Queer Inclusion in the United Methodist Church

Amanda Udis-Kessler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135896225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sexual Health & Sexuality

The United Methodist Church has been in conflict over lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender inclusion issues since 1972. That year, in response to the gay liberation and gay rights movements, wording was added to the UMC Book of Discipline (the compilation of denominational policies and doctrines) characterizing homosexuality as "incompatible with Christian teaching." Since then, United Methodist ministers have been forbidden to perform same-sex commitment ceremonies (and United Methodist churches forbidden to host them), a rule has been passed that non-heterosexual United Methodist ministers must be celibate, and the UMC has forbidden the funding of any program or organization "supporting" homosexuality. These policies have been met with significant resistance by those fighting for GLBT inclusion. In this groundbreaking book, Udis-Kessler examines this struggle, analyzing both sides of this divisive debate among one of the most prominent religious organizations in the United States.

1
Introduction

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

(Matthew 10:34)

MAY 11, 2000

It’s the second-to-last day of the United Methodist Church’s (“UMC”) 2000 denominational meeting, the General Conference. Delegates to this gathering have just voted to retain language characterizing homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching” in the Book of Discipline, the denomination’s compilation of policies and doctrines. I watch, heartbroken, along with dozens of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (“LGBT”) United Methodists (“UMs”)¹ and their supporters as the delegates prepare to vote on several other measures that restrict LGBT UMs in the life of the church. Suddenly, the work of General Conference is shut down as a multitude of LGBT UMs and their allies enter the delegate area to protest the “incompatibility” vote. They wear clergy stoles provided by pastors who had to give up their ministries in order to live openly as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. The protesters are also clad in buttons, stickers, and other paraphernalia traditionally found at a Gay Pride festival, and many wear crosses with rainbows painted on them, signaling their identity as LGBT Christians. This is their second day of protest; almost 200 of them were arrested the day before, along with a UMC bishop.

Before the end of the day, the protesters will have been removed and 27 of them (including two UMC bishops) arrested, and the denomination will have voted to maintain its stance on homosexuality by a two-to-one margin. In addition to the incompatibility language, the United Methodist Church will have once again prohibited lesbians and gay men who will not commit to celibacy from being pastors. UMC pastors will have once again been forbidden to perform same-sex commitment ceremonies (“holy unions”), and UMC churches will have been forbidden to host them. The denomination will have once again been forbidden to fund any program or organization “supporting” homosexuality. The overall outcome will be considered a victory for the conservative and evangelical elements of the UMC², and interpreted as continued inequality within the church among the “inclusionists.”³

General Conference 2000, particularly the restrictive votes and the inclusionist protest, is a good place to begin the story of the UMC LGBT inclusion struggle⁴ because this moment in UM time captures the nature of the conflict exceptionally well. The year 2000 was the culmination of a 28-year period during which the inclusionists were consistently outvoted on the “incompatibility language” (which was first added in 1972) and the homosexuality-related prohibitions (the first of which was added in 1976).⁵ The two-to-one margin in 2000 could mean that most UMs did not approve of homosexuality, that evangelical groups were more successful in getting delegates elected, or that other factors were in play. One might wonder, though, why a denomination generally committed to social justice appeared not to sustain that commitment when it came to LGBT people in their own church. Inclusionists, in turn, chose to protest because they understood protests as a natural and appropriate response to inequality. Indeed, inclusionists had protested to some degree at every General Conference since at least 1988, though 2000 marked the first time related to homosexuality that such protesters were arrested and removed from the plenary floor.⁶ However, as inclusionists both told me and demonstrated by their actions, their day-to-day lives as UMs were not focused on protest and politics, but rather on mundane church activities and on their walk with Christ. One might wonder, then, why inclusionists perceived General Conference as in need of a protest that would shut it down, albeit temporarily; one might also wonder about the effects of their protest on the rest of the church. The logic behind the votes and the protest, their relation to each other, and their impact on those invested in the struggle (evangelicals, inclusionists, the “Methodist middle”)⁷ are the subject of this book.

