to engage the culture in fruitful conversation.

My hope is that the current presidential campaign will be a moment in which HBCUs will reconsider their opportunity to contribute to a new postmodern model of participatory democracy. It is a cliché to say that Obama represents a new day in American politics.

But as with most clichés, that statement contains a grain of truth. Within some segments of the American voting public, Obama is a symbol of a passion for a new way of doing politics, for a new post-liberal moment in American political life.

Leaders almost always fail to live up to the promise they symbolize, and I have no doubt that this will be the case with Obama, if he is elected. Nonetheless, we would miss some important opportunities in this election period if we did not move beyond personality politics and think carefully about what Obama symbolizes to many, and why he symbolizes this.

People have grown frankly tired of the tendency of liberal leaders to triangulate, to play one marginal group against the other, to calculate how to play the game adroitly enough to stay on top while making vacuous promises to exploited marginalized groups who have no choice except to support the liberal leader, since he or she promises to be marginally less horrible than the neoconservative one (on this, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.html).

Reading the Atlantic’s post-mortem on Hilary Clinton’s failed campaign today at the Huffington Post website made me recall yet again why some of us have placed so much hope in the Obama candidacy (www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/hillary-clinton-campaign). People are frankly tired of liberal rhetoric about inclusive values that does not issue in inclusive behavior. I am frankly tired of having men of the ilk of Bill Clinton or John Edwards speak about the need to safeguard the sanctity of marriage in the face of appeals to extend marriage rights to gay citizens. It’s bad enough to hear that rhetoric from Larry Craig, but from Clinton and Edwards?

Many of us are tired, too, of race-baiting—whether it comes from the white or the African-American community. The same issue of the New York Times that contained the Blow op-ed piece decrying racism in the current election also carries an essay by one of my favorite political commentators, Bob Herbert. As does Blow, Herbert deplores the race-baiting that keeps surfacing in our political process www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/opinion/09herbert.html).

He notes, however, that this critique cuts both ways. Herbert recounts a sordid little story of a recent Democratic primary campaign in Memphis in which an African-American candidate, Nikki Tinker, played the race card against her opponent, Steve Cohen. To be specific, she resorted to ugly anti-semitic tactics against Cohen, in the hope of eliciting black discontent with Cohen because of his ethnic-religious background.

And she lost, in a district that is heavily African-American. People are growing weary of racially divisive political tactics, and this weariness is helping to spur the movement that points Mr. Obama to the White House. If Mr. Obama is elected, it will be interesting to see whether both black and white social institutions—including churches and academic institutions—take advantage of their opportunity, in this new moment, to transcend the tired liberal politics of race-baiting (and of other forms of division and exclusion, including demonization and marginalization of gay people), and help build a better, more inclusive, more honest and more compassionate, society in which the values to which liberals pay lip service actually make a difference.

*On this, see my essay “Remembering Katrina” at the blog café of the National Catholic Reporter (http://ncrcafe.org/node/429).

Discourse Rules for Holy Conferencing: God Hears the Cries of the Poor

Discourse Rule Three:

Effective holy conferencing that aims at the practice of faithful Christian discipleship will give a privileged place at the table to those whose voices are least powerful in mainstream culture.

As I have noted, among the reasons I am offering critical reflections on the Wesleyan tradition of holy conferencing as currently practiced in the United Methodist Church is that this tradition offers a valuable model for other churches. Other churches already practice what the United Church of Christ calls “sacred conversation.” For churches that interact with the public sphere in a pluralistic democratic society to bring gospel values to the public sphere, holy conferencing provides a sound foundation for the interchange of church and culture.

Holy conferencing brings democratic procedures to the internal life of the people of God. The democratic model is a point of intersection with the pluralistic democratic societies with which the church interacts.

Democracy is a praiseworthy form of government, one perhaps particularly suited to the gospel viewpoint that every human being is of equal value in the sight of God, since we all originate from the hand of the same Creator God. However, democratic polity contains a hidden flaw that we must tease out and address, if democracy is to move in the direction of justice and not of the rule of the powerful over the less powerful.

This hidden flaw is that when human beings meet in the public sphere or in the context of holy conferencing, they do not meet as equals. God may see us as equals. We see ourselves otherwise. We are socially constructed such that some of us have power and privilege that transcends our shared origin in the hands of the Creator God.

