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
Showing posts with label spong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spong. Show all posts
Saturday, October 24, 2009
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
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Spong Manifesto
Still (!) working on that dang editorial.
Nonetheless: I ran into a fascinating piece today, a manifesto by the Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. Spong is well-known in progressive Christian circles (and reviled in conservative Christian circles) for books like Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. There he takes an unabashedly liberal view of some of the main tenets of Christian doctrine, challenging believers to relinquish views he considers fundamentalist, e.g., the Bible as inerrant, the narratives in scripture as literal histories, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ. He has been a particularly vocal advocate of GLBT inclusivity in church and society and bitter critic of faith-based rationales for denigrating GLBT people.
The manifesto ("A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!") continues this latter trend. Well--I say continues. Bishop Spong himself presents the manifest as a kind of final word on the subject, his "I will fight no more forever" statement.
A quote is in order:
"I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is "an abomination to God," about how homosexuality is a "chosen lifestyle," or about how through prayer and "spiritual counseling" homosexual persons can be "cured." Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy."
He continues with further personal resolutions regarding not listening to debates, reading or listening to views "from the other side," or bothering to respond to them in person or in print. He mixes in other resolutions about dismissing those in breakaway factions of the Episcopal church (who are leaving to align themselves with other bodies in the Anglican Communion), ignoring religious leaders like the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury on matters relating to human sexuality, and--in a gutsy move--criticizing various "third-world" ministers who foster "killing prejudice" against GLBT people and get away with it by virtue of their origins.
The battle, he argues, is over. Inclusion is the way of the future, and the church can either get on board or move out of the way. Spong makes it clear that he views the topic of GLBT sexuality as closed, just as most of Christendom views questions of whether segregation is right or whether wives are their husbands' property as no longer debatable. He resolves, finally, to turn his energies and attention elsewhere.
A bold statement, to be sure.
I have questions, however, as to its purpose and ends...
More tomorrow,
JF
PS--100th post! Yay blog! (even though the last few posts have been quite slim).
Nonetheless: I ran into a fascinating piece today, a manifesto by the Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. Spong is well-known in progressive Christian circles (and reviled in conservative Christian circles) for books like Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. There he takes an unabashedly liberal view of some of the main tenets of Christian doctrine, challenging believers to relinquish views he considers fundamentalist, e.g., the Bible as inerrant, the narratives in scripture as literal histories, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ. He has been a particularly vocal advocate of GLBT inclusivity in church and society and bitter critic of faith-based rationales for denigrating GLBT people.
The manifesto ("A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!") continues this latter trend. Well--I say continues. Bishop Spong himself presents the manifest as a kind of final word on the subject, his "I will fight no more forever" statement.
A quote is in order:
"I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is "an abomination to God," about how homosexuality is a "chosen lifestyle," or about how through prayer and "spiritual counseling" homosexual persons can be "cured." Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy."
He continues with further personal resolutions regarding not listening to debates, reading or listening to views "from the other side," or bothering to respond to them in person or in print. He mixes in other resolutions about dismissing those in breakaway factions of the Episcopal church (who are leaving to align themselves with other bodies in the Anglican Communion), ignoring religious leaders like the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury on matters relating to human sexuality, and--in a gutsy move--criticizing various "third-world" ministers who foster "killing prejudice" against GLBT people and get away with it by virtue of their origins.
The battle, he argues, is over. Inclusion is the way of the future, and the church can either get on board or move out of the way. Spong makes it clear that he views the topic of GLBT sexuality as closed, just as most of Christendom views questions of whether segregation is right or whether wives are their husbands' property as no longer debatable. He resolves, finally, to turn his energies and attention elsewhere.
A bold statement, to be sure.
I have questions, however, as to its purpose and ends...
More tomorrow,
JF
PS--100th post! Yay blog! (even though the last few posts have been quite slim).
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