Do All the Good You Can: Strategies to Combat Institutionalized Homophobia in Churches

Julie, I asked your permission to respond to your testimony about this year’s United Methodist General Conference because your testimony powerfully stirred me. I appreciate your providing the link to it at www.7villages.com/post.asp?p=43967&i=1536, and also your giving me permission to respond to the testimony in a posting. I wanted to ask your permission in case this posting would cause you any difficulty in your connection to the church.

Before I focus on some specific statements in your testimony, I want to begin by thanking you from the depths of my heart for making solidarity with those of us who are LGBT and who believe the churches can and should include us as children of God. As a straight single parent, you don’t have to reach out in this way.

The fact that you are doing so, and that you are paying a price for doing so (as your testimony about General Conference indicates), moves me—to tears, actually. I am sorry for the pain of anyone put through some of the humiliating experiences those of us who are gay and who ask for fair and humane treatment receive from the churches on a routine basis. And I am impressed and heartened that others care enough to share some of the blows alongside us.

Several comments you make in your testimony leap out at me, because they closely parallel experiences I have had as a gay believer. I just finished reading Scott Pomfret’s book Since My Last Confession. I mentioned this book in a posting a day or so ago. In reading it, I find other parallels in his experience and mine. I am beginning to see that there are patterns in experiences that I have thought of previously as uniquely humiliating and hurtful.

Seeing the patterns helps me recognize that they are part of a systemic response of a homophobic church to LGBT believers and those who stand in solidarity with us. When an institution that preaches love and justice decides to hate and to practice injustice, it has no choice except to seek to diminish and even destroy those who witness to the disparity between what is proclaimed and what is lived. Seeing that this is systemic, that the patterns are part of a response that goes beyond personal dynamics, helps me discern how to combat the institutionalized homophobia at the institutional level at which it has to be fought, if we're to eradicate it.

Your testimony states, “The people: my closed minded delegates who turned away rather than look me in the eye; the ones who refused to shake hands; the ones who would not speak.”

Yes, I know exactly what you speak of here—the deliberate, intentional slight, the intent to reduce one’s humanity to the level of a thing, a despised object. The refusal to shake the hand offered in greeting, the refusal to look you in the eye. These are attempts to denigrate, to humiliate, to deny one’s humanity, to claim that the humanity of the one engaging in such shoddy behavior is at a higher level than that of the dirty gay or a dirty straight person in solidarity with dirty gays.

We see evidence of these same dynamics in the national presidential campaign now, and there, though the originating prejudice is different, it is equally ugly. When I saw Mr. McCain ignore Mr. Obama’s proffered hand after the debates two nights ago, and when I witnessed McCain point to Obama without looking at him and call him “that one,” I had an ah-ha! moment. I’ve been there. I know what these experiences feel like. I know why McCain is doing that to Obama, what he hopes to do to his soul and personhood by trying to demean him in that way.

I have been at gatherings of my partner Steve’s family in which some of his homophobic siblings—who are staunch traditionalist Catholics—have refused to shake my hand, when I extended it to them. I know how foolish one feels when this happens, how exposed. How belittled.

When it is done by people with whom you have just prayed, and when the prayers ask for “an increase in charity,” the experience is breathtakingly painful. How does anyone pray in one breath for an increase in charity and with the next breath deny connection to another human being? The implication is that the person being demeaned does not have the status of a full person: how else to reconcile the prayer for charity and the shunning behavior that utterly belies charity?

I’ve also had that experience of being spoken of in third person, as “that one,” and I know how the words wash like acid across one’s self-esteem. At a former United Methodist workplace, I once sat in the office of my supervisor and witnessed her assistant, who was sitting right in front of me, and in my earshot, speaking to her boss on the phone. She referred to me as “him” and to Steve as “the other one.” She apparently did not care that I heard this demeaning language. She is a lesbian and is studying for the ministry, though, like every other gay and lesbian employee of that campus, she is not out at work. Her ministerial background (which surely does not teach her to treat others this way!) and her lesbianism made her objectification of us even more hurtful.