Some of us have power and privilege because of the color of our skin, others because of our national origin, many because of our age, some because of our gender, others because of our economic and social status and educational background. Our sexual orientations make us not merely radically different from each other (so long as social and ecclesial structures continue to notice this difference and construct insider-outside lines on its basis): sexual orientation provides a demarcation point for entry to or exclusion from public conversations, power, and privilege, as well as holy conferencing. We do not meet as equals either in the public sphere or in holy conferencing.

Holy conferencing does not deserve to be called holy, if it continues the unequal power relationships of the public sphere within the church context. As a democratic process, holy conferencing is meant to provide a countercultural witness to pluralistic democratic societies—a model of what democracy at its best might be, when it seeks to empower all, bring all to the table, be truly inclusive and truly participatory.

There is a very strong strand in the thought of Main Street USA which assumes that, in our interaction in the public sphere, we are all on equal footing. This atomistic individualistic understanding of democratic society implicitly accepts the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. We assume that those who make it to the top have gotten there through their wits, hard work, and righteous living. Conversely, we assume that those who have fallen to the bottom are somehow flawed—that they are ill-educated or unintelligent, lazy, and unrighteous.

This understanding of our connection to each other in the webs of power and privilege that run all through democratic society overlooks the various ways in which power and privilege give many of us a head start on the rest of us. Some of our voices will never be heard, because the social networks of power and privilege are so constituted that our voices simply cannot emerge, cannot have a hearing.

Many of us spend so much of our time and energy simply surviving, that participating in public conversation or holy conferencing is well-nigh impossible. It is a luxury to discourse about holy things when getting one’s daily bread is an overweening concern.

The Main Street USA myth that we all interact on equal footing implicitly protects the status quo. That is, it protects the power and privilege of those who already have power and privilege. The myth that, in a society in which power and privilege are unequally distributed, we can remain aloof, “objective,” neutral, serves to bless and excuse the power and privilege of those already empowered, already privileged.

When the balance is strongly in one direction, the only way to change the balance is to place weight on the side that has very little heft. If the church wishes its holy conferencing to be holy—which is to say, truly inclusive—the church has to norm its discourse rules with considerations about justice. The church has to commit itself to an ongoing process of social analysis, which seeks to understand how power and privilege are distributed in any given society, how they operate in that society, and above all, how they function to suppress the voices and contributions of those without power and privilege.

I am making some theological assumptions in saying this. One assumption is that God is always on the side of the poor. God has a special preferential concern for the marginal, the outcast, those pushed to the verges of society. When Jesus announces the inauguration of his ministry in Luke’s gospel, he equates his ministry with the jubilee of Israel: he speaks of his ushering in of the reign of God as a kairotic moment in which slaves will be set free, the hungry fed, the poor brought to the table.

Another theological assumption implicit in what I am saying about the need for justice as a critical norm in the discourse rules of holy conferencing is that we cannot be merciful without doing justice. We Christians of Main Street USA like to believe in ourselves as the good, the merciful, the fair-minded.

We are not merciful, however. We are not merciful because we are not just. We do not look at our social (and ecclesial) structures from the vantage point of justice, to ask who is savagely excluded, who cannot even reach the table, who is asked to sit at the lesser table and be thankful for crumbs.

We are expert at binding up social wounds. We all too seldom ask how to heal and staunch the wound that causes the injuries we bind up. Our gospel message falls on deaf ears because the discrepancy between who we profess to be and who we actually are is too stark, too acute, for many people to support.

We claim to be merciful, while we practice savage injustice.

Holy conferencing will not be either truly countercultural or truly holy, unless and until it devises ways to bring to the table those most often discounted, ignored, and shunned in the various societies in which the church has taken root. The United Methodist Church has given outstanding witness in recent years as it seeks to bring people of color and women to the table.

The United Methodist Church—as with most churches of Main Street USA—has behaved, on the whole, with shocking cruelty towards and contempt for its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters. This is all the more shocking when one considers that many of those who wish to continue the exclusion of gay believers from the table speak of their action as countercultural witness! It is all the more shocking when those continuing this savage exclusion willingly play some marginal groups—e.g., people of color and women—against LGBT persons, as they try to engineer the conversation so that it does not reveal the real power centers of the church (the white male heterosexist power centers) whose control is threatened by anyone trying to craft a truly inclusive, truly participatory conversation.

