More Reflections on Parallels Between Discussion of Slavery and of Homosexuality: The Persistent Obstructionist Tendency of Churches

I’ve been involved in two blog threads this weekend, both of which had strong toxins flowing through them.  And it suddenly hits me: the toxins come from the same sources, though the threads are not similar in other respects.  Since this insight follows from what I posted earlier today about the national debate re: the morality of slavery in the 19th century, I want to develop it a bit.

One of the two discussions was at a local website where the blog proprietor posted some good comments about Charles Blow’s op-ed piece in this weekend’s New York Times.  As Blow notes, a recent Gallup poll shows that, for the first time since polling on this point has been done in the U.S., a majority of Americans approve of the morality of gay “relations.”  And the biggest jump in those shifting from disapproval to approval is among men.

Still Looking for Abraham: Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas on the Morality of Slavery (with Implications for the Debate about Homosexuality in American Today)

*I mentioned a few days ago that I’ve been reading Daniel Mark Epstein’s Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington (NY: Random House, 2004).  I noted that I might have more to share about that book in a few days.

One of the points sustaining my attention as I read this informative study of the amazing connections between Lincoln and Whitman is the backdrop of national debate about the morality of slavery at the time Lincoln became president.  The book does a super job of sketching that backdrop and showing how it formed the basis for the president and poet’s connection to each other.  It’s impossible to be reminded of what that national moral debate entailed without thinking about our current national debate regarding the morality of gay lives and relationships.

Bearing Witness: On the Weakness of "Self-Evident" Arguments Against Full Social Inclusion of LGBT Citizens

To continue my discussion of the need for LGBT believers to bear witness, and of what the silence of opponents of same-sex marriage in the New York Senate last week portends for those who had hoped to see an opening to inclusion of gay citizens in our culture following last year’s election: it is crucial that gay and lesbian believers bear witness to the grace running through our lives, to counter the maliciously stupid stereotypes on which the dehumanization of gay people by law and custom continues to be based.

The silence of the majority of New York senators who refused to accord the right of civil marriage to gay citizens speaks not only of their implicit belief that those with might on their side can claim with impunity to have right on their side. It demonstrates, as well, that those who continue to promote the exclusion of gay human beings from the full range of human rights do not have any strong basis other than prejudice on which to ground their determination to discriminate.

The majority of New York senators who voted last week to continue dehumanizing gay citizens of their state did not offer any rational basis for their choice to promote discrimination, because they cannot offer a compelling rational basis for this choice. When one examines the primary arguments advanced by opponents of same-sex marriage in our society today, one finds that, in the final analysis, they are tautological, self-referential arguments that seek to confine marriage to the union of a man and a woman because marriage is by definition the union of a man and a woman.

Marriage should be marriage because marriage is marriage, goes the tautological argument for “traditional” marriage. And marriage always has been marriage. The burden of proof is on those who want to challenge the self-evident “argument” that marriage is and always has been the union of one man with one woman for life, just as the burden of proof is on those who wish to argue that biology does not dictate gender roles that, by their very nature, prohibit the acceptance of homosexuality.

I’ve been engaging these arguments recently on several Catholic blogging threads that have been discussing the Catholic church’s response to its gay and lesbian members. As I read and think about the arguments offered by opponents of same-sex marriage (and of tolerance and compassion for gay Catholics) on these threads, I’m struck by the malicious stupidity of the case that many Catholics opposed to same-sex marriage wish to make in support of their position.

I use the phrase “malicious stupidity” deliberately. It’s one thing to be ill-informed and to make bad ethical judgments because one lacks sufficient information to make a good judgment. It’s another thing to be deliberately ill-informed, and to make bad ethical judgments on the basis of limited information because one wants, ultimately, to harm others with those unsound ethical judgments. Much of the popular (and magisterial, as well) Catholic discourse about gay and lesbian human beings is maliciously stupid: it relies on ugly stereotypes long-since discarded in humane and enlightened sectors of society. It perpetuates those stereotypes deliberately, even as it purports to be all about pastoral outreach to the gay community.

The official Catholic position about gay marriage and homosexuality in general depends, then, on willfully limited knowledge about the lives, the experience, and the humanity of LGBT Catholics. Those who control the discourse at the center are unwilling to open a discourse space in which the authentic testimony of LGBT Catholics can be heard, because the leaders of the Catholic church have a vested interest in keeping such testimony at bay—in order to keep alive the ugly stereotypes on which homophobic prejudice is based.

Without those stereotypes firmly in place, people of good will both within and outside the Catholic church would immediately recognize that the Catholic church’s approach to LGBT persons is anything but what it claims to be: a pastoral approach centered on redemption and salvation. It is all about cruel exclusion, and it is designed to be all about such exclusion.

Here’s the kind of argument I keep encountering when the situation of gay Catholics is discussed on Catholic blogs these days: marriage is and always has been about the lifelong union of one man with one woman because that is what marriage is and always has been. Man was made for woman and woman was made for man. Nature confirms what God has revealed about marriage, and everything the church does and says at this point in history hinges on holding firm to this revealed truth.

(Actually, I’ve cleaned up the argument a bit and made it a bit more cogent than it normally is when some of my fellow Catholic bloggers promote this argument on Catholic blogs. As I’ve noted before, one blogger who persistently logs into these discussions on any and every Catholic blog discussing gay issues has a fondness for tautological “arguments” bedecked with capital letters that go something like this: God made Marriage Sacred, and Marriage is the Sacred Union of Man and Woman because God made this Union. The Truth has Taken Flesh in Christ and questioning the Enfleshed Truth of Christ is questioning God.)

Or something like that . . . .

Think for a moment about the preceding arguments, and it becomes immediately evident that they are not arguments at all. They are tautological statements designed to close off any rational discussion of what marriage is or means, by pointing to what advocates of traditional marriage believe marriage has to be. Because it has always been so. These are arguments designed to prevent argument, not to foster it. They are arguments whose tautology points to the weakness of the case of those offering the tautology as a valid argument.

The customary arguments that people of faith use to defend “traditional” marriage do not try to take into account the wide diversity that has existed in the institution of marriage over the course of history—in particular, the obvious and extremely significant fact that the Judaeo-Christian scriptures themselves accept a polygamous (one man, many women) model of marriage for generations of salvation history. The scriptures themselves undermine the tautological argument that marriage has always been about the union of one man and one woman for life.

Nor do those Catholics promoting the one-man, one-woman -for-life model of marriage want to deal with the obvious and easily discovered fact that a large majority of Catholics in the developed nations today practice artificial contraception. The biologistic natural-law norm used as an ultimate basis to condemn, marginalize, and exclude all gay and lesbian Catholics who accept their sexual orientation as a gift from God is the very same norm used to condemn the use of artificial contraceptives. (That norm is that all sexual acts that are not open to the possibility of conception are ipso facto intrinsically sinful.)

The focus of Catholics who wish to defend “traditional” marriage is exclusively on homosexuality, when issues of sexuality and marriage come up for discussion. It is not on the far more widespread practice of contraception, or on gender roles and how these have shifted, despite what the traditional argument wants to say about how God created things “naturally” to be, and despite the obvious intent of many Catholics opposed to homosexuality to reinstitute rigid gender roles that subordinate women to men.

In other words, what is clear is that the preoccupation of Catholics who wish to continue stigmatizing and condemning their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is all about homophobia. It’s not about defending traditional marriage. If it were, the critique used to exclude gay Catholics would be applied equally to the large numbers of married Catholics practicing contraception.

And a concerted effort would be made to return women to their “natural” roles as homemakers, child-bearers, supporters of their men. These “traditional” assumptions about the immorality of contraception and the need for women to be subservient to men are inherent in the “self-evident” argument that Catholics opposed to same-sex keep pushing. The fact that anti-gay Catholics don’t push those aspects of their “traditional” argument to the same degree that they push the anti-gay aspect of the argument suggests that what is driving many Catholics’ approach to their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is, first and foremost, prejudice.

