Robert Blair Kaiser's Inside the Jesuits: How Pope Francis Is Changing the Church and the World — Jesuit DNA and the Papacy

Some weeks back, Rowman & Littlefield kindly sent me for review a copy of Robert Blair Kaiser's book Inside the Jesuits: How Pope Francis Is Changing the Church and the World (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2014). The book has now, I believe, appeared in print, but the copy I received was an advance reading copy, a point I mention as I start this brief review because the page numbers I'm citing are from the page proofs, and both they and the text itself may have altered somewhat when the book was published.

Quote for Day: Jay Michaelson on Queer Discernment and the Huck Finn Moment

Quote for today: Jay Michaelson writing at Religion Dispatches about tshuvah, the call to repentance during Yom Kippur, and the dangerous heteronomous ethics with which we end up when we absolutize biblical texts and refuse to respect the process of interpretation that requires us to wrestle with texts if we're ever to fathom their authentic meaning or to make that meaning significant for our own lives:

Vatican Attack on Theologians, Vatican Attack on Humanity

The following journal entry is from October 1990:

I've just read an illuminating, extraordinary passage in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) (pp. 35-6). Rorty's talking re: how Freud’s theory of the unconscious suggests that every person is a poet, a maker, as the etymological sense of the word “poet” indicates, one who spins a narrative of one’s life that strives to weave the contingencies of life into a story that will strike others as useful. As Lionel Trilling (Beyond Culture [NY: Harcourt Brace, 1965], p. 79) puts it, Freud showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind.

These passages bring to mind what Dorothee Sölle has to say about the term “fantasy” in her book Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future, trans. Lawrence W. Denef (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1970). Sölle says,

In German, Phantasie has a potentially far more positive value than the word “fantasy” has in English. Its meaning includes the dimensions of imagination, inspiration, inventiveness, flexibility, freedom and creativity (p. 10).

In fantasy, we reach for metaphors to signify, to tell the story we’re trying to tell, to weave the narrative. Thought itself is poetry; thought is thus precisely what Ernst Bloch calls it, a process of always venturing beyond.

My insight as I think about Rorty's insight: the tragedy—or better, grave injustice—of what the Vatican is doing to theologians today is the suppression of fantasy in theology. Why tragedy? Because to suppress fantasy is to suppress humanity. We theologians are now being asked to become machines that merely replicate information fed into us from without, information that itself pretends to replicate Truth Out There. Our task is to spit Truth out in machine-like fashion, never varying the message, never asking any questions about what it means.

+ + + + +

As I think, as I pray, as I listen to God's voice in my heart (and in scripture and the Christian community), I have come to believe that God loves gay people intensely, inordinately, deliriously. Ratzinger, do you hear?

Take that “intrinsically disordered” rhetoric and shove it.

The Churches and Fascism: The Other Side

Interesting reminder last night of the path some churchmen* took during the Nazi period, which provides a model for us today different from the one provided by those who blessed fascist leaders. Last night, we happened to watch Claude Berri’s 1967 film “The Two of Us” (Viel homme et l’enfant).

As many readers already know, it’s a classic memoir of life in occupied France, told through the eyes of a little Jewish boy evacuated to the countryside to live with an elderly Christian couple who are unaware that they are hosting a Jewish refugee. The charm of the film has to do with the interaction between the gruff, anti-semitic “grandfather” smitten by the little boy desperately trying to hide his identity even from his hosts.

One scene in the film spoke strongly to us. It could easily be lifted out of the Pétain years and used as a parable for contemporary Catholics as they discern political choices.

It’s a Sunday homily in the parish church. The grandfather has gone unwillingly, aware that the local priest doesn’t share his anti-semitic views.

And sure enough, the priest chooses to preach on the response Jesus demands that his followers make to the scenes of hatred and murder unfolding all around them. He tells the parishioners that it is entirely anti-Christian to make judgments about whom God loves and whom God rejects.

That’s God’s work, the priest says. It’s God’s job to sort the tares from the wheat, and the measure God uses is far different from the one we ourselves use. In fact, God has a particular love for those who are oppressed, no matter where they’re found or who they happen to be.

Including—and especially—the Jewish people, since, after all, Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he? God looks at the world at each period of history, the priest informs his parish, to identify those most in need of love and acceptance. And it’s the obligation of Christians to do the same, over and over, in new cultural settings and new time-frames.

Why a parable for the contemporary church? Obviously, because a significant proportion of church members have been expending so much energy—and continue to do so, even now, when far more serious substantial issues face us and demand our creative responses—deciding who’s in and who’s out. Who belongs and who doesn’t.

Who’s worthy to sit in the pew and who isn’t. Who’s the true Catholic (or evangelical, or fill in the blank) and who’s the false one. Who should receive communion and who ought not to do so.

This is what the culture war and the wafer wars have been all about: human beings taking it on themselves to mind God’s business and do the sorting of the wheat and the tares here and now, in the muddled circumstances of history. And these are the hate-filled impulses on which fascism feeds. This is why I see the churches inextricably involved with the rise of fascism—or with preventing its rise, in the way in which they deal with the impulses of hatred right within their own walls.

The parish priest in the film is completely correct to challenge the root of the fascist impulse—the willingness to give way to hatred, and on that basis, to begin dividing people into worthy and unworthy. The willingness to use coercion and power to consolidate the division of human beings into worthy and unworthy. The readiness to lie and bully when all other means have failed, to cheat and steal and call this righteous behavior when we imagine we’re doing it in the name of God.

When some people of faith (like the parish priest in the Berri film) can see so clearly that these options are anything but consonant with the basic ethical tenets of all world religions, why does the fascist option keep attracting other people of faith (like the German bishops depicted in the photo accompanying yesterday’s posting about discernment)? This is a complex question, one that would take page after page of careful analysis to answer.

