Speak Out, and They Will Silence You: John Pavlovitz on "the Heart Sickness American Evangelicals Have Inherited"

If you speak out, they will shut you down — or try to do so. As happened to me this past weekend when I insisted on talking about racism in my own neighborhood and community, and was told repeatedly by a young punk — a young straight white male — to shut up.

"There Is Almost Complete Silence on Homosexuality" in Amoris Laetitia: There's Silence and Then There's Silence — Interpreting the Silence of Amoris Laetitia About LGBTQ Lives

So, silence. What to do about silence? Massimo Faggioli writes about Amoris Laetitia, 

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Historians, Silence, and Sexual Orientation: "As a Gay Child and Teenager, I Also Effortlessly Developed . . . An Observer Status"

A few days ago, I made some connections between Diarmaid MacCulloch's book Silence: A Christian History (NY: Penguin, 2013), which I had just finished reading, and the silencing of abuse survivor Peter Saunders by the Vatican abuse commission, which has expelled him for speaking out about the inaction of Pope Francis vis-a-vis clerical abuse of minors and its cover-up. An interesting theme of Silence, and of MacCulloch's work as an historian in general, is how his growing up gay (and the son of an Anglican parson) informs his work as an historian.

Peter Saunders, Member of Vatican Abuse Commission, Silenced, and I Finish Reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's Silence: A Christian History: Making the Connections

Silences such as Christian involvement in child abuse, anti-Semitism, slave-owning, demand constant rupture. On such noise does the health of Christian society depend. 

~ Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (NY: Penguin, 2013), p. 216.

On World AIDS Day, What Message of Good News Do Catholic Leaders Have for People Affected by HIV — After Pope Francis's Trip to Africa?

Yesterday was World AIDS Day. What was the official, unambiguous statement of good news offered by the leaders of the Catholic church to the world on World AIDS Day, regarding an illness that remains epidemic and lethal in particular in the continent of Africa?

Frank Mugisha, Ugandan Advocate for LGBT Rights, on Pope Francis's Missed Opportunity for Conversation on Protecting LGBT Persons

Amy Fallon writes, 

"I Will Never Be Silent Again": Pastor Frank Schaefer to United Methodist Church Court

Rev. Frank Schaefer

"I will never be silent again," United Methodist pastor Frank Schaefer told the church court that tried him for officiating at the wedding of his gay son. (And, as an aside that's not really an aside, isn't it amazing that Jesus so decisively excoriated the legalism of the scribes and pharisees, while churches that claim him as their founder have ended up with intricate judicial mechanisms that place people on trial--as if the scribes and pharisees and not Jesus founded the Christian movement?)

When My Silence Is Actually Speech

When others are being dehumanized and I see what is taking place but remain silent, my silence is actually speech.

By remaining silent, I am saying that I find the degradation of these others thinkable.

I am saying that I find their humanity less than my own humanity, that if challenged, I could offer reasons for their dehumanization.

I am saying this because, under similar conditions, I would cry out loudly, with righteous indignation, against my own dehumanization.

Because I know I am human, and I know that human beings ought not to be treated as less than human.

And I would expect others to join in as I cried out against my dehumanization, because they, too, are human as I am human.

Why I Cannot Remain Silent: On the Necessity of Speaking Out in Face of Injustice

I could not remain silent.

When the rights of my African-American brothers and sisters were being assaulted during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, I had to speak out. I could not remain silent when many of my fellow citizens wished to overturn legislation affording black citizens civil rights, for the following reasons—reasons that have compelled me throughout my life to speak out against assaults on the rights of people of color:

▪ Silence in the face of injustice is complicity in injustice.

▪ Denial of the rights of others implies that the humanity of the other is less than my own. I cannot participate in the diminution of others’ humanity (either actively or passively, through tacit consent) without diminishing my own humanity.

▪ In a democratic society (and in a moral universe), we are all interconnected. To permit the humanity of others to be diminished and their rights to be removed—even or especially by the will of the majority—dissolves the bonds that are the only possible foundation on which a viable participatory democracy can be built.

▪ I am those I deem Other. It is only an accident of history that has assured that I live my life in another skin that that of the Other. If I permit the Other to be demeaned for any reason whatever, when my words and actions can prevent this, I cannot reasonably or morally expect to escape the treatment accorded the Other, if my own situation happens to change and I find myself the Other.

▪ The keystone of the system of legal segregation in the United States and of the cultural norms this system presupposed was violence. Underneath the entire system ran a constant threat of violence against any black person who got out of his or her “place.”

I saw actual violence with my own eyes, during the period leading up to and immediately after the Civil Rights act of 1964, as some white citizens of my community sought to keep black citizens in their “place.” I knew people who, having cleaned fish, would put the offal from the fish into brown paper sacks and throw these onto the roadsides in black neighborhoods, to remind their black neighbors of their inferior “place.” I knew white teens who would drive close to black children walking on roads in black neighborhoods, so that the children would be forced to jump into the ditches beside the road.