So, sadly, I understand why those experiences from General Conference—the refusal to shake your hand, the refusal to look you in the eye, the refusal to speak to you—struck you, and why you mention them in your testimony. They are outrageous experiences in any human gathering, but in one dedicated to holy conferencing?! What can Christians be thinking, when they enter holy conferencing with murder in their hearts? Do they think that refusing to acknowledge another person’s presence as a fellow human and not a thing is anything less than a kind of spiritual murder?

Your testimony and Scott Pomfret’s book remind me that these are routine experiences of gay believers and those in solidarity with us in relation to the churches today. It helps—a tiny bit—to know that when I experience them, they are not designed as unique torments for me personally.

It also helps to know they are systemic: those engaging in these practices are doing the bidding of systemic homophobia. And certainly, gay and lesbian people within church contexts can act out institutionalized homophobia with all the fervor of any gay-bashing Christian anywhere. My experience of being depersonalized by a lesbian studying for ministry is not unique: some of the worst gay bashers in the Catholic church are priests and nuns who refuse to confront their own sexual orientations honestly, and who act out the institution’s homophobia against gay brothers and sisters (or those in solidarity with us) who mirror to them more healthy possibilities of being in the world.

One of my former bosses likes to surround herself with expendable "pet" gay folks, trick dogs who do the boss's bidding and allow the boss to preen and prentend gay-friendliness. But if those gay folks assert their humanity and refuse to perform the tricks ordered, the boss quickly becomes enraged and banishes the pets. The only gay people with which the boss will permit herself/himself to be surrounded are ones who hide their "lifestyles" and live in shame.

Your testimony also says, “The people: the Bishop who yelled at me for being ‘misquoted’ (not) in our newsletter; my own Bishop who would not speak to me in any of my three attempts to do so.”

Yes, I’ve been there, too. I know how this treatment by bishops shocks. I know how it hurts. When I received an unexplained one-year terminal contract at a Catholic college outside Charlotte, and when the school then lied to me about the contract and the abbot of the monastery who owned the college refused to speak to me about it, I turned to the bishop of Charlotte for support.

For pastoral support: my letters to the bishop made very clear that this was why I sought to meet with him. The experience of being lied to by a Catholic college and a community of monks shook me at the very core. It assaulted my faith. I needed the sense that someone who represented the church in an official pastoral way was willing to listen, to acknowledge, at the very least, that such behavior is incompatible with Christian teaching.

I requested a meeting with that bishop. I did so repeatedly. I wrote him numerous letters. In response, he sent an intermediary to me. The intermediary told me that the bishop was disturbed by the treatment I had received.

This was all I ever got. Finally, in response to my numerous letters asking for a meeting, the bishop’s young priest-secretary told me that the bishop considered my requests disrespectful—the request of a hurting member of the flock for pastoral guidance from the shepherd of the flock. When push came to shove, the bishop did nothing—absolutely nothing—to aid or comfort me.

When push came to shove, his solidarity was squarely with his brother clerics at the college that violated my rights. The bishop never saw my human face, never has seen my human face, though, if his intermediary was truthful, the bishop professed to be troubled by how I had been treated within a Catholic institution.

At the two United Methodist institutions at which I worked, I had the responsibility to interact routinely with the Methodist bishops who sat on the boards of both institutions. At meeting after meeting, one of those bishops never once looked me in the eyes. She behaved as if I were simply not in the room.

At the other institution, I recall having one single conversation with the bishop on the board of that particular college. When I found he was from Mississippi and recounted a story my cousin had just told me following a business trip to Mississippi, the bishop acted as if the inoffensive story was profoundly insulting.

He used the story as a pretext to vent his own personal disdain for me as a gay believer, a disdain about which I knew from the president of this school, who had told me of the bishop’s views about my partner and me. The bishop turned an inoffensive make-conversation dialogue into a pretext to treat me as less than human, as if I had offended his dignity, and to withdraw from conversation and human relationship with me.

