The Church Turns East . . . And Back: Bishop Slattery of Tulsa Reorients Christendom

Lately, several Catholic blog sites have been discussing an issue of burning concern to American Catholics. And it’s not the health care debate or new revelations about torture under the previous administration or leaks about the forthcoming report of heinous sexual abuse of minors by Irish clergy in the Dublin diocese.

It’s which way to turn when we worship. America and Commonweal recently had lively blog discussions of a decision of the bishop of Tulsa, Edward Slattery, to face east as he celebrates Mass at his cathedral. This means turning his back on the congregation, who are also expected to face east along with the celebrant.

I’m fascinated by the theological reasons Slattery advances to justify this decision. But I’m even more intrigued by the intense fascination of many American Catholics with this topic of praying ad orientem. If these two blog discussions are any indicator, nothing quite excites the American Catholic imagination these days like a decision to face east when we pray.

In a nutshell, Slattery’s argument is that it has always been done this way, and it has been done this way everywhere. And the decision following Vatican II to have the priest facing the congregation during liturgy was a mistake, because that decision contravenes always-everywhere norms.

Slattery adds to this fundamental principle an argument about how the Eucharist is a sacrifice that the priest offers on behalf of the people of God, so that it makes sense for priest and people to be facing God all together as the priest offers up the sacrifice. And so Slattery chooses to move against the Vatican II practice of emphasizing that the Eucharist is a shared meal in which the priest and people of God commune around a common table, with the priest facing the people from that table.

Slattery’s theological arguments are problematic from a number of angles. First—and conspicuously—the argument that an ad orientem style of worship has prevailed everywhere in the church from the beginnings of Christianity completely overlooks the evidence of the New Testament communities. On which the theology of Eucharist is based and has to be based, if it’s to be connected to that formative moment of revelation from which the church itself springs. And which are all about connecting the memorial meals commemorating Jesus to his life and to the meal he celebrated with his followers before his death.

Second, there are conspicuous examples that completely contravene Slattery’s always-everywhere insistence. The most glaring of these is St. Peter’s in Rome. There, in order to face east, the priest has to face the congregation—unless, that is, the congregation turns its back on the priest in order to face east along with him, in line with Slattery’s all-together-now rubric for worship.

Third, there’s the almost total obliteration of the Eucharist-as-meal aspect of liturgy, in favor of a Eucharist-as-sacrifice understanding of divine worship. That theological move wipes away several centuries of theological agreement between the Catholic church and other church traditions that rightly want to hold those understandings in tension, and/or to emphasize the centrality of the meal aspect of the Eucharist, in line with the dominant witness of New Testament texts.

I understand, of course, why Slattery is making the move he is making—and why many Catholics also want to make this move. It’s all about priesthood. It’s about maintaining the clear, unambiguous notion of the priest as mediator between God and the people of God, which has become fuzzy and has even been challenged in post-Vatican II Catholicism.

To the extent that Catholicism hinges its future on that notion of priesthood, and on maintaining a system of governance and distribution of power centered on clerical privilege, it has to reassert this understanding of priesthood against all and sundry, in every way possible. As Rome did recently when it denied the decision of the Maryknoll community to have a brother rather than a priest lead that religious community . . . .

As I say, though, what fascinates me even more than the not very persuasive theological foundation on which Bishop Slattery bases his turn to the east (and backwards) is the way in which this decision is being welcomed—even celebrated—by large numbers of American Catholics. That is, it’s being welcomed and celebrated by American Catholics if the America and Commonweal blogs about this issue are any indicator.

Before I comment on this popular consensus, I should issue a disclaimer. As I’ve noted previously on this blog, I’m a Catholic who is alienated from the church, primarily because my life partner and I have found ourselves pushed away from the church, from communion and worship. When a college owned by a community of monks (which has, interestingly enough, now become closely connected to the controversial Legionaries of Christ) peremptorily ended our employment as theologians while offering prevaricating reasons for this in Steve’s case and no reason at all in mine, we found ourselves on the outside looking in.