MEANING, POWER, AND INEQUALITY IN MAINLINE CHRISTIANITY

The question of how mainline Christian denominations such as the UMC should respond to their LGBT members has received a great deal of attention recently. The issue of LGBT inclusion has been characterized as “the most divisive element facing the Church today,” the most volatile issue facing mainline denominations, and “the fault line in American Christianity.”⁸ Every mainline denomination has been dealing with the subject since the 1970s, as have denominations outside the mainline, all four branches of U.S. Judaism, and other world religions.⁹ Denominational struggles over homosexuality have been intractable and frustrating for those seeking inclusion, those resisting it, and the large majority of Christians “in the middle” who generally support gay rights but who do not find homosexuality morally acceptable. At the time of this writing, the Episcopal Church in the United States is in deep tension with the worldwide Anglican Communion as a result of the Episcopal Church’s unwillingness to cease performing holy unions or to guarantee categorically that no more lesbian or gay bishops will be consecrated. Studying the United Methodist struggle may thus be valuable simply because the UMC is among the denominations that have felt the need to ask, “Will homosexuality split the church?”¹⁰

Beyond the UMC conflict’s import for church members, a case can be made that any church struggle involving votes and protests should have some valuable insights for the study of social inequality. Christianity is an extremely powerful social institution, for better and for worse, and because it trades so heavily in meaning and symbols, it can be a highstakes locus for reproducing or transforming any kind of inequality based on social devaluation; this may be particularly true for LGBT inequality. For example, people who attend church frequently demonstrate more antigay prejudice than those who do not attend church frequently, and even people involved in LGBT-tolerant religions show more antigay prejudice than those with no religious preference.¹¹ Correlation is not causation, but it does suggest some kind of relationship between Christianity and antigay prejudice. My research suggests that religiously conservative Christians object to the church supporting civil rights for LGBT people even in the public sphere, while they work diligently to keep prohibitions that can be interpreted as antigay in place within the church.

Even those in the “Christian middle,” who support civil rights for LGBT people in the public sphere, often treat the church quite differently. U.S. polls suggest that people who would be completely comfortable with a gay man selling furniture, performing surgery, and even serving in the military are unwilling to belong to a denomination that would ordain the same gay man as a pastor. Similarly, some people who believe that a lesbian couple is entitled to legal protection of their rights as a family unit would leave their congregation if its pastor blessed the same couple’s holy union in church.¹² While the commitment of such people to equality in the public sphere is laudable, it is somewhat inconsistent that such commitment should not extend into all social institutions, including religion. Studying the UMC conflict can help explain why LGBT equality is more likely to be stymied within Christianity than within other, non-religious, contexts.¹³

It is also important, however, to acknowledge and understand when and where Christianity is a source for transformation in the direction of equality. What does religion look like for inclusionists, both LGBT and heterosexual? Here, too, the study of a mainline denomination’s sexuality struggle can help explain the differences between Christians who reproduce LGBT inequality on all fronts, those who support equality in civil society but not in the church, and those who work to make the church fully inclusive.

This study takes seriously the connection between religion’s role in helping people make sense of the world, on the one hand, and religion’s homophobia and heterosexism on the other. My approach follows that of Sered (1997, 1999) in linking the symbolization of a group to its disenfranchisement. By applying mechanisms of devaluation normally associated with other kinds of inequality (racism, sexism, class inequality) to homophobia and heterosexism, and by demonstrating how these mechanisms work in a religious context, I seek to show that the United Methodist Church reproduces homophobia and heterosexism institutionally regardless of whether that is its intention. The issue of intentionality is important because evangelical and conservative UMs routinely claim that they don’t mean anyone ill, and that they are not “unkind” or “stony-hearted” as inclusionists sometimes characterize them. They profess simply to be committed to religious values that do not allow them to accept homosexuality.¹⁴ Without entirely rejecting their claim, I situate it in a larger context of cultural values and institutional priorities that renders intentionality unnecessary for social inequality to flourish in the church.

The “United Methodist Church” is, of course, more than the delegates who vote on what to leave in or remove from the Book of Discipline, and more than the congregations filled with people who might accept a lesbian realtor but not necessarily a lesbian pastor. The denomination also includes the inclusionists, those clergy and laity who consider themselves “the loyal opposition”¹⁵ when it comes to the sexuality-related prohibitions. The inclusionists clearly intend to transform the church in the direction of LGBT equality. However, the question can be raised, even in their case, as to whether actions such as the General Conference 2000 protest truly aid them in their cause. My findings suggest the controversial possibility that protesting may have a complex set of consequences for the inclusionists, not all of them positive.