That’s the only leg that the traditional argument has to stand on, when all is said and done. As the real lives of gay and lesbian persons become more widely known—as the grace evident in the lives and relationships of many gay and lesbian persons becomes more widely apparent—we can expect a redoubled effort of those promoting the tautological argument (marriage must be about the union of a man and a woman because marriage has always been about the union of a man and a woman) to shove this argument to center stage in cultural discussions of homosexuality.

This is the last and best argument that opponents of same-sex marriage (and of social acceptance of gay persons) have to offer. It is an argument that, in its very tautology, exposes what is really at the heart of social opposition to the acceptance of gay persons as fully human: sheer prejudice. Sheer refusal to accord gay human beings the full range of human rights because of a preconceived notion that gay human beings are human to a lesser degree than others are human.

I am right because I say I am right. You are wrong because I say you are wrong. I have the power to make my definition of right stick. I would not have this power if I were not in the right.

This is precisely how those social groups with the power to enshrine prejudice in law succeeded in making the following arguments stick, long after rational examination had exposed the fatuity of the tautological “arguments” on which the following “self-evident” statements rested:

1. It is self-evident that God and nature have designed women to stay at home and engage in maternal tasks.

2. It is self-evident that God and nature have designed women as the weaker sex, and so women should not serve in the military.

3. It is self-evident that God and nature have made some people black and others white in order to divide those sets of people into distinct racial groups, living in separate area, who ought not to mix.

All of these powerful “self-evident” arguments were eventually overturned by careful rational examination, which permitted a social opening that allowed those affected by these arguments to demonstrate through their own lives that there is nothing self-evident (or divine or natural) at all in these arguments. To permit those hampered by the arguments to demonstrate, through their lived challenge to the stereotypes enshrined in the arguments, that these arguments are about nothing more and nothing less than sheer prejudice . . . .

The culture of nations around the world has been involved, since the latter half of the 20th century, in a slow, painful re-examination of similar “self-evident” arguments about homosexuality. Movement away from prejudice has occurred in many cultures, and has been accelerating in recent decades.

In response to this development, and, in particular, in response to what had appeared to be an opening to further forward movement in this area with the last election, a strong attempt is now underway in American culture to reestablish the prejudices on which the “self-evident” arguments against full inclusion of LGBT people in society rests. Some evangelical churches and the Catholic church (at an official level) have, to their shame, chosen to play a leading role in this re-establishment of prejudice.

Not only American culture but global culture itself is paying a high price for this choice on the part of many evangelical churches and the Catholic church (at an official level) to deepen rather than heal social wounds. The prejudice that these religious groups seek to reinforce in American culture is now being exported to developing nations such as Uganda, so that those with the power to reimpose homophobic stereotypes in the U.S. can point to developing nations as buttresses for the argument that homosexuality is “self-evidently” abhorrent to those who have not been brainwashed by secular modernity.

In this way, what had been a moment of promise is quickly being made a moment of peril for LGBT Americans and for our counterparts around the world. History is full of examples of what happens when powerful people consciously decide to promote noxious stereotypes, and when gullible people swallow those stereotypes because they have not given careful thought to destructive propaganda. History is full of examples of what happens when well-intentioned people stand by in silence as maliciously ignorant folks fan the flames of prejudice.

When careful, reasoned discussion of social-moral issues coupled with powerful personal testimony about these issues falls on deaf ears; when the best that those charged with defending the core values of a society have to offer to those calling for reasoned discussion of these issues is ominous silence and tautological “arguments” about how things always have been nd always should be, then people concerned about building a more humane world need to perk up their ears. These are the kind of conditions that produce not social progress but widespread persecution of despised minorities.

Mr. Clinton Changes His Mind: Knowing Gay People and Rejecting Homophobic Discrimination

There’s an aspect of what former President Clinton said the other day about gay marriage that keeps sticking in my mind, like a small pebble in an otherwise comfortable shoe. But before I talk about this, I want to take a cue from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog and give credit to Mr. Clinton for changing his mind about gay marriage, and being willing to say so publicly.

In response to a critic who faults him for “enthusing” over Clinton’s change of mind about gay marriage, Andrew Sullivan notes that he has often written critically about the former president’s record on gay rights. As he says, having done so, he now has an obligation to give Mr. Clinton credit when credit is due.

I, too, have criticized the Clinton record about gay issues on this blog, and I agree with Andrew Sullivan that it is only just to recognize the significance of Clinton’s change of mind now. I take Andrew Sullivan’s remark about this as a useful reminder to remember to praise those I may have criticized on this blog, when they deserve praise.

With those remarks by way of introduction, here’s what catches my attention in Mr. Clinton’s statements about why he eventually changed his mind re: gay marriage. In response to Anderson Cooper’s question about what made him change his mind, Clinton says,

I had all these gay friends, I had all these gay couple friends, and I was hung up about it [i.e., about the term “marriage” as applied to same-sex couples]. And I decided I was wrong.

That comment intrigues me—it speaks volumes for me—because of what it says about how people change their moral minds when injustice and discrimination towards a targeted group of people have become so ingrained (and, often, so hedged about with religious warrants) that they seem “natural.” And right. And hardly unjust at all.

I’ve noted over and over on Bilgrimage that my own thinking about many social issues has been decisively shaped by my experience coming of age in the middle of the Civil Rights movement in the American South. As I’ve said here, some of my formative experiences during those years opened windows in my mind and soul, through which I began to see that I had been tutored in racism as a white Southerner, and that a social system I had grown up to think of as natural and even as divinely ordained was a radically unjust social system founded on insupportable tenets of white supremacy and black inferiority.

These formative experiences had everything to do with beginning to know African Americans as human beings. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was, like many white Southerners, in constant contact with African Americans. A black woman cleaned my family’s house and, to a great extent, raised my brothers and me.

But these contacts were controlled contacts: they were contacts that white society controlled so that they would invariably yield, among white citizens coming into contact with black citizens, the unvarying impression that whites are superior to blacks, that the humanity of blacks is inferior to that of whites. What changed that deeply inculcated impression for me was coming into contact with black people in uncontrolled environments, in settings in which the dominant white manipulation of racial consciousness had been removed by law—for instance, when the schools were integrated, and I came to know African Americans as human beings every bit as human as myself.

Once I had these breakthrough insights, there was no going back. The insights forced me to rethink everything I had taken for granted. They forced me to do more than see, feel, and think. They made me change, since that’s what moral insight is all about: new perspectives spawn new decisions that lead to new actions, which in turn deepen the perspectives that initiated the process of change in the first place.

One of the governing insights that these formative experiences have led to in my life is the recognition that we all grow up in social contexts in which we take for granted unjust, discriminatory practices and attitudes in many different areas of our lives. Recognizing that this is the case in one part of one’s life—say, in the area of race—only opens the door to questions about whether it can also be the case in other areas—say, re: gender or sexual orientation.

The process of re-examining our formative presuppositions, once revelatory insights have led to us to recognize that some of them are radically skewed by prejudice, is never-ending. There is no area of our social formation in any part of our upbringing in which we do not have the potential to imbibe discriminatory presuppositions.

I’m glad that Mr. Clinton has come to a recognition in the area of sexual orientation akin to mine about race, and that this recognition seems to have reached him through his interactions with gay friends. At the same time, I wonder why it is taking so many of us to reach conclusions similar to Mr. Clinton’s. Mr. Clinton is not the only one with gay friends. We all live in a world in which the likelihood that we know several gay people as more than passing acquaintances is rapidly increasing.

Why are people’s social attitudes about gay people and discrimination against gay people so often moving at snail’s pace, given that this is the social world in which many of us now live? For that matter, having struggled with his heritage of racism as a white Southerner, why did Mr. Clinton take so long to extrapolate from his experience in analyzing and rejecting racism to a recognition that discrimination based on sexual orientation is just as insupportable as discrimination based on race?