Scott Pomfret’s book is full of vignettes about his similar interaction as a gay believer with the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, Sean O’Malley. I remember when Cardinal Law resigned in the wake of revelations about how he had handled the crisis of clerical sexual abuse of minors. I remember the hope with which many American Catholics greeted the appointment of O’Malley—a hope that quickly turned to ashes as O’Malley proceeded to play ugly political games with the lives of gay and lesbian citizens of Massachusetts.

As a gay Christian living in Boston, Scott Pomfret has had to track O’Malley’s behavior towards gay people in Massachusetts. From his book, I learned more than I would ever like to have known about the petty, vindictive details of O’Malley’s behavior towards gay Catholics.

What I learned as well, however, is that my experiences with that Catholic bishop in Charlotte and those Methodist bishops, or your experience with your bishop, is not unique. It was not about me. It is about homophobia in the churches—homophobia as an institutionalized force within the churches, a kind of monster that has the churches by the neck and shakes them vehemently when it needs to show its power.

Scott Pomfret’s book suggests that bishops lie without any seeming remorse both to and about gay Christians because many bishops are swept up in the wave of institutionalized homophobia. Their complicity in that institutional force, which has such deep roots in the life of the church and the surrounding culture and a powerful financial grip on the churches, blinds them to the moral implications of what they are doing when they lie, when they betray fundamental Christian principles of justice, when they dehumanize and expel.

These Christian leaders, and all who are allied with them in the structures of churches and the institutions that churches own, are, God help them, apparently convinced that they are doing the work of God in treating us as less than human. After reading Scott Pomfret’s book, I have become aware that there is a kind of systemic moral numbing in the lives of homophobic Christian leaders. Begin with demeaning gay Christians, and you can end up lying to other groups, treating other groups of believers as if they have no rights and no humanity, or even, as in the case of some Catholic bishops, engaging in criminal behavior.

Is there hope? Strangely enough, though the picture Scott Pomfret paints in his book is bleak in the extreme, his book is full of hope. As I noted in a previous posting, Scott Pomfret pins his hope on the outrageous presence of the Spirit (the outrageous Spirit) among those Christians who are identified by the institutional church and by society in general as flawed.

The outrageous presence of the outrageous Spirit among dirty gays and dirty lesbians. Among the dirty straight folks who invite us to the table and share your food with us, becoming tainted by our sin. Among the kind of misfits who attend Scott Pomfret’s inner-city parish—mentally disturbed people who disrupt liturgies by moaning and shaking, discarded elderly folks, the plethora of the halt and lame that come to such parishes for comfort and affirmation of one’s fundamental humanity.

Your testimony stresses the invitation that brought you to your church and to General Conference. Those fellow Christians who refuse to shake your hand or speak to you in holy conferencing, and bishops who shout at you and make false accusations about you, would like to have make-or-break power over that invitation. But they do not have such power. They have only the illusion of such make-or-break power.

It is God who extends the invitation. It is God who decides who will open the door and who will shut it. It is God who flings wide the door that Christians try to keep shut.

As Scott Pomfret’s book reminds us, in Massachusetts, when Sean O’Malley and the other Catholic bishops of the state sought to throw their institutional homophobic weight around to coerce Catholic legislators to vote against gay marriage, they had an unpleasant surprise: Catholic legislators would not let themselves be coerced.

They chose to do the right thing instead of the thing the bishops ordered. They listened to the outrageous Spirit, who is the one who does the inviting and the including, not the bishops and their homophobic minions.

Your testimony reminds me of another reason for our hope, even as we deal with the slurs, the ugly rituals of exclusion, the lies about who we are and what we have done, coming out of the mouths of Christian leaders, bishops, university presidents, who maliciously twist their own lies and their own dehumanizing practices around to try to paint us as deserving of the humiliation they enact against us. You say, “The one who told me hearing peoples’ stories at a listening session had given her things to consider in ways she never had before.”