Finally, the UMC sexuality struggle should be of interest to those concerned with LGBT equality more generally because of just how “American” United Methodism is, and because of just how Methodist the United States has been in the past. The extent to which U.S. Methodism and American culture have historically informed each other suggests that the UM sexuality struggle may provide insights about the possibilities and challenges facing LGBT people and their allies in society more broadly.

PREVIOUS STUDIES OF THE UNITED METHODIST LGBT INCLUSION CONFLICT

While a number of researchers have studied the UMC inclusion struggle, most have been interested either in documenting inequality or in theory development, but not in both to an equal degree.¹⁶ Comstock’s (1996) study of lesbian/gay/bisexual people in the United Church of Christ and the UMC represents a good example of research that focuses on recording experiences of sexuality-based inequality without separately generating new theory. Comstock studied religious belonging, switching, leaving, and “religion shopping;” service, participation, leadership, and advocacy in church; experiences with seminary, ordination, ministry, and employment; beliefs and theology; available support and community; and evaluations, feelings, reasons, and challenges related to staying in the church. He found substantial structural and cultural inequality in most of these areas. In terms of feelings associated with being an LGBT United Methodist, 50 percent of respondents reported feeling angry, 46 percent reported feeling discouraged, 44 percent reported feeling marginalized, 41 percent reported feeling sad, and 26 percent reported feeling unwelcome (ibid., 204–205). Most UM respondents did not feel good about their affiliation with the denomination, and “reported that they remained affiliated with their denomination because they are committed to changing their denomination” (ibid., 229), particularly with regard to the homosexuality-related prohibitions. Others stayed because they had found supportive local congregations or because they protected themselves by maintaining only a “tangential” relationship with the denomination. Still others stayed, simply, because United Methodism was home for them (ibid., 228–229).¹⁷

Several studies of the UMC sexuality struggle that focus on theory development incorporate the inclusionist experience of inequality to some degree, such as Stephens’ (1997) application of various conflict resolution theories to the struggle. Similarly, Oliveto (2002) studied the processes by which important organizations on both sides of the struggle came into existence, determining that congregations were a particularly important locus of social change because they served as a meeting place for “private” and “public” concerns. One early study (Wood and Bloch 1995) examined the conflict but took a substantially different tack, finding evidence that General Conference 1992 served as a model of civility and Habermasian communication.

One study (Moon 2000, 2004) stands out in combining theory development and a focus on inequality within the church. Moon used participant observation and interviewing to study two UM congregations, one in Chicago and one in a nearby rural area, in order to learn how members of these congregations made sense of homosexuality and denominational struggles around it. The urban church, which prided itself on being inclusive, had experienced turmoil over the issue. The rural church had few inclusion-minded members, and had several members involved with ministries designed to transform homosexuals into heterosexuals. While Moon interviewed some lesbian and gay church members, her focus was on “normals,” those she described as “unmarked,” and she sought to show “how [such] people reproduce the silent authority of normative sexuality as they seek in their daily lives to discern between right and wrong, godly and sinful, loving and unloving” (2000:15–16).

Moon found that her respondents defined church and politics as opposites (2000:18; see also Moon 2004). They appeared to construct marriage and the church as unmarked “zones of innocence” standing not just apart from, but in contrast to, issues of politics, inequality, and sex. These latter three “zones” were understood as material realities from which one escaped in church through spiritual transcendence. Just as the home has been described as a “haven in a heartless world,” the church was a haven from the secular world for Moon’s respondents.

While Moon studied the inclusion conflict at the congregational level and I studied it at the denominational level, our findings are similar on several fronts. First, Moon (2000) found that church members shifted among discourses of Scripture, tradition, science, experience, and democratic ideals in their reasoning about homosexuality; I observed identical discourses at play in published literature, during interviews, and throughout my fieldwork at General Conference 2000. Second, we both found a tension between “the church” and “the world” that substantially informs how those opposed to full LGBT inclusion make sense of the struggle. Finally, we both concluded that this “church”-“world” tension creates a dilemma for the inclusionists, though we understand the dilemma in slightly different ways. Moon (2004) notes the improbability that “gay pain in church” will win cong...