So... After a nice make-up Christmas with my family, the inevitable Sunday morning question presented itself: where to go to church? It's a rare Sunday when my father is off from his preaching duties, but impassable streets, ice-slick church parking lots, and the specter of parishioners' broken hips compelled him to cancel his morning services, allowing he and I to travel to the city to visit my sister and her husband.
But my father's cancellation didn't mean "no church," just "different church." We ended up visiting my old church, the Methodist congregation I had attended throughout my undergrad years.
This church is what is called a "reconciling congregation," meaning it aligns with the Reconciling Ministries Network, a parachurch organization aimed at changing United Methodist policy to become more inclusive of GLBT folk. I began attending the church my freshman year largely because it was nearby (I lacked a car in those days), because some friends of mine went, and because the church was smaller than the more intimidating Huge Methodist Churches in the area.
That it was Reconciling was, in retrospect, a God thing--serendipity with a divine push--for my freshman year of college just happened to be the year I came to terms with being gay myself.
I hesitate to go into that now; it's a story I've told so many times it feels old and trite to me. Suffice it to say that, in a time where I was questioning just about every aspect of my life and self-image, that Reconciling church helped me to hang on to a sense of God as reliably loving. I might be changing (at least, my image of myself--my past, my future--might be changing), but two things I knew: 1) my family loved me no matter what; and 2) God loved me no matter what.
To those who haven't experienced a reconciling congregation or other GLBT-affirming worship--I recommend it. Rarely do you see such a cross-section of society (racial, class, gender, age, ability) in a single sanctuary. People--gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender people especially--hear about this place where it's OK to be who they are and worship as they feel they should. And they come. And they come. And they come. When I first started attending, the church had just voted to become reconciling, and church numbers soared.
You experience the conventions of worship, the vocabulary of liturgy, so differently in an audience of people who come from places where they've been denied those things. To sing a hymn together openly and proudly, to hear a sermon with hope rather than trepidation, to take communion--these things are so easy to take for granted. In a reconciling church, you realize that you are surrounded with people who many times have lived years locked outside of church participation because of who they are. Many had been told that they could never, ever be gay or lesbian and live a life pleasing to God. Many had been subjected to (or had subjected themselves to) intensive, psychologically excruciating efforts to change or mute their sexuality or gender identities, only to fail and, in shame and sorrow (and perhaps with bitterness, too) strike out "going to church" from their future life script.
Some people I knew had even been excommunicated from their congregations. One man described a ceremony where his tiny congregation--the congregation he had grown up with, laughed and prayed and cried and shared and worked and fellowshipped with--formed a circle around him and turned their backs to him, one by one, to demonstrate his out-cast-ness.
I really have to wonder just what kind of picture of God or agape such people had in their minds or hearts to imagine such an act as Christlike.
So, in a reconciling church, if there's mention of the open table of communion--all are welcome--there's an added kick. All means all.
This church had communion every Sunday. It still did. My father and I braved the icy side streets (well, he drove, so he really braved the ice) to find the church open for business. The crowd was smaller than normal, but some people recognized me from 10+ years ago (and my father from nearer to that--he's a more frequent visitor). We met new faces. We shared songs (finally Christmas songs!) and bread and juice. It reminded me of what's best about church and what's great about a Methodist church who takes its call to be loving and open seriously.
More tomorrow,
JF
Showing posts with label GLBT issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GLBT issues. Show all posts
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Interventions and the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill
I've been thinking about the bystander issue in relation to GLBT issues lately largely because of this bill, which was proposed in Uganda.
The bill (which seems to be known in various internet debates by both supporters and opponents as Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill), at least in current drafts, essentially defines homosexuality as a crime punishable by life imprisonment or even execution. Also criminalized in the bill are offenses like "aiding and abetting homosexuality" or "conspiracy to engage in homosexuality," each punishable by a sentence of seven years in prison.
The proposed bill, not surprisingly, has drawn sharp criticism from those in the GLBT rights community. Indeed, even conservative Christian groups are raising protests against the bill (see this Facebook page, for example, or this statement from Rick Warren). The Obama administration has condemned the bill, as have other countries and human rights organizations.
Uganda, never a go-to locale for GLBT rights, has largely rejected what it sees as outside attempts to meddle in its affairs. Supporters of the bill have started their own Facebook group, even as a number of Ugandans--including many Christian groups and speakers--have spoken out against the bill.
Complicating this issue, of course, is the fact that a number of ex-gay ministers had recently visited Uganda to hold a mini-conference regarding ministry to and help for homosexual people (i.e., get them to stop living as homosexual people, convince them to see their sexuality as a corruption or disorder, etc.). I need to do more research on this, but least some of the ministers supporting the bill in Uganda appear to be drawing on arguments used by these ex-gay speakers. Several in the "ex-ex-gay" movement who watchdog and criticize ex-gay organizations, have laid the blame for Uganda's current bill at the feet of ex-gay ministries. The ex-gay ministries themselves, of course, take offense at this allegation, firing back with posts and protests of their own.
For a taste of the depth of the debate from a number of sides, I recommend this posting on a blog by Warren Throckmorton, a conservative Christian psychology professor who has been very active in organizing US-based opposition to the bill (he founded the anti-bill Facebook page I linked above). This post, which relates a statement by Ugandan ministers and groups opposed to the bill, fascinates me largely for its ongoing (as of this writing) comments section. There you can read posts from a surprisingly wide spectrum of viewpoints, from ex-gays to gay-affirmative Christians and everything in between.
Particularly striking are comments from a poster who identifies himself (I believe it's a himself) as a Ugandan national very much in favor of the bill. In addition to lambasting the other posters for meddling in Uganda's own affairs, the poster expresses flat disbelief that anyone who calls herself a Christian could possibly be against the legislation.
The comments from that poster and from others provoke a startling realization about just how radically apart we who exist in the global body of Christ can be. I write often of fundamental disagreements between believers, but here is a fundamental disagreement of an order rarely seen in present-day US contexts. Indeed, the example of the bill's supporters (which would no doubt include many non-Ugandan Christians such as Fred Phelps) contrasts starkly with most of the pro-family/anti-gay/ex-gay movements here. Compared to people who see homosexuality as worse than murder and homosexuals as richly deserving of death, ex-gay ministries look positively liberal.
Mucking up all of these debates, of course, is the postcolonial context of massive, long-term Western and European interventions into African cultures. Indeed, "interventions" of various sorts (economic, military, governmental, cultural, religious), many of which cloak themselves with the best of intentions, have long defined the West's approach to African affairs, casting "the West" and "Africa" as characters in an old fashioned melodrama. In more recent narratives, the West becomes "intervener"--blessed or tasked with the power (ability, maturity, moral superiority) necessary to save the poor, benighted, self-defeating African nations (who cannot or will not help themselves). Centuries of such unequal roleplay contaminate present-day relations, making the question I've asked in the last few days--how and when to intervene--almost impossible to answer.
That vexed and vexing relationship, however, promises to grow only more pressing throughout this century as the locus of energy for Christianity shifts to the global south. Issues like the current Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill--itself redolent with conflicting histories of Christian interventions and counter-interventions--presage similar conflicts yet to come.
This is already apparent in the United Methodist Church.
More tomorrow,
JF
The bill (which seems to be known in various internet debates by both supporters and opponents as Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill), at least in current drafts, essentially defines homosexuality as a crime punishable by life imprisonment or even execution. Also criminalized in the bill are offenses like "aiding and abetting homosexuality" or "conspiracy to engage in homosexuality," each punishable by a sentence of seven years in prison.
The proposed bill, not surprisingly, has drawn sharp criticism from those in the GLBT rights community. Indeed, even conservative Christian groups are raising protests against the bill (see this Facebook page, for example, or this statement from Rick Warren). The Obama administration has condemned the bill, as have other countries and human rights organizations.
Uganda, never a go-to locale for GLBT rights, has largely rejected what it sees as outside attempts to meddle in its affairs. Supporters of the bill have started their own Facebook group, even as a number of Ugandans--including many Christian groups and speakers--have spoken out against the bill.
Complicating this issue, of course, is the fact that a number of ex-gay ministers had recently visited Uganda to hold a mini-conference regarding ministry to and help for homosexual people (i.e., get them to stop living as homosexual people, convince them to see their sexuality as a corruption or disorder, etc.). I need to do more research on this, but least some of the ministers supporting the bill in Uganda appear to be drawing on arguments used by these ex-gay speakers. Several in the "ex-ex-gay" movement who watchdog and criticize ex-gay organizations, have laid the blame for Uganda's current bill at the feet of ex-gay ministries. The ex-gay ministries themselves, of course, take offense at this allegation, firing back with posts and protests of their own.
For a taste of the depth of the debate from a number of sides, I recommend this posting on a blog by Warren Throckmorton, a conservative Christian psychology professor who has been very active in organizing US-based opposition to the bill (he founded the anti-bill Facebook page I linked above). This post, which relates a statement by Ugandan ministers and groups opposed to the bill, fascinates me largely for its ongoing (as of this writing) comments section. There you can read posts from a surprisingly wide spectrum of viewpoints, from ex-gays to gay-affirmative Christians and everything in between.
Particularly striking are comments from a poster who identifies himself (I believe it's a himself) as a Ugandan national very much in favor of the bill. In addition to lambasting the other posters for meddling in Uganda's own affairs, the poster expresses flat disbelief that anyone who calls herself a Christian could possibly be against the legislation.
The comments from that poster and from others provoke a startling realization about just how radically apart we who exist in the global body of Christ can be. I write often of fundamental disagreements between believers, but here is a fundamental disagreement of an order rarely seen in present-day US contexts. Indeed, the example of the bill's supporters (which would no doubt include many non-Ugandan Christians such as Fred Phelps) contrasts starkly with most of the pro-family/anti-gay/ex-gay movements here. Compared to people who see homosexuality as worse than murder and homosexuals as richly deserving of death, ex-gay ministries look positively liberal.