But one obvious answer that leaps off the page immediately—and deserves attention, in the context of the religio-political debates currently underway in the United States—is this: in the Catholic context, there’s been a fateful and malicious retrenchment in the period following the Berri film, which was made in the era of Vatican II. That was an era in which the church spoke about positive dialogue with the contemporary world, and about retrieving aspects of theology and ethical thinking that had fallen by the wayside in the period in which the Catholic church was in complete, closed, defensive reaction to modernity.

Within the context of the dialogue Vatican II invited with the modern world (a dialogue Pope John Paul II and his chief advisor Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, largely shut down), a promising new approach to moral theology, but one rooted in biblical and patristic thought, began to develop. This approach stressed the formation of good character as the goal of ethical life, rather than—as the Catholic tradition had stressed in its period of reaction to the modern world—a focus on individual acts as good acts or evil acts.

The moral theology that began to develop after Vatican II, but was quickly squelched by the top pastoral leaders of the church, noted that character is more fundamental than acts. Produce good people, and good acts will follow.

The exclusive focus on acts as the center of the moral life runs the risk of keeping people woefully immature, when it comes to making moral decisions and political decisions that involve moral judgments. At its worst, it produces a churched population that looks for some answer book—a catechism, a bible—to provide all the answers it needs as it makes moral judgments. And, it should be noted, some answer book as authoritatively interpreted by church leaders . . . .

The churches, especially in the American context, all too often keep their adherents in a state of moral infantilism, through their focus on the rightness and wrongness of this or that act, as proved by selected texts of catechism or bible, interpreted exclusively by church leaders. This approach to the moral life (and to the application of the moral life in the political realm) yields simple-minded sloganizing that all too quickly degenerates into a hate-filled division of everyone into the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the in and the out, the true believer and the false believer, the blessed by God and the despised by God.

In other words, it paves the way for the kind of leaders that rose to power very quickly in Nazi Germany. One of the painful lessons the churches ought to have learned in that period is how important it is to prepare people carefully to make political decisions on some moral basis that goes beyond sloganizing, pandering to hateful social movements, and resorting in the most simple-minded way to religious authority figures to tell us what is right and wrong.

Forming people of good character who make sound moral judgments is far more difficult than telling people to do this and that. Helping people develop character, helping them to come to sound ethical decision making within their own lives, using their own minds and consciences, is much more difficult than handing them catechisms and bibles and telling them to do x and avoid y.

I hold the American Catholic bishops responsible for helping to foster such immaturity in moral decision making among American Catholics, that many of us simply cannot see the way in which we have sold out our most fundamental values in the elusive pursuit of "the" pro-life candidate. We’ve needed much more from them as pastoral leaders in the past several decades, we who still identify, however tenuous the connection has become, as Catholics. While we’ve needed religious education to allow us to gain adult maturity in moral decision-making, we’ve been spoon-fed. We’ve asked for respectful dialogue and have been handed Catholic answers.

And the fruit of this approach to the moral life has been so exceedingly bitter that, with their abdication to the religious right, Catholics have practically forfeited any claim to have something of importance to say to the public sphere, in a period in which making ethical moral judgments about political issues has perhaps never been more imperative. Fascism—telling people what they must do, forcing them to do it if they refuse, and pandering to hate—is certainly a lot easier and a lot less messy.

But, oh, the price, when we give in to it!

*Men, because most churches have historically excluded women from key leadership roles.

The Kind of Place from Which Hate Comes: Discerning the Spirit in Political Decisions

In a previous posting on this blog, I noted a brilliant observation of Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell from this year’s United Methodist General Conference (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/dirty-money-united-methodist-church-and_28.html). At a panel discussion sponsored by Soulforce, Rev. Caldwell spoke about the interconnected –isms by which social groups (including churches) engineer the denigration and exclusion of despised outsiders.

Accidie and Running from Whales

Sometimes I feel itchy inside—in heart and soul—and when that happens, I know I’m entering into a period of what early Christian monks of the desert called accidie. They defined this state of soul as a kind of dryness in which it seems that no matter what you attempt, you fall short. And so you slide into a state of not caring . . . .

For me, the spiritual malady of accidie presents as more of an inner itchiness. I can’t focus. I have ideas, but they lead me nowhere. Everything seems too much—too much bother, too much busy-ness.

In this spiritual-psychological state, prayer becomes . . . gruesome. Not that I have ever been much of a pray-er, in the formal sense of the word. I do say my prayers, knowing full well as I do so that words are not ultimately what praying is all about. Praying at its best is disposing our whole selves—mind, heart, soul—to be receptive to God’s influence in our lives. We can (and should) pray, no matter what we’re doing. And we often do it best when we aren’t even mouthing the pious words—when we’re hoeing in the garden or stirring the pot of beans.

Accidie makes you not even want to try. It’s about giving up, succumbing to distraction in a way that you know is all about fragmentation: of concentration, of that disposing of self to be available to God.

I’ve learned to live through these periods. They always do teach me something—about myself, about the very different rhythms by which the world I try to place at my own disposal lives independently of me, and about God. If nothing else, they teach me to be less certain that I know something, that I can control anything, that God is at my disposal rather than vice versa.

They teach me to be careful even about using the name God, which we profane by overuse. When G-d becomes a word we speak oh so glibly, rather than the Word that calls us to life, we have lost all sense of what that word means. When we’ve begun to think that we know what the word G-d means, we’ve lost contact with the Word.

So what’s all this high-falutin’ theological theorizing about, ultimately? In my case, these days, I have a fairly good grasp of what the accidie is about.

First, I’m on information overload. When there’s too much information to take in, process, run by heart and soul so that I can internalize it and mull it over, I go into a kind of shut-down process. Can’t take more in, won’t take more in, don’t ask me to process . . . .

Things are happening fast and furious these days in some of the worlds I feel compelled to follow. Right on the heels of the GAFCON conference, there’s been high drama in the Anglican church as (the English media report) the Vatican has been holding secret meetings with some high Anglican officials who are ill-disposed to allowing women to be bishops.

