Support for Marriage Equality as Litmus Test for Receiving Communion: In the Land of an Eye for an Eye, All Will Be Blind

One more tidbit as this day ends (and if I seem discombobulated, I am--by a day's vexatious travel home yesterday, which has left me tireder than usual): remember how I mentioned, a few days back, that both gay folks and those expressing solidarity with gay folks have been barred from communion by some Catholic bishops in recent years, while the 90%+ of married heterosexual Catholics using artificial contraception are never barred from communion?  

Michael Signorile on Gays as the Canaries in the Coal Mine of Obama Administration

Michael Signorile at Salon, noting how the erosion of Mr. Obama's base, which has resulted in the loss of Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat, began with his cold shoulder to his LGBT supporters--from the outset of his administration:

Obama's coldness toward gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people upon taking office could have predicted that he wouldn't get tough on the banks or show any passion for a public option. Gays were the canaries in the coal mine back on Day One of this administration. That was the day when Rick Warren gave the invocation at the inauguration. It signaled how easily this president would insult and sideline a loyal constituency in return for the false promise of bringing in people who will never support him.

And in my view, not merely coldness, but calculating coldness, coldness designed to demonstrate to Republicans who never intended to do anything but oppose the new president that he was willing to bend over backwards to listen to and include them in policy-making decisions.

You can tell a great deal about a person's character by observing how he or she treats his/her friends. 

Words Worth Hearing:

Richard Cohen in today's Washington Post, from an op-ed piece entitled “Warren On? Party Off”:

Finally, what we do not hold in common is the categorization of a civil rights issue -- the rights of gays to be treated equally -- as some sort of cranky cultural difference. For that we need moral leadership, which, on this occasion, Obama has failed to provide. For some people, that's nothing to celebrate.

The party's off (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/22/AR2008122201848.html?hpid=opinionsbox1).

In speaking of what we do not hold in common, Cohen is reflecting on Obama’s defense of his selection of Rick Warren, in which Obama states, "We can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans."

I’m grateful to John Aravosis for bringing Richard Cohen’s article to our attention today on America blog (www.americablog.com/2008/12/rick-warren-and-rev-wright.html). As John says, re: the passage I have just quoted,

That last full paragraph is, I think, the crux of the matter, and the reason the Rick Warren issue has touched off such a firestorm in the gay community. Obama is essentially asking us to acknowledge that our humanity is negotiable. That our view of ourselves as full members of American society, as equal members of the human race, is somehow "just our opinion," no more and no less valid than those who compare us to pedophiles.

Human value does not ever occupy a sliding scale in a moral universe. Humans are either human or they are not. If they are human, they are entitled to all rights accorded every other member of the human race. It is obscene to ask any group of citizens to be content to allow their very status as members of the human race to be debated, qualified, voted upon.

Those who do not see this simply miss a fundamental moral point. And they do so no matter how often or eloquently they quote scripture. Those who bought and sold slaves and held people with darker skin in bondage quoted the bible furiously. Those who consigned innocent people in New England to be hanged knew their bible well, and cited it freely.

If history teaches us anything, it is that knowing and being able to quote the holy stories of the world's faith traditions is no guarantee of moral insight.

Those who try to defend the diminution of the humanity of anyone for any reason whatsoever have not yet reached the threshold of moral thinking. When leaders appear to subject the human status of any group of human beings to political calculation, they undermine their ability to lead, since sound leadership depends on sound moral judgment.

The graphic heading this posting illustrates the 1947 statement by the United Nations about fundamental human rights. A resolution extending this statement to gay citizens of the world is now before the U.N. The United States has refused to endorse the statement.

Advent: Finding God at Home, and Home in God

In a comment to my posting yesterday about Michael Witbank’s BYU art exhibit, my e-friend and sympathetic reader Julie Arms reminds me of something important—namely, of the hard work many gay-inclusive people of faith are putting into the effort to open church doors, minds, and hearts. I responded to Julie’s reminder with a note that, in this advent season, I need to remember to thank these stalwart allies for their important efforts on my behalf and on behalf of LGBT people in general. Advocates like Julie take blows from some church leaders and some people of faith, just as we who are gay often do: and they do this for us.

Just yesterday, I read a good posting by another e-friend, Mattheus Mei, on his Leonardo’s Notebook blog, about a Lutheran church in Columbia, SC, that is intentionally reaching out to gay believers (http://leonardosnotebook.blogspot.com/2008/12/local-columbia-congregation-undergoes.html). I thanked Mattheus for calling attention to the gay-inclusive policies of this church. When we don’t live in a particular area, we often don’t know the good news about what some churches in that area are doing on behalf of the LGBT community.

Perhaps because it’s advent time in many liturgical traditions, I’ve been thinking lately about my own quarrel with some churches, and about what I expect from churches. What may not be clear to all readers when I critique religious traditions is that this is a lover’s quarrel. It is for me, at least.

I am profoundly disappointed in the churches, insofar as the face they show me and other gay persons is demonic and not salvific, because I care. Not because I want to attack and destroy.