Mucking up all of these debates, of course, is the postcolonial context of massive, long-term Western and European interventions into African cultures. Indeed, "interventions" of various sorts (economic, military, governmental, cultural, religious), many of which cloak themselves with the best of intentions, have long defined the West's approach to African affairs, casting "the West" and "Africa" as characters in an old fashioned melodrama. In more recent narratives, the West becomes "intervener"--blessed or tasked with the power (ability, maturity, moral superiority) necessary to save the poor, benighted, self-defeating African nations (who cannot or will not help themselves). Centuries of such unequal roleplay contaminate present-day relations, making the question I've asked in the last few days--how and when to intervene--almost impossible to answer.
That vexed and vexing relationship, however, promises to grow only more pressing throughout this century as the locus of energy for Christianity shifts to the global south. Issues like the current Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill--itself redolent with conflicting histories of Christian interventions and counter-interventions--presage similar conflicts yet to come.
This is already apparent in the United Methodist Church.
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Idealism and Privilege
On the topic of "agreeing to disagree" about GLBT issues int the church and the less-than-positive undertones of such a suggestion: In one of my courses I had students read a play by a African-American performance artist named Robbie McCauley. The play--I should say "performance piece"--is Sally's Rape, and it concerns McCauley's great-great-grandmother Sally, who was a slave and was raped.
I call it a "performance piece" to indicate that it's not a play in the sense of presenting a self-contained story with characters (and actors pretending to be those characters). Rather, the piece features Robbie as herself and a younger white woman named Jeannie, who in the piece seems to be a particularly close student of Robbie's. Robbie and Jeannie, one gathers, have worked for some time on the history of Robbie's family. Much of the play consists of their testing out different ways to imagine, enter, and explore Robbie's family history, a process that inevitably raises present-day issues about race.
Both performers address the audience directly, walking out into the audience at times. They divide the audience into three parts: one section they tell to yell encouragement and affirmation ("That's right!" "Yes, indeed!"); one section they charge with expressing disagreement; and one section they challenge to offer dialogue, observation, and commentary. Such a request leads to frequent improvisation; much of the script contains provisos to the effect of "this scene is always different in performance; here's how it worked one night."
Such interactive, presentational (as opposed to the fourth-wall-style representational) dramaturgy charges the performance with a sense of danger and possibility. The people--not characters, but people--on stage are of two different races and are having explicit conversations about how to talk about racism's past and present. And the audience can't simply watch and listen; they have to participate--and the people on stage talk right back.
Nor do they sugarcoat the difficulties of having a conversation about white privilege and continuing racial minoritization. One particularly brutal (as in brutally honest) scene features Jeannie and Robbie having, well, an argument of sorts. They face each other and tell each other hard truths. Jeannie is sure that Robbie thinks she's too idealistic, that she's not getting something vital about Robbie's position. Robbie expresses frustration that the language they use has trouble capturing this sense.
One section of this scene stood out to me. Jeannie, challenged by Robbie to say in her own words what it is that Robbie finds troublesome about Jeannie, suggests this: "About my idealism. I have some idea of humanism. Something that we share, something more than our differences."
Robbie responds, "Let me see if I can use the language to say what I feel about your idealism. I think it covers over something in your history that makes your idealism still a whim. It angers me that even though your ancestors might have been slaves—because they did have white slaves . . . only made Black slavery mandatory for economic reasons, so they could catch us when we ran away—that history has given you the ability to forget your shame about being oppressed by being ignorant, mean, or idealistic . . . which makes it dangerous for me."
That line resonates with me: "something in your history makes your idealism still a whim." I might say, in reference to the GLBT debates ripping denominations apart currently, that something about the seemingly idealistic push to "just stop fighting and get along" signals a serious underestimation of the stakes of the debate. If you can choose whether or not to fight--if your idealism is a whim, an equally viable choice among many others, then you may not be in the best position to dictate to those for whom concern about the issue in question is not a choice.
I get annoyed, actually, when the call to stop fighting about GLBT issues from some spot of moderate higher ground. "I'm not on either side," goes such a call, "I just want us to get back to [X activity of the Chruch]. It's those on the extremes who are making this an issue. I just don't care about it. Can't we get back to what's important? We moderates just want to be Methodist (or Episcopalian, or what have you)."
McCauley's line highlights how this moderate position, the we're-really-all-the-same-so-stop-fighting, depends upon a great deal of often unacknowledged privilege. To be unconcerned about a major issue takes effort. It's not easy to be uninterested.
To be sure, often the work involved is someone else's. A spoiled adolescent, for instance, may experience life as a worry-free succession of distractions, never realizing the hard work that someone (parents, grandparents, household staff, etc.) has to go through in order to achieve for the child that work-free environment. But work there is.
I do not mean that those calling for an end to debate, a "let's just agree to disagree" on GLBT issues, are spoiled; I think their intentions are often sincerely peace-loving. But that idealism, as McCauley argues, spings from the soil of a particular historical and cultural situation, a situation that lets some people and not others off the hook of having to grapple with such issues.
I cannot, as a gay man, simply ignore the reality that many in my Church believe me unfit to take communion. I cannot ignore the fact that I may not pursue ordination or get married to my partner. And I hear those on the other side of the issue saying similarly that they could not simply "live with it" were gay couples allowed to be married or were a lesbian to be ordained as a pastor.
As much as I disagree with people from that latter perspective, I feel even more frustration toward those who instead of listening carefully to the debate decide that the entire discussion is unimportant and make a virtue of their disinterest.
That, I submit, is detrimental to everyone.
More tomorrow,
JF
I call it a "performance piece" to indicate that it's not a play in the sense of presenting a self-contained story with characters (and actors pretending to be those characters). Rather, the piece features Robbie as herself and a younger white woman named Jeannie, who in the piece seems to be a particularly close student of Robbie's. Robbie and Jeannie, one gathers, have worked for some time on the history of Robbie's family. Much of the play consists of their testing out different ways to imagine, enter, and explore Robbie's family history, a process that inevitably raises present-day issues about race.
Both performers address the audience directly, walking out into the audience at times. They divide the audience into three parts: one section they tell to yell encouragement and affirmation ("That's right!" "Yes, indeed!"); one section they charge with expressing disagreement; and one section they challenge to offer dialogue, observation, and commentary. Such a request leads to frequent improvisation; much of the script contains provisos to the effect of "this scene is always different in performance; here's how it worked one night."
Such interactive, presentational (as opposed to the fourth-wall-style representational) dramaturgy charges the performance with a sense of danger and possibility. The people--not characters, but people--on stage are of two different races and are having explicit conversations about how to talk about racism's past and present. And the audience can't simply watch and listen; they have to participate--and the people on stage talk right back.
Nor do they sugarcoat the difficulties of having a conversation about white privilege and continuing racial minoritization. One particularly brutal (as in brutally honest) scene features Jeannie and Robbie having, well, an argument of sorts. They face each other and tell each other hard truths. Jeannie is sure that Robbie thinks she's too idealistic, that she's not getting something vital about Robbie's position. Robbie expresses frustration that the language they use has trouble capturing this sense.
One section of this scene stood out to me. Jeannie, challenged by Robbie to say in her own words what it is that Robbie finds troublesome about Jeannie, suggests this: "About my idealism. I have some idea of humanism. Something that we share, something more than our differences."
Robbie responds, "Let me see if I can use the language to say what I feel about your idealism. I think it covers over something in your history that makes your idealism still a whim. It angers me that even though your ancestors might have been slaves—because they did have white slaves . . . only made Black slavery mandatory for economic reasons, so they could catch us when we ran away—that history has given you the ability to forget your shame about being oppressed by being ignorant, mean, or idealistic . . . which makes it dangerous for me."
That line resonates with me: "something in your history makes your idealism still a whim." I might say, in reference to the GLBT debates ripping denominations apart currently, that something about the seemingly idealistic push to "just stop fighting and get along" signals a serious underestimation of the stakes of the debate. If you can choose whether or not to fight--if your idealism is a whim, an equally viable choice among many others, then you may not be in the best position to dictate to those for whom concern about the issue in question is not a choice.
I get annoyed, actually, when the call to stop fighting about GLBT issues from some spot of moderate higher ground. "I'm not on either side," goes such a call, "I just want us to get back to [X activity of the Chruch]. It's those on the extremes who are making this an issue. I just don't care about it. Can't we get back to what's important? We moderates just want to be Methodist (or Episcopalian, or what have you)."
McCauley's line highlights how this moderate position, the we're-really-all-the-same-so-stop-fighting, depends upon a great deal of often unacknowledged privilege. To be unconcerned about a major issue takes effort. It's not easy to be uninterested.
To be sure, often the work involved is someone else's. A spoiled adolescent, for instance, may experience life as a worry-free succession of distractions, never realizing the hard work that someone (parents, grandparents, household staff, etc.) has to go through in order to achieve for the child that work-free environment. But work there is.
I do not mean that those calling for an end to debate, a "let's just agree to disagree" on GLBT issues, are spoiled; I think their intentions are often sincerely peace-loving. But that idealism, as McCauley argues, spings from the soil of a particular historical and cultural situation, a situation that lets some people and not others off the hook of having to grapple with such issues.
I cannot, as a gay man, simply ignore the reality that many in my Church believe me unfit to take communion. I cannot ignore the fact that I may not pursue ordination or get married to my partner. And I hear those on the other side of the issue saying similarly that they could not simply "live with it" were gay couples allowed to be married or were a lesbian to be ordained as a pastor.
As much as I disagree with people from that latter perspective, I feel even more frustration toward those who instead of listening carefully to the debate decide that the entire discussion is unimportant and make a virtue of their disinterest.
That, I submit, is detrimental to everyone.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Pro- and Anti-GLBT Inclusion
Neat as it may be to think ethics as a response to a demanding situation, an acknowledgment of an event, it doesn't quite dodge the problem of how or by whom a demanding situation gets recognized as such. In Alain Badiou's philosophy, Events (the transformative experience that creates the demanding situation) are either simply and obviously there to be recognized plainly or they are fought for by die-hard, no-compromise true believers whose work makes the Event a capital-E affair (e.g., Paul making Christ's death/resurrection an Event that demands a whole new ethical way of life).