A significant number of bishops and clergy are seeking to hold the Anglican communion hostage, just after GAFCON fired its volleys at the same communion. In the case of GAFCON, the “presenting issue” (to echo the less than scintillating archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen) is the gay issue: gay people. Our existence. Our expectation to be at the table of the Lord. The choice of the Episcopal Church USA to make one of us a bishop—one of us not hiding his/her identity, that is, but one of us who is out and proud. As Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the ECUSA, said some time ago, it’s no secret at all that the ranks of the episcopacy in the Anglican communion have always contained a significant number of closeted gay men.

For the group now pressuring Rowan Williams on the heels of GAFCON, the presenting issue is the choice to make women bishops. The Anglican communion is faced today with a two-pronged, overlapping set of threats to divide the communion—one group pressing the gay issue, the other the women’s issue.

Though the two groups are not entirely coterminous with each other, and though one is low-church evangelical (GAFCON) and the other high-church Catholic (the anti-women bishops group), they share a certain set of theological and political predispositions. And these theological-political predispositions are being gleefully exploited by right-wing interest groups in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia.

The bottom line is bullying. These right-wing interest groups want to de-fang the mainline churches, to eliminate their political influence within the global North, to reduce that influence to frippery. They’d far rather have “their” churches foaming at the mouth about the length of lace to be worn on an episcopal gown than preaching about the sins of capitalism, exploitation of the environment. Or about the sins of racism and homophobia.

To its credit, the Anglican communion has just chosen to stand up to these bullies. Yesterday evening, a synod gathered in York voted to move ahead with ordaining women bishops in the Church of England (the U.S., Canada, and Australia are already ahead of the curve here).

The Anglican communion will pay a price for its courage here, as the ECUSA has been paying a price for making Gene Robinson a bishop. And this news comes on the heels of a recent decision by the Presbyterian Church USA to overturn its ban on (openly) gay clergy and to move towards blessing gay marriages.

That decision now has to be confirmed by the presbyteries of the church, and in all likelihood, will not be confirmed by many of the presbyteries—particularly in the last big stronghold of ecclesial misogyny and homophobia, my homeland, the American Southeast.

Nonetheless, these are important decisions. They indicate that the power of the religious right (and, above all, of its right-wing puppet masters) to control the conversation of mainline churches is waning. They suggest that the religious right will be less capable of manipulating the consciousness of American voters in future, by playing anti-gay and anti-women cards.

The interaction between the group threatening to leave the Anglican church over ordination of women bishops and the Vatican also points to the continuing ugliness of many ecclesial and political stands taken by the current pope and his cronies. And that recognition (the recognition of the ugliness at the center of my church) in turn points to the growing divisions between the Vatican and many Catholic people, particularly in the U.S. On his return to Australia from his recent American tour, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson recently noted that he was shocked at the amount of discontent he found among American Catholics, and at the corruption of church officials that is producing this discontent.

Indeed. The American Catholic church is a mell of a hess, as my aunt likes to say. And that hess is not likely to be resolved anytime soon—not until a significant number of American Catholics get as mad as hell and determined not to take it anymore. And until those who continue to affiliate publicly with the hess start withholding money from the church, from their church . . . .

And through it all, the United Methodist Church remains, as I predicted it would, once delegates to General Conference had gone home, bafflingly silent about the issues it so hotly debated at General Conference—about the issue, the gay issue, the place of gay human beings in the church and at its table. It appears that, as with previous General Conferences, the United Methodist Church will continue to get away with the claim that it opposes discrimination against gay people, while its own institutions discriminate freely and unapologetically against gay people.

It appears that not even the most recent statement of General Conference deploring discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation will provide some UMC-sponsored institutions to adopt policies stating flatly that they will not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. As a blogger on the gay-inclusive UMC Reconciling Ministries website noted recently, while Presbyterians are debating gay ordination and gay marriage, Methodists are still stuck over whether even to admit gay members.

John Wesley must be hanging his head in shame.

So, accidie: all of this quick shifting and turning and buzzing within various churches today, regarding significant issues, leaves me overloaded with information. I need to get a feel for what is going on—at a spiritual level; at a deeper level than that fathomed by media soundbytes. I need some “away” time to take it all in.

I’m feeling accidie as well because, out of the blue, I have a delightful invitation to publish something in a venue I admire. And, again out of the blue, in quick succession, I have received hard shoves recently to publish a book I have long outlined in my head. And have been hesitant to publish.

For all kinds of reasons. The book touches on stories that in turn touch on the lives of people still living, and I want to be careful to do justice (and practice charity) if I do publish anything about those lives.

I’m also plain frightened to try to write this book. Not sure I have it in me. Not sure that what I think is an important story to tell will turn out to be important, once I have done the research necessary to gather narrative detail. Not sure I have the ability to work narrative detail into clean, compelling narrative line.

But aware, at some level, that whatever or Whoever is pushing me in this direction is beyond my own control, and that resisting some Whoevers can be more than a tad dangerous, as witness one Jonah. It’s easier to shut down and scratch my itch, than to go ahead and grasp the live wire of this vocational nudge.

Perhaps there’s a nice quite monastery somewhere that needs a lay gardener? Or a placid little Quaker community that wants a live-in cook to assist the Friends to whom it offers retreats?

But I suspect a whale can swallow a body even in the hills of Pennsylvania or Kentucky—or wherever those refuges are to be found. Particularly when that body is running away from what’s really worth doing in his own life?

And I'm surely not any Jonah. But I suspect that all of us end up getting chased by his whale every now and again, when we try to divert our lives to a direction other than the path set before us . . . .