Because I care. And what I care about seems, to my simple-minded way of thinking, exceedingly simple. I care about church as home, family, welcoming and inclusive community. What I seek in churches—and what I daresay many gay folks seek there (and what most folks seek in churches)—is that churches fulfill their fundamental calling, a calling to provide nurturing, loving community that is home and family to us in our spiritual journeys through the world.

Because the strange circularity of life has brought me back to the city in which I grew up—at least, until I was 8 years old—I often think about my family’s life in the critical period in which I began school. The house in which we lived then is not far from the one in which I live now. My grandmother’s house—a symbolic house, since it was a stable and always loving home for us during my growing-up years—is between the two houses.

For reasons that have only gradually become apparent to me, many of my narrative poems and aborted short stories center on that growing-up house that my family left in 1958 to move briefly to Louisiana, my father’s home state, and then to south Arkansas. What happened to me in that house of my childhood was, in many respects, decisive for my entire life.

In the final year in which we lived in the childhood house, my father abandoned us for a good bit of the year. When he returned home at Christmastime that year, he did so because he had been in a serious car accident in California. He needed family. He needed my mother to take care of him.

Within a few days after his return, I accompanied my father to his law office. As I sat there, I happened to hear him tell someone on the phone that he had been with another woman when he wrecked his car in northern California. In all innocence, I went home and mentioned this to my mother.

All hell broke loose. My parents quarreled, and my father told me at the end of the fight that he was not my father—that I was not his son, because I always took my mother’s side.

It was not really news to me that I was not the son my father wanted. He had made no secret of his disdain for my bookishness, my “feminine” ways, the ease with which I cried when a movie or book moved me, my terror at carnival rides or frightening shows, my inability to excel at the sports my brother Simpson, a year younger, played with ease.

Still, I had never heard the words that I knew brooded in his heart—the ugly words of repudiation: you are not my son. For the rest of my father’s life, I was never able to bridge the gap, to be the son he wanted me to be. I was never able to learn to love him adequately beyond the hurt. I could not be what he wanted: a manly man made in his image, a mirror into which he could look and see his best qualities (as he imagined them) reflected.

In short, my childhood comprised a serious wound, right at the center of my being. As do most of our childhoods, in very specific ways that differ from one life to another.

These are the kinds of wounds we look for church to heal. When our families of origin hurt us to the core of our being—and they inevitably do so, in all of our lives—we hope not to have the hurt replicated by our families of choice, including our religious communities of choice (and of a choice that chooses us, of vocation).

For too many of us who are gay, church echoes the parental (and familial) repudiation that is a crucial part of our formative life stories. Steve was deeply scarred by our savage treatment at a Benedictine college in North Carolina—and, in particular, by a meeting he had with the abbot of the monastery that owned that college, after I had been hounded out of my teaching post and not long before he was dismissed on spurious grounds of financial exigency.

What the abbot, the father, the abba of the community, did to him hurt him to the quick because Steve’s family has longstanding Benedictine ties. His father’s two sisters are Benedictine nuns; a great-aunt in the same family was also a Benedictine. The Benedictine communities in Minnesota, both male and female, are full of his cousins. His family came to Minnesota with the first Benedictines at St. John’s. They have lived for generations near the monastery, which is the historic center of their lives of faith.

When the Benedictine abbot in North Carolina spent a solid hour screaming at Steve, threatening him, shaking his finger in Steve’s face, Steve was shocked. He had never seen a religious behave this way. That was precisely the phrase he used when he came home and told me about the meeting. He was in tears—something that is rare in Steve’s life. He is less given to emotional expressions than I am.

This savage behavior by a Benedictine abbot hurt precisely because it was a familial event: it was an expulsion from family. Steve’s experience of attending Benedictine schools as a boy was idyllic, in contrast to the Catholic-school experiences many adults report. His memories of the nuns and their school are happy ones, ones centered on praying, singing, and learning—never on condemnation, threats, and expulsion.

Steve’s familial wounds are different from mine. His father was always affirming, as is his mother, perhaps because their lives were/are so deeply rooted in that Benedictine tradition of praying, singing, and loving—and not judging, condemning, and expelling.

He does have siblings, though, who find themselves unable to affirm him, or to accept me. And this hurts. It hurts him that my nieces and nephews dote on me, while some of his do not even know him, since their parents have deliberately sought to keep their children from him. And it hurts that these siblings are the staunchest believers in the family, the self-professed orthodox Catholics.

The point of this meditation? Churches should be what our families often fail to be. They should be family. They should be home. These are minimal expectations of what church ought to be. And they are also what church is all about. These are the ultimate expectations of what church ought to be, if it wants to claim valid connection to the gospel.

Advent does not bring to my mind hope for some miraculous intrusion of the divine into our everyday lives. This season inevitably leads me to reflect on the homely ways in which the divine is already there in our lives—ways that we overlook as we hunger for miraculous intrusion.

Homely, as in a warm house to come home to at the end of the day. As in candles in windows when it grows dark outside earlier and earlier. As in family and friends who care enough to cook a meal for us, to set a table for us, to smile and hug us when we come through the door. As in bread, wine, salt, oil, water, the basics of life that become vehicles of encounter with the divine in sacramentally oriented religious traditions.