But which response to the Event is the ethical one?
It strikes me that the really difficult disagreements--the fundamental fractures I've been interested in--have to do precisely with how gets to define a response to an Event (or a demand) as such. In the near-schism-level conflicts over the status of GLBT people that plague mainline denominations now, the Event in question seems to be the realization that GLBT people exist, that they are, as it were, "self-avowed, practicing," and insistent that they are not by virtue of their sexuality in any way incompatible with the Way of Christ.
For the pro-inclusion side, the response to this Event seems obvious: just as similar recognitions of racial and gender diversity within the body of Christ demanded (and received) transformations in church stances, so too does the recognition of differing sexual orientations and gender identities demand that the church adapt to this understanding. Part of this change involves polity: gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender people should be accepted as equal members of the church and granted the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexuals (e.g., becoming members, receiving communion/baptism, pursuing ordination, getting married). The deeper change involves theology; passages of scripture that decry same-sex erotic behavior are, like passages allowing slavery or approving of lesser status for women, considered as culturally and historically bound rather than eternally constraining.
The anti-inclusion side often gets represented doing little more than obstructing this inevitable response to the Event. Given the advent of GLBT people coming out as members of the church, the anti- side can seem like it's sticking its fingers in its ears and going "lalalalalala--I don't hear you!"
While I'm sure there are some in the church who are being willfully ignorant, I don't think this depiction accurately captures the anti-inclusion side. In fact, the narrative of GLBT people in the church as an Event is common throughout conservative Protestant discourse. Anti-GLBT sides on the Christian right regularly portray the GLBT issue as a recent and unwelcome challenge to the Body of Christ. Joe Dallas, a spokesperson for the "ex-gay" movement, has said that same-sex sin is not technically any more or less sinful than any other behavior. But the GLBT movement--the Event of GLBT people making a claim to equal membership--presents a challenge that requires a specific response. No other sin, Dallas argues, has so elaborated its own theology. Practitioners of this particular sin, in other words, have created a whole new way of being a Christian around the framework of GLBT inclusion.
In conservative Christian thinking, the Event that is the GLBT movement's transformational demand itself demands a response: retrenchment and revival. Churches and denominations must risk drawing their historical boundaries of orthodoxy ever more clearly and ever more carefully. That is (and of course I'm synthesizing here), Churches have to realize that following Christ and His Word requires them to resist cultural imperatives for wide-open inclusivity. The Christian message broadcasts universally, but the path that message lays out is singular and exclusive. Christians have to accept that their Way is narrow even if their love is wide. Many behaviors and attitudes we would like to declare non-issues simply cannot co-exist with fidelity to the Word of God. To be sure, the orthodoxy borders need to be drawn and maintained with sensitivity and love; the new revivalists of the anti-GLBT-inclusion movement are often quite honest about how the church has failed to present a loving face in the past. But against the Event of GLBT-inclusive theology, the church must say "no."
For Badiou, saying "no" to an authentic Event can constitute the very essence of unethical behavior. But here I would point out that "no"--the stereotypically "conservative" gesture--does not have to be stagnant or unproductive; "no" does not mean denying the event happened but responding to the Event as a challenge or threat. History offers multiple instances where a "no" to an Event produces new structures and organizations. The Protestant Reformation was surely an Event--an unignorable transformation that demands a response--yet the Catholic Church's "no" wasn't a refusal to respond but a robust Counter-Reformation that reformatted church practice and doctrine.
Now, of course the Protestant Event did drastically alter the Christian landscape. Instead of merely being "Christian" one (in Western Europe) now had to be a particular kind of Christian. It was not possible simply to pretend that the Event had not happened or that it was dismissible. But neither was it the case that the response to the Event of Luther et al. took only the form of full approval.
Here's where I feel that the push for the pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides of the GLBT debate "agree to disagree"--suspend or mute their arguments in favor of peace--runs into problems. To suggest that this disagreement is minor enough that it can be suspended is in a sense to deny the Event as such. Like it or not, the fact that GLBT people are making a claim that polity and theology have to change to include them is a move of great magnitude.
Paradoxically, both sides of the debate would agree that anyone who believes in the ephemerality of the argument isn't paying attention. It is not, for example, within the privileges I enjoy to be able to ignore debates about GLBT status in my church. If my church denies openly gay individuals the right to pursue ordination, that affects me. And--while it's difficult for me to see this sometimes--if my church were to openly affirm the right of GLBT folk to be ordained, the anti-GLBT side would feel similarly compelled to respond and unable to ignore this change.
It worries me, however, to think of the two sides to the GLBT issue as similar (though to a lesser degree) to the Counter-Reformation and Reformation. Divergent responses to an Event often presage intense and bloody conflict.
If "agreeing to disagree" is untenable, can there at least be a way to agree on how to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
But which response to the Event is the ethical one?
It strikes me that the really difficult disagreements--the fundamental fractures I've been interested in--have to do precisely with how gets to define a response to an Event (or a demand) as such. In the near-schism-level conflicts over the status of GLBT people that plague mainline denominations now, the Event in question seems to be the realization that GLBT people exist, that they are, as it were, "self-avowed, practicing," and insistent that they are not by virtue of their sexuality in any way incompatible with the Way of Christ.
For the pro-inclusion side, the response to this Event seems obvious: just as similar recognitions of racial and gender diversity within the body of Christ demanded (and received) transformations in church stances, so too does the recognition of differing sexual orientations and gender identities demand that the church adapt to this understanding. Part of this change involves polity: gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender people should be accepted as equal members of the church and granted the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexuals (e.g., becoming members, receiving communion/baptism, pursuing ordination, getting married). The deeper change involves theology; passages of scripture that decry same-sex erotic behavior are, like passages allowing slavery or approving of lesser status for women, considered as culturally and historically bound rather than eternally constraining.
The anti-inclusion side often gets represented doing little more than obstructing this inevitable response to the Event. Given the advent of GLBT people coming out as members of the church, the anti- side can seem like it's sticking its fingers in its ears and going "lalalalalala--I don't hear you!"
While I'm sure there are some in the church who are being willfully ignorant, I don't think this depiction accurately captures the anti-inclusion side. In fact, the narrative of GLBT people in the church as an Event is common throughout conservative Protestant discourse. Anti-GLBT sides on the Christian right regularly portray the GLBT issue as a recent and unwelcome challenge to the Body of Christ. Joe Dallas, a spokesperson for the "ex-gay" movement, has said that same-sex sin is not technically any more or less sinful than any other behavior. But the GLBT movement--the Event of GLBT people making a claim to equal membership--presents a challenge that requires a specific response. No other sin, Dallas argues, has so elaborated its own theology. Practitioners of this particular sin, in other words, have created a whole new way of being a Christian around the framework of GLBT inclusion.
In conservative Christian thinking, the Event that is the GLBT movement's transformational demand itself demands a response: retrenchment and revival. Churches and denominations must risk drawing their historical boundaries of orthodoxy ever more clearly and ever more carefully. That is (and of course I'm synthesizing here), Churches have to realize that following Christ and His Word requires them to resist cultural imperatives for wide-open inclusivity. The Christian message broadcasts universally, but the path that message lays out is singular and exclusive. Christians have to accept that their Way is narrow even if their love is wide. Many behaviors and attitudes we would like to declare non-issues simply cannot co-exist with fidelity to the Word of God. To be sure, the orthodoxy borders need to be drawn and maintained with sensitivity and love; the new revivalists of the anti-GLBT-inclusion movement are often quite honest about how the church has failed to present a loving face in the past. But against the Event of GLBT-inclusive theology, the church must say "no."
For Badiou, saying "no" to an authentic Event can constitute the very essence of unethical behavior. But here I would point out that "no"--the stereotypically "conservative" gesture--does not have to be stagnant or unproductive; "no" does not mean denying the event happened but responding to the Event as a challenge or threat. History offers multiple instances where a "no" to an Event produces new structures and organizations. The Protestant Reformation was surely an Event--an unignorable transformation that demands a response--yet the Catholic Church's "no" wasn't a refusal to respond but a robust Counter-Reformation that reformatted church practice and doctrine.
Now, of course the Protestant Event did drastically alter the Christian landscape. Instead of merely being "Christian" one (in Western Europe) now had to be a particular kind of Christian. It was not possible simply to pretend that the Event had not happened or that it was dismissible. But neither was it the case that the response to the Event of Luther et al. took only the form of full approval.
Here's where I feel that the push for the pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides of the GLBT debate "agree to disagree"--suspend or mute their arguments in favor of peace--runs into problems. To suggest that this disagreement is minor enough that it can be suspended is in a sense to deny the Event as such. Like it or not, the fact that GLBT people are making a claim that polity and theology have to change to include them is a move of great magnitude.
Paradoxically, both sides of the debate would agree that anyone who believes in the ephemerality of the argument isn't paying attention. It is not, for example, within the privileges I enjoy to be able to ignore debates about GLBT status in my church. If my church denies openly gay individuals the right to pursue ordination, that affects me. And--while it's difficult for me to see this sometimes--if my church were to openly affirm the right of GLBT folk to be ordained, the anti-GLBT side would feel similarly compelled to respond and unable to ignore this change.
It worries me, however, to think of the two sides to the GLBT issue as similar (though to a lesser degree) to the Counter-Reformation and Reformation. Divergent responses to an Event often presage intense and bloody conflict.
If "agreeing to disagree" is untenable, can there at least be a way to agree on how to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The Demand to Choose
To recap: I hate conflict. I hate when people get angry or upset in reaction to something I've done or left undone. And I think that, thanks in no small part to the Western dramatic tradition, conflict as a virtue can too easily be overrated. I just don't buy the "If you're making everyone angry, you're doing something right" line of thinking.