* Another nudge: I'm intrigued that, in the past day or so, as the Anglican synod gathers in York, my counter for hits on this blogsite shows several log-ins from York. I do not intend to be self-promoting in noting this. I note it because it's another nudge to me not to let the accidie stop me from trying to put word after word, as I gather thoughts and seek with millions of other Christians to hear what the Lord says to the churches today.

Discourse Rules for Holy Conferencing: Being Honest about M-O-N-E-Y

Discourse Rule Two

Effective holy conferencing requires policies and procedures to create transparency and accountability among all participants about organizations other than the church that they may be representing in holy conferencing. In particular, effective holy conferencing requires policies and procedures that create transparency and accountability about funding sources for delegates who represent organizations other than the church, as they engage in holy conferencing.

One would like to think that ecclesial sacred conversations occur in a hermetically sealed holy environment where politics, power, and money hold no sway. Alas, that is not the case. Nor has it been the case at any point in Christian history. Politics has always been part and parcel of church assemblies and their discernment process.

Human nature being what it is, and human communities what we are—prone to bow to those with wealth and power—those gathering groups of people for holy conferences would be well advised to think about the way in which power and money may sway, or even determine, the outcome of a church’s discernment process. In my view, there have to be clear discourse rules that take into account these human tendencies and provide checks and balances against them, if holy conferencing is to remain holy.

I don’t by any means wish to suggest that participants in holy conferencing don’t or shouldn’t have manifold interests and commitments beyond their commitment to the church. We are all of us affiliated to various organizations, both within the churches and outside them. In holy conferencing, we bring to the table the weight of our life histories, our cultural formation, our class status, our political and intellectual commitments, our personal likes and dislikes and optic on the world.

And this is all to the good—that is, it’s to the good, when we acknowledge the biases and commitments that grow out of our particular interests and affiliations as starting points in a dialogic process where we open ourselves to the possibility of seeing things from other standpoints, as we pursue the truth together. This acknowledgment of our diversity and of the ways in which we are shaped by different histories and influences makes holy conferencing all the richer. It assures that a multiplicity of viewpoints—ideally, as many as the parish of God’s world contains—are represented at the table of holy conferencing.

What I’m addressing with this discourse rule are not the manifold interests, commitments, and affiliations we all bring to the table of holy conferencing. What I’m addressing is the real possibility that some of the groups with which we are affiliated would like to do all they might to influence the outcome of holy conferencing, even when those groups are not at their core first and foremost organizations formed to listen carefully to the gospel and to ask what the gospel has to say to contemporary culture.

In the American context, the persistent and strong influence of such political interest groups can never be discounted when church folks meet for holy conferencing. In a nation with the soul of a church, what churches say and do has influence far beyond the boundaries of the church itself. Political activists, corporate leaders, people of power and influence, care about what the churches say and teach—if only because what the churches say and teach affects the direction of our culture, and thus affects the political and economic spheres.

This being the case, it seems to me critically important that churches aiming at holy conferencing do all they can to identify the various interest groups represented by delegates to holy conferences, and, above all, call for accountability and transparency about how funds from those groups have flowed to members of the church conference. Questions that can justifiably be asked in this regard would be the following:

1. Is anyone at the table of holy conferencing primarily a representative of a particular interest group, and only secondarily a representative of the church seeking the Spirit’s voice for the whole church?
2. Is anyone representing a particular interest group at the table of holy conferencing being funded or paid by that interest group?
3. Is anyone representing a particular interest group at the table of holy conferencing using tactics (e.g., handing out gifts with strings attached, circulating printed materials containing misinformation designed to malign or harm some children of God, threatening or black-mailing) that have no place at the table of holy conferencing?

In my view, churches cannot be too intentional about pursuing answers to such questions as they meet for holy conferencing. That is, they cannot be too intentional about pursuing such answers if they want their conferencing to be what it claims to be about: holy, a shared dialogic quest to listen to the voice of the Spirit without undue influence of any interest group, no matter how powerful or well-connected.

And it goes without saying that the intent to transcend such control is an ongoing battle in a capitalistic society. Shut the door to one attempt to buy delegates at the sacred conversation, and interest groups will inevitably find another way to try to buy influence. Money talks. Money has power. And it is always on the move.

Dirty money moves beneath the radar screen. Dirty money does not want people to see where and how it is flowing. For those concerned to safeguard the “holy” in the phrase "holy conferencing," resisting the influence of dirty money takes a strong commitment to truth-telling, justice-seeking, and authentic discernment. But even more, it takes those same strong commitments to determine that one will seek in every way possible to track and rule out the influence of such money, when it flows in hidden channels.

What appears on the face of it to be a benign gift to a church or to members of a church gathering can, on closer inspection, have ethically dubious strings attached. What appears to be money coming from a group with clean hands can, on closer inspection, turn out to be money disseminated by another group for which the seemingly praiseworthy group is merely a front.

Tracking the ways in which money flows behind the scenes to influence what church groups do and say today and how their decisions appear in the media is a full-time job, one that requires the commitment of a people covenanted to seek the truth in love together. This is an imperative need—and a serious challenge—in a culture in which the ultimate source of money given to an organization may be light-years removed from the various front organizations through which the money is advanced.

A corollary of all that I am saying is that church-sponsored institutions also need always to be looking carefully at the sources of money provided to these institutions. Does money offered to a church institution come from a source that consistently violates key gospel principles and key theological commitments of the church? If so, what does it say about our principles that we are willing to take this money in our church-affiliated institution?

Is this money given with strings attached? Does it require us to engage in behavior that undercuts our commitment to gospel principles? As an example, is the money given to a particular church institution tied to expectations that this institution not hire openly gay employees, or that it refuse to adopt non-discrimination policies regarding sexual orientation? If so, should we accept this money?

If we are a United Methodist institution, can we do so, and claim fidelity to the church’s Social Principles and to resolutions of General Conference that call upon the church to oppose discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation? What does it say about our commitment to the Social Principles and to our resolutions, if any of our UMC institutions do not have policies in place to prohibit discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, or if our governing boards permit gay or lesbian employees to be discriminated against, and do nothing to investigate such discrimination and see that justice is done when injustice has taken place?

