The Church's One Foundation: Homosexuality and Schism in the UMC

As the United Methodist General Conference nears, I continue to be fascinated by essays written by Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the Florida Conference, regarding the church and homosexuality. In previous postings on this blog, I have noted my interest in the stance of the Florida Conference and of Bishop Whitaker on this issue.

I’ve noted that my partner and I were hired by a United Methodist college in Florida in 2006. I’ve also noted that the executive committee of the board of that college (on which Bishop Whitaker sits) approved our hire, after holding a discussion about the fact that we are an openly gay couple in a long-standing committed relationship.

I’ve posted as well about what happened after we arrived in Florida on the very day that the statewide conference ended in 2006, bitterly divided over the issue of whether gay and lesbian persons can be welcome in Florida Methodist churches.

These experiences, and my own history with the Wesleyan tradition, also detailed in previous blogs, give me a strong interest in what is happening with the United Methodist Church in relation to gay and lesbian persons. As I have also noted, in my view, it’s important to track what is going on in the UMC re: gay folks because the Methodist church is, in important respects, a weathervane for the attitudes of mainstream Americans.

Despite its Wesleyan origins and strong Social Principles, the Methodist church is very much a middle-of-the-road heartland American church, a church that reflects cultural norms in strong ways. As goes Methodism, so goes the nation. Our current president is a Methodist, and one of the two Democratic candidates, Mrs. Clinton, is a Methodist. The United Methodist Church bears watching, if one is gay and living in America. (Once again, in offering this analysis, I want to recommend the valuable statement of Shannon B. entitled “Why You Should Pay Attention to What Is Going on in Ft. Worth at the End of April” at Pam’s House Blend blog; I cited this statement in my blog posting of 11 April at http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/citizen-journalists-methodist-canaries.html).

I offer the following perspectives as someone with a personal history of connection to the Methodist church—a connection both very rewarding and exceptionally painful—and as a Catholic theologian looking from the outside at the theological basis presented by those like Bishop Whitaker who resist revision of the sexual ethic of Methodism regarding homosexuality. I’m particularly fascinated by the argument Bishop Whitaker offers in a statement on the case of Rev. Karen Dammann in the Pacific Northwest in 2004.

Rev. Dammann is an out lesbian living in a committed relationship. After she informed her bishop, Bishop Elias G. Galvan, of her relationship, he referred the matter to a local Judicial Council. After various levels of deliberation and adjudication (all detailed in the statement of Bishop Whitaker on which I am commenting today), Rev. Dammann was acquitted of the charges against her and allowed to continue in ministry.

The statement on which I am reflecting today is Bishop Whitaker’s response to the Dammann judicial decision. It is found on the website of the Florida UMC Conference at www.flumc.org/bishop_whitaker/dammann_statement.htm.

What particularly interests me in Bishop Whitaker’s statement is that it offers arguments drawn from some version (but a rather filtered and watered-down one) of Roman Catholic traditional teachings about sexual morality. It seeks to establish a broad “transcultural” consensus about the “divine order” of human sexuality which is reflected in a Christian tradition that Bishop Whitaker sees as uniform across history and cultures.

Bishop Whitaker states,

Those who support the Church’s position believe that the prohibitions against homosexual practice in Scripture and tradition should be placed in the context of the whole teaching of Scripture which affirms that the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman and celibacy in singleness are the revelation of the divine order for the sexual life of human beings. They believe that the Church should adhere to this divine order rather than accommodate to ideas and practices acceptable in Western societies (emphasis mine).

Though Bishop Whitaker is drawing on a version of Catholic tradition in the preceding statement, as a Catholic theologian, I find Bishop Whitaker’s argument far from compelling. In the preceding statement, Bishop Whitaker is imposing on the Wesleyan tradition a watered-down version of Catholic natural law theology. Official Catholic teaching about sexuality has long held that, if human beings reflect rationally on the “purpose” for which sexuality is given by a Creator God, we will come to the conclusion that sexuality is a gift given for procreation. Catholic theologians have long spoken of a natural law written in all human hearts which makes these insights accessible to all human beings—the transcultural and transhistorical “divine order” about which Bishop Whitaker writes.

Bishop Whitaker seems unaware, however, that a large number of Catholic theologians and a huge percentage of Catholic laypersons have rejected many of the conclusions of Catholic natural law theology pertaining to human sexuality. In fact, studies show something over 90% of Catholic married laypersons in the Western nations repudiating official Catholic teaching on contraception—which is rooted in the same natural law theology on which Bishop Whitaker’s argument relies.

Thomas Aquinas reasoned that, if sex is given for procreation, then masturbation is more sinful than rape, since the latter has, at least, the potential to result in procreation. On the basis of natural law theology, the Catholic church holds that not only are homosexual acts sinful, but any genital act that does not deliberately intend to be procreative is sinful.

If Bishop Whitaker is going to impose Catholic natural law theology on Methodism, in support of his belief that homosexuality violates divine order, he must also, to be faithful to the tradition he is imposing, forbid contraception, masturbation, impure thoughts, and so on. Catholic natural law theology teaches that each of these—the very act itself—is “grave matter” that results in the condemnation of a person to hell, if that person engages in the act willingly.

To repeat: very few Catholics in the Western world today accept these conclusions about human sexuality. In fact, a majority of us oppose these conclusions and the use of natural law theology and a language of divine order to speak about human sexuality. For many of us, an ethics based on relationality and stewardship would do a better job of preserving key Christian values re: human sexuality than does the language of divine order, which reduces human sexuality to an animal level by seeing it only in procreative (and not relational) terms.

But perhaps even more interesting in Bishop Whitaker’s statement about the Dammann decision is his willingness to bring out some other big gun ideas and terms from the Catholic tradition in speaking about the decision re: Rev. Dammann. Bishop Whitaker ends his statement by warning of the dangers of heresy and schism: “There are two main sins against the church of God, heresy and schism. Heresy is choosing one’s own theological opinion over the doctrine of the church when one’s theology is contrary to the teaching of the church. Schism is separating from the church and destroying the church’s visible and physical unity.”

These are highly charged terms from the Catholic ecclesial tradition. Bishop Whitaker is particularly concerned that the Dammann case might lead to schism in the church.

What fascinates me in this conclusion is the implied assumption that welcoming, ordaining, and giving full human rights to gay persons in the church is a church-dividing act. Bishop Whitaker’s argument implicitly elevates the church’s sexual ethic to the level of a “non-negotiable” on which the church is founded. Alter this ethic—tamper with the “divine” order and the “transhistorical” consensus—and you will destroy the church.

This is overdone. Not even the Roman Catholic tradition would see sexual ethics as the basis on which the church is founded, such that, to alter its traditional teachings in this area, it would call into question the unity of the church. The Roman Catholic church has never made any infallible declarations about matters of morality precisely for this reason: morality has a significant cultural component that shifts throughout history and across cultures. To found the church on a particular moral teaching is to build it on sand.

The church once forbade the practice of usury. The church taught that it was gravely sinful to lend money at interest, to use money to make money. The church once defended slavery, a transcultural practice that had a strong basis in the scriptures themselves.

Because the church clearly has altered its moral teachings, it would be very unwise to ground the church on any sexual teaching. The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord—not a teaching about sexual ethics.

As is evident from other postings on this blog, I also strongly question Bishop Whitaker’s argument that, in fully including gay and lesbian persons in church life, the Methodist church would be abandoning a consistent “transcultural historic and global” position of Christianity. Bishop Whitaker characterizes the consensus of Methodism as follows: “…[T]hey believe that the public teaching and moral guidance of the Church about human sexuality should be faithful to the witness of Scripture and consistent with the teaching of the transcultural historic and global Christian community.”

Even if we conclude that there is transcultural and transhistoric consensus about the inappropriateness of homosexual behavior (and I am not willing to accept that conclusion so readily as Bishop Whitaker appears to be), there are the matters of slavery and of subordination of women to men to contend with: these are cultural practices that were long held by Christians worldwide to be not merely appropriate, but biblically ordained.

We now reject those conclusions.