Nevertheless, I do believe that ethics--Christian ethics particularly--necessarily involves the risk of conflict. Philosopher Simon Critchley, in a gloss on Alain Badiou's theory of ethics, writes about ethics not (as Badiou does) as fidelity to an Event but as the recognition of a demand. Here he means a demand not in the sense of authoritarian bossiness thundering down from on high but demand a situation that imposes the responsibility of response. Seeing a child drowning in a river, for example, produces a sense of demand. Once apprehended, the situation presents an undeniable reality. The drowning child can't be un-apprehended.
Our action or inaction to this un-un-apprehendable reality inevitably acquires an ethical dimension. If we leap in to the river to save the child, risking our own life (as is probably the case--it's not recommended that untrained, unassisted folk leap into a rushing river to save someone drowning)--our act is an ethical response to the demand. If we do nothing, turning back to our own affairs--this too carries an ethical charge. The situation, the demand, colors every act subsequent to it.
Departing from Critchley's specific argument, I would venture that what makes the demand ethical is that the demand doesn't dictate a specific response. Suppose someone holds a gun up to your head and says, "Dive in and save that child, or I'll blow your brains out." Alternately, to move us closer to certain strains of Christianity, suppose someone presents you with the threat of Eternal Hell and says "Dive in and save that child, or you'll burn in unending fire for all of forever." In both these cases we're dealing with something other than an ethical demand of the kind I'm talking about. In the former case, we're dealing with a threat, a force imposed on us. We have no choice, really, but to dive in. Ethics has little or nothing to do with the decision. In the latter case, we're dealing with a subtler but nonetheless still dictatorial kind of force.
Ethics, as I'm using it, suggests a less straightforward, more inquisitive process than the simple application of a moral law. The Ten Commandments, in this sense, represent a kind of morality--here's what to do. The Golden Rule, on the other hand, presents a general guideline to be adapted to different situations in different ways. It is not quite a relativist, there's-no-right-or-wrong philosophy; neither, however, is it a comprehensive instruction manual for navigating each and every situation.
Ethics, in other words, implies a zone of uncertainty about the right thing to do. It's the exploration of that zone in the face of a demand that constitutes the risky ethics I'm interested in here. But--and here's the rub--the demand imposes a kind of time limit on ethical exploration.
Let me retreat to a realm I'm more comfortable with. One of the first things you have to learn as an actor, designer, or director in the theatre is the necessity of making a choice. The director Ann Bogart, for example, speaks of the need for directors to "choose death" (a notion she borrows from aikido, if I remember correctly). In deciding how to stage a scene, she explains, a director has an infinity of choices. The chair could go here, or there, or there, or there--or there could be no chairs or a hundred chairs. At the end of the day, though, the director has to make one single choice: the chair goes here and nowhere else. By making that one choice, the director essentially "kills off" all of the other multitude of possible choices that were available. This can be painful, especially when on opening night the director realizes, oh, the chair should have gone THERE, not where I put it. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to make a choice. The reality of opening night exerts a demand.
There's little in the way of strict guidelines about where to put the chair; no rulebook will explain to you where chairs go. The choice is open, and there's no guarantee that the choice you make will be "right." In this demand-situation, though, the wrong thing is to not make the choice. If a director is too frightened of criticism, too afraid of risk to make a choice, then the director should reconsider careers.
How, then, might the ethical demand perspective reframe the GLBT issue debate I've been writing about?
More tomorrow,
JF
Nevertheless, I do believe that ethics--Christian ethics particularly--necessarily involves the risk of conflict. Philosopher Simon Critchley, in a gloss on Alain Badiou's theory of ethics, writes about ethics not (as Badiou does) as fidelity to an Event but as the recognition of a demand. Here he means a demand not in the sense of authoritarian bossiness thundering down from on high but demand a situation that imposes the responsibility of response. Seeing a child drowning in a river, for example, produces a sense of demand. Once apprehended, the situation presents an undeniable reality. The drowning child can't be un-apprehended.
Our action or inaction to this un-un-apprehendable reality inevitably acquires an ethical dimension. If we leap in to the river to save the child, risking our own life (as is probably the case--it's not recommended that untrained, unassisted folk leap into a rushing river to save someone drowning)--our act is an ethical response to the demand. If we do nothing, turning back to our own affairs--this too carries an ethical charge. The situation, the demand, colors every act subsequent to it.
Departing from Critchley's specific argument, I would venture that what makes the demand ethical is that the demand doesn't dictate a specific response. Suppose someone holds a gun up to your head and says, "Dive in and save that child, or I'll blow your brains out." Alternately, to move us closer to certain strains of Christianity, suppose someone presents you with the threat of Eternal Hell and says "Dive in and save that child, or you'll burn in unending fire for all of forever." In both these cases we're dealing with something other than an ethical demand of the kind I'm talking about. In the former case, we're dealing with a threat, a force imposed on us. We have no choice, really, but to dive in. Ethics has little or nothing to do with the decision. In the latter case, we're dealing with a subtler but nonetheless still dictatorial kind of force.
Ethics, as I'm using it, suggests a less straightforward, more inquisitive process than the simple application of a moral law. The Ten Commandments, in this sense, represent a kind of morality--here's what to do. The Golden Rule, on the other hand, presents a general guideline to be adapted to different situations in different ways. It is not quite a relativist, there's-no-right-or-wrong philosophy; neither, however, is it a comprehensive instruction manual for navigating each and every situation.
Ethics, in other words, implies a zone of uncertainty about the right thing to do. It's the exploration of that zone in the face of a demand that constitutes the risky ethics I'm interested in here. But--and here's the rub--the demand imposes a kind of time limit on ethical exploration.
Let me retreat to a realm I'm more comfortable with. One of the first things you have to learn as an actor, designer, or director in the theatre is the necessity of making a choice. The director Ann Bogart, for example, speaks of the need for directors to "choose death" (a notion she borrows from aikido, if I remember correctly). In deciding how to stage a scene, she explains, a director has an infinity of choices. The chair could go here, or there, or there, or there--or there could be no chairs or a hundred chairs. At the end of the day, though, the director has to make one single choice: the chair goes here and nowhere else. By making that one choice, the director essentially "kills off" all of the other multitude of possible choices that were available. This can be painful, especially when on opening night the director realizes, oh, the chair should have gone THERE, not where I put it. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to make a choice. The reality of opening night exerts a demand.
There's little in the way of strict guidelines about where to put the chair; no rulebook will explain to you where chairs go. The choice is open, and there's no guarantee that the choice you make will be "right." In this demand-situation, though, the wrong thing is to not make the choice. If a director is too frightened of criticism, too afraid of risk to make a choice, then the director should reconsider careers.
How, then, might the ethical demand perspective reframe the GLBT issue debate I've been writing about?
More tomorrow,
JF
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Privilege of Agreeing to Disagree
Just what does it mean, to agree to disagree?
Yesterday I sketched out a few salient aspects of the disagreement between churchgoers (at least, those in the United Methodist Church) over the issue of homosexuality. The differences are fairly stark and passionately held; indeed, my own overview of the two sides slanted considerably to the side I personally support (i.e., inclusivity).
I've had occasion to see this debate played out in literal terms both at Annual Conferences and General Conferences (that is, state-level and national/international-level legislative gatherings of the UMC). Inevitably, after various advocates of both sides have made impassioned pleas to the body as a whole, someone else stands up and requests (generally in an exasperated tone) that the whole issue just be dropped, that it's decisive and distracting, and that most of the church is simply uninterested in this quagmire of an debate. Let's just agree to disagree, in other words.
While I appreciate the irenic, can't-we-all-just-get-along intentions of such a sentiment, I can't help but suspect some deeper motives at work in these kind of requests. Basically: conflict makes me uncomfortable. So does homosexuality. Let's drop it.
I can relate; conflict makes me uncomfortable, too. On stage or on screen it's the heart of the Western-European dramatic tradition. In life it can be plain awkward and misery-inducing.
And I can understand that a red-hot issue like GLBT behaviors and identities can also make people uncomfortable, partially because it's foreign and vaguely threatening to many people and partially because, in a UMC Conference setting, it signals--you guessed it--conflict.
My sympathy with the let's-just-avoid-it question has limits, though. Part of what I teach my students in coursework about gender and sexuality is that differences in human identity nearly always get arranged into privileged and no-so-privileged categories. The privileged categories currently include white (rather than non-white), male (rather than non-male), well-off (rather than not-so-well-off), educated (rather than not), heterosexual, and non-disabled. Now, at this point, my white-male-straight-etc. students often get a little antsy, feeling like they've been cast as the villain in some melodrama of social justice. If left unaddressed, antsy-ness can morph into defensiveness.
The remedy involves specifying what privilege is--or, rather, what it's not. Privilege is not, first off, the same thing as active prejudice or bigotry. Nor is it the same as personal responsibility for others' oppression. As a white male, I have a degree of privilege due to my gender and my skin color. This is not to say, however, that I am consciously, intentionally involved in an agenda to keep down non-white and non-male people.
What does privilege mean? Well, answering that question fully would fill up a book (at least). A few key aspects of privilege I point out to students, though: for one thing, I enjoy (as a white male) the privilege of default status. When there is talk of "a person" in general, with no identifying features, most likely image most people imagine (or the image the talk intends people to imagine) looks more or less like me. If it were otherwise, the "person" would need some qualifiers to be distinguished from the white-male default. "A police officer came to the door," for example, is generally taken to describe a white, male police officer. Of course, this is not universally true; it's a general tendency rather than an always-everywhere certainty.
Another privilege I enjoy is visibility. I don't have to flip around TV for long to find a show that features a cast of people predominantly my race, my gender, and speaking my language. The most popular and prevalent characters in TV and movies are white. Exceptions of course exist, but they are, well, exceptional. That there needs to be a channel for black people (BET), for Latino/a people (Univision), for women (Lifetime), or for GLBT people (Logo) points to the fact that most channels are for "everyone"--meaning the generic "everyone," i.e., white males.