On the outside looking in at the worshiping church: when the monks who shoved us away from the table of daily bread and of health coverage stood at the table of the Lord and preached about respect for human rights and the need for bread and health coverage for all, the discrepancy between what they were proclaiming and what they had done to us became too great to bear. Our very belief in the Eucharist as the bread of life was threatened by that discrepancy. It is hard to believe that those proclaiming that the Eucharist is the bread of life can seriously mean what they say, when they remove daily bread from the mouths of their brothers and sisters in Christ.

The monks who had taken away our daily bread and health care coverage did not have to live with the worry of finding new jobs or of receiving medical treatment if they were ill. All of that was assured to them, even as they took these necessities from us. It became impossible for us to hear the Eucharistic words proclaimed, to hear words welcoming us to the table of the Lord with any belief in their sincerity, when those mouthing the words seemed to belie everything that this table stands for in everyday life.

So I approach this discussion knowing very little, at a practical level, about what has been happening in Catholic parishes and Catholic worship for almost two decades now. We do not go to liturgy any longer, because we cannot do so. We can no longer bear the huge gap between what the church proclaims and what it actually does. Since no official representative of the church has sought to reach across that gap and to offer healing or even an apology for the injustice done to us, we remain where we've been placed, outside looking in.

Here is what strikes me, as an alienated Catholic eavesdropping on discussions of my co-religionists now regarding revision of the liturgy: first, it’s astonishing how quickly those leading the church in the post-Vatican II period have succeeded in shutting down important theological conversations that, when they began, promised significantly to enrich the church’s life in manifold ways.

These conversations included conversations about exegesis, about the New Testament church, and about christology, which might as well simply never have taken place for many of those talking about liturgical reform today. In the blog discussions to which I link above, some posters try to make the point that the New Testament evidence in support of Slattery’s ad orientem thesis is ambiguous at best.

But for the majority of those posting to the two blog discussions, that point falls on deaf ears. There appears to be no awareness at all of the considerable, powerful biblical scholarship both within the Catholic tradition and in other Christian traditions throughout the 20th century, which shows that the Eucharist grew out of a communal meal celebrated by the early Christian communities to remember Jesus and to keep his memory alive in a communal context.

It’s as if biblical scholarship and theological development since the Council of Trent have suddenly vanished. We are now back at questions about whether Jesus lifted his eyes to heaven at the last supper, and whether the Eucharistic sacrifice can be meaningful when it is offered around a common table by a priest facing his (yes, always “his” in these stifling Catholic intra-ghetto discussions) brothers and sisters sharing the meal with him.

We are back at a sacrificial notion of the Eucharist that could well have just been proclaimed by the Council of Trent, as if Vatican II never happened. The pastoral leaders of the church who have worked very hard to return us to this situation—to obliterate Vatican II in order to preserve clericalism at all cost—have succeeded, to a great extent.

They have succeeded to an astonishing degree in dumbing down our theological conversations, our understanding of church, our theology of worship, our strategies for relating the Catholic tradition both to the public square and to other religious traditions. They have failed lamentably in one of their most important pastoral charges: catechizing the people of God. And this failure has been deliberate, and that makes it all the more heinous.

And the predictable upshot of this failure is that we find ourselves more and more irrelevant, as other churches and the public arena discuss political and ethical issues of great importance in the postmodern period. We have nothing to offer, except for a handful of slogans that are in no meaningful sense a reasoned, persuasive contribution to important political and ethical discussions, but the antithesis of reasoned and persuasive moral discourse.

As I listen to many Catholic contributions to the health care debate (and this is relevant; it is clearly related to the liturgical issue, since it’s in the worship context that people’s theological imaginations are largely informed), I become more and more convinced that all many Catholics have to offer anymore to any debate is the slogan, But what about abortion!?

Mrs. X: Isn’t the weather nice today? Mr. Y: Yes, but what about abortion?

Mr. A: Aren’t these revelations about torture dreadful? Mrs. B: But what about abortion?

Ms. L: Catholic teaching insists that everyone needs access to health care. Mr. M: And what about abortion!?

Or, as Steve's mother said several years ago after we took her and Steve's father to a play about the Holocaust, followed by a first-hand testimony about life in a German concentration camp by a Holocaust survivor, “Yes, it was terrible, wasn't it? But what about abortion? We're butchering babies off like chickens nowadays.” Because both of his parents had grandmothers born in the Sudetenland areas that so ardently supported Hitler, and because Steve's mother's family maintained ties with some of these relatives who were Nazi soldiers, Steve had hoped for a probing ethical discussion about the Holocaust.