One would expect people who have struggled to understand and reject racism to do the same when they begin to encounter gay people and questions about sexual orientation. Wouldn’t one?

Or is there some difference between race and sexual orientation that is simply not obvious to many of us who make connections between those two issues, and who have come to the conclusion that homophobic discrimination is as indefensible as racial discrimination is? I suppose the question I’m really asking here is, how does one have close gay friends and gay family members and gay colleagues, and still support discrimination against these human beings whom one knows at a human level?

I’ll admit that this is a question I’ve already asked myself about Bill and Hilary Clinton for some time now, for a somewhat personal reason. Since I happen to live in a place in which they, too, have lived and were political leaders, I also happen to know some of the gay couples who have been closely associated with them over the years.

I want to be clear here. I do not know the Clintons at all. I do, however, know a number of gay people, including several gay couples, who have lived near members of their family, and have—or so they have told me—a more than passing acquaintance with the Clintons.

And as I have listened to these folks talk about their connections to the Clintons, I have wondered repeatedly over the years how they can have been so enthusiastic about a president who—let’s face it—had a less than stellar record in supporting gay rights. When Hilary Clinton was asked about her stance on gay issues during the last presidential campaign, and responded by saying something to the effect that she was still making up her mind, I have to admit I wondered how the gay people I know who claim to be close to the Clintons can have been so enthusiastic about them over the years. Enthusiastic about them as friends of the gay community . . . .

I take remarks like Hilary Clinton’s in response to that question personally. I put myself in the place of those gay couples that have close ties to the Clintons, and I think about their lives. They’re, as far as I can see, upstanding, hard-working, people who contribute a great deal to the community.

As far as I can see, nothing in their lives could possibly account for the decision of a majority of folks—at least in this area of the country—to deny them the right to adopt children, to marry or enter into a civil union, to be protected against discrimination in housing and employment, to visit each other in the hospital and make medical decisions about each other.

How, I wonder, does one know such people on a more than superficial basis, and not feel compelled to work as hard as possible to outlaw such gross discrimination—especially when one has the power to do so? If one concludes that one must make such solidarity with those discriminated against on grounds of race, how does one draw a line and then decide that similar solidarity is not demanded when sexual orientation is the question at hand?

I have come to the conclusion that, when it comes to gay people and gay rights, quite a few people do not move from knowing gay family members, friends, and colleagues, to working resolutely on behalf of gay rights, for one primary reason. This is that people—including many liberal people who profess to find discrimination of all sorts abhorrent—feel, at some deep, unexamined level that gay humanity is not quite like the humanity of heterosexual people. It is humanity at a slightly less human level.

How else can one claim to know, love, and support gay people, and continue accepting the legitimacy of gross, overt, persistent discrimination against gay people? And not merely accepting, but refusing to do what is in one’s power to overturn this particular form of discrimination, since one knows real people who suffer from it and do not deserve to suffer in that way?

My intent in asking these questions is not to criticize Mr. Clinton. I applaud him for changing his mind about gay marriage, and for saying so.

But I suspect he’s far from the only liberal Democrat in the United States who continues to struggle with questions that have everything to do with figuring out how to deal with the real humanity of people we’ve been taught by discriminatory ideologies to regard as somewhat less human than ourselves. And like Mr. Clinton, unfortunately, some of those liberal Democrats have the ability to make decisive changes to make things better for their gay family members, friends, and acquaintances.

And like Mr. Clinton until fairly recently, they do not seem to feel much urgency about making those changes, even when they have the power to make them. Even when they are, many of them, running the churches that talk a whole lot about love. And the government in D.C., which talks about change we can believe in.

Poor Rowan Williams: The Moral Conundrum Facing the Churches Today, Through Gay Lives

Two days ago, I challenged the poor-Rowan Williams meme now developing in centrist Catholic circles (and in centrist Christian circles in general, among liberal Christians who want to appear tolerant while refusing to risk anything by actually supporting the cause of gay rights in the churches).

The Poor-Rowan Conundrum

The poor-Rowan meme wants us to see the Archbishop of Canterbury as a thoughtful, sensitive man caught in an impossible conundrum. The conundrum itself is not entirely clear to me. Either it’s the conundrum of holding a communion together when some of its members regard the full inclusion of gay human beings as an issue worth dividing the church over, or it’s the conundrum of doing the impossible balancing act of trying to keep the church on track biblically by preaching that gays are sinners, while proclaiming that the church is, as it ought to be, welcoming of all.

The Conundrum Facing Churches: How to Preach Love While Practicing Hate

If it’s the latter conundrum for which we ought to pity poor Rowan, then it’s important to note that this is a conundrum facing the Christian churches in general today. It’s the conundrum of trying to profess what a church has to profess in order to be church at all—and that’s love—while practicing the opposite of love. It’s the conundrum of trying to present oneself as loving when one is, in fact, hateful in one’s deliberate decision to treat gay humanity as less than the humanity of everyone else. It’s the conundrum of saying that one is just and inclusive when one is, in fact, unjust and excluding in one’s institutional life as a church.

The conundrum facing the Christian churches at this moment in history is the conundrum of having to make a choice, when one event after another has definitively revealed the traditional teaching of the churches, held always and everywhere, grounded on a consistent reading of the scriptures throughout history, as indefensible. As immoral. As a betrayal of what the scriptures are really all about, at their most fundamental levels.

And so it’s not a conundrum at all, really. It’s a question of either doing what we know is right, or of continuing to do what we know is wrong when we actually know better, and while we proclaim that we’re trying to do right. It’s the age-old conundrum that has always faced people aspiring to an ethical life: bridging the gap between theory and practice; doing what you know is right, particularly when the doing requires that you pay a price.

It’s easy to theorize, analyze, and preach. It’s much harder to practice.

But the preaching of the church about love will make sense to people only when the church practices and stops preaching—stops preaching, that is, until it begins to practice. The preaching of the church about love will make sense to people only when the church listens carefully to Francis of Assisi when he tells his followers to preach all the time, but use words only when absolutely necessary.

In this final sense—the conundrum of doing what you know is right, when there is a price to be paid for doing right—the conundrum that the Archbishop of Canterbury is now facing does seem poignant. And it’s one worth analyzing, because it’s one that Christians in general now find themselves facing.

The Biblical Face of the Moral Conundrum Facing the Churches

Homophobia is being so decisively exposed within the culture at large as unjust and immoral, that many Christians are now having to reassess their attitudes towards gay persons at a fundamental level. And this pushes Christians towards something they do not like to do: that is to reassess their entire tradition, including how they read the bible and how they find absolute certainty and absolute authority in the bible.

If we might have been spectacularly wrong about the gay issue, the reasoning of many Christians goes, then what else might we have been wrong about? Where do we find absolute authority and certainty, when our reading of biblical texts appears to be affected and even normed by cultural developments that challenge the traditional reading?

Real-World Context of Reading the Bible: Pressure and Threats from Powerful Interest Groups

It is important to note, too, that discussions of how to read the scriptures and apply them to the life of the church never take place in a theological vacuum, apart from the real world. The decisions churches make about how they choose to interpret the bible have real-life effects. And many groups, including some that have no real interest at all in religion, but a vested interest in placing religion on their political and economic side, work very hard to assure that the churches’ reading of the bible does not change, where they do not want it to change.

How we read the scriptures affects how we do business. Ultimately, what stands in the way of change in Christian churches, when it comes to repenting of homophobia, is not really the bible itself and how we choose to read it. It is economic self-interest that stands in the way, the self-interest of church leaders who know that they will pay a price in the real world, an economic price, if they permit new readings of the bible to inform the viewpoint of their churches about gay issues.