There is perhaps no injustice greater than to define others without permitting the Other a voice in being defined. This is what the United Methodist Church does when, over and over, it passes legislation defining gay believers as sinful and non-normative, while holding gay voices, gay witness, at bay. This continued injustice in the very heart of the church—in its sacred conversation—so radically undercuts the church’s claim to be merciful, that many people repudiate the church’s invitation, and find it impossible to believe that the church is an open-door church comprised of those with open hearts and minds.

If what I am reading in many places about the most recent General Conference is correct, the church paid a very high price at General Conference this year, for continuing its engineered conversation about LGBT brothers and sisters. I am reading of parliamentary tricks, of managed “debates” in which alternative viewpoints were not truly given any voice.

If these reports are true—if the price the church paid to continue its exclusion of LGBT brothers and sisters at this General Conference was the deliberate manipulation of the conversation by a few powerful church leaders acting in unison with political interest groups for whom it is intolerable that the United Methodist Church become gay-inclusive—then one has to ask what it is about the unfettered witness of LGBT believers that the church finds so frightening. What is it about the stories, the lives, the faith-journeys of gay believers, that the church cannot hear, will not permit to be spoken?

The discourse rules for holy conferencing must work against the attempts of those with power and privilege to engineer the conversation. There must be mechanisms in place to name and expose crafty underhanded attempts to subvert authentic conversation. There must also be mechanisms in place to permit the voices of gay believers to be heard.

God is found among the marginal. Churches seeking to hear God’s voice in democratic public conversations and to discern the will of the Spirit for the church on that basis will fail to hear all that God might say and will fail to engage in authentic discernment, if they do not find ways to listen to the voices speaking from the margins.

As it is currently constructed, the public sphere of most societies is hardly a safe space for LGBT persons and our voices. There is much misplaced talk of the wealth of gay persons. One of the malicious lies peddled among the churches of the global South to work up resentment against gay believers in the global North is the lie that all LGBT people are wealthy and privileged.

Careful social analysis does not bear out such an analysis of the economic status of all LGBT persons in the societies of the global North. In the United States, even when gay persons have economic resources, we are still subject to manifold forms of discrimination, including lack of protection against being fired solely because of our sexual orientation, lack of the right to visit a partner in the hospital, lack of parental rights and privileges in many states, lack of protection against being verbally or physically assaulted as we walk down the street or go to school.

Life is not simple in such a society. Life is not safe in such a society. If the churches ever wished to hear voices such as mine, I could tell stories—and I know others who could tell stories—that the churches sorely need to hear, if they really want to be known as places of healing, mercy, justice, and inclusion.

Church should always and everywhere be a safe space for those who are subject to painful exclusion and savage treatment in society at large. Churches cannot call themselves countercultural when they do not seek intentionally to become such safe spaces in every society. To be such safe spaces, churches must turn from either ignoring or demonizing LGBT persons, to welcoming us.

In order to be welcoming, churches must break silence about issues of sexual orientation (saying no over and over again is hardly breaking silence), and build conversations in which Christians of Main Street USA get to know and hear the stories of their LGBT brothers and sisters. To be welcoming, churches must abolish the lesser table and invite LGBT persons to the one table of the Lord. Such welcome will be meaningful only when the same rules that apply to the lives and relationships of all believers apply equally to LGBT persons and our relationships.

It goes without saying that the church will convince no one it is truly welcoming, as long as the institutions it sponsors—e.g., its colleges and universities—are permitted to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Church-sponsored institutions must have non-discrimination statements and policies in place. Gay employees should never be dismissed without the same right to an evaluation (to which they are permitted to respond) accorded to a non-gay employee.

Gay employees should not be demoted and then terminated after bogus “evaluations” by hired “consultants” who do not even know the person they are “evaluating,” and who have no qualifications to “evaluate” the person whom they are evaluating. Gay employees should not be demoted and terminated on the basis of such an “evaluation” when they are never shown this evaluation and given a right to respond to it, but the “evaluation” is distributed to others.

There is a connection between such crafty and unjust procedures within church institutions, and the engineering of the sacred conversation of holy conferencing to keep openly gay voices out of the conversation. Firing people unjustly results in exclusion of that person from the participatory structures of economic and social life: it robs that person of a voice. When the people subjecting LGBT persons to such injustice in church institutions are the same people calling on the church to remain countercultural in opposing full inclusion of LGBT persons, and are the same people engineering the conversation to exclude the voices of LGBT persons, holy conferencing is radically subverted.

