"Do All the Good You Can": Not the Catholic Cup of Tea — Really?!

As I noted last week, it is fashionable in some circles within the U.S. Catholic commentariat — I'm going to call these circles centrist ones (and more on that in a moment) — to disparage the kind of traditional Wesleyan piety represented in the venerable Wesleyan adage Hillary Clinton cited in her acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential candidacy:

Bush and Torture: What Does It Mean to Be Methodist Today?

I have been fighting with myself about this posting. Because, God help me, I cannot read the sickening memos about our recent legacy of torture that the government released yesterday (here), without reminding myself that George W. Bush is a Christian. And, to be specific, a United Methodist.

As I’ve noted previously on this blog, both of my grandfathers were Methodists, so I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Methodists. I cherish the Wesleyan traditions that call social structures to conversion, to the practice of justice and peace. When I read documents from my own family’s history, I am struck by the passion with which some members of my family engaged the slave system in which they were enmeshed, as plantation owners and slaveholders who also happened to be Methodists. I am struck by their struggles, that they cared enough about their church’s teaching to struggle—and often struggle hard—with the disparity between what their church proclaimed and what they did in their personal and economic lives.

In some cases, their Methodist convictions led them to manumit their slaves. In other cases, it urged them to assist freed slaves as they migrated to Liberia. In one case, it led a Methodist minister who was also a state representative in Alabama to buy slaves that were mistreated whenever he could do so and to set them free. In another case, it led a white planter-minister to challenge the laws against miscegenation and to form a marital union with a free woman of color, acknowledging her as his wife and his children by her as his lawful family, even when laws forbade such acknowledgment.

So when I read the memos about torture under the Bush administration, I take these personally. I ask how a United Methodist, with the historic legacy of commitments I have just sketched, could possibly countenance brutal torture of other human beings. And could work to set up a system for such torture sponsored by my own government.

I’m sickened by these memos. As I read them, I wonder what being a Christian—a Christian walking in the footsteps of John Wesley—means in the world today. What difference does it make, I have to ask myself, for the United Methodist church to issue noble proclamations deploring injustice, war, mistreatment of workers, homophobia and heterosexism, if those proclamations mean nothing, nothing at all, in the real world? In the lives of Methodists. In the behavior of Methodist institutions.

As I say, I have fought with myself about saying these things on this blog. I am an outsider to the United Methodist church, after all, albeit one with deep family roots in Methodism. It is always a touchy matter to criticize other families and their behavior. One can confidently skewer the pretensions and hypocrisies of one’s own family, but doing so with other families is tacky, and courts angry responses from the family under fire.

And still. Bush was president. He was my president, though I surely did not vote for him. I have a right to wonder about the disparity between what his church claims to cherish, and what Mr. Bush did as president.

I have also worked in United Methodist institutions and have seen at close range what goes on in those institutions, vis-à-vis the Social Principles. I have seen how the Social Principles of the church can be honored by effusive lip-service, but totally ignored in the labor practices of United Methodist institutions.

I have watched the United Methodist church pass resolutions condemning homophobia and heterosexism (here), while the United Methodist institution in which I worked did absolutely nothing to combat those sins within its own structures, and when it savagely punished anyone who called for dialogue about this. I’ve worked in a United Methodist institution that, even after the last General Conference passed a resolution decrying homophobia, not only does not have any policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, but actively oppresses gay employees.

I feel I have to speak out. In this nation with the soul of a church, religion is more than a private matter, after all. Religions have a public face. The United Methodist church has a significant and powerful public presence in American life. I live in a city whose culture—whose civic and not just religious culture—is imbued with a Methodist ethos.

It matters to me when my Methodist brothers and sisters do not call their own brothers and sisters to accountability for making a mockery of core Wesleyan values and principles. It matters to me when I look at who is leading the fight to re-outlaw gay marriage in Iowa, and discover that the senator spearheading that movement, Christopher Rants, is a United Methodist (here).

I have been made sensitive to United Methodist dialogues and the powerful influence of the United Methodist church in American culture by my own horrendous experience of injustice in a United Methodist institution. It appalls and will continue to appall me that, when my partner and I were treated with gross indignity by a United Methodist institution, not a single minister on that institution’s governing board raised her or his voice in protest. It appalls me that it was a United Methodist minister who advised the leader of that institution when Steve and I were assaulted as human beings by that Methodist institution, had our livelihood removed from us without cause, and were placed in a precarious economic position that still burdens our lives.