I suggest that these corollary considerations have to be kept in mind by those concerned to keep holy conferencing holy, because delegates come from and represent church-affiliated institutions. One cannot discount the effect of the commitments (or the trade-offs or sell-outs) members of a church-affiliated institution have made for money, when it comes to what is said and done at the table of holy conferencing.

When institutions throughout a church have accepted funds from organizations seeking to control the church’s sacred conversation and what the church says and does in the public sphere, it would be naïve to assume that these influences do not permeate the table of holy conferencing. Delegates bring their commitments to the table. Some of those commitments include commitments to represent the interests of groups funding their home church-affiliated institutions.

The commitments in which church institutions are enmeshed through financial dealings affect the tenor of holy conferencing. If churches want to safeguard their sacred conversations, they have to be clear-eyed about the kinds of commitments—including commitments to funders—that they permit their church-sponsored organizations to undertake. These commitments must constantly be scrutinized in light of the church’s key theological teachings and of the gospels.

Otherwise, there will be such a disparity between what the church and its institutions say and what they actually do (for the sake of money), that people will not be impressed with the rhetoric as they watch the reality undercut the rhetoric. Much ink has been spilled in the past decade in the media about the purported need to safeguard the religious affiliation of church-affiliated institutions, particularly institutions of higher learning.

This conversation has centered largely on determining how the leaders of churches are to assert or keep control over institutions in their jurisdiction. It has often masqueraded as a conversation about the soul and identity of church-affiliated institutions.

In my view, the conversation has usually been misplaced, because the crucial question it has not asked is the question of whether the commitments church-affiliated institutions make, especially to funders, undercut the core principles of the gospel and of a church’s teaching. This question—the elephant in the living room—is one that most church-affiliated institutions will not permit at the table. If it were answered honestly, church-sponsored institutions might have to ask questions not about the loss of religious identity, but about the loss of their soul—about their captivity to leaders who are soulless, even when they employ religious rhetoric or tout their strong ties to the church sponsoring the institution they lead.

I speak out of my own experience working within the administrative structures of two United Methodist institutions of higher learning. I have no doubt that, had I worked at a similar level in colleges affiliated with other churches including my own Catholic church, I would have seen something of the same picture I saw within the Methodist colleges/universities for which I worked. Soullessness is a pervasive problem in many religiously affiliated institutions of higher learning today, and it is evident right at the top of those institutions, in their key leaders and governing boards, many of whom value fiscal soundness more than social transformation or fidelity to religious principles.

What I saw in these institutions troubled me. I heard key leaders say things like, “The color of money is green. It spends the same, no matter who it comes from.” I was rarely in a position to protest, and I did not offer my own opinion except when asked to do so, since the governing structure of both institutions was exceptionally autocratic and did not entertain the input of those “serving” (a word often used by the top leader of both institutions) the college/university president.

Nonetheless, I was and remain troubled by the assertion that the color of money is green. I am troubled by the assumption that a church-affiliated institution can take money from a source whose goals and ideals are clearly at odds with those of the church. I am troubled by the assumption that a church-affiliated institution can take dirty money and not be corrupted in the process—not sell its soul.

When money comes with strings attached, back-room deals are often cut. Midnight calls ensue. Decisions that should be made in independence of the influence of funders are made with full complicity of funders, and often with funders ultimately controlling the decisions made. When these funders have deep-pocket ties to members of governing boards (and they usually do), their influence is compounded.

As an example, I know from my own administrative work in two church-sponsored institutions of higher learning that how both institutions have dealt with the church’s counsel that workplaces must not discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation has been driven by financial considerations, by concerns about keeping the loyalty of key funders. One of these institutions still lacks a statement published in its official policy handbook—its university catalogue—prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

Since this university is in a right-to-work state in which an employee has no ground for contesting unfair dismissal, I would be very hesitant to recommend that any openly gay or lesbian person take a job at this institution. The president of the institution has a peculiar history of hiring gay and lesbian persons out of proportion to our numbers in the population, and then dismissing us in grossly unfair ways when it seems expedient to do so.

The other church-affiliated institution at which I have worked as an administrator just brought (I am told on good authority by a faculty member) an outspoken anti-gay speaker to address its graduating class. I am told (and have no reason to doubt) that this speaker made explicit and ugly statements about the evil ways of gay and lesbian persons to graduating seniors.

This happened in a United Methodist college immediately after General Conference passed resolutions condemning homophobic violence and discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. Where will students take their core values, when they are presented with such parting words by their United Methodist alma maters: from the church and what it teaches? Or from the homophobic speaker brought in by the leader of the United Methodist institution? When boards of such United Methodist institutions stand by in silence as such behavior contradicts the sponsoring church’s core teaching and gospel principles, will people be convinced that these teachings and principles mean anything at all?

What I hope to emphasize in recounting all these experiences is that no one comes to the table of holy conferencing free from outside influences. When money is attached to those influences, the discourse rules for the sacred conversation need to be realistic and honest about the possibility that money—including dirty money—can determine the course of the sacred conversation.

Delegates for holy conferencing who represent church-affiliated institutions that have made deals with the devil based on accepting dirty money—for instance, money attached to continued homophobic discrimination—are not likely to call their institution’s practices into question, when they sit at the table of the holy conference. To do so would require that their own institution behave differently, and with transparency and accountability about the funds it receives.

I speak here as well out of the experience of having been involved in theological conversations in my own Catholic church about the horrific problem of clerical abuse of minors. This deep-seated problem has everything to do with abuse of power. It is first and foremost a crisis of abuse of power, and secondarily a crisis of abuse of youth.