The world in which we live does all it can to make gay people victims, and then to blame gay people for exhibiting traits of victimization. The church must not continue this unjust victimization and re-victimization process, if it wishes to engage in holy conferencing. The conferencing of the church will not be holy until the church itself becomes (along with its institutions) a safe space in which to be openly gay.

Soul Work: Holy Conferencing in Postmodern Context

Now that the United Methodist Church General Conference is over, it seems imperative that the UMC (and other churches) think carefully about what is entailed when the Christian community meets for holy conferencing.

I’ve noted previously that the United Methodist Church has iconic status as the church of the radical middle and of Main Street USA. Following my 2 May posting on that theme last week, Religion News Service reporter Daniel Burke published a 3 May article in the Washington Post, using the Main Street USA metaphor to discuss what happened at General Conference. Burke’s article is entitled “Methodists Struggle to Reflect Diversity” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050203416.html).

He notes that the UMC strives to hold together diverse constituencies: it is the church of George Bush and Hilary Rodham Clinton, as well as of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia. Though Burke’s article echoes a right-wing trope I find rather tired—liberal churches of the global North losing members while conservative churches in the global South boom—it also notes that the tensions within the UMC communion require that the church figure out ways to bring everyone together in its international dialogues.

The United Methodist practice of holy conferencing is a valuable tool for churches that seek to engage the public sphere in dialogue. All churches that try to remain faithful to the gospel while seeking to understand the demands of the gospel in new cultural contexts stand to learn from the UMC practice of holy conferencing. All churches that see the interchange between religion and culture as dialogic—an interchange in which the church brings the gospel to bear on contemporary culture, while simultaneously listening for the voice of the Spirit that speaks in culture as well—can benefit from a careful study of Wesleyan holy conferencing.

As I have noted in previous postings, I find the Wesleyan tradition of holy conferencing useful for all churches, because of the following hallmarks:

1. At its best, it tries to bring everyone to the table (and “everyone” is the subject of salvation: God calls and wishes to embrace everyone);
   

2. At its best, it allows everyone a voice in ecclesial decision-making that, after all, affects everyone, both those inside and outside the church;
   

3. In fidelity to Wesley and his spirituality, at its best, it seeks out in particular the least among us, to give that person a privileged place at the table, and a voice in an ecclesial context, whereas cultural contexts always give the voice of the powerful more authority than the voice of the less powerful;
   

4. At its best, it listens carefully for the voice of the Spirit in the whole Christian body, and, in particular, in the witness of the least among us.
   

5. At its best, it constantly tries to keep hearing the voice of the Spirit anew in new cultural contexts, by bringing church, culture, and scripture/tradition into fruitful conversation.

As other churches struggle to engage in similar church-wide (and culture-engaging) dialogues, the Wesleyan way of holy conferencing has something to offer. The United Church of Christ, the church to which Mr. Obama belongs, has just inaugurated a “sacred conversation” about race in American society and churches (www.ucc.org/sacred-conversation). We desperately need such dialogues—provided (an important proviso, the subject of this series of posts) that we can develop discourse rules to make them productive.

We are a culture fractured by interconnected fault lines of race and gender, heterosexism, homophobia, economic privilege and exploitation, militarism, and environmental destruction. We who are believers need to find sane, holy, gospel-centered ways to talk together about these issues (and their interconnections) in a culture in which religious ideas and commitments have tremendous sway in the public sphere.

In the next several days, I want to argue that, as wonderful as the concept of holy conferencing is in theory, as it has currently come to be practiced in Methodism, it leaves much to be desired. In order for the United Methodist Church to offer a useful paradigm to other churches that seek to engage believers and the culture in sacred conversation, the UMC needs to think much more carefully about what is really entailed in holy conferencing.

In my analysis of holy conferencing, I hope to offer some insights from the perspective of someone who is an outsider to the Methodist church, but who has worked in Methodist institutions, and who has experienced at first hand both the strengths and weaknesses of the technique of holy conferencing as it is now practiced in United Methodist institutions.

I am also speaking as a theologian who, throughout his theological career, has had a strong concern to understand the relationship between culture and religion. In particular, I have written and published for several decades now about the relationship between the church and public life.

My research into the origins of the Wesleyan movement and the effect of this movement on British working classes, and then on the social gospel, has convinced me that the relationship between church and culture must always be reciprocal. The church has an obligation to bring its beliefs and values—the gospel—to the public sphere.