Yes. There is tremendous power in the stories, the real-life stories, of those who live faithfully in the face of oppression. This is why the need to keep the door shut is so ravening. This is why there is such ugly intent to refuse to acknowledge our humanity, by refusing to speak to us, to look us in the eyes, to shake our hands. There is a profound intent, on the part of systemic homophobia in the institutional church, to keep our stories and our voices at bay.

That is why we have to keep telling them, in season and out of season. When people hear them, they know that they hear in these experiences the voice of a truth that shatters the lies of systemic, institutionalized homophobia. Not because we are better people or more faithful people, but because even flawed people who are treated as we are treated by the church do not deserve what is heaped upon us.

Above all, the young are listening. You say, “The people: our young adults – what a stellar future we have in them! They are our Future With Hope.”

Yes. And we need to cherish these young folks, who listen with new ears, ears not yet attuned to the institutionalized homophobia. We need to take their dreams seriously.

In conclusion, I am pained to hear of what happened to you at General Conference this year. At the same time, I am powerfully moved by your testimony, and your willingness to endure such ill treatment from fellow Christians on behalf of others who endure this treatment routinely.

As church members like you continue to offer your hand even when it is shunned, as you keep standing at the door to hold it open to outcasts, as you use your own invitation as the basis to invite others in and let their stories be told, as you nourish the tender faith of the young, things will change. For the better. Thank you for caring.

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

Discourse Rule Three:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Holy Conferencing as Love Building: The Witness of Mary McLeod Bethune

Thinking today about angry white men, stupidity, and malice. Steve and I have an ongoing conversation about the latter.

Having grown up in the great heartland of America, where one can cherish mightily the illusion that one is innocent, Steve ever sees the glass as half-full when I see it as half-empty. He’s quick to recognize stupidity and the effect of its heavy hand in social institutions, including the church. He is loath to see outright malice in much of the bungling that passes for leadership in church and society.

With my crazy, tormented Southern family tree, I’m more inclined to spot evil. I more often grant people the benefit of the doubt re: their ability to understand what’s happening around them. I see many of the blockages in building a better world as willfully evil, willfully malicious and self-interested, rather than fed by stupidity.

And so (naturally) to angry white men: I’m one of them. But what angers me most of all, I think, is something other than what seems to make the “typical” angry white male tick. What angers me has to do with the confluence of stupidity and malice in the thought patterns of so many people who want to resist necessary social changes at all cost.

The current U.S. federal election has resurrected the angry white male—as if he had ever gone away. Powerful currents in our culture resistant to progressive change continue to feed resentments of the angry white man around issues of gender and race. A politics of stupid, venal obstruction, which is never removed from the power centers of our culture, is playing a key role in the current political debates.

And it will probably continue to play a key role when the two candidates are finally selected and voters line up behind one or the other. The question—one of the fundamental questions—we face as a culture (and in our churches of the radical middle, which so closely mirror the culture) is whether we want to stand on the side of the stupid and malicious, or on the side of those who have, at least, the intent to move our culture towards the key ideals for which we claim our nation was founded.

So, anger, yes: my anger as a white male tends to focus on those who seem (to me) intent on willfully thwarting the coalescence of movements of progressive change around our foundational ideals. I could, if I wished, nourish resentment against women or people of color. Some of my most painful experiences in recent years, as a white gay man, have been at the hands of black women—women whom I expected to know better, and knowing better, to do better. Those experiences cut deeply, precisely because I suffered them at the hands of people representing two groups with which I commit myself to stand in solidarity.

But what is to be gained by singling out two social groups that struggle with crushing historic oppression, and venting all my rage about the venality and stupidity of the world on those groups, as if they (and not my demographic) stand for all that is evil in the world? In my view, LGBT people have everything to gain by standing in solidarity with our brothers and sisters across racial and gender lines. Our society as a whole stands to gain—and all of us as marginalized groups pitted by triangulating white-male “managers” against each other—by forming strong bonds of solidarity with each other. When a woman or an African American breaks through the barriers of the triangulating power center, I gain as a gay white man.