At the very heart of the churches’ (self-made) conundrum about how, whether, when, to include gay human beings in the churches’ life, how to treat us as fully human, is fear. Fear runs deep inside all Christian churches and the institutions they sponsor when they consider what otherwise seems to be a theological issue: the question of how to read the scriptures regarding gay people, and of how to apply those texts to the life of the church today. There is tremendous unacknowledged fear around these issues within the Christian churches. It is fear of economic reprisal, fear of reprisal if they choose to do what they know to be right . . . .

Time and again, when churches, church leaders, and church institutions admit that the traditional approach of the churches to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people is just not theologically and morally defensible, they face serious reprisal. Wealthy church members routinely hold churches hostage by withholding funds from churches that do the right thing vis-à-vis gay human beings. They withdraw their funds from such churches and move them to gay-excluding churches.

The Power Exerted by Right-Wing Political Watchdog Groups to Keep Homophobia Alive in Churches

Powerful political watchdog organizations also get into the act and assure that churches choosing to alter their gay-excluding stances pay a steep price for that choice. These organizations target such churches, publicize their choices, and call on people both inside and outside the church to make the church pay for its choice. These groups are capable of raising hell for churches that do not dance to their reactionary tune. They have strong ties to the mainstream media, and they control the dominant media text about the churches’ response to gay people, depicting every move to inclusion within the churches as a move away from the bible and longstanding Christian tradition—an abdication of Christian belief and values for cultural norms.

These powerful political watchdog groups are adroit about assisting reactionary groups within any church that chooses to repent of homophobia. They encourage these splinter groups to split the church—to preach that the church’s choice to welcome gay brothers and sisters is a church-dividing choice, one that demonstrates that their church has repudiated the bible and longstanding tradition. They not only help these groups to create splinter churches claiming to represent the tradition in all its purity, but they also assist these splinter groups in filing lawsuits that try to damage the mother church financially by taking its property away when a split has occurred.

Rowan Williams's Conundrum as the Conundrum Facing the Churches Today

So, yes, I can well imagine that Rowan Williams does face a conundrum right now. But I would frame that conundrum differently than right-wing groups with a strong presence in the mainstream media want to frame it when they promote the poor-Rowan meme.

To frame the conundrum facing the churches today as gay people ask to be treated as fully human in the churches, it’s important to look at what has happened in the past, when the church has been confronted with similar requests from other groups long marginalized by the churches, as the churches claimed sanction for their oppression of these groups in the bible and in tradition.

Similar Conundrums for the Churches in the Past: Slavery and Women's Rights

This is not the first time in history that the churches have chosen to split over issues of inclusion or exclusion, of full or partial humanity of marginalized groups of people. And it’s not the first time in history that churches choosing to do the right thing have been faced with economic reprisal by those with a vested interest in maintaining a status quo based on discrimination.

In the United States, the churches split over the issue of slavery in the 19th century, and throughout the 20th century, as churches that once made women second-class citizens have opened their doors to full inclusion of women in church life and in the ministry, there have been splits, with economic reprisals, in churches that have chosen to do what is right in this area—despite long-held interpretations of the bible throughout Christian history that have justified the exclusion of women from ordination and have regarded women's humanity as flawed and inferior to the humanity of males.

Just as churches that supported slavery and the continued subordination of people of color to white people preached in the 19th century that they were simply doing what the bible had always told Christians to do—hold slaves, but treat slaves with Christian kindness . . . . In all the churches that chose to split over the issue of slavery—in the churches that took the pro-slavery tack—the argument was consistent: the patriarchs of the Old Testament held slaves; Jesus never condemned slavery, but took it for granted; Paul upheld the right to hold slaves. Tell us that we’re reading the bible wrong about slavery now, and you challenge the entire history of Christian biblical interpretation. You undermine the whole authority of the bible, in changing what Christians have long held to be the correct biblical interpretation of slavery.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's Justification for Resisting Change re: Gay Issues

So it’s interesting to read now the Archbishop of Canterbury’s justification, published three days ago on his website, for punishing the Episcopal Church USA after that church has abolished bans on the ordination of openly gay clergy. I’m interested in particular in the Archbishop’s argument that “the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years” makes the decision to abolish bans discriminating against gay clergy candidates problematic. The Archbishop’s statement reads,

6. However, the issue is not simply about civil liberties or human dignity or even about pastoral sensitivity to the freedom of individual Christians to form their consciences on this matter. It is about whether the Church is free to recognise same-sex unions by means of public blessings that are seen as being, at the very least, analogous to Christian marriage.

7. In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years, it is clear that a positive answer to this question would have to be based on the most painstaking biblical exegesis and on a wide acceptance of the results within the Communion, with due account taken of the teachings of ecumenical partners also. A major change naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding.

“In the light of the way in which the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years”; “painstaking biblical exegesis”; “wide acceptance” within the communion; “solid theological grounding”: what the Archbishop of Canterbury is offering here is an impossible process of indefinite delay, before the churches ever act on the growing culturally-grounded consensus that homophobia is morally indefensible. Rowan Williams is arguing that issues which I believe he himself has long since regarded as settled—in favor of a full welcome of gay human beings in the churches—need further study, as a prelude to further dialogue to build futher consensus among Christians who are, in many cases, determined to resist any opening to gay people within the churches.

Further, further, further, which essentially means never, never, never.

Rowan Williams' Argument That Anti-Gay Biblical Texts Are "Very Ambiguous"

What’s fascinating about this argument—and here is where I find the poor-Rowan meme apt—is that prior to his election as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams wrote theological essays that reject precisely the argument he now wants to impose throughout the Anglican communion, as a way of dealing with the divided mind of his church regarding the humanity of gay persons. In 1989, Rowan Williams wrote an article entitled "Theology and Sexuality" which he presented as the 10th Michael Harding Memorial Address to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.

In that article, he argues,

In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.

Interesting, isn’t it? In 1989, for Rowan Williams the theologian and pastor, the biblical texts condemning same-sex relations were “very ambiguous,” and the attempt to impose them on the entire church in the name of longstanding tradition was “fundamentalist.” Now, in 2009, for Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury, the church has consistently read the bible to condemn same-sex relations for 2000 years, and the attempt to impose that viewpoint on the entire Anglican communion is not fundamentalist at all.

The burden of proof is now, in 2009, on those who want to challenge that longstanding interpretation of the scriptures. They must now convince even the most fundamentalist of their brethren who hold views in other areas—e.g., re: the treatment of women—that not even fundamentalist Anglicans in many regions can support. They must now convince those espousing a fundamentalist reading of the bible which is not even consonant with the Anglican tradition, and not imposed in any other area of Anglican life except when it comes to gay human beings.

Nor has Rowan Williams really recanted what he wrote in 1987. In 2007, he was asked by Time reporter Guilhelm Alandry precisely that question: whether he stills stands by the position he defended in 1987. He replied as follows:

Yes, I argued that in 1987. I still think that the points I made there and the questions I raised were worth making as part of the ongoing discussion. I'm not recanting. But those were ideas put forward as part of a theological discussion. I'm now in a position where I'm bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It's not for me to exploit my position to push a change.

The Heart of Rowan Williams' Conundrum: Doing Right When One Knows What Is Right

And so we see here with utter clarity precisely where the conundrum lies for poor Rowan Williams: “It's not for me to exploit my position to push a change.” I have my personal viewpoint: I regard the biblical texts long thought to condemn same-sex relations as “very ambiguous.”

But as Archbishop of Canterbury, on behalf of the Anglican communion, where there are many Christians (with powerful economic and political elites backing them) who promote what I know personally to be an indefensible fundamentalist reading of these scriptures, I have to act as though those scriptures which I know to be very ambiguous are binding on the whole communion and represent the longstanding tradition of the church. That tradition must be defended and cannot be changed without wide consensus throughout the whole church.