What drives the opposition to full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons in the life of the church? In my view, this is all about a tremendous fear on the part of many men that opening the church to the feminine will topple the social order, the divinely ordained, traditional social order—in which they have long been at the top.

I find Bishop Whitaker’s aside—“For decades there have been emotional disagreements about homosexuality expressed at sessions of the General Conference”—enlightening in this regard. Emotion is what women do—at least, in the viewpoint of men who reserve rationality to themselves.

This aside implies that arguments about divine order, transcultural consensus, heresy, and schism, are rational, cool, male things, while protests by those excluded from full communion are female, emotion-laden events. It also implies that the church should listen to the cool rational voice of its male spokesmen, and not be swayed by the emotional voices of protesters.

Given these prejudicial assumptions, which seem to me to be deeply woven into Bishop Whitaker’s discourse about gay and lesbian persons and their places in the world and church, I find it hard to accept his conclusion that even those opposing the full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons in Methodist churches “support justice for homosexuals in civil society and hospitality toward all homosexual persons….”

How can there be justice for gay and lesbian persons in civil society when the church and its institutions are themselves unjust? How can civil society learn to display hospitality towards gay and lesbian persons when the churches and their institutions do not lead the way and provide an example of such hospitality?

Were the experiences of my partner and me at Bishop Whitaker’s Methodist university experiences of justice and hospitality, experiences that model these virtues for civil society?

And who should be asked, if we want to find out how the church truly behaves towards gay and lesbian persons—its cool rational male leaders, or those whose lives are in the control of and directly affected by the cool and calm rational discourse of those leaders?

In my view, if the church wants to find out how it really treats gay and lesbian persons, it has to ask, first and foremost, gay and lesbian persons ourselves.

And how can it do that, when it hounds us out of its institutions, and does not even afford us job security in those institutions? Or when it never gives us a place at the table as it doles out its crumbs of “justice” and “hospitality” to us . . . .

If homosexuality is a church-dividing issue today, it is so in that the continued failure of the churches to recognize that all Christians are invited to the one table, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, thwarts the church's ability to be what it is intended to be at the most fundamental level possible: a sign of God's loving mercy and justice in a world in which these virtues are sometimes at a premium.

The Churches and Counter-Cultural Witness? Florida's Anti-Gay Marriage Debate

As this week ends, I’m gathering some loose end of thought. One thread that particularly fascinates me is the attempt of Christian thinkers who are essentially apologists for neo-conservative political positions to co-opt the term “counter-cultural” for their theological and political viewpoint.

I critiqued the essay of United Methodist Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker entitled “The Church and Homosexuality” earlier in the week, precisely on this ground. In my view, Bishop Whitaker’s attempt to present the Methodist church’s stance on homosexuality as counter-cultural is not plausible.

To the contrary, in maintaining that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian faith, and in upholding structures of discrimination against (openly) gay persons in the church and its institutions, the United Methodist Church is applying cultural norms, rather than bringing the gospel critically to bear on cultural practices. The United Methodist Church and other churches do not pay a price for standing with culture when it legitimates discrimination against LGBT people.

The truth is that the churches pay a price when they do stand against this vicious form of social oppression. They do so by losing donations and support, by incurring the wrath of right-wing think tanks with deep pockets and strong influence in the controlling sectors of American economic and political life.

I argued earlier this week, and continue to argue, that in standing with discriminatory cultural practices regarding gay human beings, the churches are standing on the wrong side of a movement of liberation as significant in human history as the previous movements to set slaves free, to end segregation and apartheid, and to accord women full human status. The moral arc of the universe bends to justice, and if the churches expect to earn the title “counter-cultural,” they must follow that arc towards justice for every group of people in the world, for all of those shoved away from the table and dehumanized due to innate characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

Having offered this analysis of Bishop Whitaker’s essay “The Church and Homosexuality,” I find it fascinating to read that the group attempting to use gay human beings and gay marriage as political footballs to bring right-wing voters to the polls in Florida in the coming elections have just rolled out a new website to support their effort. To be specific, I find it fascinating that the new website and press announcements about it show an extremely close connection between this campaign to use and vilify a group of human beings and churches in Florida.

In an article entitled “Florida Amendment Sponsors Roll Out New Campaign of Hate” on the Bilerico Project blog yesterday (www.bilerico.com/2008/04/florida_amendment_sponsors_roll_out_new.php#more) Waymon Hudson Notes the strong connections between churches in Florida and this campaign of hate:

The group behind the Florida ‘Marriage Amendment’ has launched a new website and media blitz. Not surprising, all of the press conferences announcing the effort took place at churches around the state. It seems they aren't even trying to hide the purely religious basis for the amendment that would not only ban gay marriage and enshrine discrimination in the state constitution, but also take away domestic partnerships and other important rights and benefits.

As Hudson notes, “With links to ‘sample sermons for preachers’, ‘church action plans’, and ‘God's design’, it [the website] reads like a church bulletin instead of a substantive effort to pass legislation . . . . This is religious-based bigotry, pure and simple.”

I find it astonishing to read that, in announcing the new website, Rev. Hayes Wicker, a Southern Baptist minister, stated to the press, “This is a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery.”

This is a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery: opposing gay marriage is a social crisis equal to that faced by the churches when they upheld slavery!?

The mainstream white churches of the South defended slavery, though Rev. Wicker's comment seems to imply that they gave countercultural witness against slavery. Rev. Wicker seems to have forgotten that his own church, the Southern Baptist Church, was founded precisely because Baptists in the South wished to continue holding slaves.

Rev. Wicker seems not to remember that almost all white churches of the antebellum South defended slavery. How can opposing gay marriage be considered countercultural today, when the churches mounting that opposition are the same churches that once defended slavery?

There is something extremely dishonest in the way some Christians today are attempting to paint themselves as counter-cultural, in opposing gay rights and gay human beings. If Bishop Whitaker wants his United Methodist Church in Florida to fulfill John Wesley’s vision for the church—namely, that the church be an agent of healing for social wounds, of lifting up the downtrodden—it seems to me that United Methodists have much work to do in the state of Florida today, where gay human beings can be fired at the whim of employers simply because they are gay, where gay teens are being shot on the streets, and where many Christians are urging further social violence against gay people.

It would be refreshingly counter-cultural if the United Methodist Church in Florida used its Social Principles to counter this ugly form of social violence. It would be refreshing to see United Methodist institutions in Florida defying such indefensible prejudice by hiring and promoting openly gay employees skilled at addressing these issues and helping the church bring healing and redemption where there is such pain and violence.

For further reading about the co-opting of the term “counter-cultural” by churchmen today who essentially defend neo-conservative (and culturally entrenched) political and ethical norms, see “Politics of Methodist Appointment System” on the Deep Something blog at http://deep.mastersfamily.org/2005-06-05/politcs-of-methodist-appointment-system. As the author of this posting, a Florida Methodist named John Masters, demonstrates, it is entirely possible for church authorities to use people of color or women in appointments that purport to be cross-cultural, but to use these appointments (and these minority groups) to uphold positions that are anything but counter-cultural.

And since this posting is continuing previous reflections about the United Methodist Church’s stance regarding gay and lesbian human beings, I would also like to recommend a posting by John Aravosis this week on America Blog, entitled “Would Hilary Quit an Anti-Gay Church? How About a Pro-Life Church?” Aravosis is commenting on the critique of Barack Obama that asks why he did not leave his church when Rev. Wright inveighed against racism in terms some critics regard as excessive.

As he notes, it is curious that no one has asked Hilary Clinton what she would do if a minister in her United Methodist Church upheld an anti-gay position—such as the position of the UMC Book of Discipline that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian Faith. The article is at www.americablog.com/2008/04/would-hillary-quit-anti-gay-church-how.html.

Finally, I found Maura J. Casey’s op-ed piece entitled “Of Witches and the Wait for Justice” in the 13 April New York Times fascinating (www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/opinion/13sun2.html). The article looks back on a period of American history in which many churches not merely opposed witchcraft, but supported the execution of witches (almost all of whom were women).