Neither default status nor high-visibility are indications of personal prejudice. I didn't choose to be white and male; I didn't play a personal part in the historical and cultural processes that made those identities privileged. These are for that reason often described as unearned privileges. But I recognize that, regardless of my personal causative role (or lack thereof) in their creation, these realities exist.
A vital aspect of privilege, though, involves the privilege of non-awareness. It's a mark of unearned privilege that those who hold it can go through life oblivious to the fact that they enjoy those privileges as such--and that other people don't enjoy that privilege. I can, as a white male, for the most part go through my life without having to think actively or critically about race or gender status. I can enter just about any store in this nation (with some obvious exceptions, of course) without having once to think of how my skin color might make me seem dangerous or dishonest to those in charge. I can walk across campus without having to worry that I might be sexually assaulted. I can apply for a loan without having to worry about "sounding white" for the bank teller. And most of all, I can do all of those things without ever viewing them as special or unique to people like me. It's just The Way Things Are.
Indeed, the only times I would really have to think about the issue would be when someone from an unprivileged status makes the privilege deficit an issue. If someone accuses me of hoarding all the visibility on TV shows, I have to suddenly look at my default status and greater visibility as contingent--changeable--rather than Just The Way Things Are. Moreover, I have to consider that The Way Things Are might be wrong or unfair, that I may actually have to share or (more likely) give up some degree of default status or visibility in order to equalize statuses between myself and others.
In other words, awareness is disturbing because it leads to responsibility. As soon as I become aware that I enjoy unearned privileges over others, I become responsible for how those privileges play out. It becomes my problem that women aren't hired for X job at equal rates to men, my problem that black people have a harder time getting good loans than white people, my problem that a taxi will stop for me rather than for the Latina standing next to me. Again, responsibility isn't the same as fault. I didn't personally cause those situations. But it does behoove me to do what I can to remedy them. Otherwise, if I sink back into willful non-awareness, I do more than enjoy unearned privileges; I perpetuate them.
For this reason, I tell my students, we have to be very careful when we assert that the proper course of action in a particular situation is to "agree to disagree" or stop arguing or "be neutral." We have to be careful that the peaceful status quo we seek to restore or preserve isn't just a way to keep ourselves safely unaware of the unearned privileges we hold (and therefore ignorant of the unearned deprivations that others suffer). After all, to silence debate about a privilege issue is primarily to ask those who suffer to shut up and accept their lot in life.
Now--to what extent does this privilege reflection bear on the GLBT debate in the UMC and the desire to "agree to disagree" or stop talking about it? This very question, it turns out, forms part of the debate itself.
More tomorrow,
JF
Yesterday I sketched out a few salient aspects of the disagreement between churchgoers (at least, those in the United Methodist Church) over the issue of homosexuality. The differences are fairly stark and passionately held; indeed, my own overview of the two sides slanted considerably to the side I personally support (i.e., inclusivity).
I've had occasion to see this debate played out in literal terms both at Annual Conferences and General Conferences (that is, state-level and national/international-level legislative gatherings of the UMC). Inevitably, after various advocates of both sides have made impassioned pleas to the body as a whole, someone else stands up and requests (generally in an exasperated tone) that the whole issue just be dropped, that it's decisive and distracting, and that most of the church is simply uninterested in this quagmire of an debate. Let's just agree to disagree, in other words.
While I appreciate the irenic, can't-we-all-just-get-along intentions of such a sentiment, I can't help but suspect some deeper motives at work in these kind of requests. Basically: conflict makes me uncomfortable. So does homosexuality. Let's drop it.
I can relate; conflict makes me uncomfortable, too. On stage or on screen it's the heart of the Western-European dramatic tradition. In life it can be plain awkward and misery-inducing.
And I can understand that a red-hot issue like GLBT behaviors and identities can also make people uncomfortable, partially because it's foreign and vaguely threatening to many people and partially because, in a UMC Conference setting, it signals--you guessed it--conflict.
My sympathy with the let's-just-avoid-it question has limits, though. Part of what I teach my students in coursework about gender and sexuality is that differences in human identity nearly always get arranged into privileged and no-so-privileged categories. The privileged categories currently include white (rather than non-white), male (rather than non-male), well-off (rather than not-so-well-off), educated (rather than not), heterosexual, and non-disabled. Now, at this point, my white-male-straight-etc. students often get a little antsy, feeling like they've been cast as the villain in some melodrama of social justice. If left unaddressed, antsy-ness can morph into defensiveness.
The remedy involves specifying what privilege is--or, rather, what it's not. Privilege is not, first off, the same thing as active prejudice or bigotry. Nor is it the same as personal responsibility for others' oppression. As a white male, I have a degree of privilege due to my gender and my skin color. This is not to say, however, that I am consciously, intentionally involved in an agenda to keep down non-white and non-male people.
What does privilege mean? Well, answering that question fully would fill up a book (at least). A few key aspects of privilege I point out to students, though: for one thing, I enjoy (as a white male) the privilege of default status. When there is talk of "a person" in general, with no identifying features, most likely image most people imagine (or the image the talk intends people to imagine) looks more or less like me. If it were otherwise, the "person" would need some qualifiers to be distinguished from the white-male default. "A police officer came to the door," for example, is generally taken to describe a white, male police officer. Of course, this is not universally true; it's a general tendency rather than an always-everywhere certainty.
Another privilege I enjoy is visibility. I don't have to flip around TV for long to find a show that features a cast of people predominantly my race, my gender, and speaking my language. The most popular and prevalent characters in TV and movies are white. Exceptions of course exist, but they are, well, exceptional. That there needs to be a channel for black people (BET), for Latino/a people (Univision), for women (Lifetime), or for GLBT people (Logo) points to the fact that most channels are for "everyone"--meaning the generic "everyone," i.e., white males.
Neither default status nor high-visibility are indications of personal prejudice. I didn't choose to be white and male; I didn't play a personal part in the historical and cultural processes that made those identities privileged. These are for that reason often described as unearned privileges. But I recognize that, regardless of my personal causative role (or lack thereof) in their creation, these realities exist.
A vital aspect of privilege, though, involves the privilege of non-awareness. It's a mark of unearned privilege that those who hold it can go through life oblivious to the fact that they enjoy those privileges as such--and that other people don't enjoy that privilege. I can, as a white male, for the most part go through my life without having to think actively or critically about race or gender status. I can enter just about any store in this nation (with some obvious exceptions, of course) without having once to think of how my skin color might make me seem dangerous or dishonest to those in charge. I can walk across campus without having to worry that I might be sexually assaulted. I can apply for a loan without having to worry about "sounding white" for the bank teller. And most of all, I can do all of those things without ever viewing them as special or unique to people like me. It's just The Way Things Are.
Indeed, the only times I would really have to think about the issue would be when someone from an unprivileged status makes the privilege deficit an issue. If someone accuses me of hoarding all the visibility on TV shows, I have to suddenly look at my default status and greater visibility as contingent--changeable--rather than Just The Way Things Are. Moreover, I have to consider that The Way Things Are might be wrong or unfair, that I may actually have to share or (more likely) give up some degree of default status or visibility in order to equalize statuses between myself and others.
In other words, awareness is disturbing because it leads to responsibility. As soon as I become aware that I enjoy unearned privileges over others, I become responsible for how those privileges play out. It becomes my problem that women aren't hired for X job at equal rates to men, my problem that black people have a harder time getting good loans than white people, my problem that a taxi will stop for me rather than for the Latina standing next to me. Again, responsibility isn't the same as fault. I didn't personally cause those situations. But it does behoove me to do what I can to remedy them. Otherwise, if I sink back into willful non-awareness, I do more than enjoy unearned privileges; I perpetuate them.
For this reason, I tell my students, we have to be very careful when we assert that the proper course of action in a particular situation is to "agree to disagree" or stop arguing or "be neutral." We have to be careful that the peaceful status quo we seek to restore or preserve isn't just a way to keep ourselves safely unaware of the unearned privileges we hold (and therefore ignorant of the unearned deprivations that others suffer). After all, to silence debate about a privilege issue is primarily to ask those who suffer to shut up and accept their lot in life.
Now--to what extent does this privilege reflection bear on the GLBT debate in the UMC and the desire to "agree to disagree" or stop talking about it? This very question, it turns out, forms part of the debate itself.
More tomorrow,
JF
Saturday, October 24, 2009
GLBT Issues: Two Sides, Two Views
Can't we just agree to disagree?
This is the question I implicitly raised in reacting to Episcopalian Bishop Spong's recent Manifesto about giving up trying to debate or talk to people who don't believe GLBT folk deserve equal status in church and civic life. I myself have written about the GLBT question in relation to fractures afflicting my own United Methodist denomination. Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists--nearly all the "mainline" denominations are facing possible schisms over this issue.
As I've mentioned before, I see the GLBT issue largely as a sock puppet for a deeper conflict about Biblical inerrancy and authority. Scripture seems fairly clear, in a "plain sense" sort of reading, about its prohibitions regarding same-sex erotic behavior. Spong and others have been quite active in deconstructing such plain sense readings of verses like Leviticus 18:22 ("Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable"), but for a great many people of the old "Bible believing" tradition of plain-and-simple-ism, such critical efforts look like chicanery by effete intellectual snobs desperate to weasel their way out of hard truths. Some weaseling and deconstruction they've had to accept--re-interpreting or un-interpreting verses supporting slavery and segregation or passages prohibiting women's ordination--but on the GBLT issue they (the conservatives) have had enough. The slippery slope of re-interpretation stops for them at the reclassification of homosexuality as a non-sin.
The other side--Spong's side, and mine--offers an equally passionate, frustrated reply. Namely, that the church's attitude toward GLBT people is morally wrong and theologically bankrupt. On the latter point, my side argues that the "plain sense" of scripture is at least as full of shenanigans and weaselly interpretive maneuvers as any other hermeneutic--only it's a lot less honest about it. No one reads the Bible totally in its "plain sense." There's always an interpretive consensus--a meta-interpretive framework--that tacitly defines the "sense" that is supposedly "plain."