We value these things all too little. Advent calls us to remember them and their significance in our lives. This is why I do not capitalize the word advent: it is, to my way of thinking, about the homely things in which God comes to us far more than it is about miraculous intrusion.

About family, for instance. About what churches should be and can be, but often forget to be. And about those we need to thank for pushing the churches to be what they proclaim they are—even for us who are gay and lesbian.

At Week's End

As this week ends, I need to acknowledge and give thanks to two bloggers who have recently linked to this Bigrimage blog.

One of these is Mattheus Mei of Leonardo's Notebook blog. I've added a link to Leonardo's Notebook to Bilgrimage. This is a blog new to me, but one that I have been visiting with a great deal of interest--crisp writing, a nicely eccentric slant on news that other bloggers overlook: in short, my kind of blog.

I also want to express profound gratitude to Sapphocrat at Lavender Newswire for recommending Bilgrimage as bookmarkable in a recent posting. This is another blog I intend to add to my list of recommended blogs. Just hope I can live up to the recommendations . . . .

I also can't let the week end without recommending a posting of my friend Colleen Baker at her Enlightened Catholicism blog earlier this week. Colleen imagines a Catholic church in which John Paul I had been permitted to remain pope longer than the brief time he had in that office: http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2008/11/oh-what-might-have-been-had-john-paul-i.html.

I learned quite a bit from this posting, particularly about John Paul I's inclusive, affirming view regarding gay human beings. The aborted papacy of John Paul I was a tragedy for gay people around the world. Colleen is right to ask what might have been had he, and not John Paul II and Ratzinger, dominated the institutional life of Catholicism in the latter decades of the 20th century.

One Great Fellowship of Love: Mormons and Catholics United

In all the fallout over what happened in California with proposition 8, I think we must not lose sight of a modern-day miracle. With signs and wonders from the hand of God at a premium these days, we need to celebrate each and every one that comes our way.

Gay people—gay lives, gay loves, gay flesh and blood—have just accomplished what ecumenists (not to mention the Spirit Herself) have tried to do for decades, and have failed at: the Mormon and the Catholic churches have just found common ground. In fact, it’s not a stretch to conclude that the Mormon and the Catholic churches have just declared themselves one church now, a church united in a common cause (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).

They’ve united. And they have the gays to thank. Gay people, gay lives, gay loves, gay flesh and blood: gays as juicy diversionary targets for a culture in which the power of religious groups to coerce democratic voters is waning and needs a booster shot. We gays turn out to be just what the Mormons and the Catholics needed to get themselves recognized as movers and shakers again: a shared enemy over whose prostrate body the two religious groups can shake hands, exult in victory, and declare themselves one great fellowship of love.

The Morlic Church. Bishops calling prophets calling elders calling priests, burning up the phone lines. One great fellowship of love. Yes, indeed!

Mind you, I’m not sure the-gays-as-despised-victims are going to be able to do all that needs to be done to hold the new Morlic Church together. After all, we’re talking about religious groups with wildly disparate belief systems, radically different rituals. And head-butting truth claims that wipe each other out. We’re talking about two churches that both claim to own God and God’s absolute revealed truth—unilaterally and exclusively.

So I anticipate some fireworks when the position of pope and prophet gets sorted out in the new Morlic Church’s one great fellowship of love. The polity of these two churches is certainly very much alike. If you wanted to identify the two most hierarchical, male-dominated churches in all of Christendom, I don’t think you could come up with a closer match than Mormonism and Catholicism.

Top-down, males on top, truth owned at the top and disbursed in tiny tidbits to a faithful constantly enjoined to be obedient and receptive or be damned: that’s Catholicism. And it’s Mormonism.

And the closeness of the two may make not only for one great fellowship of love, but for sparks, when the two unite as Latter-Day Morlickism. When pope and prophet both claim the uncontested right to speak God’s word to the flock today, who’s going to be on top? Who’s going to give?

Since strong currents in both groups insist on women’s subordination, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that the fancy frocks Benedict sports (sometimes misconstrued as female attire) might give President and Prophet Monson an edge? If males are on top, President and Prophet Monson surely does dress the part.

But popes do have that well-known and sometimes a tad bit refractory penchant for wiliness. I can admit it. I’m Catholic. I know my people. And if I have learned one thing from years of watching my people, it's that, though clothes may make the man, lace and silk frocks do not the woman make. Not when a man is wearing them.

So I wouldn’t count on the befrocked Pope to submit to the business-suit attired President and Prophet. Not without a struggle. But all normed by the one great fellowship of love, of course. With its shared disdain for gay human beings, gay bodies, gay loves.

It’s going to be interesting, watching the fireworks at the love feasts. But, heck, if religion doesn’t provide us with interesting shows in American culture, what on earth does it do?

Untune That String: Hidden Assumptions of the Divine Order Argument about Sex

I continue to ponder that strange intrusion of Catholic natural-law thought about divine ordering of sexuality into contemporary Protestant teaching about sex. As I have noted in previous postings, it is fascinating to observe leaders of churches that have historically stood aloof from Catholic doctrine and practice eagerly grafting onto their theological traditions today a rather mystifying intrusion into those traditions: namely, the Catholic natural-law based theology of human sexuality, with its strong emphasis on the “ordering” of sexuality to procreation (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/catholic-bible-thumping-and-protestant.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/churchs-one-foundation-homosexuality.html).