That discussion became, But what about abortion!?

That’s where we’ve gone. That’s it, in a nutshell. That’s what we have to offer now: But what about abortion!? Nothing more, nothing less. That’s our moral analysis, our moral argument, our overweening moral stance.

It’s totally unconvincing, and it’s not designed to be convincing. Because we don’t want or intend to talk. We intend to draw lines and face, all in one direction, all in a unified body, against anything and everything that we can conceivably connect to abortion, if that anything and everything gives the slightest impression of being in favor of baby-killing. We intend to shout and overcome. Not to convince.

And certainly not to witness. And that’s my third observation about recent liturgical discussions among American Catholics. Perhaps the most lamentable result of the suppression of theological discourse, the deliberate refusal to catechize, and the molding of the Catholic community into a slogan-shouting political machine in recent years is the way in which our theology—and our liturgy—have taken leave of what always has to be foundational for any Christian church, if it is convincingly to claim a vital connection to Jesus and his memory.

This is the story of Jesus, the heart of the gospel message—the story we remember and proclaim (and share as bread) over and over in our liturgical gatherings. The Jesus we re-ghettoized Catholics have come to see to the exclusion of all other representations is the Jesus who is a high priest, the Jesus offering himself as sacrifice for the sins of the world.

There may well be a place in theological traditions for that image of Jesus, and it certainly has New Testament validity. But no christological tradition and no image of Jesus can ever be adequately Christian unless it also finds ways to link, fruitfully and with practical implications, to the story of Jesus’s life in the gospels.

Book after book after book has been written on this topic within the Catholic tradition in recent years—by Schillebeeckx, Crossan, Kasper, Haight, Segundo, Metz, Gutiérrez—and by powerful writers in other Christian traditions, including Marcus Borg. But for those intent on turning the church back to its true and final orientation—to the east—it seems as if none of those books has ever been written.

The attempt to relate what Christians do when they worship and when they witness to the New Testament documents, and above all to the gospels, is simply gone from much of the discussion of liturgy I’ve been hearing as I follow the ad orientem discussion. The attempt to relate what Christians do to how Jesus lived, insofar as we can glimpse the path he walked from the gospels, is entirely absent from these discussions.

And so the necessary theological step of grounding the Eucharist first and foremost in the gospel witness regarding the last supper, and in the New Testament documents which suggest how the first Christian communities incorporated that memory into their developing Eucharistic worship, is nowhere to be found in the discussions of those enthused at the thought of facing east all together now—if the discussions I’ve been following are a good indicator of the tenor of thought of those promoting this move.

It’s all about sacrifice, an intermediary priest, facing the east, standing together before a God whom we need to appease. And shouting together in every way possible at every moment possible, And what about abortion!?

How on earth did we get so quickly into this sad, constricting little ghetto after the springtime of promise Vatican II seemed to represent?

A Former Lutheran on the ELCA Decisions: Eric Reitan's Statement

As a counterpoint to my postings on the actions taken at the recent ELCA assembly (see especially here, and click labels ELCA and Evangelical Lutheran Church of America), I’d like to take note of an outstanding article that Religion Dispatches posted today. It's by Eric Reitan.

Reitan is a former Lutheran who left the ELCA for the United Church of Christ when he could no longer live with its stance on gays in ministry. Though his family has deep roots in the ELCA and his extended family “practically drips with Lutheran pastors,” Reitan could not accept the decision of the ELCA to turn gay Lutherans into

second-class citizens—invited to join the church but denied the right to pursue ordination (unless they submitted to a requirement of celibacy not imposed on straight clergy), and excluded from the only model of responsible sexuality that the church offers: the institution of marriage.

Note that, as someone with insider knowledge of the ELCA’s dealings with gay Lutherans, Reitan confirms the point I have persistently made about last week’s decisions—a point the mainstream media seem intent on missing spectacularly: the ELCA decisions are about justice. They’re about abolishing a caste system that turned gay Lutherans into second-class citizens.

