Membership and Excommunication

Is the church a voluntary community? To what extent, if any, may a church be discriminating in accepting or keeping members?

These questions came to me as I wrote about L. Gresham Machen's 1923 Christianity and Liberalism. Arguing from the fundamentalist view that liberal Christianity is a distinct species of belief and practice from orthodox Christianity, Machen recommends that those who believe in liberalism be weeded out from amongst the orthodox faithful. Anticipating the cries of "how intolerant," Machen defends intolerance (or, rather, repudiates the idea that communities must be endlessly tolerant) by distinguishing between involuntary organizations, like a nation or state, and voluntary ones. Involuntary organizations must tolerate a wide variety of views. Voluntary organizations must on the contrary work hard to maintain their distinctiveness by policing members. Those members who do not subscribe to the community's core beliefs out not be accepted.

Voluntary communities, Machen implies, have a right and a duty to be intolerant and discriminatory. Lest I seem like I paint Machen as a bigot, I hasten to add that he is correct. Intolerance and discrimination can have non-bigoted meanings. No community can accept all comers equally and remain a distinctive community. If a Jewish synagogue accepted avid Eastern Orthodox believers equally as Jewish believers, the resulting community could hardly be described as Jewish at all but as some kind of Jewish-East Orthodox hybrid. So long as the synagogue wished to remain a Jewish synagogue, it must discriminate between those who wish to join the synagogue in good faith--agreeing to the core beliefs and undergoing entrance procedures specific to that faith community--and those who do not.

To a certain extent, even Machen's example of an involuntary community, the State, must practice a degree of exclusivity. Modern nation-states have citizens, a status of insider that distinguishes them from just any warm body that happens to live within the nation-state's borders (a denizen). For a denizen to become a citizen requires a long and complicated process of bureaucracy, background checks, exams (some of which many natural-born US citizens could not pass), and screenings.

Similarly, most churches have membership procedures of some sort--vows, training, ceremonies, and even examinations. I've described already that Southern Baptist membership typically requires a public confession of faith plus a subsequent baptism, though most churches will accept the word of the prospective member about whether she or he had done those things at a previous church. Methodists have prospective members take a vow of faith before the congregation, who answers that vow with a reaffirmation of their own vows. Baptism may follow.

Neither faith is particularly stringent in its examinations of various members. Local churches generally delight in receiving new members, and most are content to take people at their word. It is not unheard-of, however, for individual churches to refuse membership to people known to be in violation of the church's beliefs. A private religious institutions, individual churches are not legally compelled to accept all comers and may control the intake of members as they see fit.

Once gained, church membership is not necessarily permanent.

I take Machen's point that nation-states (as generally conceived in the present) may not be quite so discriminatory as purely voluntary associations in that most nations have natural-birth provisions. So long as one is a natural-born citizen of the US, for instance, there' s not much that person can do or believe that would neutralize that status. Tim McVeigh, for instance, can blow up a federal building in an anti-government act of terrorism and yet still be a citizen. John Walker Lindh joined Afghanistan's Taliban army in opposing the US, yet he remains a citizen. People may renounce their citizenship, but once granted by birth or by naturalization, it's hard to get rid of (It's not impossible, but the standard is quite high).

Churches have historically had their own processes of expatriation, i.e., excommunication, where a member is permanently or temporarily un-membered from the church. Now, the exact understanding depends upon the ecclesiastical body doing the excommunicating. The Roman Catholic Church, although perhaps the body most frequently associated with excommunicating members, specifies that excommunication is meant to have a restorative rather than a penal effect (see here).

Whereas expatriation from the US cannot be renounced or rescinded, Roman Catholic excommunication can, provided the excommunicant repents. Indeed, the hope is that excommunicating a member will create a wake-up shock resulting from being denied full participation in the Church (and therefore full grace). The shock will then hopefully lead to the person's repentance and reconciliation with the church.

In other Christian traditions, excommunication becomes blurrier in terms of how it may be done, who may do it, and if/how it may be rescinded. Some denominations have formal excommunication procedures. Others (particularly congregational systems) simply declare a person anathema (accursed), generally after having followed several interventions outlined in Matthew 18:15-17, about "a brother who sins against you." I have spoken to people who were excommunicated by their local congregations for being gay. They described a ceremony in which prayers for the excommunicant's salvation were followed by ritualistic turnings-away from the person. Church members shunned the person afterward, avoiding all social contact.

Here, though, I encounter some confusion. Individual churches, local congregations--these are discrete communities that may practice what discriminatory procedures in accepting or excommunicating members they see fit.

But, transcending denominational affiliation for a second--what about the Church in general, the community of Christians, broadly conceived? May this Church be discriminatory? Is it a voluntary association?

More tomorrow,

JF