I offer these reflections today as I focus my reflections about holy conferencing on an enormously influential African-American leader of the 20th century, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. I want to focus today’s critical analysis of Wesleyan holy conferencing, as it is currently practiced in the United Methodist Church, on the following claim of Dr. Bethune in her moving Last Will and Testament:

Love builds. It is positive and helpful….Our aim must be to create a world of fellowship and justice where no man's skin, color or religion, is held against him. Loving your neighbor means being interracial, interreligious and international.

Love builds: love is constructive; its opposite is not. This is the leitmotiv of Mary McLeod Bethune’s thought. It is far easier to tear down in a moment something that has taken many years to be built up, than it is to build. It is easier to destroy than create. Chaos beckons everywhere around us, constantly. The choice to move against chaos is one that pulls against the grain, that forces us to muster imagination, trust, creativity, strength of mind and heart, in a world where it is much easier to go along, to become a witting or unwitting agent of all-encompassing chaos.

One of the rare privileges I was given at my last academic job was the charge to immerse myself in the thought of Dr. Bethune (though, strangely enough, I was later reproached for fulfilling this assignment; I was told that it was inappropriate for me as a white man to be analyzing the thought of Mary McLeod Bethune, and that the hard work I did—to research, write, and disseminate information to the university community—was not “work” but “talking” . . .).

My reading of Dr. Bethune has led me to the conviction that this 20th-century figure has something of crucial importance to say to those of us who struggle to keep holy conferencing alive in a 21^st-century postmodern context. In church institutions, including church-affiliated academic institutions that are in danger of losing their souls because the leaders of those institutions have acceded to the pressures of those skilled at triangulation, Mary McLeod Bethune points a way forward.

She points to another possibility than accepting the managerial techniques of triangulating power centers who would like us to assume that such techniques are inevitable, if we wish to be preserved from chaos. She points to the possibility of building, not holding the line as if stasis is the single option left if we do not wish chaos to ensue.

Mary McLeod Bethune’s commitment to progressive social change—to constructive building—led her to found a United Methodist HBCU, Bethune-Cookman College. One of Dr. Bethune’s significant innovative practices was her development of town-hall meetings on the campus of the college she founded. It is this development to which I want to draw attention today, as I reflect on how holy conferencing has come to be practiced in the United Methodist Church (as opposed to its prophetic possibility in Wesleyan tradition).

Because Dr. Bethune believed that students learn most effectively when involved in hands-on work with the social challenges of their communities, she made the walls of her college permeable: she linked her campus to the surrounding community, such that the college became an educational presence in the community at large, while the community itself became a privileged locus for her students’ education in social transformation.

I am pointing to Dr. Bethune as a pioneer of a participatory democratic process that has much to offer the United Methodist Church today, as the church examines what it means to engage in sacred conversation. I want to draw attention to Dr. Bethune for another reason, as well.

Her town-hall meetings have gained the attention of progressivist thinkers not only because of their innovative pedagogical interface of town and gown. These meetings also blazed the way for a dialogic process of participatory democracy that brings everyone to the table. At a time and in a place in which the seats of honor were saved in any gathering for those with white skin, Dr. Bethune deliberately assigned no seats to anyone on the basis of power or privilege (which is to say, on the basis of race and socio-economic privilege).

Seating at her town-hall meetings was first-come, first-served. Everyone was welcome. But the meetings comprised a safe space in which the powerful were not permitted to rule over the powerless. They were a safe space in which the voice of the powerless was not only permitted to be heard, but actively solicited.

In other words, at the United Methodist College she founded, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune modeled one of the key principles of Wesleyan holy conferencing, in her town-hall meetings: she actively worked against cultural patterns that gave privilege and voice to a select few on the basis of race, gender, economic status, and so on. She protected those who are ruled out of the conversation and dismissed from the table at most gatherings in the society in which we live (and the churches we attend in Main Street USA).

