As you no doubt recall, I spent a weekend recently groovin' at a Lutheran Synod meeting, debating the role of homosexuals in the church. (Newsflash: Lutherans drink bourbon, and if the Lutherans I met in the hotel bar were any indication, some Lutherans drink a lot of bourbon.) I spent last night reporting back to the Congregation Council (Board of Directors, to you gentiles) of the home church. It's fair to say that the local Lutherans were every bit as divided on the issues of gay marriage and ordination as is the national church.
"You can't tell me," one board member said, "that there are people in the church who think homosexuality is normal and acceptable."
Well, uh, yeah, I can. My guess, based on votes of the very conservative Indiana-Kentucky Synod, is that it's about a 60-40 split, with the minority in favor of gay marriage and ordination. As importantly, on the "60" side there are an awful lot of people who favor a sort of don't-ask-don't-tell policy rather than any kind of purge.
How the church going to get through this intact I don't know. It may not be possible or even desirable. But I'm struck by something I read this morning, via Pandagon, that, to quote the headline, "Christians look to form
'new nation' within U.S." "Christians" are doing this because they're offended by gay marriage and abortion, but mostly by gay marriage.
Well listen here, campers: "Christians," as a bloc, pretty much don't believe any one thing, with the possible exception that Christ was the Son of God -- and some of us (we see you out there, Unitarians) are a little shakey on that.
Christians are a diverse group, running the gamut from Jesse Jackson over there on the left to Pat Robertson on the right. The Bible is a document given to interpretation, and interpret it we do. Take last night's meeting: Two groups, one Bible, two conclusions about gay marriage. Take any significant issue and you'll find much the same thing. The whole point of the Protestant Reformation was that religion is a matter of personal conscience, not obedience to a Pope. (Sorry Catholics, but we protestants are a disorderly bunch.)
Anyway, the article discusses the possibility that Christians -- not "a Christian group" or "a Christian website" or "deeply troubled bigots hiding beneath a cloak of perverse Biblical interpretation" -- might move to one state, take it over, and secede from the Union to form just the right kind of Christian place to raise families and, presumably, be free of sin.
There are, or course, those on the left who think this secessionist movement is not such a bad idea; scroll down Pandagon's comments and you'll meet some of them. The underlying theory is: Get "the fundies" all in one place where they won't bother the rest of us.
This is not a new strategy. My grandmother, a thoroughly delightful woman who was born in the 19th Century and carried with her the hideous bigotry of her time, once suggested as a solution to the Civil Rights unrest of the 1960s that we should "give 'em Texas." Her thinking was not that of today's fashionable Black Secessionist movement -- that separation is the only way to bring about real social justice. Instead, her thinking was that of an expedient bigot: At the cost of a single state that she didn't like much anyway, she could get rid of a bunch of people didn't like anyway. It's a twofer.
There is, of course, no real Christian Secessionist movement. The Yahoo! group for the organization behind the whole thing has, as of this writing, 204 members, and I'd venture that some of them are like me: Goofballs who signed up to get amusing email.
The whole movement is little more than performance art. It's sponsored by an organization called Christian Exodus that is so reputable that its website contains not a single name of a sponsor, board member, or staffer. Clearly, people are clamoring to be part of this movement:
ChristianExodus.org has been established to coordinate the move of 50,000 or more Christians to a single conservative state in the U.S. for the express purpose of re-establishing constitutional governance. It is evident that our Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system. The efforts of Christian activism have proven futile over the past five decades and, whereas desperate times require desperate measures, we are now in the most desperate of times. The federal government is considering whether marriage, the foundation of civilization since Creation, should be reserved solely to a man and a woman. Christians must now draw a line in the sand and unite in a sovereign state to dissolve our bond with the current union comprised as the United States of America.
Now, I'm not one for calling names, but Christian Exodus represents the extreme rightward lunatic conspiracy-theorist dealing-with-a-lot-of-phychological-issues fringe of Christianity.
ChristianExodus.org is orchestrating the move of 50,000 or more Christians to one of three States for the express purpose of dissolving that State’s bond with the union. The three States under consideration are Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina. The exact destination will be chosen by vote of our membership. Our move will commence when the federal government forces sodomite marriages on our local communities or once we reach the 50,000-member mark, whichever comes first.
Nonetheless, there are those who will take this seriously as some sort of indicator or what Christians believe. There will be a binge of publicity. Look for Christian Exodus founders to appear on cable news shows ("Scarborough on line 1!") that are drawn to telegenic extremists. Following that, there will be a substantial fund-raising effort, which will raise just enough money to cover the cost of direct mailings sent out by a firm closely associated with one of the movement's founders. Maybe someone will use the mailing list to tout Christian real estate developments in one of the target states. There may be some mildly scandalous bankruptcy proceedings followed by....nothing much.
The idea that "Christians look to form a new nation within the U.S." is absurd, both Biblically and politically. Christ didn't call for believers to remove themselves from their sinful society; he called for belivers to engage with that society in order to change it. And the idea that even a significant minority of Christians are so offended by gay rights that they would uproot their lives and move to the Eden that is, say, a sprawl of tract homes in rural Alabama, is just ridiculous.
Still, there's a challenge here for Liberals: We need to not take the bait this group presents. We need to avoid doing what WorldNet's headline did: Lumping all Christians into a single, scorn-worthy group. I hear it all the time at meetings of Democrats: Christians this, Christians that, with infomercial snakeoil salesmen like Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell held up as somehow typical.
Remember: Martin Luther King's activism was inspired, in large measure, by his Christianity. Many of his followers believed that the courage that allowed them to stand up to the night riders and fire hoses and police dogs was a gift from God. And many of those who became open to equality and intermingling of races had changes of heart inspired by prayer and reflection.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of hours of community service in support of Liberal causes is performed in the name of Christ. The little old ladies of my church help women getting out of prison regain custody of their children, find affordable daycare, and get and hold jobs. We have groups that feed the hungry and house the homeless. These are people Liberals should see as potential allies, but instead we make sweeping generalizations that turn potential friends into enemies.
That's not how you win elections, and it's not how you change the world for the better.
Comments