As an example of such grotesque grafting of natural-law thought onto traditions antithetical to natural-law theology, I’ve cited essays written by the United Methodist of Florida, Timothy Whitaker, who chaired this year’s UMC General Assembly discussion of homosexuality. Bishop Whitaker is widely regarded in Methodist circles as a leading opponent of attempts to make Methodist teaching about gay and lesbian persons more welcoming, inclusive, and affirming. As I note in previous postings, when Rev. Karen Dammann of the Pacific-Northwest UMC conference was permitted to remain in ministry in 2004 after having made her sexual orientation and committed gay relationship public, Bishop Whitaker wrote a strong critique of the church decision that allowed her to continue in ministry. That critique states,

Those who support the Church’s position believe that the prohibitions against homosexual practice in Scripture and tradition should be placed in the context of the whole teaching of Scripture which affirms that the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman and celibacy in singleness are the revelation of the divine order for the sexual life of human beings. They believe that the Church should adhere to this divine order rather than accommodate to ideas and practices acceptable in Western societies. They support justice for homosexuals in civil society and hospitality toward all homosexual persons, but they believe that the public teaching and moral guidance of the Church about human sexuality should be faithful to the witness of Scripture and consistent with the teaching of the transcultural historic and global Christian community
(www.flumc.org/bishop_whitaker/dammann_statement.htm; emphasis added).

Bishop Whitaker repeats the assertion about the divine ordering of human sexuality in a recent essay about what it means to live the Christian life (www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000049/004993.htm). This essay speaks of the “ordering of sexuality” as one of the non-negotiables of Christian discipleship.

These are merely examples of a much wider field of discourse found throughout the Protestant world today.* The discourse of divine ordering of human sexuality, with the attendant claim that the “whole teaching of Scripture” affirms such divinely revealed order and the implication that the churches are bulwarks against social chaos insofar as they uphold a divine order that has existed from the beginning of the world, runs everywhere through Protestant rhetoric about sexual life today.

Also implicit (and, indeed, often quite explicit) in these claims that God has revealed in both nature and Scripture a divine plan to order human sexuality are claims that this divine order requires us to regard men and women as ordered to complementarity, as complementary not merely in the biological sense, but in the roles the divine plan for human sexuality requires each gender to play (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/male-female-complementarity-and-bogus.html). And, it goes without saying, the roles that male church leaders (and, yes, their female cheerleaders, too) find etched into the divine law of nature and the sacred law of scripture require men to rule and women to submit.

It’s all so neat. It’s all so obvious. Why can’t those who reject this game plan hardwired into the human psyche just see it, admit that it’s there for all of us to see and follow? Why can’t those who rebel against this most fundamental dictate of God for happy and prosperous human life recognize that such rebellion will result in upheaval in every institution of Christian society—not to mention, in such disruptions of weather that sexually permissive areas of the world will be wiped from the earth through “natural” disasters?

The men who rule us: it’s so clear to them. And what’s clear to them ought to be obvious to everyone else, since they stand at the top of the pyramid looking out over the vast disarray of creation, noting the breaks in the dykes of divine order, shouting down to us below about those breaks and the disorder they portend for us all.

As I ponder the scenario (albeit from the bottom of the pyramid, where the feet on my shoulders inconveniently distract me from thinking as clearly as the owners of the feet above do), I wonder how biblically based theologies like Methodist theology have managed to get from the scriptures to the natural law concept of the divine order of human sexuality. When even Catholic theologians have always admitted that it’s well-nigh impossible to combine natural law thinking and the scriptures—they are two entirely different discourse fields, two entirely different ways of looking at the world, with different originating imaginations—how can Protestant church leaders be so supremely confident today, as Bishop Timothy Whitaker is, that the whole teaching of Scripture points to an absolute and consistent revelation of the divine order for the sexual life of human beings?

As I noted a day or so ago in my critique of the similar (and the similarity is not surprising; it’s telling) assertions of Cardinal Walter Kasper to the Anglican Lambeth Conference, no, it does not (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/catholic-bible-thumping-and-protestant.html). The whole teaching of scripture decidedly does not constitute or contain some kind of consistent revelation of the divine order for the sexual life of human beings.

Focus on the term “order” alone, and you step into a minefield of exegetical problems that illustrates the difficulty of wringing the philosophical concept of divine order out of scripture texts. The first such problem is that the term is almost entirely absent from the thinking of those who wrote both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. It is a philosophical term derived from Greek and Roman philosophy. Order is a concept that simply did not engage the imagination of the Jewish and Christian biblical authors as it did Graeco-Roman philosophers.

In fact, in some key respects, the Jewish and Christian scriptures constitute stringent critiques of the Graeco-Roman philosophical concept of order. The prophets set themselves against all oh-so-assured theologies of divine order that divinized the way things are—and that gave divine status to those who benefited from how things were arranged. And whereas Jesus never speaks of divine order—which is to say, of the philosophical concept on which the men who rule us want to hinge the future of the church today—he talks constantly about the reign of God.