And that abuse of clerical power and privilege is deeply rooted in and compounded by abuse of money. There are very weak structures within the American Catholic church to require fiscal accountability and transparency on the part of dioceses and bishops. Until such structures are in place, we cannot expect the crisis of clerical sexual abuse of minors to be addressed forthrightly.

The United Methodist Church, by contrast, has a rather admirable history of financial transparency and accountability. The United Methodist emphasis on sound stewardship sets a standard other churches—including the Catholic church—would be well-advised to emulate.

But if this tradition of fiscal responsibility and sound stewardship is to mean much in the context of holy conferencing, then it is incumbent on the United Methodist Church to be clear-eyed about both how money is used to influence the outcome of holy conferencing, as well as how money is used within church-affiliated institutions, which send large numbers of delegates to church conferences. People will listen to what the church proclaims when that proclamation is lived first, and spoken only following the lived witness.

Discourse Rules for Holy Conferencing: Speaking Truth in Love

In my next series of postings, I’d like to spell out some discourse rules that, in my totally unsolicited view, would help churches of the radical middle stay faithful to their traditions of holy conferencing and sacred conversation. In my humble opinion, these discourse rules would do much to further the holy conferencing of all Christian churches that have any interest at all in remaining in fruitful dialogue with the culture of their day—that is, church traditions that don’t want merely to turn their back on culture and hurl scriptural or doctrinal invectives at it, as if the world is not God’s parish.

I don’t pretend to any sort of comprehensiveness in the list that follows. I have drafted these as I observe, listen to, and pray (all from afar) about the holy conferencing that has took place at the latest UMC General Conference. These ground rules arise out of my own experience and theological reading, and probably have many different theological and philosophical sources. If there’s any one primary source from which I have derived them, it’s the conversation about religion and public life in American life that has been going on for some decades now, and about which I have published for several decades.

Discourse Rule One:

1. In effective holy conferencing that aims at the practice of faithful Christian discipleship, truth claims need to be backed by evidence and sources that are accessible to all, and capable of being evaluated by all.
   

This is crucially important in discussions of complex issues of morality that require attention to the most compelling testimony of the natural and social sciences.

A case in point is homosexuality. In any public Christian discussion of this topic, every participant has, of course, the right to state her or his opinion, bias, interpretation of scripture and tradition—provided, of course, that the opinion as so stated is not a hateful attack on any group of people. People have a right to believe and to state that the moon is made of green cheese, if they wish to do so.

But if public conversation in an ecclesial discernment process of an issue like where to “put” our LGBT brothers and sisters is to be effective and to further faithful Christian discipleship, the discussion has to move beyond expressions of opinion and to search for the truth. Not to seek the truth when people’s lives are radically affected, positively or negatively, by decisions contingent on a public discussion of an issue like this is to abandon fidelity to the gospel, which challenges us always to ask how our decisions and beliefs affect real people who live real lives in the real world.

If the topic under discussion is, as it was in medieval Christianity, whether the sun revolves around the earth, I might take the floor in holy conferencing to advance all kinds of scriptural warrants for my belief that the sun revolves around the earth. Christians in the middle ages did precisely this when this topic was discussed in church forums.

I might also add my deeply held conviction that changing how scripture has been viewed for centuries would be disastrous for the church and the world—that people would stop believing in what the church teaches if it admits it has been wrong about such an important matter, that the scriptures are inerrant, that changing such a central belief would result in social chaos and the decay of social institutions.

But I shouldn’t expect to be listened to carefully or believed if I didn’t also seek the truth about heliocentrism from whatever scientific sources are available to me, particularly when those sources have devloped refined techniques for helping me understand the relationship of the earth to the sun. As a Christian who believes that the world is God’s parish, I am committed to listening to scripture and the church, as well as to the most credible scientific sources possible, since I believe that God speaks in manifold ways in the worldwide parish.

As a Christian in such a dialogue, I would also approach these questions with a strong degree of humility, knowing that the church had sometimes been deeply wrong in its previous teachings and had, in fact, caused serious harm to human beings by committing itself to wrong interpretations and wrong teachings, including teachings that incorporated outmoded scientific information. The churches have in the past executed witches, burnt Jews at the stake for being Christ-killers, held human beings in chattel slavery, taught that women are misbegotten males, and so on.

Unless those involved in a process of holy conferencing listen carefully to, weigh, and ask for further information about the truth claims advanced by each participant, the church cannot engage in sound discernment, move forward to meet the demands of the future, or provide good pastoral ministry to the world in which it lives.

What do I mean by listening carefully to, weighing, and asking for information about truth claims? To return to the case of homosexuality (that is, to the real lives of real gay brothers and sisters, since that is ultimately what the discussion is about), churches would be remiss—they would not be upholding a sound discernment process, they would not be faithful to their commitment to seek truth and to provide good pastoral ministry—if they discounted or distorted the best scientific evidence at their disposal, when they conference.

It is certainly possible for Christians today to believe and to propose that homosexuality is “curable,” is a mental illness, is “caused” (in males, who seem to be the predictable focus of these discussions, even when this bias is never brought to the table) by overbearing mothers and weak fathers, will be rooted out when boys have strong male role models, does not exist in the nations of the global South, etc.

I say it is possible to believe and to propose these entirely erroneous theories. But they should not hold sway—they should not have legitimacy—in the ecclesial context of holy conferencing, if the church engaged in holy conferencing really is committed to finding the truth, so that its witness is truthful and not harmful to those receiving that witness.

Much valuable time—time the church can better spend in binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked—is misspent in holy conferencing, when people are permitted to postulate outrageous pet theories that have no basis at all in truth. Good holy conferencing sets ground rules that require truth claims to be backed by evidence and sources accessible to all, so that all can evaluate that evidence and those sources—and so that valuable time is not wasted in fighting losing battles about issues long since resolved by scientific research.