In particular, this essay focuses on the attempt of a mother and daughter, Debra and Addie Avery, to have their ancestor Mary Sanford, who was executed for witchcraft in 1662 in Connecticut (she had drunk wine and danced around a bonfire), exonerated. To their surprise, their attempt to defend their ancestor, who was hanged at age 39, leaving a husband and five small children, has “taught them something, perhaps more than they wanted to know, about the mob mentality.”

After their move to exonerate their ancestor began to be discussed on the internet, the Averys found that commentators on various blogs fiercely opposed the attempt to examine the churches’ role in the witch-hunts of New England, and that they themselves were vilified for defending Mary Sanford. They learned, in short, that the mob mentality that justified the hanging of women for witchcraft remains alive and well in the 21^st century in other forms.

The Averys are undeterred. As Addie Avery, who is fourteen, concludes, “There are worse things than mockery. Now, I’m not afraid to stand up when I see something wrong.” Though the attempt to exonerate Mary Sanford of witchcraft comes some 340 years after her execution, “finally someone is speaking up for Mary Sanford.”

And this gives me courage to keep speaking, even if no one today listens. Down the road, I believe, people will look back at this point in human history and ask how the Christian churches and Christian people could ever have demonstrated such savagery to LBGT people, and have believed that in hating and oppressing, they were doing the will of Christ.

Benedict's Visit: Drawing Lines or Opening Arms?

This has been a week of travel, in which it has not been easy to be online frequently. Given this, and since I’ve fulfilled my major task for the week—to send an open letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church’s Florida Conference—I want to end this work week with a brief reflection on some news stories that have caught my attention this week.

I’m, of course, following the news of Pope Benedict’s trip to the U.S., to the extent that I can do so without easy internet access. I am heartened that Benedict has met with survivors of clerical sexual abuse. I’m reading Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church (Dublin: Columba, 2007) now, and am persuaded by his argument that the abuse crisis is the most serious challenge the Catholic church has faced since the Reformation. I’m also persuaded by his contention that, had the pope addressed this crisis forthrightly, with transparency, from the time it broke as an international news story in 2002, we would be much further down the road of healing than we are now.

That being the case, Benedict’s meeting with survivors is a symbolic gesture of great importance—about which, more in a moment. If reports are correct which say that Benedict has also distinguished between pedophilia as the problem to be addressed, and homosexuality in the priesthood, then I am further heartened by what Benedict is accomplishing on this pastoral visit.

There have been strong forces within the church that wished to use gay priests as a scapegoat in ugly image-management attempts to sweep the abuse crisis under the rug. Archbishop Wilton Gregory has made that argument explicit, claiming that the church doesn’t have a pedophilia crisis but a homosexuality crisis in its priesthood. If Benedict has, indeed identified pedophilia as the problem to be addressed, and has distinguished between pedophilia and homosexuality, then he has made a valuable contribution. The crisis will not be resolved by scapegoating gay priests. It is a crisis of abuse of power first and foremost, and must be resolved at that level—not at the level of sexual orientation, which has nothing at all to do with its genesis or prevalence.

My posting yesterday reflects on Hilary Rosen’s recent comparison between Benedict and Desmond Tutu in a Huffington Post article. As I state in that reflection, in my view, if the churches truly want to reach the minds and hearts of people in the 21^st century with the gospel and to address social needs around the world, they cannot continue to attack gay and lesbian human beings.

The attack on a group of human beings already subject to social stigmas in many places in the world undercuts the churches’ proclamation of the good news. It undermines the churches’ attempt to be a beacon of hope for justice everywhere in the world. The church cannot participate in injustice and at the same time convince people—thinking people—that it stands unambiguously and everywhere on the side of justice.

Benedict himself has called for investigation of seminaries in the U.S., to weed out gay candidates for the priesthood. Not only will such a witch-hunt not “solve” the abuse crisis (which is about abuse of power first and foremost): this is a radically unjust attempt to manage the crisis and the public image of the church by scapegoating gay priests.

Impression management will not resolve the problem of abuse. Scapegoating a marginalized group of human beings will not resolve the problem. The problem has everything to do with misuse of clerical power, with a system of clericalism that accords a vastly disproportionate share of power and privilege to clergy rather than laity in the Catholic church.

Until that problem is addressed honestly, forthrightly, with transparency and full accountability, the abuse crisis will not go away. Though Benedict’s symbolic measures this week have been for the good, in my view, they are only a first step: as Geoffrey Robinson argues so cogently, dealing with the crisis before us now will require radical re-thinking of the role of the papacy, of clericalism, and of how power is used (and misused) in the Catholic church. It will require dialogue that permits the laity to have a voice, and, in particular, that brings to the table groups that have been rudely shoved away, including gay and lesbian believers as well as theologians silenced by Benedict himself when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Acting as head of that Congregation, Benedict unleashed a monster, and he must now confront that monster if he wishes to bring healing to the church at this moment of crisis. Some of the most talented and forward-thinking minds in the church—including Charles Curran—were silenced by Ratzinger at a point in the history of the church when we most need their contributions to move beyond the abuse crisis.

In addition, under the papacy of John Paul II, both John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger allowed some groups of Catholics in the United States to present themselves as the sole “orthodox” voice of Catholicism. These Catholics want the church to speak with a unitary voice on their “non-negotiable” issues. They want the church to read all dissenters out. They prefer a church of the holy few rather than the unwashed many—a Donatist church rather than a truly catholic one. They want the church to speak with their unitary voice, and to be their church.

They also wish to see the Catholic church explicitly aligned with one political party, the Republican party. To a great extent, they have turned the church in the U.S.—or tried to do so—into a political machine to serve the needs of the Republican party.

As E.J. Dionne says in his superb new book Souled Out, which I cited in a previous blog posting, this alliance of right-wing interest groups in U.S. Catholicism with the Republican party reached its nadir in the 2004 elections, when some bishops did all but stand on their heads to coerce Catholics to vote “right”—that is, to vote Republican. Some bishops were willing to take the entirely untraditional and theologically insupportable route of using the Eucharist as a political weapon in the 2004 elections. These bishops threatened to deny communion to Catholics who did not endorse their list of “non-negotiable” issues.

And, though these bishops hotly insisted that voting Republican was voting for life, they were conspicuously silent when the administration they told Catholics to elect betrayed all Catholic pro-life values in its response to Hurricane Katrina. They have been much more muted in their criticism of the tremendous assault on pro-life values in the Iraq War than they have ever been about abortion.

The recent Pew study shows about a third of American Catholics having walked away. Many of us have done so, I would submit, because we can no longer stomach the politicization of a tradition that has a much richer perspective on the interface of religion and politics. It is our very commitment to Catholic values—the broad range of values that vastly exceed the tight little list of “non-negotiable” issues—which causes us to distance ourselves from the church insofar as it is the Republican party at prayer.

Until the church deals with the monster it has unleashed by politicizing Catholic faith at this point in history, by allying Catholicism with a narrow political option in the Western world—until it deals with the connection between that attempt to bully all believers into lockstep thinking and voting, and the system of clericalism, it will continue to bleed members. And those who walk away will include individuals and groups whose contributions are crucially needed if the church is to be truly catholic, as well as to meet the significant challenges of transmitting its fundamental beliefs and values to the postmodernist culture of the 21st century.

If Benedict really wants to begin dealing with the deep roots of the abuse crisis, he needs to begin making clear distinctions between the endorsement of a single political option, which betrays the richness of the church’s tradition, and an approach that recognizes that the church brings a wide range of values to political life, which need to be applied in diverse ways in different cultures. Benedict needs to stand against the misrepresentation of “the” Catholic position in the American political sphere by some groups of American Catholics who want to use their “non-negotiables” as a litmus test to rule the rest of us out of their church. Only then will many of us take seriously what he has said and done this week about the abuse crisis.

A case in point: in my travels this week in the American heartland, I have found that many Catholic homes have gotten a recent mailing from Karl Keating of Catholic Answers. The mailing has to do with the upcoming World Youth Day in Sydney. In flaming bold red letters, it opens by announcing to Catholic families that their young people will be preyed on by homosexual activists at this international Catholic event. It calls on those receiving the flyer to donate so that they can keep Catholic youth safe in Sydney.