That was a social order in which the “divine order” proclaimed by the men who ruled in his day was to be turned upside down. Jesus’s vision of how human beings should live together if God ruled the world was anything but orderly. It was anything but a prop for the social imagination imposed by those at the top of his society.

In the reign of God, the last are first. The poor take precedence over the wealthy. Those who are sated will be turned from the table so that the hungry may eat. The path to power in the reign of God is to renounce all power. Exercising leadership in the reign of God is choosing to serve all, and, in particular, to kneel before and wash the feet of the humblest.

Divine order? If Jesus ever even dreamed of such a concept, he clearly did so to stand it on its head. And for that reason, he was crucified. The Roman authorities put him to death because they feared the revolutionary potential of a teaching that undercut all their assertions about how the world had to be ordered, if civilization were to continue. Jesus’s central act to proclaim the intrusion of God’s reign into history—his shockingly disorienting choice to sit at table with sinners and share their food, thus taking on their contaminated status—was considered an act of social defiance that, if practiced more widely, would turn the whole world upside down. He had to be stopped, this preacher and practicer of intrusive social disorder that proclaimed God’s inclusive love for everyone, and God’s preferential love for those most excluded from the benefits of the order that structured their society.

Viewed against the framework of what is central to Jesus’s teaching and life, the concept of divine order proclaimed so confidently by the churchmen who rule us today is curious, indeed. How can anyone read the Jewish and Christian scriptures and come away convinced that God has set up a divine order that just conveniently happens to be dispensed by (and benefits) those who find such divine order stamped all over creation and inscribed in their holy books?

Note what is really going on in the attempt of churchmen today to use the concept of divine order to regulate the sexual lives of others. At its heart, the argument that there is a divine order for human sexuality inbuilt in creation and affirmed by scripture is an argument that human sexuality is volatile, dangerous, inherently transgressive, and will destroy society if it is not regulated.

That is to say, the argument about a divine order for human sexuality goes hand in hand with arguments (sometimes implied, sometimes stated outright) about the need for the churches to maintain social order. Or else. Let women get out of hand, and see what happens then. Let people control their reproductive destinies, and imagine what chaos will ensue. Let gays “affirm” themselves and “marry,” and everything we hold most sacred will surely stream down the same gutters out of which the gays have climbed into the light of day.

Shakespeare knew the argument. He heard the same tune sung in his day—only, then, the question was what would happen if the hierarchical social system of Elizabethan England, symbolized by monarchy, should be toppled. As has Ulysses say in Troilus and Cressida,

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe.

Untune that string, and hark, what discord follows! This is an old, old argument used persistently throughout history by those with all power in their hands, when that power is threatened. This is the ultimate logic of the divine order argument about human sexuality. This is the warning within the warning, when the churchmen who rule us preach about the unthinkability of allowing gay persons to imagine that they have a place within the divine order established by God for creation: a place equal to that of their heterosexual brothers and sisters.

The entire argument is based on hidden assumptions about the discord that will follow, about the social chaos that will occur, if natural law is violated (that is, if the church-defined and church-enforced natural law is violated). The entire argument is based, as well, on hidden assumptions about who should define divine order, who spots it more clearly than the rest of us, who interprets it for us, who owns the books in which the concept is spelled out. The entire argument depends on hidden assumptions about who should remain at the top of the scheme of divine order that God (the male God, the Father God) has set into place, which is dispensed and protected by the churches under the leadership of the men ruling them.

If the men who rule churches really want to engage human sexuality as an energy, to find its “place” in human society, perhaps they would be better advised to stop imagining it as a chaotic, dangerous, dark, destructive energy that they are called to curb for the good of society, and to begin thinking of it as the engendering center of creativity. Perhaps a more convincing theology of human sexuality could be built around the concept that erotic energy is inherently disorderly in a good way, a way that has powerful potential to fuel creative movements for constructive change.

But to go down that theological road would require that the churchmen who rule us submit their own power and privilege to re-examination and re-negotiation. It would require opening the conversation to those these churchmen insist on treating as dangerous Others. It would require that, as they open the conversation, they bring to the table precisely those against whom their theology of a divine ordering of human sexuality has been used as a powerful weapon: women and gay persons.

And I just don’t see the men ruling the churches ready to take that step today. Do you? It is easier to pretend we have all the answers when the question itself presupposes that the world may be a bigger place than we can control, a place in which our supremacy may not be assured by nature or God, if we examine it honestly.

*A disclaimer: as previous postings on this blog have noted, I underwent a life-changing experience rooted in homophobia at an institution under Bishop Whitaker's pastoral supervision in Florida. Because I have sought to understand and deal with this painful life experience, I have had no choice except to try to understand and deal with the theology that justified the treatment I received. This has led me to examine Bishop Whitaker's work, to try to understand how churchmen can continue to state that they deplore homophobic discrimination while they oppose equal rights for (and equal treatment) of gay employees in institutions under their supervision. Bishop Whitaker is far from the only churchman today to whom such questions should be placed. I do not intend to be unfair in singling him out. But the effect of one of his instititutions on my own life has given me no choice except to seek to understand and deal with what that institution did to my partner and me. When injustice is done to us, those who are implicated in the injustice inevitably become part of the prism through which we seek to understand and deal with questions of injustice thereafter.