How Churches Change Their Moral Minds

This is definitely a conundrum, and it’s one that calls for our compassion: as Rowan Williams' own argument in 1987 noted, the church can and does change its moral and theological mind. It has done so throughout history. It does so, in many cases, when cultural developments cast an entirely new light on how the church has always and everywhere read the bible, and shows that a certain interpretation of the bible is fundamentalist, morally undesirable, less ethically insightful than the viewpoint of the culture at large.

In 1987, Rowan Williams referred to the case of artificial contraception. He admits that the church has changed its mind about this practice, and he admits that longstanding Christian tradition and biblical interpretation view the practice as immoral. He takes for granted that the church was right to change its moral and theological mind about artificial contraception, and right to ditch the longstanding, traditional reading of the scriptures to outlaw the practice—even though many Christians still do not buy into this new viewpoint, and there is not complete consensus about this issue within the Christian churches.

What I think the Archbishop of Canterbury knows, and what makes his current conundrum poignant, is that his analysis of how churches change their moral and theological minds is fundamentally wrong. And it’s wrong because he appears unwilling to take the only morally defensible side he can and must take in the current controversy about gay issues, though he may pay a strong price for doing so.

The Archbishop of Canterbury knows full well that the churches changed their moral minds about slavery and about the place of women in church and world despite what had always been the theological and exegetical consensus in the churches. And the churches changed their moral minds regarding these issues despite the opposition of large numbers of Christians to this theological and moral shift. There was not widespread consensus on these issues when the churches finally decided to do what was right.

The churches changed their moral minds in these instances because cutting-edge groups of prophetic believers within the churches took the risk of speaking out, needling, prodding, challenging the status quo, opening doors to women and people of color when the church itself refused to open those doors. Significant shifts in the moral minds of churches do not occur because churches have built a consensus around a new reading of the scriptures. The shifts are driven by prophetic minorities who then precipitate a shift that eventually creates a new consensus in a recalcitrant body bent on keeping change at bay.

Invariably, when such new readings arise—from the margins of churches, and often in collaboration with secular human rights movements—the majority of church members kick and scream against change. And those with the strongest vested interests in maintaining the status quo—who also often happen to be the wealthiest and most powerful members of the churches—do all they can to resist, as they maintain that accepting the new reading of the scriptures will undermine all religious authority in the world and make everything relative.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is, I believe, faced with a significant moral conundrum today. It is the same conundrum that faces many Christians, who are slowly becoming aware that how their churches have chosen to treat gay human beings throughout history, while quoting the bible, is no longer morally desirable.

It is the conundrum of choosing to do right, once one has attained the intellectual insights that precede a shift in moral awareness. Knowing what is right to do is often not the biggest problem in the ethical life. It's actually doing right that's difficult, and choosing to do so when we know we will pay a price for making that choice.

But when the ability of the church to convince others that its message is worth hearing depends on doing what we know is right, rather than on talking endlessly about what is right, while we remain aloof from the world of choice and action, what a steep price the church pays, in terms of its credibility and ability to be a sign of salvation in the world.

Faith Communities in Support of Health Care for All: A Catholic Perspective

The latest editorial in the national publication National Catholic Reporter calls for health care reform now, noting that the president promised this when he campaigned, and that access to health care for all citizens is a moral imperative.

For NCR, the moral imperative calls for universal access to affordable quality health care for all citizens. Anything short of that will represent a failure on the part of the administration.

And as I have repeatedly noted on this blog, such moral imperatives should be framing the administration's policy initiatives from the start of the new administration, when the window is still open for substantial reform.

Select passages:

Sixty-four years later, nearly two decades since legislators last seriously considered comprehensive health reform, it is long past time for Congress to act. President Obama ran on a platform of reforming health care. The legislative and political window will be open only briefly. The moment to act is now.

The basic principle of true health care reform is clear, as it was in Truman’s day: Any program that emerges must include universal access to affordable quality care. Bishop William Murphy, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, had it right this spring when he told the Senate Finance Committee that “the moral measure of any health care reform proposal is whether it offers affordable and accessible health care to all, beginning with those most in need.”

Anything less, given the moment, will be judged a failure.

And,

The politics of the “public option” are, to say the least, difficult. The forces arrayed against it -- largely private insurance companies -- are powerful. It remains, however, the most effective means under consideration to achieve universal affordable quality care for all Americans.

It is shameful that the wealthiest nation in the world, one that prides itself on its level of material development, is still bickering about what every other developed nation in the world has long since accomplished: making basic health care accessible to all citizens. Our inability as a nation to frame this discussion as the moral discussion it is speaks volumes about how our material development has vastly outpaced our moral development, as a people.

The Way Forward as the Way Backward: The Effects of a Leadership Vacuum as Societies Change Their Moral Minds

I'd like to add a brief autobiographical gloss to what I wrote earlier today. What may not be apparent in my analysis of how societies change their moral minds is a strong concern underlying that analysis: this is a concern about what happens when leaders block rather than facilitate necessary shifts in the moral mind of a group they’re charged to lead, and/or promote empty language about change as a cover for their passivity, qua leaders, in promoting necessary moral change in their society.

As I’ve noted previously, when leaders who profess moral vision and commitment abdicate their responsibility to spearhead necessary moral change in the groups they lead, those groups are likely to find themselves moving rapidly backwards rather than forwards, in terms of moral development. On many blogs and news sites that are discussing the Obama administration’s curiously passive (and even retrogressive) approach to the human rights of gay citizens in the past several days, I’ve noted this concern surfacing again and again.

If the administration continues to do nothing, people are saying, we’re likely to find ourselves moving backwards even in areas where we’re taken forward steps recently. We’re likely to find ourselves further back than we were before this ostensibly gay-affirming administration came into office.

I share that concern. This is why I am particularly disturbed by the attempt of the DOMA brief to undercut the claims of the gay rights movement to moral legitimacy. I consider that attempt not only misguided and downright nasty. I think it’s dangerous for our entire society.

And here’s why . . . . In our work life, Steve and I have lived through a number of experiences in which one or both of us were hired by an organization that wanted to make a progressive statement about gay rights, but had not yet counted the cost of that statement, and was therefore unprepared to deal with backlash when the organization did step forth and do what was right. Because of our training as theologians, which has often placed us in church-owned institutions, each of these experiences has occurred in a church-related context.

Invariably, each time we’ve walked into a situation like this, we’ve seen the organization regress rather than progress, once it encountered backlash due to its moral commitment, and once it had slammed the door on those gay folks it had courted as poster children to signal the enhanced moral awareness of the organization. Each of these organizations has become not merely more viciously homophobic after expelling the gay employees it had courted in an effort to appear morally enlightened. In each case, the organization has also ended up becoming more downright corrupt in general, in its overall treatment of all employees, in its leaders’ blatant disregard for the moral principles of the church sponsoring the institution, and in the leaders’ abdication of any commitment to fair, transparent, professional standards of leadership.

In one case, in fact, the organization simply dismantled after its leaders refused to deal with a church-grounded homophobic purge that targeted Steve. In another case, the organization has reverted to pre-1960 governance procedures and has embraced the far-right fringe of American Catholicism, after having announced (when it hired us) that it wanted to move in a Vatican II direction.

When a group begins the slow, painful process of moving towards a new moral consensus demanded by new moral perceptions among a critical mass within the group, and then steps back on its new moral commitments, it tends not just to move backwards, but to do so with a vengeance. It places itself in a worse, a more regressive, position than it found itself in before it ventured forth to do the morally right thing. It fulfills the biblical parable about what happens when people sweep out a house but leave it empty: seven spirits worse than the one they intended to sweep out return and occupy the house.

One particular work experience has been paradigmatic in showing me this. One of the principles of the Jesuit tradition of spirituality that has shaped my adult spiritual life is a caution against making important decisions of discernment when one is experiencing turmoil.