Mr. Keating’s letter characterizes gay and lesbian persons as “sinister.” He says that gay and lesbian persons are intent on “recruiting” Catholic youth. Mr. Keating waves the battle flag of intrinsic disorder. He states, “These people [sic] practice what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls ‘acts of grave depravity’ that are ‘intrinsically disordered’.” “These people” have chosen an immoral “lifestyle” and are not entitled to “special civil rights.”

These people? These human beings? These brothers and sisters in Christ? These people?! What Catholic values does that phrase represent, I wonder?

What to make of such a letter? Many of us might shake our heads and dismiss it as just another example of the ugly propaganda of the religious right.

I think letters like this deserve more attention, however. In the first place, this is a vile political screed masquerading as a religious statement. It is a screed that employs hate speech. It fuels social violence against a group of people identified as the sinister Other. It trades blatantly on ugly insupportable stereotypes of gay and lesbian human beings as sexual predators targeting the young.

The letter deserves attention as well because its mailing coincides with the visit of Benedict to the U.S. The timing of this letter can hardly be coincidental. In the same week that heartland Catholic families are glued to their t.v. sets watching Benedict, hearing news of his attempt to address the abuse crisis, they are reading a foul missive from a right-wing Republican activist group purporting to speak on behalf of “the” Catholic church, attacking a group of stigmatized individuals.

E.J. Dionne’s Souled Out notes the mysterious way in which Keating’s Catholic Answers group suddenly found funding to create a Catholic voter guide in 2004—a voter guide calling itself the Catholic voter guide, which overtly endorsed the Republican candidate. Attempts to track the money funding this politico-religious venture have not been successful, though Dionne notes that there are strong indicators that the funds came directly from the Republican party.

In the week that Benedict comes to try to bring healing to the U.S. church, one Catholic group in the U.S. sends out a hate-filled screed blanketing the American heartland, seeking to use gay and lesbian human beings as objects in a political game designed to bring Catholic votes, once again, to the Republican party. Pope Benedict, if I may be so bold as to address you, you have work to do: the healing we need is much deeper than symbolic gestures, however noble and good those gestures are as a first step.

To find healing that goes beyond the symbolic level, we need a church in which people of good will are once again free to speak their minds, to follow their informed consciences, to talk and pray together about very serious issues that cannot be resolved by top-down coercion, by crozier-shaking and excommunications, by threats of hell and damnation, or by allying the church with a single political option. To deal with the wounds of our church today, you must deal with some of what you yourself set in motion in the period in which you headed the CDC.

Even if you yourself have broken with that crozier-shaking style now that you have become pope, there are powerful groups within the Catholic church, as well as bishops, who continue to try to bully and coerce rather than to persuade and love. Thank you for giving signals, in your meeting with survivors of clerical abuse, that a much more pastoral, more thoughtful, more nuanced, and above all, more loving response is required on the part of a church that truly wishes to retain the loyalty of those targeted by the attack dogs that have been unleashed in the church in recent years.

We must move beyond the insider-outsider lines that try to create a church of the pure and washed, of true believers who happen to be all Republicans. I find the contention of Cardinal John P. Foley that “good morals, like good art, begin by drawing a line” absurd both on the face of it, and as a theological proposition (see Ian Fisher and Laurie Goodstein, “Hard-Liner with Soft Touch Reaches Out to U.S. Flock,” NY Times, 13 April 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/nationalspecial2/13pope.html). Foley uses this analogy to characterize the approach of Pope Benedict, the drawer of lines that define what is and is not Catholic, who is or is not inside the church.

I can think of all kinds of good art that is non-linear, that does not require drawing a line. And in my reading of the gospels, Jesus was all about transgressing social and religious lines that made some people insiders and others outsiders, some folks more human than other folks. The life and ministry of Jesus was about abolishing the lines that suggest that God loves some people more than others—or does not love some people at all.

The central Christian symbol is a set of lines that undercut and transgress a unitary line—a cross. If one wishes to meditate on the role of lines in Christianity, and if one takes this symbol as his or her starting point, then one might arrive at the conclusion that, in its core significance and at a fundamental level, Christianity challenges the drawing of any line that makes one group the inside group and other groups outsiders. The vertical line is cut across by the horizontal one, at the very heart of Christianity.

Rather than being about a single line that shows who is in and who is out, Christianity is about two lines that stretch the single line to its limits—about one line that crosses over the other, so that there is never a single, excluding line, but a pair of lines representing the open arms of a God who embraces every single human being. An effective papacy would take this symbol as its starting point . . . .

An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker: Only One Table

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

In conclusion, I want to thank you for listening to my testimony in this week of preparation for General Conference. Thank you for your public appeal for commentary on your essay “The Church and Homosexuality.” My comments are a response to your invitation to hear the reflections of the Christian community regarding your essay.

I do not speak as a United Methodist. I do speak, however, as someone whose life and vocation have been strongly influenced by the Wesleyan tradition, and who has served in a leadership capacity at two United Methodist institutions. I speak as well out of an experience of gross injustice at a United Methodist institution under your pastoral charge.

In discerning God’s will in our lives, we must speak from where we are placed—by biological inheritance, by economic structures beyond our control, by social and ecclesial structures, and so on. For many of us, including those of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered, the place to which the churches relegate us is a place of second-class citizenship. We are invited to partake of crumbs at the lesser table while other believers feast at the great table.

Being placed in marginal positions, being subject to injustice, certainly does not automatically make us holy. The experience of repeated injustice can cause us to be bitter and angry. If we do not learn to let our justifiable anger at injustice enter the depths of our soul, and be transformed there into a passion for justice for all God’s creatures—and, in particular, for all subject to injustice—our anger can eat us up.

For some of us, finding ways to speak out about our injustice, to make links between the injustice we have experienced and that experienced by other communities subject to historical marginalization, is a way of trying to respond redemptively to the place offered us. We hope, in recounting our painful experiences, to offer the church in return the opportunity to transform injustice into mercy. We hope to make the passage from bitterness to redemptive love for all in our own lives, by offering our reflections as honestly as possible to the Christian community.

Thank you for taking these reflections into your heart prior to the upcoming General Conference. I hope to have provoked you to give consideration to at least one overriding concern: this is the recognition that, in order to be effective and compelling as it challenges social injustice everywhere in the world, the church cannot itself practice injustice. Acts of injustice within the church and its institutions radically undercut the church’s effectiveness, as it offers the world the redemptive love of Christ, in which justice and mercy meet.

I read yesterday an interesting reflection on the fact that, in the past two weeks, two prominent men representing the contemporary church have been in the United States. As Hilary Rosen’s Huffington Post article entitled “I Am a Papal Party Pooper” notes, just prior to the current visit of Pope Benedict XVI to our country, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was among us (see www.huffingtonpost.com/hilary-rosen/i-am-a-papal-party-pooper_b_96976.html).

The article reflects on the very different message these two men offer gay and lesbian human beings. On the one hand, Benedict offers a teaching centered on the proposition that gay and lesbian human beings are intrinsically disordered in our very natures. Many of us who are gay and lesbian Catholics have rejected that teaching, since we do not experience ourselves as disordered. To the contrary, we experience our nature, including our sexual orientation, as part of the inestimable artisanship of the Creator God, who has chosen to fill the world with many different types of human beings, to mirror the tremendous diversity within the Creator’s own nature.

We reject the tag of “intrinsic disorder” as well because, in dehumanizing us, it implicitly justifies discrimination against us. Just as in the United Methodist Church and some of its institutions, in my church, the Catholic Church, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered human beings are subject to many forms of discrimination. In the Catholic Church as in the United Methodist Church, we are bidden to sit at the lesser table where crumbs are handed out, and not the one great table the church offers to all believers.

Archbishop Tutu offers a radically different word to gay and lesbian believers. He speaks to our hearts and to our experiences of injustice and exclusion. He speaks prophetically. In listening to him, we hear the church offering us the redemptive love of Christ—an unconditional love that encompasses all of creation. Out of his own struggle with draconian structures of racial injustice, he has come to name homophobia as a new form of apartheid. He tells the church that if it offers a homophobic God to the world, the world will not find the message of redemption in the image of God offered to the world.