Contrary to what Patrick Condon has published in his now widely distributed articles on the Lutheran decision to ordain “sexually active gays,” the ELCA prohibition of non-celibate Lutheran ministers did not extend to straight Lutherans in ministry. Only gay Lutherans seeking ministry positions were asked to choose lifelong celibacy as a prerequisite to ordination and to active ministry. Unmarried straight Lutherans seeking ordination and ministry positions have always had and will always have the option to marry.

And the ELCA decision about this is monumental, because the ELCA is not the only church that has created precisely this kind of two-tier, second-class system to handle the question of gays in ministry, now that more church members are coming out of the closet, and some of those are experiencing calls to ministry.

After battling within the ELCA for a number of years to gain justice for gay Lutherans, Eric Reitan and his wife could no longer stay in the ELCA. They felt worn out, spiritually dispossessed. They wanted a place to worship in which they would not be forced constantly to battle, and in which their gay brothers and sisters were fully affirmed. They left.

Before he did so, Reitan wrote a document he calls his “manifesto," explaining his family’s decision to move on. Reitan’s Religion Dispatches article excerpts portions of this powerful statement.

As I’ve done repeatedly on Bilgrimage, Reitan suggests that those who cite a meager handful of exegetically problematic scripture verses to condemn their gay brothers and sisters seem to be missing a very important point about the Jewish and Christian scriptures. This is that the moral vision of life they offer is normed above all by love. To use the scriptures as weapons to hurt, impair, and subjugate other human beings is to misuse them.

As Reitan notes,

Any sincere holistic reading of Scripture reveals a clear commitment to an ethic of love. As such, it seems utterly clear to me that we must reject any approach to Scripture that leads to the endorsement of teachings that marginalize some of God’s children, that contribute to suicidal depression in gay teens, that stifle compassion and inspire otherwise good people not to hear the anguished cry of their gay and lesbian neighbors. Traditional teachings about homosexuality do all of these things. If our approach to understanding Scripture and its authority leads to these teachings, then it violates the ethic of love, and hence is a profound violation of the spirit of Scripture itself.

And now Reitan has seen his church of origin move along that path, a path that makes sense to him, and the question facing him is whether he should go back. As he notes, one reason he might consider a return to the ELCA is that much work remains to be done in building bridges between Lutherans determined to move ahead on these issues, and those who remain anguished by the decisions the ELCA made last week.

Reitan notes that in his part of the country (he teaches in Oklahoma), it will be a long time before Lutheran congregations become comfortable with the presence of openly gay people and open gay couples in their midst. His recognition of what remains to be done makes him wonder whether he should return to his church of origin, now that this church has taken a step for which he battled long and hard before leaving the ELCA.

And that sounds to me like a fine reason for considering a return to the ELCA. The pressure will be intense in coming months to split the church and to punish it for its courage in taking the steps it has taken. It will certainly benefit from courageous, generous people working in the opposite direction.

Maine Catholic Diocese Keeps Giving Itself Black Eye: More Church Closings as Money Flows to Anti-Gay Campaign

And now an update to a story about which I’ve blogged a number of times in the past (here and here).

As the postings to which I’ve just linked note, the Catholic diocese of Maine has made it a priority to roll back same-sex marriage in Maine—such a priority that the diocese has mysteriously found major funds to help support the campaign to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of the state, even while the diocese announces financial exigency. Where those funds are coming from and how they happen to be in the coffers of a diocese that is closing churches due to financial hardship has never been fully explained.

The diocese’s fixation on combating the civil rights of a targeted group of citizens and its willingness to donate lavishly to that political cause while closing churches is not sitting well with many Maine Catholics.

And it looks as if those Catholics now have more to be upset about. The diocese has just announced that it will close two more churches by the end of this year, as plans are in the works to shut more Catholic churches in Maine down the road.

As I said in my last posting about this story,

The Catholic church gives itself a black eye when it talks out of one side of its mouth about the need to defend human rights, while out of the other side of its mouth, it calls on citizens to combat the human rights of a targeted minority. People tend to look at what we do and not what we say, when we preach.

And this latest chapter in the saga, coupled with the moral pusillanimity of many U.S. Catholic bishops in the health care debacle, surely doesn’t give me any reason to change my mind.