Jesuit discernment calls on one to avoid making important decisions in a time of turmoil because our vision is likely to be limited in such a moment, and good discernment requires that we seek to see as clearly as possible. This principle calls on those who set forth on a spiritual path to learn to hold together a number of different viewpoints in tension with each other. Spiritual growth is about learning always to see more rather than less. It’s about challenging ourselves to doubt and discard our peremptory judgments, since such judgments tend to be based on too little evidence and limited vision, and to wait a while until we see more clearly—and more broadly.

Because I value that approach to the spiritual life, and have found it promotes spiritual growth (resulting in greater peace and more ability to love, hallmarks of the presence of God’s Spirit in our decisions, according to the Jesuit tradition), I have sometimes walked into work situations in which I sensed that something was not quite right, but because whatever troubled me was not immediately apparent to me, I decided to work with the situation, listen, discern, and let my vision be made wider and deeper, as I trusted God’s call for me in that particular vocational moment.

One of these situations involved working with a supervisor who professed, on the front end, a strong commitment to gay rights, from the time I began working with her. She is one of several women under whose supervision I worked in my academic career. And she is one of several female supervisors who also happened to be African American. I mention this because her background plays a significant role in the story I want to tell—as will be apparent shortly.

In the years in which I worked with this ostensibly gay-affirming supervisor, I came to recognize (at least in part) what was not quite right, what I couldn’t quite identify as I began to work under this person’s supervision. Part of what was not quite right was that the profession of a commitment to respect for gay persons and gay rights was only rhetorical. It was a smokescreen.

In fact, this supervisor had (and continues to have) a history of hiring gay employees only to terminate them, one after another, without affording them any due process as she targets them, and with conspicuous malice towards them precisely as gay persons, when she decides to fire them. Several of us who have experienced this supervisor’s twisted managerial approach to her gay employees have concluded that her malice is rooted in some autobiographical experiences of her own that make her want to deal with the fact that people she loves are gay, but which also prevent her from permitting those family members to be close to her.

And so the tortured push-pull, slap-hug way in which she deals with gay employees reporting to her, ultimately shoving them decisively away from her in the end in each and every case. As she has done with those gay family members in her own life . . . .

Part of what was not right, as well, in this person’s approach to leadership is, as it turns out, that she is completely unbalanced mentally and emotionally, but most of all morally. And that lack of balance is rooted in her complete lack of any moral center. She is willing and able to remake herself on a daily basis, as needed, in order to remain on top.

And remaining on top is her sole goal, as a leader and personnel manager. While spouting language about moral commitments and caring communities that derives from the church that owns the institutions in which she works, she belies that language in everything she does as a leader and personnel manager. The religious-moral rhetoric is a cover for her moral emptiness, and because her church does not regard the claims of gay people as legitimate moral claims, she is able to get away with what she does to gay people (and to other employees) again and again.

I did not, of course, see all of this when I began working under this person’s supervision. Though I knew from the outset as I worked with her that something was not right, I could not place my finger on it. And I wanted to suspend judgment, to listen, to discern, to remain open to the possibility that my own vision of this workplace was constricted and inaccurate.

And this is where the question of this supervisor’s background comes into the picture, and why I have to mention it: because this supervisor was both a woman and African American, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, over and over again, as she made decisions and engaged in behavior that shocked me. I told myself that I did not live within her cultural universe, and therefore might be perceiving her decisions and behavior in an inaccurate and prejudiced way.

I wanted this person to succeed—I wanted her to succeed because she is an African-American woman, and I stand in solidarity with women and people of color as they struggle for rights. I am committed to promoting the rights of these groups who experience marginalization as I do, because of inborn characteristics that ought not to be the basis of discrimination, but that are used to marginalize.

I put up with behavior from this supervisor that I ought never to have tolerated, because she is a black woman. I found, in the end, that what I was trying to see and excuse as cultural particularity in her behavior is simply dysfunction, and dysfunction of the most dangerous sort—dysfunction rooted in moral vacuity.

I hope I will not make that mistake again. I am reminded of that mistake over and over these days, however, as I struggle to understand and respond to the Obama administration’s approach to gay rights and gay persons. Just as I did in my work with the supervisor described above, I find myself in recent days bending over backwards to try to imagine the push-pull, slap-hug behavior of the current administration toward gay citizens as a manifestation of some higher reason, some pattern I don’t quite understand yet: the hurtful but not intentional oblivion to my needs that comes from being focused on other issues, which are perhaps more important than mine; the cultural limitation that comes from not living life in a gay skin, and therefore not being able to see what one sees through gay eyes, etc.

Until recently, I have tried to understand and to excuse, and I have wanted to do so because my understanding of the spiritual life requires me to do that, before I make judgments. I would hope others do that for me, and I am obliged to do it for them, to treat others as I would hope to be treated myself.

Now, however, I’ve moved to another stage. I’ve decided that we may be dealing with dysfunction rather than higher reason, and that, at the center of that dysfunction there may be lack of moral commitment. I’m not yet ready to decide where that lack of moral commitment lies.

I prefer—perhaps because I cast my vote for him and found him inspiring as a candidate—to continue thinking, for now, that the president himself remains committed to human rights for gay citizens, on moral grounds. I prefer to think that he is perhaps being very badly advised by some of his key advisors. I suspect that I know who some, at least, of those advisors are, but I do not know enough to be certain of any judgment I might want to form in that regard.

I also suspect that the president has imbibed from various religious communities—including some African-American ones—a perception that gay rights are not really as pressing as some other issues that demand his attention now, on moral grounds. I suspect his religious outlook and religious associations afford him the illusion of skill at sorting and classifying the various moral issues that now face him as president, and that he imagines that gay rights are at the bottom of the list, because the religious culture on which he depends makes that deceptive judgment about gay people and our rights.

In my fifteen years working in church-sponsored historically black colleges and universities, I heard over and over a litany of rationales that many churched African Americans use to deny moral validity to the movement for gay rights and the moral claims of gay human beings. I could recite that litany in my sleep.

Though I would like to believe that the president's remarks about the need to combat homophobia in the African-American community mean that he is aware of the speciousness of these rationales, I also do not doubt that his outlook has been shaped in some respects by that litany. And he knows that it remains significant to some of his strongest supporters, to many African Americans.

I also think that as these games are being played out, the clock is quickly ticking, and there will soon be no time left to address gay rights issues—because we will have started on the backwards path. At which point, I fear, things will become much worse for gay and lesbian persons in the United States, because of the lack of leadership we are now seeing from our president despite his claims to be a fierce advocate for LGBT people.

Worse, in fact, than they have been for a long time . . . .

When Pragmatic Calculation Overrides Moral Imperatives: The Demise of Fierce Activism (and Fraying of the Moral Claims on Which It Rests)

Reports indicate that, in an attempt to address discontent among progressive supporters due to its inaction on its promises to address gay rights and its choice not only to defend DOMA but to do so vigorously (and with malice towards gay persons), the White House intends to make an announcement today. It will offer some—but strictly limited—benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. And these will be in place only as long as Mr. Obama is president.

According to Jeff Zeleny in the New York Times, the president will sign a “memorandum” today that provides things like relocation expenses for same-sex partners of gay federal employees, but not health insurance benefits. Not the health insurance benefits provided to heterosexual spouses. DOMA itself—the 1996 federal legislation that the president tells us he opposes and has promised to repeal, but which his administration is now defending—is apparently a stumbling block in that regard.

As I read this interesting news about shiny baubles dangled before a group of citizens experiencing discrimination in the apparent expectation that those citizens will be too dull to recognize that we're being offered bright trinkets in place of the respect and rights we keep demanding, I’m wondering if the administration even realizes how insulting this gesture is—how it compounds rather than addresses the core problem.

It’s about respect. It’s about recognizing that my human rights are equal to yours, that my humanity is on the same level as your humanity. It’s about realizing that what would wound you deeply also wounds me deeply, because my human nature feels pain as keenly as yours does.