Archbishop Tutu challenges the church to stand against savage injustice towards gay and lesbian believers, just as it has stood against slavery, segregation/apartheid, and the subordination of women to men.

Which of the two speaks for the future of Christianity? For those of who are LGBT, the answer is plain: we cannot see the face of God in the word the Pope offers us; we do see the face of God in the word Archbishop Tutu offers us.

These two radically different words spoken by the contemporary church: they call for believers to take sides, to be engaged, to discern what currents within contemporary culture point to God’s redemptive yes to all of creation.

We who are believers now look back and confess our previous lack of justice and mercy in upholding slavery, segregation, subordination of women. We will, many of us believe, one day look back as well and confess our lack of justice and mercy towards gay and lesbian persons. As Mr. Obama, in challenging the deeply entrenched homophobia of his African-American community, has reminded us, equality is a moral imperative.

To remain credible, the church must respond to that moral imperative. Moral imperatives demand a response . . . .

As you go to General Conference, where once again, God will set this particular moral imperative before United Methodists and will ask for a response, please remember the guidelines for ethical treatment of gay employees I offer in my “Open Letter to the United Methodist Churches” cited in yesterday’s blog. These arise out of my experience at a United Methodist university under your pastoral charge. They are as follows:

1. United Methodist institutions that claim to deplore discrimination against gay employees MUST have non-discrimination policies enshrined in the documents that constitute the institution’s official statements of policy.

2. Official policy statements forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation are particularly needed in areas in which local laws afford NO legal protection to gay employees, and permit at-will firing without any stated reason on the part of the employer.

3. When United Methodist institutions hire openly gay employees with the full acknowledgment and approval of the governing board of the institution, and when those employees are summarily dismissed without even having received an evaluation of their work, the governing board has an exceedingly strong responsibility to investigate what has happened in the dismissal.

4. United Methodist institutions should not hire openly gay employees who are also couples if the institution is intent on treating the gay couple differently from other married couples in the same institution.

And please remember, as well, the prophetic words of Bishop Kenneth Carder in his Episcopal Address to General Conference, 2004 entitled “The New Creation and the Church’s Mission”:

When we welcome the stranger, extend hospitality to the marginalized, embrace with agape love the despised and rejected, we are pointing toward Christ’s redeemed and reconciled community.... When we live the oneness of the human family that Christ makes possible, we are providing a foretaste of the heavenly banquet when people will come from the north and the south, the east and west and sit at table with Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and Mary, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mary McLeod Bethune, Oscar Romero and Mother Theresa, Desmond Tutu and Albertine Sisulu.

When God’s new heaven and new earth come to completion, justice will permeate all relationships, institutions, and policies. Biblical justice is defined primarily as extending God’s loving righteousness throughout the whole of human existence, enabling the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized, ‘the least of these’ to have access to God’s table of abundance and to flourish as God’s beloved children.

Thank you for listening, Bishop Whitaker. Blessings on your ministry at General Conference. Please feel free to copy and share these reflections with other delegates, as the Spirit moves you. I am happy to have them shared with anyone at all who is concerned to listen to the experience of one gay believer.

An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker (#3)

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

Having given you my testimony, and, in particular, having sketched the ways in which Methodism informs my religious commitments and value judgments, today I would like to offer a response to your essay of 13 July 2006 entitled “The Church and Homosexuality.”

Thank you for having placed this essay on the website of the Florida UMC Conference at www.flumc2.org/page.asp?PKValue=967, and for having invited responses to it. I understand that the essay arises, in part, out of what occurred at the 2006 Florida statewide UMC conference assembly.

Interestingly enough, that conference ended the very day Dr. Schafer and I arrived in Florida to take positions at a United Methodist college under your pastoral jurisdiction, and on whose board of trustees you serve. Though the fact that we are openly gay and living in a longstanding committed relationship was discussed by your college’s board prior to our coming to this college, and though the board approved our hire, we were not told of the bitter conflict that emerged in the Florida UMC just at the time of our arrival to serve at your college.

If I understand correctly, this conflict centered around a controversy in Virginia, in which an openly gay man asked to join a United Methodist church and was turned away by its pastor. He was told he was not welcome. Interestingly enough, I happen to have a personal connection to this story, in that a cousin of mine is married to a close relative of the person around whom this controversy centered, and I know of the man’s experiences from that context.

From what I learned after it became evident to Dr. Schafer and me that

, your 2006 statewide conference ended with bitter divisions in the Florida UMC church. If I am informed correctly, those divisions were over the question of whether openly gay and lesbian believers can be welcomed by Methodist churches.

Your essay responds to this question by providing an overview and defense of the current position of the UMC that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian faith. At the same time, your essay makes a plausible and thoughtful argument for reasoned, inclusive dialogue about the church’s response to gay and lesbian human beings. Your essay ends with a warning about what might happen if the United Methodist Church revised its current prohibition against the “practice” of homosexuality or the ordination of (openly) gay and lesbian persons or blessing of gay unions. You state,

If The United Methodist Church changes its basic position on homosexuality, then it will be making a move toward modern Western culture, but against a historic and global ecumenical consensus. Some would justify this move as the prophetic action of a church in the vanguard of enlightenment. However, the fact is that such a move would change the way The United Methodist Church would be viewed by the rest of the ecumenical Christian community, which, by a vast majority, adheres to the traditional teaching of Christianity. It is not far-fetched to envision the rest of the Christian community viewing The United Methodist Church as a “culture church” that would have some historic connection to the Christian faith and community, but that had wandered away from the substance of the Christian tradition in order to offer a Christian interpretation of the ideas and values of its culture. One could even imagine a future ecumenical council to which United Methodists might be allowed to send official observers, but in which we would not be allowed to participate with vote because of our status as “culture Christians.”

Finally, what is needed now is an environment in the church for a calm consideration of all of the complex issues in this debate, civil discourse, responsible theological reflection, and above all, prayer for discernment of the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

Your argument regarding the dangers of becoming a “culture church” is provocative. As you may be aware, since you participated in the process by which I was hired at your college, my doctoral dissertation was a study of a social gospel theologian, Shailer Mathews, who was accused by neo-orthodox theologians such as the Niebuhrs of having been a culture-Protestant.

My reading of Mathews’s theology convinces me that this charge is inaccurate. In my view, in Matthews’s work, the social gospel exhibits far more critical acumen about culture than its neo-orthodox critics gave it credit for having. I wrote a dissertation that was published as a book entitled Shailer Mathews’s Lives of Jesus to study Mathews’s social gospel theology. The dissertation concludes that the charge that Mathews was a culture-Protestant is not accurate.

My work on this topic was preceded and informed by a master’s thesis that studied the early roots of Methodism. Given my family’s historic ties to Methodism and the way these informed my own religious upbringing, I wanted to research and understand how Methodism dealt with questions of social justice from its inception among the working classes of the British Isles.

That research flowed naturally into my study of the social gospel. In my Christian journey, the Methodist strand in my family’s background has led to a constant concern to see the churches do justice. I see Jesus as one who always reached beyond barriers in his society that defined some human beings as less human than others, that defined some human beings as more deserving of power and privilege than others. In my reading of the gospels, Jesus constantly transgresses social and religious lines that define one group as the righteous and the other as the unrighteous.

My concern to see the churches challenge social norms permitting some people to be treated as less human than others led me out of my childhood church, the Southern Baptist church of my paternal grandmother, and into the Catholic church when I was a teen. My decision to join the Catholic church had everything to do with the fact that my family’s church was deeply entrenched in the system of segregation. Our church found itself unable to speak a prophetic word against racism during the Civil Rights struggle, because to do so would require costly grace. The Catholic church in my south Arkansas town attracted me because it was the sole “white” church in our town in which black and white Christians were worshiping together in the mid-1960s.

Watching the feeble foot-dragging responses of almost all white churches in Arkansas to the historic Civil Rights movement led me as an adolescent to conclude that churches often take their cue from culture, particularly when there is a price to be paid for speaking courageously against injustice. This experience, coupled with the strands in my family history that pointed to different possibilities in which churches move against and not with currents of injustice in their social context, led me to my calling as a theologian.