Alternet's Weekly Take-Action Campaign: End DOMA

Alternet has just announced that the top item in its weekly take-action campaign is calling for the end of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Alternet encourages readers each week to take action on behalf of a number of causes the website deems significant.

This week’s top action item is to pressure President Obama to ditch DOMA. As Byard Duncan’s article about this notes, the president’s pre-presidential zeal for abolishing DOMA (a legislative act he himself has characterized as discriminatory) appears to have vanished once he took office.

In June, the administration filed a brief in support of DOMA that sparked widespread protests in the gay community and among those who stand in solidarity with us. Since then, the Obama administration has issued a statement indicating that it continues to see DOMA as discriminatory, though it believes it is obliged to defend this legislative act in court when legal challenges are made against it.

As John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay have repeatedly pointed out on Americablog, the administration could abolish DOMA by executive privilege at any point it wished to do so. It has that right, and it has used such executive privilege to override stipulations of other legislation with which it disagrees. For whatever reason, in the case of DOMA, it has not only chosen not to use this executive privilege, but to defend an act the administration itself characterizes as discriminatory.

And there has been absolutely no action on the part of the administration to begin working with those in Congress who want to see DOMA ended.

Hence Alternet’s take-action campaign to encourage readers to notify the Obama administration that we expect the administration to fulfill its campaign promises to end an act that discriminates against a group of citizens solely on the grounds of sexual orientation. Alternet is encouraging its readers to support an initiative of the Human Rights Campaign to send statements to Congress calling for the end of DOMA.

Meanwhile, it’s encouraging to read that the mayor of Newark, NJ, Cory Booker, is calling on the president to repeal DOMA and end don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT). Booker co-chaired the Obama campaign in New Jersey.

He recently told Advocate reporter Julie Bolcer that he is frustrated by the administration’s foot-dragging in the area of gay rights, and that he encourages “friends of his [i.e., the president’s] or associates of him get into his ear” to call on him to fulfill his promises about DOMA and DADT.

Booker addresses (and is not convinced by) the argument that the new administration has too much on its plate to deal with discrimination against LGBT citizens, and that such discrimination is a low priority on a list in which many other items take precedence. He views indefensible ongoing discrimination against a group of citizens as something that harms the entire nation, and that has to be addressed, if we seek to build a humane society for all:

“But that does not mean that I can’t as a citizen of this country be frustrated, impatient to watch what friends of mine who are gay and lesbian go through on a daily basis. That is such an affront to what we claim to be as a nation, and so having come from a group of Americans that’s been historically discriminated against, there’s no time but now to do certain things,” said Booker, who is African-American.

Kudos to Mayor Booker for seeing a point that the new president seems not to see so clearly--namely, that permitting indefensible prejudice to continue in the legal systems of our society harms not only those targeted by discriminatory regulations, but all of us. And to Alternet for calling for action.

Partisan Catholics Working Against Health Care for All: America Magazine Speaks Out

Yesterday I faulted the U.S. Catholic bishops for playing partisan politics with health care reform. The social teaching of the Catholic church strongly and consistently supports the provision of adequate health care to all citizens as a moral obligation of every society. This social teaching is grounded in Catholic teaching that health care is a human right.

The U.S. bishops have a significant tradition of urging the United States to assure that access to quality basic health care is provided to all citizens, and, in particular, to those most excluded from social support networks—the poor. As the 1981 pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops entitled “Health and Health Care” states,

Every person has a basic right to adequate health care. This right flows from the sanctity of human life and the dignity that belongs to all human persons, who are made in the image of God. It implies that access to that health care which is necessary and suitable for the proper development and maintenance of life must be provided for all people, regardless of economic, social, or legal status (pp. 17-18).

Unfortunately, as Frances Kissling notes in the article to which yesterday’s posting links, in the current health care debate the U.S. Catholic bishops are choosing largely to sit on the sidelines. They are refusing to throw their moral weight behind the health care reform process and the attempt to gain universal health care coverage for all citizens.

They are doing so for partisan reasons. They are doing so because a significant number of the bishops have in recent years sought to move the American Catholic church in a direction of blind one-party partisanship. Those bishops have sought to make being Catholic (a “faithful” Catholic is the phrase they like to use) synonymous with being Republican.