I am sensitive to United Methodist issues as I read the torture memos, too, because I have been receiving reminders recently of the upcoming annual meeting of Reconciling Ministries Network, a group of courageous United Methodists working to call their brothers and sisters to accountability for their injustice towards gay persons. In its treatment of gay and lesbian human beings, the United Methodist church displays the same shocking insensitivity to its own best teaching that the Methodist president George W. Bush displayed towards Wesleyan principles in crafting techniques of torture.

And the two issues are connected. You can't undermine the witness of a church by ignoring its call to just treatment of gay human beings, without also undermining the witness of a church when it calls for an end to war and the social injustices that lead to war. The same United Methodists who work tooth and nail to keep gay human beings out of the Methodist church combat the church's teachings about just labor practices and about issues of war and peace. Homophobia is connected to militarism and exploitation of workers.

As Mel White notes in an interview with Brent Hartinger at today’s AfterElton website (here),

You know, religion isn’t changing that much. Here’s the most liberal church of all, the Episcopal Church, being divided down the center by it. And here’s the United Methodist Church pastors holding at the national assembly this last summer to allow pastors to deny membership to lesbian and gay people. Allowing them to deny membership, not ordination or marriage – membership.

And the United Methodists have this great tradition of progressive kind of stance with John and Charles Wesley and the Native Americans and all that kind of stuff – they’ve always been liberal – now they’re being taken over by these right-wing organizations within their church. And the Catholic Church, I mean when the Pope just a few weeks ago says it’s as important to save the world from homosexuality as it is to save the rain forests, I think we haven’t gotten very far with him either.

When I read this, when I read the torture memos and remember that George W. Bush is a United Methodist, when I read the noble UMC General Conference resolution against homophobia and heterosexism but look at how some Methodist institutions actually behave, I have to speak out. I have to ask my United Methodist brothers and sisters please to address the disparity between the words and the deeds within their institutions—to call their Wesleyan brothers and sisters to accountability.

And I certainly promise that I will continue to hold my Catholic brothers and sisters accountable for actions that betray what we claim to cherish—because God knows, there’s a lot of work to do on my side of the fence, too.

White Eyelet Lace: Florida UMC Annual Conference, Day Two

I knew she was trouble the minute I saw she had a bible cover with white eyelet lace on it.

Thus saith one of the people I love most in the world, whose identity I won’t reveal here for two reasons. First, she lives in a big-small city/town where everybody knows everyone else, everybody talks about everybody else (while smiling in the face of those they talk about), and everybody will punish you, all in one collective huddle locking arms against you, if you tell the truth they do not want to have spoken.

I know. I live in such a place.

Second, I want my friend to keep making these pithy observations. Too many of my friends are already leery of me because they say that 1) I never forget anything they say or do, and 2) I’m liable to report what they have said or done in something I write. Comes from growing up among many Southern ladies who never missed a beat, as they pretended to socialize with each other, eyeing the other mercilessly all the while, in order to give a cold-eyed detailed report once the lovefest had ended.

And so to the Southern state of Florida and its United Methodist Annual Conference, which is now in its second day. (Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this: white eyelet lace bible covers do have something to do with the Florida UMC Annual Conference—at least, in my mind they do.)

The Florida Conference has helpfully uploaded its workbook to the conference website. Anyone who wishes can read the workbook at www.flumc2.org/page.asp?PKValue=1339.

Yesterday, I read it carefully, searching for any indicator that this annual conference will follow up on the unfinished work of the recent General Conference to keep praying about, talking about, and working for the full inclusion of gay brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church.

I was not surprised to find—not really—that the workbook has not a single mention of this topic. The words “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual” are entirely absent from the workbook.

This is not surprising because the 2006 essay on homosexuality and the church by Florida’s UMC bishop (a copy is on the same website) argues for eliminating terms such as “homosexual” and “gay” from the vocabulary of the church, as it deals with people who are, well, gay and lesbian. What is not spoken does not exist. There is no problem, where there is no language to identify a problem.

