Delegates meeting at a special
session of the General Conference of the United Methodist Church voted on
February 26, 2019 to retain the denomination’s ban on gay clergy and same-sex
weddings. The alternative plan would have permitted individual congregations to
decide for themselves. Clearly, Methodism is not Congregationalism. The debate was heated on both sides.[1]
Transcending them, we may ask whether the heat was overblown. Pope Francis had
urged his fellow Roman Catholic bishops and other clergy not to focus so much
on that issue and abortion. That urging was itself controversial, which in
itself can be read as confirmation that the two issues were getting too much
attention and energy. Unlike the case of the Pope’s urging, the vote at the
Methodists’ General Conference threatened to split that Church. Can this too be
taken as an indication that the emphasis on the issue was disproportionate to
its religious importance?
Just how important is
homosexuality as a religious issue in Christianity? Jesus does not speak of it
in the Gospels, so the issue must boil down to God’s referring to two men lying
together as an abomination, which means “disliked by God.” Relatively small
things are also disliked by God, including eating things that crawl on the
bottom of the sea. So rather displeasing
to God does not necessarily translate into a huge sin. How important is the
displeasing itself, whether about something that we now take as arbitrary or
important? In other words, is it really bad to do something that is displeasing
to God. If a person does something that is displeasing to you, that is hardly
worse than something that you hate or even detest. Even so, doing a displeasing
thing is not a good thing, especially as concerns God, which is to be glorified
rather than annoyed. This is perhaps what the issue hinges on in Judaism as
well as Christianity, only the latter has the additional question of how much
attention ought to be paid to the Old Testament prohibitions. That the issue of
homosexuality, like that of abortion, easily gets heated makes it more
difficult to get through these questions.
At root, the Methodist delegates
disagreed on the importance of the abominations in Leviticus for Christians as
well as the importance of “displeasing to God” in itself. Within the
disagreement could also have included how much, if at all, to weigh the
cultural imprint of the ancient Hebrews in the Biblical naming of specific
dislikes of God. Perhaps these questions should have been debated first, so the
delegates could have grasped how much basic disagreement existed. The question
of whether differences on them are sufficiently important as to justify
ecclesiastical separation could have debated too. To be sure, these questions
are not easy, and it could be that the sheer distance between answers could
justify separation. Religious interpretation by nature allows for a lot of
daylight between individual or group interpretations, and people to whom
religion is important are likely to find themselves investing a lot of emotional
energy into that daylight.
Hence, in the history of a given
religion, whether Buddhism, Judaism, or Christianity, splits and splits of the
splits have been the norm. Perhaps this is natural, but it also possible that
the religious person tends to go over-board in failing to restrict his or her
emotions and accepting the fact that a religious institution is not going to
perfectly align with any individual therein. A loss of perspective, including emotional and
cognitive, can easily go with homo
religiosis—our species when it gets religious. In other words, the real
problem may lie with homo sapiens
(i.e., our species). The problem is that the loss of perspective flies in the
face of the core religious nature of
transcendence. As St. Denis of the sixth century wrote, transcendence involves
going beyond the limits of human perception and cognition (and sensibility, or
emotion). So if these are too intense, we can assume too little attention is
being payed to valuing and experiencing transcendence, which if I am correct is
the basis and distinguishing mark of religion as a unique phenomenon or domain.
In theory at least, if religious transcendence
is regarded as foremost, less emotional investment would go into even the basic
questions discussed above. If Joseph Campbell was correct, even the masks of
eternity must be transcended so as not to obstruct a person’s religious
experience, whose referent-point lies inherently beyond perception, cognition,
and sensibility.
For more on transcending the ethical in religion, see Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, available at Amazon.
For more on transcending the ethical in religion, see Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, available at Amazon.
1. Bill Chappell, “United
Methodist Church Votes to Keep Bans on Same-Sex Weddings, LGBTQ Clergy,”
NPR, February 26, 2019.