Take the newish conservative argument that asserts that the Bible promotes--with perfect consistency--a single ideal plan for human living: one man, one woman, for life, in holy matrimony. That's simply preposterous, given the numerous Biblical heroes who had multiple wives (e.g., David, Solomon, Jacob). or no wives at all (e.g., John the Baptist, Jesus, Elijah). Paul is fairly explicit in defining marriage as a last resort for those unable to overcome their lustful natures (I Corinthians 7:9). The only way to read the Bible and come to the conclusion that God specifically and specially ordains non-polygamous, heterosexual marriage as the Ideal and Only Path for Humans is to read with an interpretive lens that blocks out all of the numerous counter-examples and magnifies the verses that seem best to support the hetero-marriage view.
One only has to glance at the history of debates about slavery, women's suffrage, and segregation in this country to see loads of verses quoted with plain-sense fervor in the service of points of view we would now consider repugnant (to be fair, the "good" sides of these debates had their share of Bible-quoters as well). Christianity relies on the Bible, but the Word we worship isn't paper and ink but the living, dynamic Christ whose Spirit moves among us this day.
But--beyond decrying the Biblical chicanery of "plain sense" hermeneutics--my side sees the anti-GLBT side as unloving and un-Christlike. Nothing about same-sex eroticism violates the imperative to love God and to love one's neighbor. The multiple and ongoing campaigns by various conservative religious forces to paint GLBT people as inherently--and solely because of their sexuality--sick, disordered, immoral, or damaged all lose viability when confronted by the example and witness of actual GLBT people. Worse, the vitriol and, frankly, dishonesty that characterizes many of these campaigns bespeak a raw sort of prejudice, a cultural or personal distaste for same-sex behavior and identities that lacks any foundation in logic or the Spirit.
What won the day in struggles about women's rights or racial equality wasn't a superior collection of powerhouse verses but a holy conviction that it is wrong to use non-maleness or non-whiteness as a reason to restrict the full exercise of membership in civic or church life. It is wrong, argue mainline churches, to view women as unfit for ordained ministry even though the scripture literally says otherwise. It is wrong to have slaves, to execute a woman who defends herself from rape though violence, to segregate races, to forbid interracial marriage--to do a host of things the Bible either allows or commands when read in its "plain sense." We believe it's wrong despite the plain sense scriptures to the contrary because the Spirit overcomes the letter.
Why? Because love wins. That's the overriding pattern of Jesus's ministry on earth. If he encounters a person that religious law (the "plain sense" of scripture) would forbid him to touch or speak to, he breaks the law to reach the person. "Lord," begs the leper in Matthew 11, "if you're willing, you can make me clean." Christ reaches out and touches the leper--an explicit violation of Biblical law: "Of course I'm willing. Be clean." Christ's power cured the leprosy, but I think it was the touch that healed.
And again in Acts: "But God, these animals you tell me to eat [i.e., the Gentiles you tell me to preach to] are unclean according to your Law," protests Peter in Acts 10. "Do not call unclean what I have called clean," God responds, "I am changing the rules."
Thus it is, my side argues, with the GLBT issue. It does no good for Christ-followers to hide behind rules when those rules seem to justify unfair treatment or unloving attitudes. Love demands we weigh the good of the person in balance with orthodoxy to a culturally bound rule. The church's attitude toward GLBT people hurts those people and hurts the witness of God (see Kinnaman and Lyon's book Unchristian, where their research identifies the primary adjective that young non-believers link to Christianity as anti-homosexual). It may be in certain interpretations technically Biblical, but it's unChristian.
If those are the two sides (and of course, I've simplified a great deal), is co-existence possible? Can those two sides agree to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
This is the question I implicitly raised in reacting to Episcopalian Bishop Spong's recent Manifesto about giving up trying to debate or talk to people who don't believe GLBT folk deserve equal status in church and civic life. I myself have written about the GLBT question in relation to fractures afflicting my own United Methodist denomination. Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists--nearly all the "mainline" denominations are facing possible schisms over this issue.
As I've mentioned before, I see the GLBT issue largely as a sock puppet for a deeper conflict about Biblical inerrancy and authority. Scripture seems fairly clear, in a "plain sense" sort of reading, about its prohibitions regarding same-sex erotic behavior. Spong and others have been quite active in deconstructing such plain sense readings of verses like Leviticus 18:22 ("Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable"), but for a great many people of the old "Bible believing" tradition of plain-and-simple-ism, such critical efforts look like chicanery by effete intellectual snobs desperate to weasel their way out of hard truths. Some weaseling and deconstruction they've had to accept--re-interpreting or un-interpreting verses supporting slavery and segregation or passages prohibiting women's ordination--but on the GBLT issue they (the conservatives) have had enough. The slippery slope of re-interpretation stops for them at the reclassification of homosexuality as a non-sin.
The other side--Spong's side, and mine--offers an equally passionate, frustrated reply. Namely, that the church's attitude toward GLBT people is morally wrong and theologically bankrupt. On the latter point, my side argues that the "plain sense" of scripture is at least as full of shenanigans and weaselly interpretive maneuvers as any other hermeneutic--only it's a lot less honest about it. No one reads the Bible totally in its "plain sense." There's always an interpretive consensus--a meta-interpretive framework--that tacitly defines the "sense" that is supposedly "plain."
Take the newish conservative argument that asserts that the Bible promotes--with perfect consistency--a single ideal plan for human living: one man, one woman, for life, in holy matrimony. That's simply preposterous, given the numerous Biblical heroes who had multiple wives (e.g., David, Solomon, Jacob). or no wives at all (e.g., John the Baptist, Jesus, Elijah). Paul is fairly explicit in defining marriage as a last resort for those unable to overcome their lustful natures (I Corinthians 7:9). The only way to read the Bible and come to the conclusion that God specifically and specially ordains non-polygamous, heterosexual marriage as the Ideal and Only Path for Humans is to read with an interpretive lens that blocks out all of the numerous counter-examples and magnifies the verses that seem best to support the hetero-marriage view.
One only has to glance at the history of debates about slavery, women's suffrage, and segregation in this country to see loads of verses quoted with plain-sense fervor in the service of points of view we would now consider repugnant (to be fair, the "good" sides of these debates had their share of Bible-quoters as well). Christianity relies on the Bible, but the Word we worship isn't paper and ink but the living, dynamic Christ whose Spirit moves among us this day.
But--beyond decrying the Biblical chicanery of "plain sense" hermeneutics--my side sees the anti-GLBT side as unloving and un-Christlike. Nothing about same-sex eroticism violates the imperative to love God and to love one's neighbor. The multiple and ongoing campaigns by various conservative religious forces to paint GLBT people as inherently--and solely because of their sexuality--sick, disordered, immoral, or damaged all lose viability when confronted by the example and witness of actual GLBT people. Worse, the vitriol and, frankly, dishonesty that characterizes many of these campaigns bespeak a raw sort of prejudice, a cultural or personal distaste for same-sex behavior and identities that lacks any foundation in logic or the Spirit.
What won the day in struggles about women's rights or racial equality wasn't a superior collection of powerhouse verses but a holy conviction that it is wrong to use non-maleness or non-whiteness as a reason to restrict the full exercise of membership in civic or church life. It is wrong, argue mainline churches, to view women as unfit for ordained ministry even though the scripture literally says otherwise. It is wrong to have slaves, to execute a woman who defends herself from rape though violence, to segregate races, to forbid interracial marriage--to do a host of things the Bible either allows or commands when read in its "plain sense." We believe it's wrong despite the plain sense scriptures to the contrary because the Spirit overcomes the letter.
Why? Because love wins. That's the overriding pattern of Jesus's ministry on earth. If he encounters a person that religious law (the "plain sense" of scripture) would forbid him to touch or speak to, he breaks the law to reach the person. "Lord," begs the leper in Matthew 11, "if you're willing, you can make me clean." Christ reaches out and touches the leper--an explicit violation of Biblical law: "Of course I'm willing. Be clean." Christ's power cured the leprosy, but I think it was the touch that healed.
And again in Acts: "But God, these animals you tell me to eat [i.e., the Gentiles you tell me to preach to] are unclean according to your Law," protests Peter in Acts 10. "Do not call unclean what I have called clean," God responds, "I am changing the rules."
Thus it is, my side argues, with the GLBT issue. It does no good for Christ-followers to hide behind rules when those rules seem to justify unfair treatment or unloving attitudes. Love demands we weigh the good of the person in balance with orthodoxy to a culturally bound rule. The church's attitude toward GLBT people hurts those people and hurts the witness of God (see Kinnaman and Lyon's book Unchristian, where their research identifies the primary adjective that young non-believers link to Christianity as anti-homosexual). It may be in certain interpretations technically Biblical, but it's unChristian.
If those are the two sides (and of course, I've simplified a great deal), is co-existence possible? Can those two sides agree to disagree?
More tomorrow,
JF
Friday, October 23, 2009
Polarizations and Organic Intellectuals
So--to pick up from yesterday's theme--Bishop Spong recently released a manifesto in which he resolves not to debate any more on the issue of GLBT inclusion in church and society. He considers that battle won (i.e., that GLBT people should enjoy the same rights and opportunities as straight people) and further debate counterproductive.
The problem is, first, that debates of that sort aren't won simply by one side's saying so. I can respect that Spong himself is weary of fighting; he has, after all, invested much of his time, energy, and reputation over the years into advocating for GLBT rights. But regardless of the weariness of the participants, the debate about GLBT people in the church continues (should they be members? should they be allowed to marry their same-sex partners? should they be ordained). Winning this argument--realizing a day in which GLBT members aren't categorically treated differently in terms of the life of the church--simply isn't up to the will of single person or a single side.