In my community during the 1960s, white teens driving through a black community threw a brick at an elderly black woman as she walked to church, hitting her in the head to remind her and the community of her “place.” In my final year of high school, a black teen was shot in cold blood while sitting on his porch, in a horrific act of violence that went unpunished. I knew those who shot this young man.

▪ If I permit violence—whether that violence is overt, as in hitting a woman in the head with a brick, or covert, as in creating laws to make an entire group of people second-class citizens—to rend the fabric of civil society, I cannot reasonably or morally expect at some point in my own life to be safeguarded from the violence that I have permitted to go unchecked in society at large.

▪ Every system by which one group of human beings is isolated from other groups, targeted, and then put into an inferior “place,” presupposes violence as its foundation. Without covert and overt violence, it is impossible to maintain systems of inequality that depend on keeping a targeted group in its “place.” To live with such a system and not to challenge it is to immerse myself in violence.

▪ The violence of the racially segregated society in which I grew up, and the demeaning attitude towards an entire group of human beings it reflected and enacted, were rooted in the will of the majority and in longstanding religious belief. The people among whom I grew up took for granted that the bible not only legitimated, but prescribed, their subjugation of people of color. And very little in their culture challenged that religious presupposition, precisely because it was the presupposition of the majority.

▪ As someone who reads the scriptures to affirm the common, shared humanity of every human being, I had no choice except to speak out, because my most deeply held religious beliefs were undermined by the majority’s twisting of scriptural norms to justify oppression of a demeaned minority.

▪ In the final analysis, I do not have the right to call myself a moral human being, while remaining silent in the face of injustice that I can combat through words and deeds. And being able to call myself a moral human being is important to me.

Update: I've just watched video of the latest White House press conference. Asked about President Obama's reaction to today's California Supreme Court ruling, Press Secretary Mr. Gibbs replies, “I have not talked to the president about it. I think that the issues involved are ones that you know where the president stands.”

Do we know where the president stands? From where I stand, it seems he is still silent.

At the Crossroads, the Impossibility of Remaining Silent

As expected, the California Supreme Court upheld proposition 8 today.

And as I mull over the court decision, I’m thinking back some 40 years to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In particular, I’m thinking about why I could not remain silent, as the rights of African Americans were debated (and assaulted) in my nation, as I grew to adulthood.

I was in junior high school when Congress passed the Civil Rights act of 1964. For anyone living in a community in the Deep South, as I did—in south Arkansas near the Louisiana border—it was impossible not to notice and to be affected by the many social changes that this legislation implied.

Within a few years, the white high school in the community was integrated, while I was in school there. Businesses in the town that had kept blacks cordoned off from whites—and which could do so legally—were forced to change their practices. These included restaurants which usually had no provisions at all for black diners. If they did so, those provisions consisted of a separate "window" where African-American citizens could purchase food and then eat it outside. Even doctors' waiting rooms were strictly segregated, with a well-furnished room for white patients and a shabby small room for black ones.

There were only two cinemas in our community. One of these forbade black patrons altogether. The other required black moviegoers to sit in the balcony, while whites sat in the main theater.

All this changed after 1964, slowly and painfully, and at a certain price for anyone, black or white, who contravened longstanding custom. As far as I know, the decision a black friend and I made to go to the movies together in 1967, to sit together on the main floor, was the first quiet act of defiance to integrate the theater, following the abolition of legal segregation. I remember little uproar at our choice to do what now seems so natural—sit side by side, black and white, watching a movie. I do remember an ominous silence, though, as if everyone else in the theater had held his or her breath when we sat down—and a few whispers.

I also remember the warnings my parents received as this friend and I continue do to do social things together, and after he visited my house. Neighbors told my parents that they themselves did not object (interesting, isn’t it, that no one ever wants to admit being prejudiced, even when his or her prejudice is obvious?), but feared for their safety and that of the neighborhood, if any person of color continued visiting houses in the neighborhood socially, rather than to mow the lawn or clean the house, cook, do laundry, and tend children.

Perhaps my most vivid memory of the paths that integration forced me to take—because I had no choice, confronted with the changes all around me—was the controversy that arose in my church following the Civil Rights act of 1964. As I have noted in previous postings, the abolition of legal segregation led to requests—I believe these came from conscientious members of our church itself—for us to reconsider our whites-only membership policy.

All the churches in my community except one were, to the best of my recollection, segregated. The town was dotted with black and white Baptist and Methodist congregations, and with exclusively white Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Pentecostal, and other churches not represented at all in the black community. The one exception to the pattern of rigid separation by race was the local Catholic church, which had closed its blacks-only mission by 1964 and combined that parish with the white parish.

The African-American friend with whom I socialized in high school was Catholic. I knew him from both church and school, since he was one of the students in the black school chosen to integrate the white high school when it was integrated. As I’ve also noted on this blog, when my Baptist church dithered about integrating, and when a divisive debate (full of rancor that shocked me) ensued in the church after the request that we reconsider our segregated membership policy, I left my family church and became Catholic. I did so in part because of the Catholic church’s progressive stand on racial issues in my particular Deep South community.