The Men Who Rule Us: Assuring Clerical Dominance

This is not an easy time in which to write. We’re preparing for a funeral. Even so, I don’t want to let my train of thought stop short. I offer the following reflections with the proviso that they are sketchy, written as my mind and heart are occupied with other matters now.

I wrote last week about the shared interest of men—straight-identified men—in continuing their dominance in the leadership sectors of all mainstream churches. I wrote about how the system of clericalism—a system built on male domination of women, and on the domination of gay men by straight-presenting men—is a system deeply entrenched in all the mainstream churches. There is a shared interest among the leaders of the churches in seeing that the system of clerical control remains intact, an interest that transcends denominational boundary lines.

I’m aware that not all mainstream churches resist the ordination of women, as the Catholic and Orthodox churches do. Even so, I would argue that in those churches in which women are now able to be ordained (e.g., the United Methodist, Episcopal Church USA, Anglican, Presbyterian), men still strongly dominate. One would have to be blind not to see the manifold ways in which institutional power prefers men—straight-acting ones—over women in the structures of these churches.

No matter how brilliant a woman’s seminary career is, she is highly unlikely to step into a pastorate as plush as the one afforded to her straight-presenting male counterpart when seminary ends. And she is far less likely ever to capture the pulpit of the “first” churches of the denomination, the ones from whose pulpit “the” Methodist/Presbyterian, etc., voice is beamed out across a state each Sunday.

I long since gave up attending the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion because I was, frankly, tired of rubbing shoulders with bearded, tweed-jacketed straight-presenting married men who claim to have the final word on matters religious. After I finished graduate school, I no longer had to choose to affiliate with these men who rule us. When it became obvious to me that I wouldn’t be accorded a voice, anyway, I gladly stopped rubbing shoulders with those of privileged voice, since I have my own thoughts to think, and nothing is more distracting than listening to empty cant when it postures as the final word.

Given the common interests of the system of clericalism across denominational lines, it is not surprising to discover how ready the Vatican or Orthodox patriarchs are today to shore up the “traditional” males-only, no-gay-allowed clerical system of the Anglican communion—even when the Vatican has long since declared Anglican orders invalid! Under the guise of defending orthodoxy and tradition, the men who rule us in the churches are actually defending their own clerical power and privilege, their exclusive right to represent the unitary voice that speaks on behalf of their communion. The future of Christianity is, to a great extent, being staked today on the single doctrine of male domination—of women and of men construed as feminine, due to their gay sexual orientation.

This is the why of clericalism and of its tremendous push to preserve (and extend) itself at this point in Christian history, at all costs. The how of clericalism is perhaps less obvious, less simple to analyze. It is less simple to analyze because the clerical system manages to maintain its control throughout the Christian communions by manifold expressions of power and privilege whose mechanisms are usually hidden from public view.

My own entry point for obtaining a glimpse of the system of clerical dominance in ugly operation has been in academic life. Last week, my friend Colleen Baker reported on her Enlightened Catholicism blog that Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether had recently been named to the Msgr. John R. Portman Chair of the University of San Diego—only to find herself summarily disinvited from the Chair after her appointment was announced (see http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2008/07/rosemary-radford-ruether-loses-to.html). The university provost tells Ruether that the anonymous donor who provided funding for this chair had a different vision for it than Ruether represents.

Rosemary Ruether notes that the San Diego decision is troubling on several fronts—most of all, because it implicitly denies academic freedom to the faculty who chose her for the chair. It is important to me to note that 1) the donor’s name has not been made public; 2) the donor can exercise great influence over intra-collegial decisions while remaining hidden—an unenviable development, since this opens the door to allowing academic discourse to be “bought” by unnamed powerful interest groups; and 3) the secretiveness with which the matter is now being handled underscores Ruether’s point that academic freedom is being threatened.

Academic freedom by its very nature demands that controversial decisions such as this be brought into the light of day for open, free consideration within the collegial context. Whenever the leaders of an academic institution resort to the cover of darkness for their actions—when they refuse to allow the reasons for major decisions to be made public and discussed in the public forum—one can be assured that the reasons don’t bear scrutiny and won’t stand up under collegial investigation.

What happened to Rosemary Ruether at the University of San Diego is, unfortunately, becoming all too common in church-sponsored institutions of higher learning. Since theologians are the one “official” critical voice that, by its very calling, must continue to talk about issues even when church authorities have tabled them, and must pursue truth that the power centers of church and society wish to avoid facing, then for social and ecclesial power centers that wish to reduce the truth proclaimed by a religious community to a unitary voice, it is important to suppress the voices of theologians. As Ruether’s story illustrates, it is relatively easy—and becoming ever easier—for church leaders to accomplish this using sub rosa channels of economic power and influence within university structures in which the powerful behind-the-scenes players who assist church leaders in maintaining their dominance are never revealed.