At the same time, the church stands to gain when it engages culture in respectful dialogue, keeping in mind that in a world that is God’s parish, the face of God is to be found everywhere, the voice of God to be heard everywhere. Throughout history, the church has sometimes reluctantly ditched its most obdurately cruel beliefs and practices (slavery, subordination of women to men, burning of witches, Jews, and heretics, "holy" wars, etc.) only when secular movements have demonstrated to the church that its commitment to such beliefs and practices utterly contradicts the gospels.

My theological work on these themes has made me particularly concerned to understand what is at stake when various constituencies gather in public dialogue to discuss the connection between religion and the public sphere. As a theologian, I am especially interested in the “discourse rules” that must govern public dialogue, if such dialogue is to be fruitful.

Readers might better understand where I’m coming from here if I point these abstract reflections back to the recent UMC General Conference. General Conference has ended. Delegates have now gone home. I imagine many have done so with light hearts: business completed, the church can carry on as usual for another four years.

I’d like to hope that the holy conferencing of this General Conference will have longer-lasting effects, however. Specifically, I’d like to hope that some delegates are returning home with troubled consciences.

I’d like to hope some have returned carrying in their minds the faces of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles. These are the faces that watch from the sidelines as the church holds the line yet again. These are the faces that remain on the outside looking in, while the church puts its foot down one more time.

I’d like to think of some delegates returning home with these faces in their minds, because in my reading of the gospels, Jesus never stands with the middle, but always with those on the margins—as a sign of contradiction seeking to make us in the middle uncomfortable. I can understand and appreciate the attempt of a church to hold many different kinds of people together in the radical middle: that’s catholicity at its best, and is a hallmark of church.

But in my view, the price the church can never pay for holding many kinds of people together, if it seeks to remain faithful to Jesus and the gospels, is affirmation of the middle when the middle stands for cruelty, whether the oblivious cruelty of the unthinking comfortable who can imagine no one other than the familiar, or the overt cruelty of those with a need to turn a targeted group of human beings into demons to be humiliated and expelled.

Unlike many delegates who will now go home relieved to have the fuss behind them—who may imagine that they won’t have to encounter another gay face again for four years, thanks be to God—LGBT folks have to find some way to live with the decisions the church made at this General Conference. This was a General Conference in which delegates gathered for holy conferencing had to hear a delegate from the global South refer to LGBT brothers and sisters as “the spawn of the devil.” LGBT folks now have to decide how to live with a church in which such words can be uttered in holy conferencing, and in which such words continue to ring in the ears of LGBT persons, even if they will soon be forgotten by delegates who go home relieved to be shut of the gay mess for four years.

What does it portend for the United Methodist Church that it is a church in which such declarations are thinkable, doable, in holy conferencing? As we consider this question, it might be worth asking whether any United Methodist anywhere in the world would any longer dream of saying that Africans or African Americans are the spawn of the devil (though Christians made this statement freely in the past). Would any United Methodist anywhere in the world think it permissible to say at General Conference that women are in league with the devil, though Christians for many centuries made that claim without batting an eye?

I think the answer to those two questions is obvious. The fact that it is still thinkable and doable in United Methodist holy conferencing to call LGBT human beings the spawn of the devil—openly, on the floor of General Conference—points to some very serious problems with how Wesleyan holy conferencing has come to be envisaged and practiced in the current United Methodist Church.

In the series of postings that follow, I want to probe those problems and to suggest—totally unsolicited input from a fellow-traveler sympathetic to Wesleyan spirituality—some ways for the UMC to develop a practice of holy conferencing that will help move it beyond the gridlock of this General Conference, in which delegates rejected resolutions right, left, and center. It is clear to me that they did so because the churches of the radical middle do not know what to say, where they stand, and how to speak a coherent word (and a word faithful to the gospel) today, in the face of the repeated request of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered human beings to be treated humanely by the churches.

An America as Good as Its Promise

And now Barack Obama has addressed the murder of Lawrence King. According to today's Bilerico blog, Mr. Obama released the following statement yesterday:

It was heartbreaking to learn about Lawrence King’s death, and my thoughts and prayers go out to his family. King’s senseless death is a tragic example of the corrosive effect that bigotry and fear can have in our society. It’s also an urgent reminder that we need to do more in our schools to foster tolerance and an acceptance of diversity; that we must enact a federal hate crimes law that protects all LGBT Americans; and that we must recommit ourselves to becoming active and engaged parents, citizens and neighbors, so that bias and bigotry cannot take hold in the first place. We all have a responsibility to help this nation live up to its founding promise of equality for all.