When it becomes apparent that groups within a church continuously seek to push truth claims that lack the backing of sound evidence and good sources, it is incumbent on those engaged in holy conferencing to challenge those brothers and sisters in Christ to be more careful about the truth, and to examine their motives in disseminating widely discounted “evidence” in th light of the gospel, with its challenge that we live in the truth in order not to harm others.

I say it is incumbent to challenge those promoting harmful theories based on pseudo-science, and using scripture to justify their commitment to bad science (to untruth), to challenge these brothers and sisters in Christ to be examine their motives in disseminating misinformation, because repeated attempts to bring untruth that is harmful to some brothers and sisters in Christ to the table in holy conferencing suggests ill intent. When lies such as the lie that people choose their sexual orientation and can opt out of the gay “lifestyle” through prayer and therapy continue to be brought to the table of holy conferencing even though these lies are readily disproven by abundant scientific evidence, there is clearly more going on in the attempt to repeat lies than a lack of concern for the truth.

Holy conferencing is a discernment process. Discernment calls on the people of God to seek the truth, to try to avoid doing harm to others as we do so, and to discern the motives of those who persistently try to divert the discernment process from truth-seeking. Fidelity to the gospel—to doing good and avoiding evil—requires us to engage in such discernment, even when naming the true motives of others causes controversy. We will not hear the voice of the Spirit if we are moved by spirits that are less noble than the Holy Spirit, in our holy conferencing.

Unsolicited Theological Reflections about the UMC and IRD

Note that this is part of a double posting following one I just made. That posting summarizes my recent research on the IRD and the United Methodist Church.

Unsolicited Suggestions about the UMC and the IRD in Future

No one has asked me for these. I offer these unsolicited theological reflections as 1) someone with many autobiographical connections to Methodism (have I mentioned, in addition to all I’ve said previously, that my father graduated from a Methodist college?); 2) as a theologian; 3) as someone sympathetic and indebted to Wesleyanism; and 4) as someone who has had an insider’s chance to observe (and, in some cases, be deleteriously affected by) how business is done in United Methodist institutions.

In my view, contemporary Methodism has both weaknesses and strengths that have made it susceptible to IRD infiltration, and also capable—in theory, at least—of combating those influences, if it chooses to do so. Choosing to do so will require a willingness of Methodist leaders to welcome critical reflections on the part of those working within United Methodist institutions--including outsiders to Methodism--who have gained a feel for what is happening in the Methodist church at a concrete level, from their work in Methodist institutions.

The strengths/weaknesses on which I want to focus are as follows:

▪ The Methodist tradition of seeking the “radical middle”;

▪Democratic polity, with the tradition of holy conferencing;

▪ A strong spirituality and tradition of practical social witness, coupled with a less-strong theological tradition, particularly in the area of ecclesiology.

Methodism is to be admired for its tradition of the radical middle. At best, this tradition discounts the wisdom and voice of no one. At best, it brings everyone to the table before decisions affecting the whole communion are made. Ideally, it fosters a discernment process in which all believers seek holy wisdom together, to guide church decision making as new challenges arrive at new points in history. Ideally, the tradition of the radical middle holds disparate groups together to allow the church to be authentically inclusive, authentically catholic—as church should be.

There are, however, some serious downsides to the tradition of the radical middle—as it is currently practiced by many Methodist institutions, at least. I saw and was adversely affected by those downsides in almost a decade of work in Methodist institutions of higher education.

When practiced in isolation from a theologically informed attempt to discern the path of holy wisdom within a Methodist institution, the tradition of the radical middle can easily become mere culture Christianity. When the radical middle is envisaged as some compromise between a bogus “truth” determined by right-wing operatives of the ilk of the IRD, and the Wesleyan tradition’s wisdom about social justice, it all too commonly turns into the path of least resistance—the path of cheap, rather than costly grace. The path of the radical middle can easily become plain conformity to culture.

I have made this argument in previous postings on this blog, citing my experiences in UMC institutions as well as other aspects of my life journey. I won’t try readers’ patience by belaboring those points again. What I would like to note here, though, is that, ironically, many of those now chiding the UMC to avoid becoming a church of culture rather than a countercultural church are, in their appeal to the radical middle, actually reflecting cultural norms.

Those norms make it easy to be a disciple of Jesus. They make us as followers of Christ comfortable. They do not require us to make hard decisions that set us at odds with our own cultural contexts—especially in the areas of gender and sexual orientation, or in the areas of fiscal stewardship and resistance to dirty money, insofar as our institutional purse strings are tied to holding the line on “traditional” teachings about gender and sexual orientation.

As I have said previously, my own thinking about these issues is highly influenced by my experience growing up in the American South during the Civil Rights struggle. This was a period in which I saw almost no white churches departing from the “radical middle” of Southern culture—and that consensus of the radical middle was racist. Instead of leading society at a time in which the church might have exercised prophetic countercultural leadership, the churches all too often merely mirrored social norms, citing scripture to justify their behavior.

I am therefore not conspicuously impressed by the professed repentance of these churches today for either their previous racism or misogyny. I cannot be impressed by this professed repentance when the leaders of these churches now behave towards LGBT members precisely the same way they did previously towards people of color and women.

Repentance means little when it costs nothing, now that cultural norms have made it easy to repent. Countercultural witness requires walking in costly grace in the here and now, within the cultural contexts in which we now live—and paying the price for such witness.

And when this repentance is attended by deceitful attempts on the part of these new defenders of people and color and women to promote token representatives of such groups--carefully tailored token representatives who do not rock the boat--I am even less impressed. This is a dishonest use of pretend-inclusivity and pretend-cultural sensitivity to combat the current outsider group, the LBGT children of God.

The Methodist emphasis on democratic polity and holy conferencing is admirable, an emphasis I would like very much to see adopted within my own Catholic tradition, with its tragically outmoded monarchical structures of leadership. At its best, gathering everyone around the table to discern the Spirit and make decisions together provides secular culture, in which bigger and better tables are always set for the rich and powerful, a powerful countercultural witness.

The tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing can have a very strong downside, however—one of which I have had to become crucially aware in my work for United Methodist institutions. At its worst, rather than being a tool for holy consensus-building, democratic polity and holy conferencing can degenerate into a tool of control, in which those who have power over others abuse that power by suppressing alternative (and possibly prophetic) voices, and by playing one interest group against another with no consideration for competing claims of justice.

Some of the worst leadership I have ever witnessed in my entire life has been in UMC institutions. Those exercising this leadership were not merely terrible leaders. They were leaders who were well-schooled in UMC polity and the tradition of holy conferencing. And they were aided and abetted by Methodist bishops and Methodist ministers as they abused their leadership roles.

In the name of gathering everyone around the table and listening to every voice, some of these leaders practice outrageous, blatant triangulation. They abuse religious language and references to the Methodist way of doing business to pit one member of their team against another, claiming that only by setting one member against another can a true and truly comprehensive perspective be maintained.

I want to emphasize that this technique of triangulating managerialism within the United Methodist institutions in which I have worked is not an aberration of the UMC tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing. Those practicing this blatant triangulation constantly reference the United Methodist tradition of democracy and holy conferencing, and their own training in that tradition (and in leadership) within the structures of the UMC.

In my experience working in United Methodist institutions, I have seen exceedingly ugly things done by leaders under the cover of this religious justification. I have seen leaders constantly dig for dirt on each person reporting to them, such that they could then use this negative data to try to keep team members in their place. When no dirt was to be found on some team members, I have seen leaders couple team members who were seriously trying to do their jobs with integrity to incompetent and unethical watchdog members of their teams. Those watchdogs, about whom the leader had damning information, were used to harass, report on, and try to rein in members seriously seeking to do their jobs with integrity.

I have seen leaders in United Methodist institutions, who claim that their goal in pitting one team member against another is to allow the full picture to be discerned, resort to top-down hierarchical models of leadership when their use of triangulation was challenged. In one institution, after proclaiming to her leadership team that her democratic style of leadership arose out of her experience working in the United Methodist Church, a leader immediately presented a flow chart of institutional authority depicting a triangle, with herself at the top. As she did so, she declared, “We are not a democracy.”

This experience has led me to conclude that leadership in the United Methodist Church actually often exercises top-down control techniques while talking the talk of democracy to cover over the lapses of democratic representation in leadership decisions. Effective leadership in any democratic institution requires who profess democratic ideals to hold these in creative tension with managerial goals.

In the Methodist context, church leaders and leaders of Methodist institutions need to be intentional and clear about how the Wesleyan tradition of democracy and holy conferencing informs their leadership style, even when they are adopting a managerial approach. Otherwise, not only can they betray the Wesleyan tradition in their leadership styles, but they can also end up committing the even worse sin of abusing religious language to justify leadership techniques that are imperious, insensitive, and in some cases, downright cruel and unethical.

Ultimately, the goal of managerial triangulation is always to maintain the status quo, in which those currently in leadership remain in leadership. Triangulating leaders have a vested interest in setting those they lead against each other, insofar as they want to retain their power. When the valuable Methodist tradition of democratic polity and holy conferencing is allowed to degenerate into managerial triangulation, and when such triangulation is attended by abuse of religious language, the institution remains stuck. It cannot move forward.

It cannot do so because the triangulation being practiced by its leaders disempowers those within the institution most capable of moving it forward. It disempowers prophetic voices—particularly those who speak from the margins—while lending credence to voices that do not have the best interest of the religious tradition and its institutions at heart, who should lack legitimacy in an institution that practices careful discernment. The triangulating technique of managerial leadership promotes carefully selected and sanitized examples of the disempowered to power, when it can be certain that these token representatives of the disempowered will behave in a way that does not call the status quo into question.

When the status quo is shaped by unequal distribution of power—and it always is—the church belongs unambiguously on the side of those with less power. Democracy-as-triangulation can become a smokescreen for serving the powerful of the world, when it refuses to give serious consideration to questions how power is justly to be distributed. Democracy-as-triangulation can be a smokescreen that legitimates the abuse of power (and enslavement to dirty money) when it treats the voices of mendacious apologists for unjust power as if they are just as compelling and deserving of attention as the voices of those delineating hard-earned critical truth from the margins—truth an institution needs in order to be faithful to its mission and to have a viable future.

These observations bring me to my final point: at its best, the warm-hearted Methodist spirituality derived from Wesley issues in a powerful tradition of practical social witness. At its worst, however, Methodism lacks carefully developed theological tools agreed on by the entire church to analyze and discuss its ecclesiology and whether its institutions mirror that ecclesiology authentically. Methodism at its worst often prescinds from much-needed critical questions about how Methodist institutions practice fidelity to and faithfully enact the Wesleyan tradition.

At its worst, such questions are dismissed in an anti-intellectual way as distractions from the warm-hearted piety that Methodism should really be all about, or as a critical breach with the radical middle. Methodists are strong on promoting justice. They are weak at talking about what justice actually is.

Methodists are good at listening to the voices of everyone. What the Methodist tradition often lacks, however, is a theological wisdom tradition to undergird its discernment process, so that the voices of impostors, opportunists, and poseurs can quickly be detected and will not distract the holy assembly from its deliberations.

And this makes Methodism susceptible to groups like the IRD, who know how to exploit these theological lacunae in the Methodist tradition very adroitly . . . .

Unfortunately--and more's the pity--some of the key members of the IRD are members of my own religious communion, whom I oppose as vociferously within the Catholic context as I do when they seek to meddle in the internal affairs of the United Methodist Church. For that reason, too, I feel it is important that Catholics concerned that Methodism be permitted to live its tradition authentically speak out against members of our communion who are trying to thwart the practice of authentic Wesleyan discipleship.