The point I want to make with these stories: it was impossible for me to avoid making choices, as integration took place in my town. It was impossible for me to remain silent. It is the nature of crossroads to force us to decide. We cannot go ahead, at a crossroads, without choosing one path or the other.

And so today, I’m thinking about why I could not remain silent in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement challenged longstanding laws and customs that separated the community, its businesses, its churches, and its schools according to race. I am thinking of why I could not remain silent even when speaking out put me at painful odds with members of my own family and church community, and forced me to make choices that radically affected my future. For those reasons, please see my next posting.

The Sounds of Silence

“I have never heard a sermon that offered wisdom as to how a gay man should live his life in a faithful Christian manner. All I have heard is silence, or when there was something other than silence, the words have been condemning" ~ Rev. Paul Capetz.

Presbyterian News Service for Jan. 28 carries an interesting article by Duane Sweep, entitled "Twin Cities' Presbytery Restores Capetz' Ordination (www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2008/08063.htm).

The story concerns a Presbyterian (PC USA) minister Paul Capetz, who renounced his ordination in 2000 after the PC USA added to its Book of Discipline a 1997 statement requiring ordained ministers to practice “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and woman or chastity in singleness.”

As many commentators noted at the time the policy was implemented, it was primarily aimed at lesbian and gay ministers living with partners--that is, lesbian-gay ministers who potentially might reveal their sexual orientation to the public, rather than living silent, closeted lives. Commentators in the Presbyterian church and other churches that have adopted similar policies note that they tend to be used almost exclusively to weed out openly gay-lesbian ministers. Straight (or straight-identifying) ministers who are unmarried are not normally subjected to such stringent scrutiny re: their "celibacy" as are lesbian-gay ones.

Capetz recently decided to ask for reinstatement to ordination, on the ground that the implied "vow of celibacy" that the PC USA requires of non-married clergy represents a theology of "works righteousness" antithetical to Reformed theology. His appeal was upheld on Jan. 26 by the presbytery of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

What strikes me in Capetz's testimony to the presbytery, as reported in the article cited above, is the pronounced theme of calling and witness running through it. Capetz reports that it was the church which, from childhood forward, nurtured his life of faith. It was within the church that, as a young man, he discovered a strong sense of vocation, a calling to follow in Jesus's footsteps and minister to his flock.

And it was the same church--the church that had nurtured him and provided a context within which he heard the calling to ministry--that then attacked him when he sought to integrate the experience of being gay with his vocation. It was that church that told him to live in silence about his very personhood, or incur penalties.

It is out of this painful exclusion that Capetz addresses his experience (and that of other openly gay-lesbian believers) in the church: either silence or condemnation; either the injunction (tacit or spoken) to remain hidden, defined the shameful member of the family who is never spoken of, or direct assaults on his personhood, from the very community that nurtured his faith and vocation.

Capetz's testimony strikes me powerfully, because his story could be mine. It is also the story of countless other LGBT members of Christian communities around the world, whose entire experience of grace and vocation is framed by our natures, by who we are, by what we have experienced as LGBT children of God. We experience the divine as LGBT persons. We cannot experience God in any other way. To ask us to deny our natures or pretend to be who we are not is to ask us to forfeit the experience of a God who comes to each person just as that person is....We experience God through the mediating structures of our own personhood, of our personalities, predispositions, our unique way of being in the world.

The ultimate cruelty of the churches' assault on us as LGBT persons--specifically and precisely because we are LGBT--is the churches' denial that we lead graced lives. In telling us that our nature is malformed, or that our love is inauthentic, the churches tell us that we have no witness of grace to offer the Christian community.

Yet the powerful testimony of LGBT Christians everywhere--there is a veritable cloud of witnesses--repudiates the validity of the church's judgment of us. Not only can we live lives of grace, vocational lives within the Christian community, we do live such lives.

To their shame, the churches are unable to recognize this. The loss is surely the churches' loss. In behaving so savagely, by excluding LGBT members who refuse to live in quiet shame, not only do churches undercut their claims to be church: the family of God in which everyone is welcome. In behaving thus, the churches also diminish the significance of their many ministries to heal, make whole, right the wrongs of society.

The churches cannot stand to claim for love, inclusion, healing, and justice, when they conspicuously deny those ideals by their shameful treatment of their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members.

Silence is never an adequate response to persons in need of love, affirmation, and healing. The Jewish and Christian scriptures show prophets and holy people, as well as Jesus, consistently reaching out to anyone in need, to speak words of healing and consolation. God is forever speaking....

A church that employs silence as a way of avoiding speaking words of healing and blessing to one group of human beings can hardly speak effective words of healing and blessing to others. Silence is an indefensible response on the part of churches to anyone in need.

Between silence and condemnation: this is not a place in which human beings can live and thrive.