If you would be outraged when I suggested that, because you are heterosexual, you do not deserve the same respect that I do as someone who is homosexual, then your expectation that I should be satisfied with the shiny bauble you offer me instead of respect and rights is curious, indeed. If you would find it insulting (and hurtful) when I decided not to offer your wife health benefits, while I offered those benefits to all same-sex partners, then on what grounds do you imagine I will be content with crumbs that would not be sufficient for you?

It’s about respect. And recognizing that my human rights are equal to yours. The gesture the administration is making today only drives the knife deeper, because under the guise of addressing my concerns as a gay citizen experiencing discrimination, the administration reminds me through its very gesture of “concern” that it regards my humanity as less than that of all heterosexual citizens.

I’m trying to get my mind around this . . . ham-handed and morally obtuse . . . behavior on the part of this administration. I’ve been trying to get my mind around this behavior. How does one put together the claim that equality for gay human beings is a moral imperative, and the behavior of this administration towards gay citizens?

I find it impossible to justify the Obama administration’s behavior towards gay human beings because of my experience with moral imperatives during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve written previously on this blog about my experiences during those years. I've noted that my experiences in those years led me to break with the church of my family, because of that church's hesitancy about moving to welcome African-American members. I've also noted that what I experienced in those years led me to commitments that have run through my academic life, to teaching in historically black colleges and universities for fifteen years.

I’ve also reflected at length on those experiences in a published article in Religion in a Pluralistic Age: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Philosophical Theology (NY: Peter Lang, 2001). In that article, I apply insights from a religious-theological movement in 19th- and early 20th-century America to my experiences during the Civil Rights period. That movement was the social gospel movement.

The social gospel spoke (among other things) about what it called the “social mind” of societies. Social gospel thinkers and churches influenced by social gospel theology believed that, just as individuals can change their moral minds about social practices like slavery or the subordination of women to men, so can societies do so. And the process by which societies change their moral minds is akin to—it’s linked to—the process by which individuals change their moral minds.

Social gospel thinkers noted that individuals can live comfortably with pre-moral ideas about all kinds of social practices like racism or misogyny. We can tolerate and even endorse those practices because we take them for granted: we’re conditioned to do so, by formative experiences in our families, churches, schools, and so on. We may not even see some of the institutions and practices around us, which to others’ eyes demand probing moral analysis, as moral (and so our view of institutions and practices that clearly need moral examination is “pre-moral”).

We see them as taken-for-granted, handed-down, church-blessed and society-founding practices and institutions that have no moral meaning at all. They are just there, given to us by divine fiat and by nature.

Then, as social gospel thinkers noted, in some of our lives, something happens to provoke reflection and new insights. An ah-ha moment comes along that permits us to see these institutions and practices in an entirely new light, and we find, to our dismay, that what we have taken for granted as divinely ordained and naturally given is a social construct that serves the needs of one group of people while subjecting another to discrimination.

Developmental psychologists like Lawrence Kohlberg think that this process of distancing ourselves from our taken-for-granted childhood assumptions about the world around us is part and parcel of growing up, of developing into adulthood psychologically—if we do, indeed, develop an adult psychological awareness. And that’s a big if.

Kohlberg and other developmental psychologists think that not all adults, by any means, develop adult psychological frameworks for analyzing the world around them. Many adults remain stuck in pre-adult stages of psychological and moral development, insofar as we continue, in adulthood, to rely on the absolute authority of those groups and institutions that shaped our formative years—e.g., church, family, and so forth.*

The social gospel applied these insights about individual moral awareness to society at large. This movement argued that societies can experience breakthrough moments about taken-for-granted institutions and practices, every bit as much as individuals can. In fact, as more and more individuals experience such ah-ha moments regarding the moral dimensions of practices and institutions previously taken for granted—e.g., the “natural” and divinely stamped right of light-skinned people to dominate dark-skinned ones, or of men to dominate women—societies comprising such practices and institutions have no choice except to begin confronting their taken-for-granted assumptions.

They have no choice except to do so because a critical mass has grown in their midst with a critique of what is taken for granted and of the injustice enfolded in the handed-down practice or institution that has become persuasive for a significant number of citizens who had not previously thought of this practice or institution in a moral light. When such a critical mass has developed in a society, and when a society has begun to reframe how it sees what it has taken for granted, the moral mind of society shifts. And moral imperatives flow from that shift.

I am drawn to this social gospel analysis of how societies change their moral minds (following on changes in individual moral minds) because it so perfectly captures the process I myself went through, growing up in the segregated South of the 1950s, and then having to confront the claims of my African-American brothers and sisters on my life during the Civil Rights movement. What I saw and heard around me in those years forced me to begin reassessing what I took for granted about the “natural” and God-given social order in which I was growing up.

I had no choice. Once begin to see, and one cannot stop seeing. Once one’s eyes are open—once one begins to glimpse what one has taken for granted not as natural and ordained by God but as socially constructed instead—one has no choice except to keep on seeing. Eyes that have opened will not willingly shut themselves and willfully choose self-inflicted blindness again.

Once my eyes were opened to the moral claims of my African-American brothers and sisters—and that is to say, to the full humanity of my African-American brothers and sisters, on which those moral claims rested—there was no going back. If people are human as I am human, and if I see this clearly, moral imperatives naturally flow from that recognition.

Those moral imperatives demanded, for instance, that I turned a deaf ear to all those voices around me in the 1950s and 1960s which told me that changes in longstanding social institutions would not happen overnight, that it would be better if African Americans stopped pressing for changes, that “we” would do the right thing and accord rights to our brothers and sisters in a timely, mannerly, orderly way if only they would stop making a fuss. If only they'd give us time to study, to build a consensus, to move ahead with all deliberate speed.

Once my eyes were opened—once I saw that human beings with a humanity equal to mine were pressing for what I took for granted, for the same human rights I enjoyed by accident of birth because I had a white skin—I could not play pragmatic games with those demands for justice. Justice is either justice or it is not justice at all. There is no halfway justice, because there is no halfway humanity.

And that means that justice is justice now, not justice deferred to an indefinite future by specious arguments. Justice like that is not justice at all. It is the antithesis of justice. It is my intent to keep in place a social system that demeans your humanity and denies the moral (and legal and social) claims your humanity makes on me.

I could not go back, once I saw the moral issue clearly, and once I saw that it rested on the merest, simplest, and yet most foundational insights of our social order: that all human beings are made equal, and because they are made equal, each human being deserves the same human respect and same human rights as every other human being.

I could not go back. And so I wonder—intently, daily—how someone who has spoken of equality as a moral imperative, who once endorsed gay marriage and then retracted that morally-based insight about human rights for reasons of political expediency, manages to go back. Or so it seems to me, with my outsider’s perspective . . . .

It seems to me that Mr. Obama and many of his supporters, who appear to believe that one can build a platform of progressive change around silence about and denial of the fundamental rights and full humanity of a stigmatized group of citizens, have a selective and flawed understanding of what the phrase “equality is a moral imperative” means. It seems to me that Mr. Obama and many of his supporters are seeking to advance today arguments I heard, and recognized as fallacious and deceitful in the 1950s and 1960s, arguments that were about keeping moral insight at bay, not cultivating it.

And I don’t know how one does that. I don’t know how one becomes aware of the full humanity of a group whose humanity one has previously though of in demeaning terms, and then steps back from that moral insight and the moral imperatives that flow from it. I don't know how one speaks of the moral imperative of equality, and then offers the nation, as its leader, a document that seeks to undercut the moral claims of those whose equality you recognize as a moral imperative.

I could not step back once my eyes were opened in the 1950s and 1960s. How can Mr. Obama and those who support him do so today, I wonder?

* For a recent application of Kohlberg's developmental theory to discussions of churches divided today by moral questions like gay marriage, see Colleen Kochivar-Baker at Enlightened Catholicism.

Shifting Moral Minds in a Society as Unfinished Task: New Year's Reflections on Women'

Talking about the changing moral mind of social groups and the shifting moral consensus of a society may cause some who hear this theological language to assume that social groups have monolithic social and moral minds. That’s clearly not the case, and is not what the social gospel movement meant in using this concept.