Like her sister Johnetta Betsch Cole, Dr. Bethune offers the United Methodist Church some important insights into what holy conferencing is all about, when it is practiced authentically and intentionally—with fidelity to core Wesleyan insights. Just as Dr. Cole’s image of soul work is a useful foundational metaphor for holy conferencing, Dr. Bethune’s image of constructive love, love that builds (with its echoes of Wesley’s injunction to do good constantly and avoid causing harm), offers an important critical insight into what holy conferencing can be when it is practiced with fidelity to Wesley’s spirituality.

From their experience of double marginalization as African-American women (and from their experience leading United Methodist colleges), Johnetta Betsch Cole and Mary McLeod Bethune represent radical inclusiveness, coupled with a critique of institutions that thwart the participation of any marginalized group in the structures of participatory democracy. The United Methodist Church, with its practice of holy conferencing, has much to learn from such prophetic leaders.

Dr. Bethune’s understanding of a radically inclusive participatory democracy that brings everyone to the dialogic table, and undercuts attempts of the powerful to silence the marginal, derives from deeply rooted theological beliefs that echo Wesleyan principles. Throughout her writings, she insists that authentic democracy is founded in the conviction that non-essential inborn traits including race, gender, or national status do not define human beings in the essential core of their being.

In Dr. Bethune’s view, what defines a human being and human worth is, starkly put, our common origin in one creator God. As she states in her 1954 “Address to a World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament”:

I listened to God this morning and the thought came to me, “Any idea that keeps anybody out is too small for this age—open your heart and let everybody in—every class, every race, every nation.” We must remake the world. The task is nothing less than that (in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], p. 58; emphasis in original).

Late in her life, as she drafted her Last Will and Testament, Dr. Bethune declared, “All my life I have been stirred by the idea of one God creating one world” (as cited in ibid., p. 259).

This religious conviction fed Dr. Bethune’s desire to inculcate a global perspective in African-American youth, and, in particular, in those youth she was cultivating for leadership. As she notes in a 1952 essay entitled “The Lesson of Tolerance,”

The essence of Democracy is the concept that no one group or individual is all-wise or has a monopoly of all the virtues. Training ourselves and our children to have both tolerance and respect for opinions diverging from our own, is one of the best possible ways to promote brotherhood—among the peoples of the world, and among our neighbors in our block! (“The Lesson of Tolerance,” Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in ibid., p. 267).

Dr. Bethune came to the conviction that the college she was founding was to be a “sacred place” in which the world might come to discover the world-changing possibility of interracial, cross-gender, radically inclusive dialogue in which all addressed one another as children of the same God. As her 1954 document “My Foundation” states,

So I want this to always be kind of a sacred place—a place to awaken people and to have them realize that there is something in the world they can do; and if they try hard enough, they will do that thing….I think we need leaders now so much. I thought that we would hold conferences, interracial conferences with women of all classes and creeds that we might sit together, think together, and plan together how we might make a better world to live in (Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in ibid., p. 271).

In my view, just as Johnetta Betsch Cole has recognized that the preceding principles of radical inclusivity and radical welcome must apply not only to women or people of color but also to LGBT persons in the structures of a healthy participatory democracy, were she living in our postmodern cultural context, Mary McLeod Bethune would—I have no doubt of it—welcome and include LGBT people at her table, too. Just as Dr. Bethune brought to her leadership table not only people of color but Caucasians, not merely men but women as well, in a contemporary context she would—I have no doubt of it—incorporate in her college’s leadership team openly gay and lesbian academic leaders.

And she would protect these valuable children of God from attack by members of the “entrenched male hierarchy” of the United Methodist Church, against which she constantly did battle as an African-American female leading a college (cited in ibid., p. 13, citing Clarence G. Newsome, “Mary McLeod Bethune and the Methodist Episcopal Church North: In but Out,” Journal of Religious Thought 49, 1 [1992], pp. 7-20). She would do so because her thought opens to the conviction that all human beings have intrinsic worth and a place at the table of participatory democracy because all come from the hand of the same Creator God.