As a body, the U.S. Catholic bishops are now sitting on the sidelines as the Republican party seeks to derail the process of health care reform in collaboration with economic interest groups that do not want to see the health care system changed. The bishops are, to a large extent, doing nothing and remaining silent as mobs energized by this political party and those interest groups rampage at town-hall meetings.

The ostensible reason for the bishops’ diffidence about health care reform is the question of abortion, and whether the health care bill will cover abortions or promote abortion. But the real reason for the indefensible moral malingering of the U.S. Catholic bishops as health care reform that they have a moral obligation to support goes up in smoke is, I fear, more sinister. We’re seeing partisan politics at work among the bishops.

Many bishops do not want to break the cozy, idolatrous ties they have fashioned with the Republican party in recent years. And like Republicans in general, they see an opportunity to undermine the new administration by thwarting health care reform.

Fortunately, not all Catholic leaders are moving in this direction. Since I believe in praising as well as criticizing, when praise is due, I want to point today to an editorial about obstacles to health care reform that appeared this week in the Jesuit publication America.

The America editorial sees what is happening to the health care reform process with clear eyes, and is not afraid to speak the truth about what it sees. The editorial is not afraid to use the P-word—partisanship—to describe the motivation behind the attack on health care reform.

America states,

Passage of a strong health care reform bill could allay one of the deepest legitimate fears Americans have: that of going bankrupt because of illness. Currently, insurance companies can refuse coverage, drop coverage or raise premiums beyond reach for those with a pre-existing condition. The proposed House reform bill would outlaw such practices. Just as auto insurance is currently required of vehicle owners, the bill would require health insurance of individuals and employers; it would offer subsidies for those with low incomes and small businesses. It would also cut waste and curb costs. If the majority party were to pass such legislation without the help of Republicans, it might secure Democratic leadership for years. Such reform would also exemplify the change a majority thought they had embraced when they voted for Mr. Obama: a fairer, more compassionate America.

Health care reform would not solve the job or housing crisis, or send stocks soaring. But it would add the United States to the roster of developed nations with universal health care, where no family need be bankrupt or homeless because of illness or injury. Both parties understand that passage of an effective reform bill would have major political significance. That is what drives the misinformation campaigns and the scare tactics now reaching a fevered pitch.

Finally, Mr. Obama is correct to point out the relationship between health care reform and economic recovery. For the soaring costs of health care insurance and delivery, if unchecked, are unsustainable; they will leave us mired in debt. That is one more reason why these obstacles—joblessness, foreclosures, economic instability, fear of the future and partisanship—must be overcome, and why a strong health reform bill must be passed.

And saying this, of course—speaking simple, middle-of-the-road, morally sound truth about what is taking place with the health care reform process—now opens the door to all those Catholics who want to make being Catholic synonymous with being Republican. Read the comments about this editorial already pouring into the America website, and you’ll see what I mean.

Compare those comments with the 1981 “Health and Health Care” pastoral letter, and you’ll wonder at the astonishing claim of many of these commentators to represent Catholic truth. Many commentators reject the notion of universal health care coverage in toto, and refuse to accept that societies have a moral obligation to provide such coverage for all citizens.

The fact that such fringe, anti-Catholic positions are now permitted to represent themselves as mainstream in American Catholicism—and, indeed, are even permitted to claim the center of American Catholic discourse—speaks volumes about the bishops’ abdication of sound pastoral and moral leadership for quite some time now. And, unfortunately, I’m not seeing strong indicators that they intend to use this health care reform debate as an opportunity to redeem themselves as moral and pastoral leaders.

The Media, the Churches, and the Arc of the Moral Universe: The Civil Rights Struggle Redux

Yesterday’s discussion of the role the mainstream media continue to play in distorting stories about churches and gay people and spreading disinformation about this topic has connected me to two new blogs that I highly recommend. I've added both to the blog list on Bilgrimage.

I cited one of these, Drew Tatusko’s Notes from Off Center blog, yesterday. Drew is a theologian with a ministry degree from Princeton who is working at Mount Aloysius College in Pennsylvania and completing a doctorate in education at Seton Hall University.