We can go about our business with cheerful hearts and smiling faces when we do not have to confront those we cannot see, since we do not give them even a linguistic place at our table. Without linguistic structures to frame the problem for us—the problem that the Other exists—we can talk about radical hospitality while practicing radical inhospitality.

This sometimes seems to me to be the Methodist way. The way of the churches of the radical middle, of Main Street USA. The hug-smack way. It is easy to continue doing business when our business is not disrupted by the presence of intrusive, meddlesome, demanding Others.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I often get the impression, when I look at the way the churches of Main Street USA do business, that doing business is pretty much what it’s all about. It’s about impression management and keeping up morale in precisely the same way that the corporate world deals with these marketing issues.

When our brand is sinking, we find a new way to market it. How about big screens in the sanctuary? Clowns for the children? A new logo would be nice, one with flames to show that we are on fire with love, having been snatched from the flames of damnation.

No gloom and doom for us. That would be a turn-off, and we want our brand to sell. We need it to do so. How else can we compete with those big megachurches that sell their own brand of coffee, have gym classes, snack bars, dating services, clubs of every kind a body could wish, all on huge sparkling “campuses” suggesting that God does, in the final analysis, really prosper those who believe in God?

The gays make things difficult because their very presence is a downer. Bring them in, and who knows who might leave in a huff (and take their money with them)? As a priest Steve knows once said in a discussion of how to deal with the gays in the Catholic seminary in which they both taught, “There’s no theological reason to keep them out. But they bring all these problems with them!”

They bring all these problems with them. They bring dirt with them, because being gay is being dirty. Just like the Samaritan lying bleeding by the side of the road. It was so much easier for the priest to pass the wounded man by. Remember the story? The one inside the pretty lace-covered bible? The priest was on his way to worship (to engage in salty worship, as the new Florida Methodist brand would have us say). Touching a bleeding man would make the priest ritually impure. It would interfere with his worship.

The lawyer couldn’t stop, either. After all, who knows what kind of legal tangles might ensue, if we pick up a person lying bleeding by the roadside? Better not to get involved. If he's lying there bleeding, he must have done something to deserve his lumps. Getting involved might end up implicating us—and our money.

The unexpected person is the one who notices, stops, and helps, in Jesus’s parable. Remember that the story inside the pretty bible cover was Jesus’s answer to the question, Who is my neighbor? The one who stopped was a Samaritan, a people considered racially and ritually impure by their orthodox Jewish neighbors. They had (it was alleged) intermarried with non-Jews. They worshiped on the hilltops and not in the temple.

They were not the practitioners of orthodox, right, true religion. They practiced a mixed (read: dirty) religion, not the pure religion of Judaism. And yet it was one of these—someone who was himself the Other—who deigned to stop and pick up the bleeding man, to staunch his wounds (thus contracting ritual impurity), and then to go the extra step of taking the man to a hospice to be treated. It was one who knew himself to be considered unclean who actually saw the Other we would prefer not to see, since out of sight is out of mind.

An article by Steven Skelley on the Florida UMC website today says that a workshop at the Annual Conference yesterday focused on “radical hospitality” as a mark of Wesleyan discipleship (www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000048/004841.htm). The article notes that participants thought about how congregations have to live discipleship collectively, if they expect to make a difference. The whole congregation has to practice radical hospitality, if it wants to live the Methodist way as a congregation.

And it has to reach out into its own community, where many people are removed from church. It has to take risks to “step out with Jesus” into the surrounding community.

I’m trying to get my head around these statements, given the total silence of this Annual Conference’s workbook about gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Who do those talking about radical hospitality imagine the alienated Other of their community to be?

Who is more excluded than those we make invisible by denying even linguistic structures to allow these invisibilized Others to make their presence known?

Will the Wesleyan brand convince others that it is a good brand, if it will not even talk about the group most clearly and obviously excluded by its church today? It is, after all, so easy to love the sanitized Other, the good, the approved, minority.

It is so much harder to step out with Jesus and notice that bleeding man by the wayside, whose presence raises troubling questions about the validity of our worship, when we will not even touch his wounds because we must keep our hands clean for the sanctuary.

We like our bibles, we Southern folks. We like them covered.

We’ll even cover them in white eyelet lace.

When we do that, perhaps we don’t have to peek inside them to see what they really say.

It’s so much easier to look at the pretty cover.