We live at a moment in Christian history when we will be seeing more and more attempts to curb and norm the conversation within churches, and to place it under the direct control of church leaders intent on representing their voice as the voice of the communion. What happened to Rosemary Ruether brings to mind what happened to another Catholic theologian, Charles Curran, over a decade ago.

In 1990, after he was dumped by Catholic University of America when his teaching about homosexuality and birth control earned him Vatican censure, Curran was offered tenure at Auburn University in Alabama. After the appointment was made, however, the university president announced that he would not be giving tenure to Curran. No reason was provided for this decision. At the time, there was discussion of the possible influence of Mobile Catholic archbishop Oscar Lipscomb on the Auburn president’s decision. Curran reported that Lipscomb had admitted to him that he had discussed Curran’s case with a Catholic trustee at Auburn—though Lipscomb denied having sought to influence the Auburn decision.

Charles Curran filed suit against Catholic University for his termination, only to find that the court upheld the right of the university to fire faculty members—even tenured ones—on religious grounds. The Curran case has created an ugly precedent whereby church-affiliated schools can now freely violate the academic freedom of faculty members while citing religious privilege as they do so—though schools usually employ covert ways of curbing or dismissing faculty members rather than outright termination. They do so because, even with court-defended religious exemptions, academic accrediting societies still demand that schools pay lip service to academic freedom, if the schools expect to be accredited.

Stating that one is terminating a faculty member because his/her work violates the religious beliefs of the university places a school in the unenviable position of appearing not to respect academic freedom. It is simply easier to cook up some other spurious reason (e.g., “inability to cooperate with this administration,” “lack of collegiality”) for the termination, so as to avoid negative publicity and court battles.

What happened to Curran and to Rosemary Ruether illustrates how the power centers of churches control and disempower theologians today across denominational lines. They do so via hidden channels of influence that operate at the level of presidents and boards of trustees, channels never exposed to public scrutiny. When decisions such as the Ruether or Curran decision are made by presidents and boards of trustees, the true story of how the academic freedom of a theologian is violated is never told: the story of midnight calls to pressure a president, of threats to withhold funding, of moral emptiness on the part of university and church leaders, of manufactured reasons for dismissal or denial of tenure that have nothing to do with reality, of boards of trustees that will not hold presidents accountable even when the moral vacuity of a president is patent, and so on.

If there is any truth to Curran’s assertion that Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb played a role in Auburn’s decision to deny tenure to him (and I believe there is), then this story illustrates the collusion of power players beyond denominational lines, in the contemporary push to stop the voices of theologians. Auburn was Methodist-founded and is today a state university.

What interest could a Catholic bishop possibly have, or exert, in such an institution? And how could that interest be exerted? If answers to such questions were ever made public, we’d have a very clear picture, I believe, of how leaders of churches today (acting in collusion with each other and with powerful economic and political leaders) curb critical theological discourse in the academy in order to assure the continued dominance of the clerical system across denominational boundary lines, and the right of the men who rule the churches to speak unilaterally on behalf of “their” churches.

In such situations, one would expect accrediting bodies to play a significant role in assuring that academic freedom is respected. If a church-affiliated university freely violates the academic freedom of theologians, what is to prevent its doing something similar with professors of literature, sociology, biology, etc.? What university worth its name would willingly trample on the academic freedom of any of its faculty members?

Based on my own experiences within the academy, I am not sanguine about the role played by accrediting bodies in upholding academic freedom. As I have noted on this blog, I myself have had dismal experiences at two church-sponsored colleges/universities, both under the accreditation of the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities (SACS).

Both as an administrator in SACS-affiliated universities and as someone whose academic freedom was violated by universities accredited by SACS, I have observed that SACS bends over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to the institution in cases in which faculty members report violations of academic freedom. In my first experience of being given a spurious terminal contract without any stated reason for the termination, and of being denied a written evaluation of my previous semester’s work, I met a brick wall when I reported what had happened to SACS.

Though I had ironclad proof that the academic vice-president had interfered in the operation of the college’s grievance committee, and though the refusal to provide a reason for my termination violates SACS’ own academic freedom statement, when I turned to SACS for support, SACS informed me that since the school had a grievance committee, I had had protection for my academic freedom. Never mind that this committee was a puppet committee that could not and did not act independently of the church authorities controlling the school . . . .

Because of this experience, I did not even bother turning to SACS on my second go-round at a SACS-accredited church-sponsored university. It was at this university that I was terminated without having even been given any evaluation of my year’s work—though, as I have noted on this blog, a document later came into my hands in which my supervisor reported to the board that a consultant who had been brought in to talk to me about SACS-accreditation issues had actually “evaluated” me and had recommended my termination.