Another problem with the Spong manifesto tactic is that one could just as easily imagine a manifesto from a spokesperson from the "other side," a manifesto that declares the debate settled once and for all. Indeed, such statements are common in my own denomination's ongoing struggle over the status of GLBT people. Inevitably, after every General Conference in which some compromise or pro-GLBT resolution gets defeated, the more conservative partisans on the GLBT issue release a statement to the effect of "Well--now that that unpleasantness is over, we can finally move on. Case closed." But conservative "mission accomplished" manifestos don't end debate any more than progressive ones.
I'm sure that Spong himself is under no illusions that his statement actually reflects reality; the fact that the manifesto enumerates so many people and institutions (including the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury) who continue to support less-than-progressive stances belies Spong's claim that GLBT inclusion is fait accompli. Nor do I buy that Spong actually believes that his preemptive withdrawal from the fight will end the fight.
I remain curious, then, just what effect he's going for. If he's withdrawing due to purely for-my-own-sanity reasons, why release a public statement--more than that, a manifesto--about it? Why not simply withdraw and be done with it? What's the point, in other words, of a manifesto?
Manifestos summon an audience and aim for a particular rhetorical effect, generally either solidarity ("Yes, that's just what I believe, too!") or anger ("How dare he say that! What a rebel!"). Many of Spong's full-length studies (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, for example) could be considered manifestos, attracting the like-minded and repulsing the opposition. He's a polarizer.
Not that I'm knocking polarization per se. Sometimes it's valuable and necessary. In defining the "sides" of this debate, Spong, performs a function similar to what Antonio Gramsci calls an organic intellectual. In his explorations about about how and why certain political parties achieve dominance (hegemony) in particular states, Gramsci spends time discussing how parties form in the first place. They don't just spring into being ex nihilo. Most people--even those who would ostensibly be unified under a certain banner or issue--simply exist together without any political organization. They are a mass, not a party.
For a party to form, a organic (as in "organizing") intellectual must emerge--someone with the power to frame for the mass a new vision of themselves as unified by a commonality--generally some kind of shared injustice. Moreover, the organic intellectual gives to the people a vision of the state as it could be, a "concrete fantasy" or myth of the possible community (usually a situation in which the key injustice is rectified). Once a mass of people internalize this concrete fantasy, they can begin the logistical/educational processes necessary to reform themselves as a party.
Similarly, Spong's work has provided many in the progressive Christian church with an intellectual and moral support structure for pro-GLBT (and, more broadly anti-fundamentalist) reform movements. Like any organic intellectual, Spong defines an activated movement of progressive Christians by identifying both what the movement is for (a concrete fantasy of a church-that-can-be) and what the movement opposes.
Clarity, however, comes at the price of consensus. It's useful to remember that Gramsci formulated his theory keeping in mind the life-and-death struggle between Communists and Fascists in Italy during the 1920s. It was vital, in his view, to make neutrality an untenable position. Or, more precisely, Gramsci's analysis implies that Mussolini's party proved so successful not only through its bullying tactics but also through the concrete fantasy of a masculine, revived, respected/feard Italy--a fantasy that caught on with many Italians who had been disaffected since World War I. As this fantasy gained traction among more and more people, the Fascists ratcheted up the polarization, making those who felt ambivalent about or opposed to the fantasy of New Italy under Il Duce not only "people who hold a different opinion" but active traitors, agents of the foreign governments intent on keeping Italy firmly under Western Europe's thumb. Thus, the Fascists gained power by making "not being a Fascist" unthinkable and unattractive. For or against--you choose.
Beneath the ongoing disagreements about the proper status of GLBT people in the church is a deeper debate, a meta-disagreement, about how the church ought to frame and navigate its differences on this issue. To whit: is the GLBT issue an either/or question? Is polarization inevitable or necessary?
Or, as one study about the United Methodist Church's conflict put it, the GLBT question can be parsed not only into pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides but also into the side of those who see it possible for pro- and anti-GLBT folk to co-exist in the same denomination and the side of those who see pros and antis as so divergent that schism is the only logical or ethical solution.
In his manifesto, Spong adds little that is new to the pro/anti-GLBT debate. But to a greater degree than in previous work, Spong establishes himself as firmly on the "there's no way to agree to disagree" side.
More tomorrow,
JF
The problem is, first, that debates of that sort aren't won simply by one side's saying so. I can respect that Spong himself is weary of fighting; he has, after all, invested much of his time, energy, and reputation over the years into advocating for GLBT rights. But regardless of the weariness of the participants, the debate about GLBT people in the church continues (should they be members? should they be allowed to marry their same-sex partners? should they be ordained). Winning this argument--realizing a day in which GLBT members aren't categorically treated differently in terms of the life of the church--simply isn't up to the will of single person or a single side.
Another problem with the Spong manifesto tactic is that one could just as easily imagine a manifesto from a spokesperson from the "other side," a manifesto that declares the debate settled once and for all. Indeed, such statements are common in my own denomination's ongoing struggle over the status of GLBT people. Inevitably, after every General Conference in which some compromise or pro-GLBT resolution gets defeated, the more conservative partisans on the GLBT issue release a statement to the effect of "Well--now that that unpleasantness is over, we can finally move on. Case closed." But conservative "mission accomplished" manifestos don't end debate any more than progressive ones.
I'm sure that Spong himself is under no illusions that his statement actually reflects reality; the fact that the manifesto enumerates so many people and institutions (including the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury) who continue to support less-than-progressive stances belies Spong's claim that GLBT inclusion is fait accompli. Nor do I buy that Spong actually believes that his preemptive withdrawal from the fight will end the fight.
I remain curious, then, just what effect he's going for. If he's withdrawing due to purely for-my-own-sanity reasons, why release a public statement--more than that, a manifesto--about it? Why not simply withdraw and be done with it? What's the point, in other words, of a manifesto?
Manifestos summon an audience and aim for a particular rhetorical effect, generally either solidarity ("Yes, that's just what I believe, too!") or anger ("How dare he say that! What a rebel!"). Many of Spong's full-length studies (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, for example) could be considered manifestos, attracting the like-minded and repulsing the opposition. He's a polarizer.
Not that I'm knocking polarization per se. Sometimes it's valuable and necessary. In defining the "sides" of this debate, Spong, performs a function similar to what Antonio Gramsci calls an organic intellectual. In his explorations about about how and why certain political parties achieve dominance (hegemony) in particular states, Gramsci spends time discussing how parties form in the first place. They don't just spring into being ex nihilo. Most people--even those who would ostensibly be unified under a certain banner or issue--simply exist together without any political organization. They are a mass, not a party.
For a party to form, a organic (as in "organizing") intellectual must emerge--someone with the power to frame for the mass a new vision of themselves as unified by a commonality--generally some kind of shared injustice. Moreover, the organic intellectual gives to the people a vision of the state as it could be, a "concrete fantasy" or myth of the possible community (usually a situation in which the key injustice is rectified). Once a mass of people internalize this concrete fantasy, they can begin the logistical/educational processes necessary to reform themselves as a party.
Similarly, Spong's work has provided many in the progressive Christian church with an intellectual and moral support structure for pro-GLBT (and, more broadly anti-fundamentalist) reform movements. Like any organic intellectual, Spong defines an activated movement of progressive Christians by identifying both what the movement is for (a concrete fantasy of a church-that-can-be) and what the movement opposes.
Clarity, however, comes at the price of consensus. It's useful to remember that Gramsci formulated his theory keeping in mind the life-and-death struggle between Communists and Fascists in Italy during the 1920s. It was vital, in his view, to make neutrality an untenable position. Or, more precisely, Gramsci's analysis implies that Mussolini's party proved so successful not only through its bullying tactics but also through the concrete fantasy of a masculine, revived, respected/feard Italy--a fantasy that caught on with many Italians who had been disaffected since World War I. As this fantasy gained traction among more and more people, the Fascists ratcheted up the polarization, making those who felt ambivalent about or opposed to the fantasy of New Italy under Il Duce not only "people who hold a different opinion" but active traitors, agents of the foreign governments intent on keeping Italy firmly under Western Europe's thumb. Thus, the Fascists gained power by making "not being a Fascist" unthinkable and unattractive. For or against--you choose.
Beneath the ongoing disagreements about the proper status of GLBT people in the church is a deeper debate, a meta-disagreement, about how the church ought to frame and navigate its differences on this issue. To whit: is the GLBT issue an either/or question? Is polarization inevitable or necessary?
Or, as one study about the United Methodist Church's conflict put it, the GLBT question can be parsed not only into pro-inclusion and anti-inclusion sides but also into the side of those who see it possible for pro- and anti-GLBT folk to co-exist in the same denomination and the side of those who see pros and antis as so divergent that schism is the only logical or ethical solution.
In his manifesto, Spong adds little that is new to the pro/anti-GLBT debate. But to a greater degree than in previous work, Spong establishes himself as firmly on the "there's no way to agree to disagree" side.
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Of Manifestos, Hegemony, and Women's Suffrage
Finally--the editorial is done (well, done until revisions, that is).
Funnily enough, my focus in that piece touched on some of the issues that Bishop Spong raised in his manifesto. There he declared that he is done with arguing, debating, discussing, and defending his stance that GLBT people and behaviors are no more or less acceptable to God, that they are no more or less deserving of equal opportunities to participate in civic and ecclesiastical life, than straight people are. He resolves to view the issue as closed, a moot point not worthy of serious debate.
In a sense, that resolution captures the wish of every practically every political cause. Activists paradoxically work to render their activism unnecessary. The women's suffrage movement in the US, for example, dissolved after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Abolitionists in the US had to move on to other issues after the Civil War (well, after the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, technically). The successful activist is ideally the out-of-work activist.