This calling has framed my entire approach to academic life. I have brought the concern to do justice, to critique injustice, and to form communities of solidarity resisting injustice to all of my academic work, including my work as an academic dean at one United Methodist college and then as an academic vice-president at another United Methodist college—your Florida college (now a university).

Given this academic, theological, and faith commitment running through my life as a teacher, scholar, and administrator, I read the history of the United Methodist church and its relationship to gay and lesbian human beings quite differently than you do in your 2006 essay. It is, of course, crucial to acknowledge that I read this history differently as well because I am gay, and have paid a price for being gay and honest about my life. I have paid that price particularly in Christian institutions. Since you are a heterosexual male, I would suggest that you may read Methodist history and teachings through a different optic, even if you share my commitment to social justice.

I would like respectfully to ask you to consider what happens when one takes the paragraph I cite above from your essay “The Church and Homosexuality,” and substitutes the word “slavery” for “homosexuality” in the first sentence. The sentence reads, “If The United Methodist Church changes its basic position on homosexuality, then it will be making a move toward modern Western culture, but against a historic and global ecumenical consensus.”

You are aware, are you not, that there was a time in Christian history—and a time not so very long ago, in terms of history—in which the Methodist church and the vast majority of churches taught that slavery is not only compatible with Christian practice and with scripture, but is mandated by scripture? When some Christians began to challenge that deeply entrenched cultural presupposition and the use of the bible to justify cultural norms supporting slavery, most white Christians in the American South—including most Methodists—bitterly resisted the critique of their traditional support of slavery as a distortion of the scripture.

In fact, many white Southern theologians prior to the Civil War charged churches in the North with having succumbed to culture, in challenging the longstanding practice of slavery within Christianity and the use of the bible to legitimate slavery. These theologians saw the churches of the American South as the sole bastions of orthodoxy in a world determined to alter the historic faith.

And they were right, insofar as their argument was based on the fact that slavery had always been taken for granted in Christianity, for some 1800 years, and had been approved by the churches. These theologians and churchmen resisting the historic shift to abolition of slavery were right insofar as they noted that the scriptures had been used throughout Christian history to justify slavery.

The churches of the American South have had a strange penchant, have they not, for defending the “historic faith” even when that faith includes practices that society, acting under impulses of justice, has gradually begun to recognize as unjust? We white Christians of the South defended slavery to the bitter end. When slavery was abolished, we then made a mighty noise about women’s suffrage and women’s rights.

Substitute those terms for “homosexuality” in your paragraph above, and again, I think you will see that the case you are making is precisely the wrong way around: rather than capitulating to culture in its defense of slavery, and then misogyny, and then segregation, and now heterosexist patriarchy, the churches have been captive to culture in defending these insupportable social practices. They have had to revise their support of unjust practices, to whose injustice they have been blind, insofar as prophetic movements within the churches themselves, acting in solidarity with secular movements for justice, have pushed and prodded the churches to reconsider their defense of the indefensible.

I am sorry to have to tell you this, but mainstream American churches already are—to a great extent—“culture churches.” It is captivity to culture that they must combat in ceasing to discriminate against gay and lesbian persons. Our churches often have a lamentable tendency to follow culture in justice-oriented directions only after culture has moved to accord civil rights to disenfranchised groups. Rather than leading the way, our churches all too often echo and support culture—and, in particular, cultural injustice—until necessary, justice-oriented cultural changes force the churches to take a belated look at their unjust practices and presuppositions.

To say that, in according full human status to gay and lesbian persons, the United Methodist Church would be in danger of becoming a “culture church” is to fracture logic, to twist sociological data so that they say precisely they opposite of what they actually say. The sordid reality is, Bishop Whitaker, that in a culture in which prejudice against gay and lesbian persons is still normative (though this is gradually shifting), the church pays no price at all in refusing to defend gay and lesbian persons against injustice. It is the path of cheap grace, rather than costly grace, to continue to discriminate against gay and lesbian persons in the name of the gospel.

Costly grace, the kind of grace that would motivate the churches to stand up and to speak out at all cost, would (and we all know this, do we not?) threaten the pocketbook of mainstream churches. As during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s, when I saw wealthy churchgoers with power in the business community and local government threaten pastors who condemned racism, today, any church speaking out against oppression of gay and lesbian persons is likely to risk loss of donations.

As an example, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, lavishly funded by foundations headed by several extremely wealthy neo-conservative Americans, has specifically targeted the United Methodist Church and several other mainstream churches, to try to prevent those churches from highlighting the social principles in their historic faith statements. It is no secret that the IRD has adroitly used prejudice against gay and lesbian persons—which is to say, it has used gay and lesbian human beings—to drive political wedges into the hearts of mainstream churches, to pit Methodist against Methodist, Presbyterian against Presbyterian, and Episcopalian against Episcopalian.

When these churches and their leaders speak out against unjust, discriminatory treatment of gay and lesbian persons, they pay a high price. They lose funding from wealthy interest groups. They also court highly-funded media attacks sponsored by these groups. You yourself may know this well, since the IRD has frequently reprinted some of your articles and sermons on its websites and other websites that it funds.

Much is at stake here, Bishop Whitaker, and I respectfully ask that you and other United Methodists listen more carefully to the voices of gay and lesbian believers who ask to talk with you about precisely what is at stake. To know the mechanisms of injustice in society at large (and in your own institutions), you must first and foremost ask to hear the voices of those who experience injustice. Only then will your deliberations about issues such as homosexuality be fully informed, and only then will your voice be credible.

Your essay ends with a call for calm consideration, civil discourse, responsible theological reflection, and prayer for discernment regarding the churches and their stance towards gay and lesbian persons. I second this call.

But how is it to happen when you do not even permit openly gay persons to address your assemblies? How can any discourse really be civil, when those being defined by a Christian group are not even brought to the table, but are treated as objects to be talked about while they are given no voice in the discussion?

Does your “responsible theological reflection” in the United Methodist churches include openly gay and lesbian theologians? Are these theologians invited to your General Conferences? If not, how can your words be anything more than rhetoric?

Above all, how can your conversations be inclusive (and thus fully representative of the richness of your tradition and fully open to God’s voice in all the people of God) when your institutions still sometimes make it impossible for openly gay and lesbian persons to have job security, to do productive work, to use their gifts while being forthright about their lives?

It was an experience of harsh exclusion, of punitive behavior that continues to the present.

As you prepare for General Conference, please refamiliarize yourself with what happened to Dr. Schafer and me when we responded to the invitation of the president

We did so at great cost to ourselves, because we believed that we could make a difference. Your president told us that we would be welcome and were needed, and that we would have secure jobs up to our retirement. Though we are in our late fifties and had to make sacrifices to come to your college, we stepped forth in faith and accepted the invitation. We were repaid for our sacrifice with brutally unjust and deeply hurtful treatment that was entirely premised on prejudice.

To my knowledge, neither you nor any other minister on the board of this United Methodist University

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-letter-to-united-methodist-church.html.

Can the United Methodist Church maintain that it is a prophetic church standing for historic Christian values when it participates in and covers over such atrocious injustice? Can the United Methodist Church stand against any injustice in society, when it permits any of its institutions and their leaders to behave this way towards any marginalized group?

Much hinges on the church’s willingness to give careful consideration to the testimony of gay and lesbian believers, even when we must tell painful stories of discrimination against us by church institutions. You live in a state in which violence against gay and lesbian persons has begun, in some areas, to reach epidemic proportions.

Can the United Methodist churches of Florida stand against this violence, can they offer healing and redemption to their communities, if they engage in homophobic discrimination that is intimately related to homophobic violence? I cannot imagine John Wesley encouraging the church to ignore these social needs. Nor can I imagine him standing on the side of discrimination within the institutions of his own church.

An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church (#2)

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

Again, greetings in Christ as General Conference approaches. Thank you for continuing to listen to my testimony as you prepare for this important gathering.

As I noted yesterday, today I will continue my account of my own story, as a prelude to offering some reflections on your essay “The Church and Homosexuality.” I hope that in offering these public reflections on a topic with which the church today struggles just as strenuously as it struggled in the 19^th century with the issue of slavery, I can provide some light on the experiences of gay Christians—of at least one gay Christian.