Through Drew, I’ve also learned of John Shuck’s blog Shuck and Jive. John’s a Presbyterian minister in Tennessee. I’m grateful to both Drew and John for linking to my posting about the media's distortion of the ELCA story, but even more grateful to know of their blogs and their solidarity with those calling the churches to accountability for abuse of LGBT persons.

As I continue to think about these struggles within the churches today (and the role the media play in them), I’m reminded once again how much the civil rights movement of the 1960s forms the backdrop to my thinking about these issues. I’ve talked about this repeatedly on Bilgrimage. and I've discussed this issue with Terry Weldon on his outstanding Queering the Church blog, where it strikes me that Terry's formative years during the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa have given him a moral perspective on church issues that is very close to mine.

As I’ve noted, I am reading—studying is a more accurate word—Grif Stockley’s recent overview of the history of racial relations in Arkansas, Ruled by Race. I noted in a previous posting what happened in 1964 when Rev. Edward W. Harris preached a sermon at First Methodist Church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, calling for the church doors to be open to anyone.

He and his wife were run out of town on a rail, metaphorically speaking. With the active complicity of a Methodist bishop they had expected to support them.

Run out of town by good church people in a heavily churched region for daring to proclaim that the gospels demand that the doors of churches be open to everyone.

If that doesn’t remind you just a little bit of what is happening as churches today split over the question of whether church doors can possibly be open to gays and lesbians, then I encourage you to delve into the history of the Civil Rights struggle and the role many white churches played in that struggle in the American South during the 1950s and 1960s, a role many of those churches are now repenting and confessing as sinful. And as you undertake that study, pay attention to the role the mainstream media often played in supporting churches resisting racial justice in that time frame. It's a role very similar to the role many media folks are playing today as some churches hold doors shut against gay people.

I’ve been thinking today about another incident Stockley recounts from the same Deep South part of Arkansas in the same time frame. He notes that David McDonald, the son of a Methodist minister in DeWitt, reports that when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, a boy in his school walked up and down the school hall celebrating, shouting, “They finally got that n----r lover” (p. 338). McDonald was in 8th grade at the time. McDonald’s brother remembers that some of his classmates cheered when the announcement came over the school loudspeaker that Kennedy had been assassinated.

These stories hit home for a number of reasons. I, too, was in 8th grade in south Arkansas when Kennedy was assassinated. And I, too, remember the jubilation of several classmates when that announcement came over the loudspeaker. Several boys in my class cheered and clapped. I can see their faces in my mind’s eye as clear as day, after all these years, along with the face of a classmate who broke into tears and whom the teacher rushed to comfort. I remember each of their names. The memory is seared into my brain.

And for years after that took place, I sought unsuccessfully to correct an erroneous statement that a reporter in our statewide paper the Democrat-Gazette made over and over in op ed columns remembering Kennedy’s assassination. The reporter repeatedly wrote that though he had been told there were places in the country where students cheered in schools when Kennedy was assassinated, he did not believe this happened. He had not heard any credible report of such events.

Each time the reporter wrote this, I politely sent him a letter informing him that he was wrong. I told him the names of those in my own class who had cheered. I offered to gather information on other such incidents I had heard about.

The reporter never acknowledged any of these letters. And he kept on reporting that he had heard no credible evidence of such events, despite my letters to him. My feeble attempt to call to accountability a member of the media spreading disinformation fell on deaf ears.

Stockley goes on to tell a story about what happened when David McDonald’s father preached about what it means for a church to be a church at DeWitt Methodist Church on 24 May 1964. As McDonald notes, “Several times he [David’s father] repeated his belief that Jesus would welcome all people into any place of worship” (p. 338). Rev. McDonald focused his sermon on his “profound belief” that the church was “for all people” (ibid.).

And then when the sermon was over, he rushed out of church and headed to his study, where his family found him supporting himself against a desk. He confessed that he was terrified. As Grif Stockley notes,

For a white Arkansan the act of personally and publicly confronting the immorality of racism in the 1960s was simply overwhelming, for it meant not only going against much of one’s previous identity but often against the present values and beliefs of one’s family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, not to mention it could end one’s employment.

Note what Stockley is saying here. Choosing to do the right thing when one's family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are all dead certain that they have right on their side can be extremely difficult. And it becomes even more difficult when all those who are so dead certain believe that their religion backs them up. And when the media collude in creating hermeneutic structures that prevent those believers from examining discrepancies between their worldview of exclusion and injustice and the gospel they preach.