Success in this sense consists of convincing enough people that your side of a particular issue is so compelling that it is the default way of seeing things. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist jailed by Mussolini, called this kind of success hegemony. Gramsci had been in the 1920s the president of Italy's Communist Party, a role which to post-Cold War US ears might sound like I'm describing him as Darth Vader's right-hand man. In post-World War I Italy, though, it was the Communist Party more than any other that posed the greatest domestic resistance to Mussolini's Fascism. Gramsci and the other Communists fought hard to prevent his rise, but as was the case in other European countries, their effort did not succeed.
During his years in prison, years which in fact ended up killing him, Gramsci reflected long and hard on how it could be that such a despicable bundle of ideas as Fascism could so achieve victory, winning power not only through force (the brownshirts) but also by gaining popular support. Through a collection of writings that came to be known as The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci looked to history and to foreign affairs for clues and examples as to why and how dominant political parties achieve and maintain their dominance.
One of his main insights is that it isn't enough simply to have superior force on your side. Even in non-democratic states, a dominant power must eventually win the consent (if not the wholehearted support) of its populace. Otherwise the overpowering force simply creates martyr after martyr, fomenting dissent while burning up the leadership's energy and resources stamping out rebellions. In democratic states where multiple parties vie for power, winning this popular consent takes a great deal of work. It basically consists of convincing most of the relevant (i.e., voting) population that your party's idea for the country is in fact in their (the populace's) best interests. You make your idea of the Good and the people's idea of the Good conform. It may be that you convince people to support your ideals wholeheartedly, but it would also work simply to convince people that your ideals, while not perfect, are simply better than any other alternative and that no other choice is really viable.
The ultimate goal would be to make your case was so convincing that your party's particular idea of the Good gets seen by most everyone as The Way Things Are And Should Be. You win when your take on an issue gets installed so deeply and permanently into the machinery of what it means to be Italian (or, perhaps, American or Christian) that no one really considers it to be one take among other possible choices.
Hegemony in other words, is when your take on things is the only game in town.
Part of the reason I love teaching theatre history is that I get to introduce students to past moments where the "game in town" was very, very different. To read a suffrage play from the 1910s, for example, is to tap into a world in which the question of whether or not women should be allowed to vote was considered up for debate. It's a bizarre experience to read a play that stages a realistic debate between characters of differing opinions on the suffrage issue (Charlotte Ann Perkins Gilman wrote several good ones along these lines). There's an odd sense of familiarity to the tone of the discussions--the worries about going too far, the call for moderation, the rationally stated resistance to the idea of women voting (voiced often by women themselves), and the desire to let the matter drop.
Plays like this highlight the extent to which present-day US convictions about women's rights are historically specific. We may affirm in 2009 the idea that women naturally have a right (as in, the endowed-by-their-creator natural right) to vote. But the naturalness of this right is a historical fiction, by which I mean not that it is fake or false but that it is the product of human effort. Suffragists worked for over half a century in this country to win people over to the idea that women have the same civil right to vote as men. That their effort was successful is evident in the fact that women's suffrage is now hegemonic. It has ceased to be a political issue in the US at all. No one (well, I'm sure you could find a few isolated voices) seriously suggests that this issue be re-opened, that somehow people should be presented with both sides of "the argument" and allowed to decide for themselves. "The argument" as such does not exist.
It is this state that Bishop Spong wishes to realize with his manifesto about GLBT status in civic and ecclesiastical life. Indeed, his argument is that the debate is already over, that continuing to discuss whether same-sex couples should be married or whether an openly GLBT person may be ordained is as silly as debating whether a woman should be allowed to vote because she's a woman.
But here's the rub: hegemony doesn't happen just because you want it to. Indeed, that Bishop Spong has to write a manifesto to say the debate is over proves that the debate isn't over. It's a common tactic--perhaps the most common tactic--for one side or party in a hegemonic struggle to declare preemptively that its side of things is The Way Things Are rather than one possible way out of many to see things. In critical theory parlance, that tactic is called naturalizing the argument; you frame your way of seeing things as natural, as not open to debate.
But issues that really aren't open to debate--well, they aren't debated. No one debates whether gravity is good or bad; gravity simply is. No one debates whether blood needs to flow through blood vessels in living humans; it simply does. These issues qualify, as far as we are able to imagine, as legitimately naturalized and out of the realm of moral-political debate. Issues about rights and inclusion simply lack that level of naturalness. The closest humans can come to making such issues seem as natural as gravity or blood is hegemony, and hegemony only happens--if it ever does--through loads of work and loads of time.
As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, debates about GLBT issues remain debated--and therefore debatable. Neither my side (which is similar to that of Bishop Spong) nor the "other side" has the privilege of hegemony or naturalization. I question, then, the value of pretending--or, rather, forcefully declaring--otherwise.
More tomorrow,
JF
Funnily enough, my focus in that piece touched on some of the issues that Bishop Spong raised in his manifesto. There he declared that he is done with arguing, debating, discussing, and defending his stance that GLBT people and behaviors are no more or less acceptable to God, that they are no more or less deserving of equal opportunities to participate in civic and ecclesiastical life, than straight people are. He resolves to view the issue as closed, a moot point not worthy of serious debate.
In a sense, that resolution captures the wish of every practically every political cause. Activists paradoxically work to render their activism unnecessary. The women's suffrage movement in the US, for example, dissolved after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Abolitionists in the US had to move on to other issues after the Civil War (well, after the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, technically). The successful activist is ideally the out-of-work activist.
Success in this sense consists of convincing enough people that your side of a particular issue is so compelling that it is the default way of seeing things. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist jailed by Mussolini, called this kind of success hegemony. Gramsci had been in the 1920s the president of Italy's Communist Party, a role which to post-Cold War US ears might sound like I'm describing him as Darth Vader's right-hand man. In post-World War I Italy, though, it was the Communist Party more than any other that posed the greatest domestic resistance to Mussolini's Fascism. Gramsci and the other Communists fought hard to prevent his rise, but as was the case in other European countries, their effort did not succeed.
During his years in prison, years which in fact ended up killing him, Gramsci reflected long and hard on how it could be that such a despicable bundle of ideas as Fascism could so achieve victory, winning power not only through force (the brownshirts) but also by gaining popular support. Through a collection of writings that came to be known as The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci looked to history and to foreign affairs for clues and examples as to why and how dominant political parties achieve and maintain their dominance.
One of his main insights is that it isn't enough simply to have superior force on your side. Even in non-democratic states, a dominant power must eventually win the consent (if not the wholehearted support) of its populace. Otherwise the overpowering force simply creates martyr after martyr, fomenting dissent while burning up the leadership's energy and resources stamping out rebellions. In democratic states where multiple parties vie for power, winning this popular consent takes a great deal of work. It basically consists of convincing most of the relevant (i.e., voting) population that your party's idea for the country is in fact in their (the populace's) best interests. You make your idea of the Good and the people's idea of the Good conform. It may be that you convince people to support your ideals wholeheartedly, but it would also work simply to convince people that your ideals, while not perfect, are simply better than any other alternative and that no other choice is really viable.
The ultimate goal would be to make your case was so convincing that your party's particular idea of the Good gets seen by most everyone as The Way Things Are And Should Be. You win when your take on an issue gets installed so deeply and permanently into the machinery of what it means to be Italian (or, perhaps, American or Christian) that no one really considers it to be one take among other possible choices.
Hegemony in other words, is when your take on things is the only game in town.
Part of the reason I love teaching theatre history is that I get to introduce students to past moments where the "game in town" was very, very different. To read a suffrage play from the 1910s, for example, is to tap into a world in which the question of whether or not women should be allowed to vote was considered up for debate. It's a bizarre experience to read a play that stages a realistic debate between characters of differing opinions on the suffrage issue (Charlotte Ann Perkins Gilman wrote several good ones along these lines). There's an odd sense of familiarity to the tone of the discussions--the worries about going too far, the call for moderation, the rationally stated resistance to the idea of women voting (voiced often by women themselves), and the desire to let the matter drop.
Plays like this highlight the extent to which present-day US convictions about women's rights are historically specific. We may affirm in 2009 the idea that women naturally have a right (as in, the endowed-by-their-creator natural right) to vote. But the naturalness of this right is a historical fiction, by which I mean not that it is fake or false but that it is the product of human effort. Suffragists worked for over half a century in this country to win people over to the idea that women have the same civil right to vote as men. That their effort was successful is evident in the fact that women's suffrage is now hegemonic. It has ceased to be a political issue in the US at all. No one (well, I'm sure you could find a few isolated voices) seriously suggests that this issue be re-opened, that somehow people should be presented with both sides of "the argument" and allowed to decide for themselves. "The argument" as such does not exist.
It is this state that Bishop Spong wishes to realize with his manifesto about GLBT status in civic and ecclesiastical life. Indeed, his argument is that the debate is already over, that continuing to discuss whether same-sex couples should be married or whether an openly GLBT person may be ordained is as silly as debating whether a woman should be allowed to vote because she's a woman.
But here's the rub: hegemony doesn't happen just because you want it to. Indeed, that Bishop Spong has to write a manifesto to say the debate is over proves that the debate isn't over. It's a common tactic--perhaps the most common tactic--for one side or party in a hegemonic struggle to declare preemptively that its side of things is The Way Things Are rather than one possible way out of many to see things. In critical theory parlance, that tactic is called naturalizing the argument; you frame your way of seeing things as natural, as not open to debate.
But issues that really aren't open to debate--well, they aren't debated. No one debates whether gravity is good or bad; gravity simply is. No one debates whether blood needs to flow through blood vessels in living humans; it simply does. These issues qualify, as far as we are able to imagine, as legitimately naturalized and out of the realm of moral-political debate. Issues about rights and inclusion simply lack that level of naturalness. The closest humans can come to making such issues seem as natural as gravity or blood is hegemony, and hegemony only happens--if it ever does--through loads of work and loads of time.
As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, debates about GLBT issues remain debated--and therefore debatable. Neither my side (which is similar to that of Bishop Spong) nor the "other side" has the privilege of hegemony or naturalization. I question, then, the value of pretending--or, rather, forcefully declaring--otherwise.
More tomorrow,
JF
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