In telling my story, I do not by any means intend to suggest that it is more than one person’s story. I do not intend to suggest that it is normative, or representative of the experiences of all gay Christians.

There are, however, aspects of my story and Dr. Schafer’s that, I would propose, are common to the stories of many gay believers. We who turn to the churches for welcome, for a family to embrace us and nurture our faith, for a place in which to exercise our gifts, are all too often repudiated. Where we ask for bread, we often receive a stone. The experience of gay believers in their families of faith—including the United Methodist Church—is all too often the experience of being invited to the lesser table, where crumbs are doled out, and not to the one great table around which all other believers gather.

It does not escape our attention, those of us who are gay believers, that the church’s treatment of us is premised on unexamined presupposition that we deserve no better than crumbs. From where we stand, it is clear that the churches all too often imagine that we are human in some sub-normal way that legitimates the unjust treatment we receive at the hands of the church.

Since we who are gay believers experience our own human lives and human nature differently—as fully human lives and human natures equivalent to the humanity of anyone else—we feel compelled to tell our stories. We do so in the hope that the churches will recognize that, though our humanity has been framed as sub-normal, we nonetheless bleed when cut. We experience pain when expelled from our families of origin or faith. We mourn when injustice is done to us. Like anyone dealt with unjustly, we pray for a hearing, for justice.

And so we keep speaking out. We keep telling our stories, at the risk of tiring the many who do not wish to hear these doleful stories. We keep trying to find and tell the truth in our experience of discipleship, even when the very telling of our stories often exposes us to false charges of self-concern, of being professional troublemakers, of all sorts of slanderous accusations.

I speak in the hope of articulating the experience of other gay Christians, though I am also aware that I am telling my own story, and no one else’s. I speak in the hope that, even if I am not heard now, my story will live on and Christians in an age that has recognized the cruelty the churches presently practice towards gay believers will look back to study the mechanisms of that cruelty, so as to avoid replicating it with any other social group in their own day and age.

This is, is it not, how the churches currently look back at the period of slavery—a period in which it was well-nigh impossible for dehumanized people of color, whose humanity even church members regarded as sub-normal, to have a voice? When people of color attained an education and a social space within which to speak in their own voices—something almost impossible in the period of slavery, so that miracles attended this attainment—they spoke over and over again, monotonously, about their thirst for justice. They spoke to the point of boring the churches to tears, about their hope one day to be treated as fully human.

They were often not heard. Today, however, the churches repent of their inability to hear these voices of brothers and sisters in Christ who asked for a place at the table, at the great table, but who were shoved away. Today, in looking back at the period of slavery and the churches’ complicity in that massive social system of evil, we tell ourselves that we must never again treat another human group this way. We also tell ourselves that the churches can clearly succumb to culture, can preach not the gospel of redeeming love, but a culturally shaped “gospel” of conformity to the social status quo. We remind ourselves, as we look at history, that the churches can be plainly wrong, on the wrong side of great historical moments of liberation. We remember that economic self-interest and capitulation to the wishes of powerful interest groups can cause the church to mute its proclamation of the redeeming love of Jesus for all human beings.

Perhaps there will be a day when the churches look back on our own period of history and wonder why the insights they gained in the aftermath of slavery did not fuel their imagination about the injustices they do to gay believers today. I live in hope that this will be the case. And so I tell my story.

I am also telling my story to you in particular, because I had no opportunity to do so when I worked for a college under your pastoral leadership. When the president of that college chose to terminate my employment without cause, without even providing an evaluation of my hard work, while also lying to and about me, I might easily have disappeared, as she intended for me to do—to go away silently, as if I had merited the unjust treatment accorded to me.

I cannot do so in good conscience. As a believer, I have an obligation to speak out, in the hope that, by doing so, I may make it more difficult for a United Methodist institution to treat anyone else this way again. Though, while working at two Methodist colleges, I never told anyone of my family’s own historic ties to Methodism and of how a Methodist religious sensibility informs my own life of faith, I feel compelled to do so now, to provide you with background to make sense of my theological critique of your statement on the church and homosexuality.

It is better that brothers and sisters in Christ know each other as human beings, is it not? This is what our communion in the body of Christ is all about. We are all interrelated. When one of us suffers, we all suffer. When one bleeds, we all bleed. In sharing our human stories in all their rich complexity, we find a shared humanity that makes it much harder for any of us to imagine the Other as sub-human.

I ended my chronicle yesterday with the promise to tell you today about the rich Methodist heritage of my mother’s father. The strand of his story I want to tell begins with an ancestor, Abner Winn, who was born in Virginia, grew to manhood in South Carolina and Georgia, and died in Alabama.

Two of Abner Winn’s sons, Genubath and Abner, Jr., were ordained Methodist ministers. Two others were, according to my family’s tradition, lay ministers who were not formally ordained. These include my ancestor John Alexander Winn and his brother James Russell Winn.

Among my Winn ancestors, there is a persistent strand of resistance to slavery, even while these ancestors lived within the slave states and held slaves. Family stories passed down to me, and documents I have discovered as an adult, indicate a tremendous uneasiness with the practice of slavery in which this Southern family was enmeshed, and an attempt to take the Christian witness of John Wesley seriously and end the practice of slavery.

Abner Winn’s own serious commitment to Methodism is apparent in an 1813 deed in Jackson Co., Georgia, in which he and a number of others, including his brother Lemuel, who was the father of three Methodist ministers, deeded land for the formation of a Methodist church on the Mulberry Fork of the Oconee River. This was, I believe, the first permanent Methodist church erected in that county (Jackson Co., Georgia, Deed Book F, p. 129, 13 Dec. 1813).

The decisive commitment to Methodism that pervaded the lives of these ancestors is also apparent in the obituary of Abner Winn’s wife, Lucretia Posey Winn. The obituary was published in the Methodist newspaper the Southern Christian Advocate (Nashville) on 28 May 1857. It notes that Lucretia Posey Winn had died at the residence of her son-in-law, Judge John McConnell, in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, on 19 April, aged 84 years, 3 months and 5 days.

Like Abner Winn, Lucretia Posey had been raised in an Episopalian home. Both became Methodist when their families moved (hers from Porttobacco, Maryland, his from Lunenburg Co., Virginia) to Abbeville Co., South Carolina. The obituary provides specific information about her shift to Methodism: it notes that in 1787, when she was some 12 years old, she heard a sermon of the famous Methodist minister Rev. Hope Hull (founder of a Methodist academy in Wilkes Co., Georgia, and president of the University of Georgia for a brief period) and joined the Methodist church. The obituary, written by her grandson Chelsea Cook, characterizes her life of deep faith as follows:

She was endowed by nature with a vigorous intellect, which was highly cultivated by judicious reading, especially of the Bible, and other religious books. She was well acquainted with the Holy Scriptures, and was able at all times to call to mind its leading doctrines and most important events. . . .Her exemplary and godly conversations showed that she regarded this world as the place to prepare for a better and a happier one; and this she endeavored to impress upon the minds and hearts of those with whom she associated; the effect of which was highly salutary. Thus lived and died one, whose examples we should follow, and whose virtues we should imitate.

Stories told to me often as a child speak of one of the sons of Abner and Lucretia Posey Winn as a Methodist minister who actively sought to ameliorate the lives of slaves in his community. These stories do not specify the son in question, and since I have found evidence that at least three of their sons were involved in such ministry, I am not certain to which of the three these stories refer.

In a 21 May 1978 letter to me, a first cousin of my mother, Lula Mae Giersch, places some of these stories into writing. Lula Mae had previously told me the stories a number of times, noting that they were told to her by her grandmother Samantha Jane Braselton, a granddaughter of Abner Winn’s son John Alexander Winn. Her letter states, "I can recall hearing her tell of incidents when she was a young lady (pertaining to the Civil War). I remember her telling of some relative keeping slaves. He was a Methodist minister. He did not want slaves, but they always came to his place when they ran away from other masters. He felt sorry for them & bought them when he could afford it.” In Lula Mae’s opinion, these stories referred to John Alexander Winn, with whom Samantha Jane Braselton and her mother, Elizabeth Ann Winn Braselton, and siblings lived in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, following the families’ move from Georgia.