As I said yesterday, I can understand the grief of Lutherans who reported at the recent ELCA assembly how pained they and their families and friends are as the church opens wide its doors to gay people. I understand because I’ve seen that grief before, just as I’ve seen at close hand all the powerful social forces—and media disinformation—that allow people to remain not merely comfortable at the thought of excluding others from “their” church, but righteous in their assumption that God is on their side as they slam the church door.

And, as the arc of the moral universe bent inevitably to justice, as it is wont to do, I saw those folks and their descendants move on to the next battles, the ones to keep women and gays in their places. With the same defiant, righteous certainty that exclusion rather than welcome is what the gospel is all about. And with the same active, malicious support of mainstream media intent on helping people resist rather than pursue justice.

It’s this history that convinces me that the battle for justice is worth fighting, and that the moral arc of the universe often does bend towards justice, no matter how strong and determined the forces to keep justice at bay are. And it’s this history that forces me—it will not allow me to do otherwise—to frame these battles in a moral light radically different from the one that those resisting justice for gay people in the churches today wish to shine on these controversies.

Crashing Empires and Missed Moral Opportunities: The Health Care Debacle Again

George Lakoff on where the Obama administration went wrong in presenting the case for health-care reform:

[I]t was a mistake to put cost ahead of morality. Health care is a moral issue, and the right-wing understands that and is using it. That's why the "death panels" and "government takeover" language resonates with those who have a conservative moral perspective and have effectively used terms like "pro-life." Health care is a life and death issue, which is as moral as anything could be. The insurance companies have been on the side of death, and that needs to be said overtly.

And:

• The basic values are empathy (we care about people), responsibility for ourselves and others, and the ethic of excellence (making ourselves better and the world better).

• These values form the basis of democracy: It's because we care about our fellow citizens that we have values like freedom and fairness, for everyone, not just the powerful.

• From that, it follows that government has two moral missions: protection (of consumers, workers, the environment, the old, the sick, the powerless; and empowerment through public works; communication, energy, and water systems; education; banks that work; a court system: and so on. Without them, no one makes it in America. Taxes are what you pay for protection and empowerment by the government, and the more you make the greater your responsibility to maintain the system.

Appropriate language can be found to express these values. They lie at the heart of all progressive policies. If they are out there every day, it becomes easier to discuss any issue. This is what it means to prepare the ground for specific framings.

And Frances Kissling on the lamentable sin of omission of the American Catholic bishops, who have chosen to play partisan politics in this kairotic moment of opportunity to assure access to health care for all citizens, rather than assist the new administration:

For decades the bishops have advocated for universal healthcare -- in fact, for a single-payer system with a strong emphasis on covering the uninsured, the poor and immigrants. The best shot at reform is now. But the bishops are squandering every ounce of moral capital they have, not on the public option, but on ensuring that in any reform bill not one penny of federal funds is used for abortion.

This strategy has put them in the extremist camp among those opposed to abortion. Moderate evangelicals and antiabortion Catholics bit the bullet on abortion four years ago and decided that other issues like ending wars, reducing global warming, and fighting poverty meant it was time to move on from attempting to outlaw abortion. While one can quibble with their strategy, working to prevent the need for abortion was a step forward from working to make it illegal.

Conservatives love to play games with narratives about declining empires. For generations, right-wing movements have sought to attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to increasing tolerance of homosexuality.

But as the prophets of the Jewish scriptures note, the corruption that destroys one proud civilization after another has nothing at all to do with increasing tolerance of sexual minorities. Instead, empires decay when the gap between rich and poor in a society grows intolerably wide, and when the rich are allowed to continue oppressing the poor with impunity.

As the prophets note, when people of faith not only stand by in silence as such oppression weaves itself into every facet of life, but collude in the oppression, everything comes tumbling down. And when that happens, as the crash of collapsing structures of civil life becomes the only sound anyone is capable of hearing, who will listen any longer to the fine words of religious leaders who talk about economic justice for all and God’s preferential love for the poor, but who do nothing to enact their fine rhetoric in times when their voices might have counted?