It is difficult to imagine Dr. Bethune characterizing any children of God as the spawn of the devil. It is difficult to imagine that she would have rested easily with such discourse even if it were implicitly elicited by the ground rules for holy conferencing of churches in Main Street USA—by those with power to make or break her as the leader of a church-affiliated college.

These are important considerations to lift up as we consider what holy conferencing is all about today. They are important because other voices that side with entrenched male hierarchical structures in both church and society continue to echo the “spawn of the devil” rhetoric of those structures—and African-American women can be found as well (and sadly) among those using such rhetoric.

It is interesting to note that, just as the recent General Conference got underway, several news stories broke, all involving African-American women recently called to accountability for pushing homophobic positions in their workplace. One of these is a 2 May report about Crystal Dixon, Associate Vice-President for Human Resources at the University of Toledo. This report states that Dixon was put on leave following an op-ed piece she wrote on 18 April for the Toledo Free Press (see www.towleroad.com/2008/05/ohio-college-ad.html and www.toledofreepress.com/?id=7609).

This opinion statement entitled “Gay Rights and Wrongs: Another Perspective,” purports to articulate the black woman’s perspective on gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Dixon expresses “great umbrage” at the thought the quest for gay civil rights should in any way be equated with her quest for civil rights as an African-American woman.

Dixon states that, whereas she goes to bed at night black and wakes up black, gay persons can freely decide whether to “leave the gay lifestyle.” Dixon rehearses the familiar (and widely discounted) arguments that her gay and lesbian brothers and sisters have chosen a “lifestyle”; that this “lifestyle” choice can be cured by prayer and “a transformative experience with God”; that the gay “lifestyle” is injurious to the health of individuals and society. She also advances an argument that gay and lesbian households are not in any way economically deprived, but that these households experience economic benefits unavailable to African Americans.

Ultimately, Dixon notes that her argument hinges on her theological belief that “[t]here is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose . . . . It is base human nature to revolt and become indignant when the world or even God Himself, disagrees with our choice that violates His divine order.” (For my critique of the rhetoric of “divine order,” see my posting “The Church’s One Foundation” at http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/churchs-one-foundation-homosexuality.html).

Critics of Dixon’s statement have noted that it is especially troubling, given that her position at UT requires her to adjudicate claims of job harassment and discrimination and to enforce professional codes that prohibit discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The second report I noticed as General Conference was underway is a 30 April report that the ACLU had sent a letter to the Memphis City School system, charging Daphne Beasley, principal of Hollis F. Price Middle College High School, with discrimination against gay students. Beasley is an African-American woman, and Hollis F. Price is affiliated with LeMoyne-Owen, an HBCU.

The ACLU alleges that Beasley had gathered a list of students who were dating, including gay students, and had posted this list in a public place, essentially outing gay students who had not yet revealed their sexual orientation to their own families. A gay student at the school, identified as Andrew, claims that Beasley called his mother to inform her that her son was gay, telling the mother that she does not like gay persons and does not want them on her campus.

The Memphis City Schools system has responded to the ACLU letter by upholding Principal Beasley’s right to keep order and discipline on her campus. The school system finds nothing inappropriate in her behavior (see www.towleroad.com/2008/04/aclu-slams-tenn.html and www.towleroad.com/2008/05/memphis-city-sc.html).

The third report is a 26 April posting on Chris Crain’s Citizen Crain blog entitled “DNC’s ‘Talk to the Hand’ Outreach” (see http://citizenchris.typepad.com/citizenchris/2008/04/dncs-talk-to-th.html).

Crain summarizes recent initiatives of Leah Daughtry, an African-American woman who is chief of staff to Democratic Party leader Howard Dean. In Crain’s view, Daughtry “has garnered a reputation for inciting rivalry between African American and gay constituencies within the party.” Crain notes that Daughtry had “tried to help unseat the first-ever duly elected lesbian to the Alabama state legislature, in favor of a black candidate.” He also notes that, “Later, she (and closet case Donna Brazile) pitched a fit when gay Democrats proposed that gays be included in the same quota system for selecting state convention delegates as other minority groups.”