Though I have found no historical documents to confirm this conclusion, I do find various indicators of how John A. Winn’s strong Methodist faith informed his life. Because he was known in his community in Jackson Co., Georgia, for his assistance to orphans, he was elected commissioner of the poor school, where he taught indigent children who could not otherwise afford an education (see Frary Elrod, Historical Notes on Jackson Co., Georgia [Jefferson, GA: Elrod, 1967], p. 146, citing 1834 "Poor School Report" by William Cowan). John A. Winn and wife Laodicea Horton raised at least one orphan themselves, her nephew James William Horton, who was brought up as one of their children.

A 29 April 1874 letter of John A. Winn’s sister Narcissa Byron Winn Weir to their brother James R. Winn speaks of the faith that permeated her brother’s life: "Though he left no dying testimony he has left to his children the world & the Church the influence of a long life of untireing fidelity. We can not doubt of his happiness, hope that we too will be numbered with the faithfull A few more years of toil & care & the storm of life will be over. Oh that we may be ready when Our Lord cometh."

If my family stories of a Winn ancestor who was a Methodist minister and who sought to ameliorate the conditions of slaves’ lives do not refer to John A. Winn, they may refer to his brother Rev. Abner Winn, Jr., who also lived in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, and who was an ordained Methodist minister. Abner Winn was a man of some note who served in the Alabama legislature.

His will indicates how his Wesleyan commitments affected his life as a slaveholder. It was written 31 Oct. 1855 and proven 20 Jan. 1858 (Tuscaloosa Co. Will Book 3, p. 35). In addition to leaving $1000 for the use of the Methodist Episcopal Conference of Alabama, the will specifies that his slave Jemy is to be permitted to purchase his freedom at a modest sum, and states explicitly, “I do this to enable him to get to Liberia and I do not wish him to be held in bondage by any man."

The will makes explicit arrangements for other slave families, as well, specifying that they are not to be separated or sold at public auction. Regarding one member of these families, a young man named Newton, Rev. Abner Winn notes that, if he so desired, he might accompany Jemy to Liberia. The will specifies that a free man of color, Jack Winn, was to accompany Jemy and Newton to Liberia and see them re-settled there.

I have strong reason to suspect that Jack Winn was a blood relative of the other Winn families in Tuscaloosa Co. He lived among and was protected and promoted by the interrelated white Winn families.

If the stories handed down in my family refer neither to John A. Winn or their brother Rev. Abner Winn, then they would apparently be accounts of the life of another of their brothers, James Russell Winn. According to the tradition of his descendants, he, too, was a non-ordained Methodist lay minister, who built and preached in a Methodist church at Hillsboro in Union Co., Arkansas.

James R. Winn led a fascinating life, divorcing his white wife in Mississippi, and then living for the rest of his long life with a free woman of color whom he was not permitted legally to marry. His letters to family members demonstrate that he regarded this spouse, Margaret Shackelford, as his wife. They raised their children together as his legal progeny, sending them at considerable expense to Oberlin, Ohio, as the Civil War approached, to assure their safety. Those children are listed in the family bible of their grandfather Abner Winn as the acknowledged children of his son James R. Winn, and one son, Powhatan Winn, inherited all his father’s land in Arkansas.

Descendants of this Winn brother, who now live in Iowa and Minnesota, have visited Union Co., Arkansas, on several occasions. They tell me that they spoke there to African-American families who remembered James R. and Margaret Winn and noted the esteem in which they were held in the African-American community in southern Arkansas. These families confirm family stories that James R. Winn built and maintained a Methodist church for African-Americans in his community, and preached in that church.

The courage of this relative who crossed the color line at a time in which such public actions was not permitted in the South is remarkable. Though white slaveholding men frequently fathered children by women of color, and even lived in marital arrangements with these women, social and legal restrictions made it well-nigh impossible to recognize their spouses and children of color.

James R. Winn’s letters to his children following the death of his wife Margaret Shackelford speak forthrightly about the Methodist convictions that undergirded his choice to acknowledge a spouse and family that he was not legally or socially permitted to acknowledge. These letters also speak very poignantly of his love for Margaret, and note that, since his reason for living had gone, only his faith kept him alive. He died in less than a year after Margaret left him.

The decisive commitment to Methodism, and the effect of that commitment on families’ view of slavery, are apparent in branches of the Winn family beside my direct ancestral line. A noteworthy example is Judge Richard Dickson Winn, son of Abner Winn, Sr.’s, brother Elisha Winn of Gwinnett Co., Georgia.

In November 1860, Richard Dickson Winn was elected to the Georgia secession legislature from Gwinnett County. When the statewide vote was taken at this assembly regarding the decision to secede, all three Gwinnett Co. delegates voted against secession. When it became apparent that the vote would be pro-secession, one of the Gwinnett Co. delegates changed his mind and offered a resolution to support Georgia under any circumstances. Richard D. Winn refused to sign or to change his vote.

Richard D. Winn left an abundance of written works testifying to his staunch Methodism. These clearly indicate that, though he and other Winn families were enmeshed in the slave system, he opposed secession because he wished to see slavery ended, because he accepted John Wesley’s verdict that slavery was immoral.

His cousin, my ancestor Elizabeth Ann Winn Braselton, agreed. Following the Civil War, she filed a claim in Tuscaloosa Co., Alabama, asking for reimbursement for expenses she had incurred in hiding local men to prevent their conscription into the Confederate army. The claim, which was verified by several neighbors, states that she was a Unionist throughout the war. Family stories handed down to me indicate that she did not wish to support the cause of her native South because it centered on the defense of slavery.

I do not wish, in telling these stories or those I told yesterday about my Lindsey ancestors, to suggest that these people were saints. Their lives were complex, as ours were, a mix of good and evil. They grew up within a social system that was taken for granted, the system of slavery.

They were enmeshed in that system. Even when they wrestled with the immorality of slavery, some of these families held slaves (though others explicitly repudiated slavery). Despite her devout Methodism, Lucretia Posey Winn was the aunt of a Confederate general, Carnot Posey of Woodville, Mississippi. Among the many Methodist ministers in the Winn family was a noteworthy Georgia and South Carolina minister, Rev. Alexander McFarlane Wynn, who was raised by the Andrew family—by the family of Bishop James O. Andrew, who caused the split between Northern and Southern Methodists by refusing to manumit his slaves.

According to George W. Clower, Rev. Alexander McFarlane Wynn was “among the most dedicated men in the work of the Methodist Church in the nineteenth century," and was noted for being one of the initial pastors of Atlanta’s first Methodist church, Wesley Chapel (see "Rev. Alexander McFarlane Wynn, D.D., 1827-1906: Pioneer in Atlanta Methodism," Atlanta Historical Bulletin 11,3 [1966], pp. 46-50).

And, just as our Methodist forebears in the South—yours and mine, Bishop Whitaker—struggled with an immoral but deeply entrenched social system premised on the assumption that some human beings are less human than others because of innate traits such as skin color, we today struggle with an immoral and deeply entrenched social system. That system accords power and privilege to men, and, in particular, to heterosexual men.

This social system is premised on the outrageous assumption that innate characteristics—gender and sexual orientation—make the humanity of some human beings more valuable, more normative, than that of other human beings. I wish to suggest to you, as I begin critiquing your essay on the church and homosexuality in tomorrow’s installment of my public letter to you, that just as John Wesley found such presuppositions odious and antithetical to the gospel when they manifested themselves in the slave system of his day, today he would find them odious when they manifest themselves in the social system of heterosexist patriarchy.

Far from courting the danger of becoming a culturally-determined religion if it grants the full human status of gay and lesbian persons, as your essay argues it will, I wish to propose that unless Methodism responds to heterosexist patriarchy with the same critical moral urgency that it brought to bear on the issue of slavery, it will be in danger of capitulating to culture. And in doing so, it will not be able to offer compelling and consistent witness to social justice in any area of our socioeconomic lives.

Thank you for continuing to listen to this testimony.