The insight that social gospel theology sought to capture in developing the concept of a social mind is that social groups do sometimes generate new perspectives on moral issues previously taken for granted as resolved. And when that happens, when a new consensus develops with sufficient sway to draw in the center of the social group in question (with the all-important assistance of leaders who recognize that social problems commonly involve moral aspects that cannot be ignored if we want to solve those social problems), the new moral consensus of the group is then enshrined in legal changes that create a new moral mind in the practice of the society in question.

The step of legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not necessarily mean that all groups within a given society endorse the moral shift that has taken place in their culture. In fact, there remains, in many cases, considerable resistance to any new moral consensus of a society enshrined in laws protecting that consensus. In many cases, groups actively resistant to the changes that have taken place—groups intent on removing the legal protections in place to safeguard a new moral consensus—coalesce around their goal of resistance.

I used race and gender issues as the framework for a reflection about how societies change their moral minds yesterday. To say that our society has changed its moral mind about race and gender does not mean that we have eradicated racism or misogyny. Resistance to racial justice and reconciliation and resistance to women’s rights remains very strong in our culture. And this resistance is often fueled by contemporary manifestations of the same religious viewpoints that initially resisted the enactment of laws to abolish slavery or eradicate segregation, or laws to provide equal rights to women.

The key point to be emphasized here is the point about legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus—of a new moral mind—of a society. When that occurs, the moral mind of the society in question can be said to have shifted decisively. But such legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not mean that everyone in the particular society has changed his/her own mind about the morality of the issues under consideration. Much work remains to be done in our own society around issues of race and gender, even after we have made breakthrough shifts in how we perceive those issues, sufficient to generate new legal protections for those affected by racism and misogyny.

As this new year begins, I’m thinking, for instance, of how far we’ve come (and how far we still have to go) in the area of women’s rights. Of women’s freedom and self-determination. Of recognition of women’s full personhood.

My thoughts about these issues today are framed by a post-Christmas conversation with one of my nieces. This is the big-city, glamor-girl niece who has the job of her dreams in New York, a first job right out of college. We are very happy for her. She worked hard to have the right to earn enough money each month to pay, just barely, the horrendous rent for a tiny shoebox apartment in Manhattan. We are proud of what she’s accomplishing.

This is an opportunity not one of us would want to see my niece denied, even as the social pressure for young women to marry and have a family remains strong, and as that pressure predicts that a young woman living on her own and pursuing her dreams will one day wake up feeling unfulfilled, and will realize that she needs a man and a family in order to achieve “true” fulfillment. My niece is creating her new adult life with full awareness of those siren voices which remain so strong in our culture, and which seem particularly strong in many of our churches even today: voices that prophesy doom for women living on their own, paying attention to themselves, seeking self-fulfillment and the right to live dreams. Voices that would never prophesy doom for men (well, straight white men, at least) seeking any of those things.

My niece and I spent the evening of the day after Christmas talking about this. One of her concerns now is a relative of hers who seems (from an outsider’s perspective, at least) to be locking herself into a set of grim options for the future. This relative has a circle of friends in which several of the young women, all at the end of high school, have become pregnant and married.

My niece is concerned about the same thing happening to her relative, given her relationship with a young man who seems to fit well into that circle of teens. As we talked about that, my niece said to me, “I want to say to her, ‘Really? You mean people still do that? Get knocked up at 18 and feel obliged to marry the father? Really? That’s still going on?’"

As my niece talked, I realized that she is baffled that “that’s still going on” because she herself has moved into a different world than the one in which her young relative lives. This is a world from which there is no turning back. It is the world in place now that the women’s right’s movement has opened doors for young women, through which one goes to find a place radically discontinuous from the old place of female proscriptions: a world in which women have a right to choose, to pursue their dreams, to reject societal expectations that imprison women, to ignore moral imperatives based on the idea that biology is destiny, and that the biological destiny of women is to live in a reproductive prison.

At the same time, I realized as we talked, the world in which she lives is not the world taken for granted by her young relative—or by many other people in Western cultures today. And that despite the accomplishments of the women’s movement and the enshrinement in law of protections of women’s rights.

Society has changed its moral mind, in the West at least, about the place of women in the world. But persuasive subcultures within the overall framework of Western culture have not moved in the same direction in which cultural consensus has moved, re: these issues. And considerable reaction to women’s rights still exists, particularly in religious groups, many of which would encourage my niece to return to the world in which her young relative lives—to look for a man to fulfill, support, and control her.

The life my niece is living is one lived against the backdrop of those church-based expectations for women. On one side of her family, only two generations ago, a female ancestor lived precisely the script she now fears small-town church-based society is writing for her young relative.

This ancestor became pregnant several years before she was 18. She hid that fact up to the day on which she disappeared onto her parents’ back porch, delivered her baby by herself, and walked inside with the newborn in her arms, to announce to her mother and step-father what had just happened.

She did the right thing. She did what her town and church expected her to do. She married the father and raised two other children by him. She quickly learned that the young man who had impregnated her was far from perfect—that he drank heavily and could be abusive when drunk.

When the children were approaching high school age, her husband died suddenly in a tragic accident. Left a young widow with three children and few means of support, this remarkable woman went to college and completed not one, but two, masters' degrees in education. With those, she was able to provide for her children in a time and place in which single mothers struggled merely to put food on the table.

My niece knows this story. The woman to whom it happened chose to make it public when my brother and sister-in-law married. I am glad she made that choice, since the story provides one among many lenses through which my niece can now view her life as a young woman in the 21st century, and can consider the options available to her.

To our discredit, though the women in my family were strong-minded and assertive—and though they chose careers for themselves when women were expected to be housewives and mothers—my family would have suppressed such a story. We have no base-born children in our family—not even the ones who, a few generations ago, walked down the streets of my family's small town in their mother’s tow, bearing the name of the male member of our family who fathered them, looking just like him. They didn’t exist. To us, at least.

My niece does not want the fate her ancestor endured to be revisited on her young relative. She wants the passing of generations to mean something different for women—new possibility, if nothing else, for those who want that possibility. She does not want her relative trapped, as so many young women in the church-dominated town in which she lives are trapped, in a world of unhappily married wives who join Facebook groups called 100,000,000 Christians Worship God, or Jesus 2008.

If the relative wants that world, fine. But if not, there should be options for her—options like those my niece has had, options to have a life of her own, and not the life imposed from outside. The precious option to have a self in a world that denies a self to women, or makes women pay an enormous price for seeking themselves.

Not much has changed, one might think, when one hears this story. And yet a tremendous amount has changed, when it comes to women’s rights. Even though the moral mind of society may not have changed everywhere to the same degree, it has changed substantially and decisively enough to provoke a shift in our laws, so that the laws of Western nations now recognize the right of women to the same self-determination men enjoy.

Still, the task of developing a new moral mind in a society is an ongoing task, because the fragile consensus on which new moral minds are based is always tenuous and always subject to attack from groups that have a strong interest in undermining a new moral consensus. The fight to preserve and extend a new moral consensus is an ongoing fight. It requires continued activity on the part of those convinced that the new path a society blazes for itself re: an issue of human rights is worth keeping there, keeping open, keeping accessible.

Because in any society there will always be those who want to close off paths that permit more people more liberties. In any society there will be those who see the liberty of a group previously hedged about with moral and social prohibitions as a threat to morality itself: allow those people—people of color, women, gays—such liberties, and who else will want freedom from oppression? And how to draw moral lines, when we cannot do so across the backs of those whom we have kept in subjugation for that very purpose?

Such battles continue, even in 2009. They continue because the resistance to human rights—to human rights for all—remains strong, even at the very center of many Western cultures. And no leader who leads from the center in Western culture today can afford to ignore that fact, if he or she truly wishes to lead with change in mind.