I was never given this consultant’s report. I was not even told that he had “evaluated” me. I never had any evaluation of my work prior to my termination—a clear violation of SACS academic freedom regulations. The consultant brought in to “evaluate” me has published articles about the social construction of African-American manhood that are overtly homophobic. He is a Baptist Sunday School teacher. He is not even in the area in which he purportedly “evaluated” me—academic affairs—and is not even at a SACS-affiliated college. His knowledge of SACS standards was abysmal, I discovered when he met with me. If he “evaluated” me, he did so without ever having met me, on the basis of a single interview of an hour or so. And, given his background, it is impossible to imagine that his “evaluation” of me would in any way be unbiased. He was clearly brought in to do a hatchet job on an openly gay university administrator whose “lifestyle” he held in contempt, and he did his job well.

All of which is to say, it is not hard at all to silence theologians nowadays, particularly in church-affiliated universities, and especially in areas (such as the American Southeast) in which the commitment of academic accrediting bodies to academic freedom is weak when religious commitments are involved. When one takes into consideration the fact that laws protecting the rights of workers from wrongful termination are also weak in precisely the same areas of the country in which the churches’ right to terminate faculty on religious grounds is uncontested, one begins to understand why accrediting bodies in these areas are historically weak on academic freedom issues. To defend academic freedom, they would have to stand against strong currents of their culture—and against the powerful influence of the economic and political figures who collude with church leaders to silence critical voices.

There is a game-playing dimension to the way in which accrediting bodies go about investigating institutions of higher learning. As an academic administrator, time and again, I have seen accrediting bodies send to a church-affiliated college a team of investigators heavily weighted with team members from the denomination that sponsors the school in question.

When one considers that almost all presidents of universities sponsored by a particular institution have strong institutional ties to the governing structures of the denomination controlling their university, one can understand how it is that most accrediting visits don’t probe critically into allegations that academic freedom of faculty has been violated on religious grounds. In order to move some academic accrediting bodies in the direction of a defense of academic freedom, one would have to transform the culture of the accrediting bodies themselves: to the extent that they continue to be old-boys’ networks dominated by those with ties to church-affiliated colleges and universities, they will continue not to have a strong interest in promoting academic freedom or investigating cases in which universities they accredit have violated academic freedom of faculty on religious grounds.

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And now for a change of subject: since this and previous postings focus on bishops and church governing bodies, I would like to take this opportunity to note the reappointment of a United Methodist bishop whose name has figured in previous postings on this blog. I’m referring to Bishop Timothy Whitaker of the Florida United Methodist Conference.

Bishop Whitaker has just been re-appointed to another quadrennial term as UMC Bishop of Florida. Florida interests me for a number of reasons outlined in previous postings on this blog, including the growing number of cases of violent assault of LGBT citizens in that state. This is also a state in which an explicitly anti-gay initiative is on the ballot for the next election cycle.

It’s a state, in other words, in which the churches’ pastoral efforts can do either much harm or cause much woe. As Florida deals with its issues with gay citizens, it’s interesting to note that, pastorally speaking, the central part of the state is now solidly under the control of bishops representing different churches, all of whom have taken public stands that many gay citizens see as less than welcoming to the gay community.

As a posting on this blog notes, at the most recent United Methodist General Assembly, Bishop Whitaker chaired the discussion that resulted in a vote to continue the current language of the Book of Discipline which sees the practice of homosexuality as incompatible with Christian life (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/we-are-all-care-of-one-another.html). My posting noted that participants in the debate at General Assembly were concerned with how Bishop Whitaker used parliamentary procedure to offset debate and to pave the way for a final statement in favor of the current policy by Rev. Eddie Fox, Director of UMC World Evangelism.

In a previous posting on this blog, I have also noted that the Catholic bishop of Orlando, Bishop Thomas Wenski, published a resoundingly anti-gay editorial in a newspaper in June (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-speaking-of-discrimination.html). Bishop Wenski calls for a continuation of the culture wars that have had such dismal effects on gay persons.

I have not touched previously on the Episcopal Bishop of Central Florida, Bishop John W. Howe. I should note that Bishop Howe appears to hold positions similar to those of his colleagues Bishops Whitaker and Wenski on gay persons and their inclusion in the church. All three of these gentlemen appear resolved to hold the line on gay persons and gay rights.

It would be interesting to know if any church-affiliated colleges or universities in this region manage to safeguard the right of faculty members to discuss gay and lesbian persons in a way that is more inclusive of these persons in the body of Christ . . . .

Rev. Whitaker’s friend Rev. Fox has been in the news again recently, and once again, in a way that makes clear his intent to continue defending the Methodist hard line against gay persons. When the California-Pacific and the California-Nevada Annual UMC Conferences both recently approved gay marriage and expressed support for pastors marrying gay couples, Rev. Fox responded by stating, "We've made it clear we adhere to biblical teaching and Christian tradition. Ninety-eight percent of Christians around the world believe marriage is between one man and one woman, so we're not out of step in our ecumenical relationships with Christians around the world" (see http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/07/california-umc-legislative-bod.html).

It would be difficult to imagine a United Methodist university in which Rev. Fox has influence giving hospitality to a theologian who calls for open dialogue about the place of LGBT persons in the churches, or for critical discourse about the disparity between what the churches proclaim about being welcoming places for gay believers, and how they actually behave towards LGBT persons. Fox and those allied with him seem far more intent on shutting down this conversation, than they are on pursuing it.