Given this history of contention in which, Crain believes, Daughtry has sought to sow seeds of discord and contention between the LGBT community and the black community, he finds her recent image-management attempts to patch up the rift she has worked to create too little and too late, a form of impression management to cover over triangulating procedures she herself has set in motion in the DNC office.

Clearly, there is work to do. The question is whether the United Methodist Church and other churches of the radical middle will take their cue from Dixon, Beasley, and Daughtry, or from Johnetta Betsch Cole and Mary McLeod Bethune. The time for sitting on the sidelines is rapidly vanishing as our political culture moves away from a politics of triangulation designed to create stasis to a politics of constructive building that welcomes the contributions of all God’s children.

Preceding my current series of postings on the United Methodist practice of holy conferencing is a series of open letters to the United Methodist bishop of Florida, Bishop Timothy Whitaker, under whose pastoral jurisdiction Bethune-Cookman University now currently functions. In previous postings, I have also noted the troubling violence against LGBT persons Florida has recently experienced. Daytona Beach, where Bethune-Cookman University is located, is as well the recent locus of some of the most horrifying acts of violence against homeless persons in the nation—acts often committed by teens. Florida was recently named the leading state in the country for acts of violence against the homeless.

Florida is now divided over an anti-gay marriage amendment that specifically targets LGBT citizens for no reason other than their sexual orientation.

There is clearly much pastoral work, much educational work, much healing to be done in Florida. One cannot imagine John Wesley or Mary McLeod Bethune standing aside from these glaring social needs.

Since the recent General Conference passed resolutions condemning homophobia and discrimination against LGBT persons, as well as calling for educational initiatives on the part of the church to help understand (and combat) all forms of social violence, wouldn’t it be amazing if Bishop Whitaker undertook to see that the university founded by Dr. Bethune became a force for reconciliation, education, and social transformation around issues of violence and homophobia—in a state where such reconciliation, education, and transformation are clearly needed?

Perhaps Bishop Whitaker and Bethune-Cookman University will respond to the resolutions of this General Conference by rehabilitating Dr. Bethune’s town-hall meetings with their practice of radical inclusivity. Perhaps Bishop Whitaker and this HBCU under his jurisdiction will follow Dr. Bethune’s lead by incorporating and acknowledging the contributions of all members of the campus community, black and white, gay or straight, in the leadership teams of the university, and by modeling inclusive leadership that crosses racial lines and lines of sexual orientation.

One can hope. As M. Paz Galupo notes in an article entitled “Advancing Diversity Through a Framework of Intersectionality: Inclusion of LGBT Issues in Higher Education” (Diversity Digest 10,2 [2007], 16-17), though the modern academy commonly pays lip-service to diversity and inclusion of all voices and perspectives, it lacks systematic or thoughtful strategies for integrating lesbian-gay concerns under the rubric of diversity. The academy still resists first-person testimony by its gay-lesbian members, and disallows such testimony as biased, self-interested, or distasteful.

Galupo (who is bi-racial) speaks expressly of HBCUs. She notes that HBCUs “typically have no institutionally recognized LGBT student groups” and that “structural barriers” in HBCUs prevent the successful integration of lesbian-gay persons into the academic community.

Galupo calls on the academy (and the HBCU in particular) to ask the following “hard questions” about such structural barriers, if the academy wishes to be truly inclusive:

Why do we advocate for LGBT inclusion in general, but remain afraid to challenge homophobia within our racially diverse communities? How can a dialogue about the experiences of LGBT persons of color inform…our work within the larger African American and LGBT communities? How can our successes in advancing racial diversity and gender equity inform our advocacy for LGBT inclusion? And conversely, how can arguments for LGBT inclusion be used to shift our discussions about race and gender to creative and more effective directions?

One can hope . . . . In the world coming into being in the 21st century, too much is at stake for the church and its institutions to choose triangulation and stasis over the prophetic witness of people such as John Wesley and Mary McLeod Bethune.