The Very Rev. Ryan S. Reed of St. Vincent’s Episcopal Church in Bedford, TX is quoted in a recent Fort Worth Weekly piece about the Episcopal Church. “The Episcopal Church is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the culture,” says Fr. Reed, speaking for what is perhaps the majority view of things in the ultra-conservative anglo-catholic diocese of Fort Worth. He is wrong, of course, but his error (to use a word I dislike in a context such as this) is of the heart, in my view. The Episcopal church is indeed a reflection of the culture of the United States of America, but not, I suspect, in the way Fr. Reed supposes. What the church reflects is in part a developing consensus about human sexuality and the law, not only in the United States and Canada, but in much of the world where modernity is an established condition. I don’t think this situation should trouble any Christian. It involves a relationship long familiar in the history of social justice issues.
Human equality and what we now call human rights have more often than not entered the modern Christian church by the back door, just as they have most usually claimed the teachings of Jesus as a warrant along with (take your pick) “the laws of nature and of nature’s god,” Kantian categorical imperative, history, the Constitution and laws of the United States, etc. I am thinking primarily of my own experience with civil rights issues since the 1950s, but I could document the claim going back at least to the time of Wycliffe in the English-speaking world, in the western colonies, and in post-colonial times. But I would rather put the case positively as Richard Rorty has, in a recent essay, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” claiming that Christianity, enlightenment idealism, and skeptical pragmatism may be able to find common ground in the proposition that “love is the only law,” or as he was fond of putting it in the past, “Cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Rorty’s affirmations do not seek to conquer cruelty but rather to persuade against it “through . . . positive examples of a community-affirming discourse,” as one commentator has put it.
While I understand why many liberal Christians affirm that their social and ethical beliefs originate with Jesus and only with Jesus, I’m not myself troubled if somebody thinks I am “faithless and apostate,” as claimed in a passage noted on The Rev. Susan Russell’s An Inch at a Time:
This is not a matter of opinion, mine or anyone else’s, but of objective fact. If you are gay, support gay ordination or the gay lifestyle, then you are not a Christian, and will go to hell. Again, this is not opinion or a matter for conjecture: it is simply what the bible says. It is fact.
When I was a kid in West Texas, I was declared apostate by my classmates in the Church of Christ because I was a social gospel Methodist and read the RSV, which had “taken all the blood out” of the Bible. When I was a young adult trying to persuade fellow members of my downtown Methodist church in Durham, NC that it was OK if African Americans came in and worshipped with us, sat among us, etc., I was declared apostate. So–I had a fair amount of on-the-job experience before I became an apostate in the present-day Episcopal Church.
I remain convinced that “love is the only law.” I continue to believe that as a Christian citizen of a democratic society I am to practice the second commandment, whether it comes to me from Jesus or Emmanuel Kant or my own cultural identity, without regard to ancient prejudices against “all sorts and conditions” of humans. And I continue to believe that we apostates (I suspect I have a good many colleagues in the church) should continue to persuade against cruelty “through . . . positive examples of a community-affirming discourse”; though it’s my prose and entirely private opinion that people who think they know who is going to hell don’t know shit, as we used to say in Abilene.
Finally, I want to thank Fr. Nick Knisely for a wonderful piece that appears today at the Daily Episcopalian. In it, Fr. Knisely describes his experience in an ecumenical venture with Moravians, who “won’t fight and insult each other in the manner in which some Episcopalians revel,” even though
The Moravian Church is struggling with the same issues that the Episcopal Church is at the moment. They have groups and congregations breaking away over the same concerns, and they have to manage the same sorts of resolutions that we do at our national meetings.
And I’d like to thank Fr. Mark Harris as well, for his critique today of Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola’s recent rant against the United States, in which the good Archbishop claims that hate-crimes legislation pending in the U. S. Congress is an abridgement of the freedom of religion. Too bad the Archbishop wasn’t on the Supreme Court when it ruled against cross burning. Fr. Harris notes ruefully that “The Archbishop has entered the morass of American religious politics.”
Soon he will be on the talk shows and an established darling of the religious right. After all, he has a proto-diocese here [in the United States] now.
I can’t forbear to point out that Archbishop Akinola is able to make his voice heard in this country because the United States of America is what it is. The good Archbishop is a beneficiary of the very capitalist multiculturalism he and his American disciples deplore. He will not only continue to benefit from the openness he decries as decadence, but if Fr. Harris is right he will be rewarded with media stardom as well, at least for a while.
Later this month my beloved and I will attend the Mennonite Relief Sale in Iowa City. We’ll eat a good dinner, have some pie, meet friends, and contribute to “the worldwide relief program of the Mennonite Central Committee.” Aside from the fact that it’s one of the most effective of U. S. Charities, it’s a love-in. I’m hoping there will be some good gospel music to listen to before the big auction as there has been in the past. The Mennonites have generally been more tolerant regarding divisive issues of sexuality than other theologically conservative churches, though the record is mixed and some Mennonite churches have been expelled from their regional organizations for being too permissive. Still, I thank God for the Mennonites (who ordain women, by the way).