To Talk of Many Things

And now time to catch up on this and that.

I mentioned some time ago (I think) that my nephew Luke had completed his master’s degree in South Asian Studies. Recently, I read his thesis, and doing that reminds me once again to congratulate him on his accomplishment.

The thesis is a study of how India and the Indian media have viewed ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka in the past decade. It’s well-written, cogently argued, and thoughtful. I’m proud of my nephew and hope this degree will be a starting point for jobs that fulfill his dreams, and/or more education.

I also mentioned in a previous posting that my nephew Kate had applied for the job of her dreams in the big city. Kate was offered the job she wanted and began a few weeks ago. She seems very happy in her new life. I’m proud of her, too, and wish her very well.

Perhaps because I’ll always be an educator at heart, I think often these days of the world we’ll leave to the next generation. I’m frightened. I’m sad. I’m not confident we who have “made” the world that’s being handed on have done a very good job of it.

I read discussions of the recent UMC General Conference on the official UMC website and elsewhere. One recurrent theme is that the conversation about homosexuality—which is to say, about our LGBT brothers and sisters—should be over.

We’ve had our say. We’ve told them they’re sinners. If they don’t like it, they should look for another church. We have better things to do, real needs to attend to. Let’s stop talking about an issue that we’ve resolved in favor of biblical truth.

I’m appalled at such discourse. It’s everywhere. As E.J. Dionne’s book Souled Out notes, the lines created by the intersection of political and religious concerns in the U.S. have created alliances across religious communions. The same rhetoric of exclusion that I’m reading on UMC websites exists in my own Catholic church, where brothers and sisters concerned to maintain the purity of their church routinely invite brothers and sisters with less access to The Truth to leave and join the Episcopalians.

I’m appalled. How can anyone who understands what church is all about, at its core level, invite others to leave? What is it about the very presence, the faces, the existence of gay brothers and sisters, that elicits such savagery among many followers of Christ?

How can anyone read the gospels and think that they’re about our becoming comfortable, about excluding anyone who makes us think about the world in surprising new ways that cause extreme discomfort? How can anyone who reads the gospels (or has even a passing knowledge of Christian history) not see the ugly insincerity of the choice of the contemporary church to choose one “sin” alone as The Sin for which one should forever be excluded from communion?

And as this happens, young folks—those to whom we’re bequeathing the sorry mess we have made of the world—have almost no interest, on the whole, in maintaining these structures of exclusion. If the churches of Main Street USA are really concerned about transmitting the gospel to a new generation, they’d be doing all they can to end the exclusion of LGBT brothers and sisters, if only to build bridges to the new generation.

The fact that churches want to keep on clinging to these structures of exclusion has everything to do, I believe, with the need of some of us to remain comfortable and to remain empowered. We’ll do anything we can to hold onto the seats of power, even if that “anything” includes lying about and savaging a marginalized group of people. We will mortgage the future of the coming generation to maintain our power and privilege in the present.

On the lying front, I see articles on various blogs today about how the religious right wishes to take credit for supporting interracial marriage, in the wake of the death of Mildred Loving. As a number of blogs are noting, those in the religious right now taking credit for having advanced the cause of interracial marriage are, quite simply, lying about the roots of the religious right—about its roots in a reflex reaction in the Southern U.S. against integration.

As I have noted, I know these folks, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. Their attempt to celebrate civil rights today is tinny and insincere, coming as it does from the same quarters that, a half century ago, fought tooth and nail to keep segregation in place, including in the church. The strategy of division in the religious right—of pitting African Americans against LGBT Americans, and of implying that the civil rights aspirations of the former are legitimate and of the latter illegitimate—rests on a whopper of a lie about the commitment of the religious right to racial equity.

As the blog commentaries are also noting, Mildred Loving herself noted the parallels between her struggle as an African-American woman to be free to marry the man she loved, and the struggle of LGBT Americans for equality. Mildred Loving was among the many African Americans who see the important connections between the fight for civil rights among African Americans and the parallel fight of LGBT Americans for equality.

I say much of this as well against the backdrop of the current U.S. presidential election, where recent articles note that the rise of Barack Obama to the position of Democratic front runner has everything to do with the need of younger people to have a future full of hope. Hope. Change. Those wedded to the politics of the past miscalculated, in this election cycle. In ridiculing the emphasis of Barack Obama and his supporters on hope and change, the defenders of the status quo have failed to understand the dynamics driving the millennial generation.

As with the churches and those defending the status quo in church life . . . .

Finally, I write against the backdrop of conversations with my co-religionists about issues like giving communion to politicians who have made statements supporting abortion. I find it very difficult to believe that we are undergoing that stupid conversation once again.

Polls indicate that the large majority of U.S. Catholics do not want to see the Eucharist used as a political weapon. Catholic tradition at its best maintains that the decision of someone to receive communion is a decision of conscience made by the person herself, in consultation with her spiritual director.

The Eucharist should not be politicized. If American Catholics cannot move beyond the politics of stalemate produced by the religious right, we will end up having nothing to say to contemporary culture. We won’t be part of the coalition trying to forge a new political consensus around the hope for constructive change for the future.

It is such a tragic waste of time and energy, to be involved in these stale old battles that are merely symbolic—attempts of a group of religious purists to assert their symbolic control over the rest of us. I am growing not merely weary of these attempts, but impatient of them.

Each time we have an election cycle, I notice the vultures hovering over the inter-religious conversations of churches in the U.S., doing all they can to pick at the bones of discontent in the conversation, so that the conversations do not move forward, so that people continue fighting over this and that scrap. These are carefully engineered and well-funded attempts to thwart the possibility that progressive groups within the mainstream churches might make common cause and move the political discussion in a new direction.

Those engaged in this sabotage process are seldom honest about what they are doing, about the groups for which they shill, about who is funding them, about the unsavory groups with which they are allied. And yet, one of their choice tactics is to try to manipulate the words of those they’re seeking to stalemate, to imply that their progressive opponents are dishonest and corrupt.

Enough. Anyone filled with belief is filled with hope. And hope builds. Hope is about giving ourselves over to a love that moves us outside ourselves and beyond ourselves. The ravenous need to control—to destroy in the process of controlling—is about some other kind of energy, not an energy fed by hope and love.