Kudos to Mr. Obama.

And now, as someone who has donated** to Mr. Obama's campaign, I challenge Barack Obama to continue to distance himself from "ex-gay" proponents such as Rev. Donnie McClurkin, who performed in the Obama campaign in South Carolina. The damages done to tender human psyches by bogus reparative "therapies" purporting to change sexual orientation are too well-documented to be dismissed easily. "Ex-gay" ministries are especially damaging to young people finding their way through the maze of gender issues in adolescence, youth whose families sometimes place them in "Christian" reparative therapy programs such as Love in Action in Memphis.

This weekend, there has been a conference of survivors of ex-gay ministry in Memphis, in which speakers and artists explore and publicize the damages of this spurious form of psychotherapy which has been soundly repudiated by all psychotherapeutic organizations of any standing. Peterson Toscano's a musing blog, to which my blog is linked, reports on this conference.

I also call on Mr. Obama to support the courageous stand his own church, the United Church of Christ, has taken on LGBT issues. This denomination was the first mainstream denomination in North America to ordain openly gay pastors. The UCC also supports gay marriage. Mr. Obama has stated that he is not in favor of gay marriage--that he has not yet found himself able to come to the place at which his church has arrived re: this issue.

Yet an editorial in today's NY Times reports that studies in New Jersey are showing that legalized gay unions result in a second-class status for gay couples. Gay couples in New Jersey report meeting obstacles in dealing with inheritance questions, in making medical decisions on behalf of one's partner or even in being permitted visitation rights when the partner is in the hospital. A horrific story from Miami last year, which is now resulting in legal action, reported that a woman whose partner collapsed and died when they were visiting Miami from Washington State was told that she might not see her partner in the hospital, since they were in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws.

The NY Times editorial notes that gay couples of color are especially prone to meeting obstacles under gay union laws, since they often do not have the financial resources to hire lawyers to fight discrimination, or to prepare estate documents to protect inheritance rights. The editorial calls on Gov. Corzine of New Jersey to demonstrate courage in addressing these issues.

I call on Mr. Obama to show the same courage. I was heartened by the speech he gave in an Atlanta church some weeks ago, in which he challenged the African-American community to deal with its homophobia. As someone who has worked within historically black colleges and universities, as an openly gay employee, I can testify about this: homophobia is alive and well in the African-American community (as in the white community). And it needs to be addressed. Silence about this issue contributes to the HIV epidemic in the African-American community. The failure to admit that black men can be living on the down-low and spreading AIDS to female partners, the silence about the presence of LGBT African Americans in the black community, contributes to the alarming rise in HIV cases among black women.

The black churches have historically been silent about these issues and about issues of sexuality in general. It is time for honest, open conversations. It is time to forge a new, safer social space for LBGT youth of color. The black churches should play a significant role in this regard. They--and Mr. Obama--would do well to listen to the courageous testimony of African-American athlete Charles Barkley about these issues.

Thank you for speaking out, Mr. Obama. Please keep on keeping on. And as you do so, please remember the inspiring words of a powerful African-American woman (and a lesbian), who helped pave the way for your success today. As Barbara Jordan once said, “What the people want is very simple--they want an America as good as its promise.”

This is what many of us in America--gay, straight, black, white, male, female--long for today. Please do not disappoint those who have pinned their hopes on you.


**I certainly don't want to imply that I am a major donor to Mr. Obama's campaign. I have given the bit I can as someone who is unemployed and without health insurance. But what I have given is given with strong hope that the changes Mr. Obama promises will actually be enacted, should he be elected. For those of us who are LGBT Americans, whose vocational lives have often been disrupted by prejudice, who have no federal protection when we are discriminated against in the workplace, it is crucially important that laws be enacted forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in the areas of employment, housing, benefits, medical care, and so on. When our jobs are ended due to a discrimination we can't challenge in the absence of laws protecting us, we lose access to healthcare benefits which, without an income, we cannot afford. For those of us in committed relationships, if one partner is lucky enough to obtain another job when discrimination interrupts both partners' lives, there is often no chance of carrying the other partner on the new health insurance plan, since the majority of employers do not provide partner benefits. All of this needs to be part of any serious platform of change in contemporary America. We all lose, when the gifts of some cannot be realized due to prejudice. When those being impeded by discrimination are talented young people beginning their careers, the nation as a whole stands to lose very much, if those youth cannot achieve their goals due to insupportable discrimination.