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Gays and Religion: Soulforcing the church |
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Monday morning, April 28, marked the beginning of our fourth day of Soulforce activities – our third day of vigil at the 2008 United Methodist General Conference, in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Five of us from Tyler had taken the three-hour trip to Fort Worth: Lou Anne, Brenda, Tom, Ernest and me, Troy. At least it wasn’t raining, like it had been on Sunday. Now, at last, a little weary for the effort, I began to understand the drum. In this early morning hour, a young woman unexpectedly yet most welcomedly positioned herself behind us, in support of us and our cause, and began drumming. In the crisp morning air, the deep beat of her African drum wrapped us in a blanket of beat that seemed to urge, “keep go-ing… you go, boy… I love you… keep go-ing….” Soon, the doors of the conference would open. Throngs of delegates emerged for their break period. Now, we were more popular than before. More delegates took our pictures in that fifteen-minute period than during the entire previous weekend. Eventually, a half-dozen delegates would hug us and explain that the General Conference had just elected five new members of their judiciary body, which I took to be the Methodist equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court. Every last one of the new judiciary members had expressed liberal support of gay rights, and every one of the members who had expressed conservative, right-wing, anti gay views had been voted out. What’s more, the delegates felt that Soulforce had made a real difference. They had come out to thank us and hug us and to take our pictures! Even some of the ultra-conservative people who had earlier only sneered came out, as if to look for the first time at the group who had made such a difference to the Methodist voting machine -- as if to gather evidence to take home and say, “We hadn’t expected these people!”
I was greatly moved by my Soulforce weekend, and I think you will be, too, when you read this. Even now, I’m trying now to digest it enough to write about it. This is hard because there’s so much to explain -- why we needed to go; the role of religion in our oppression; the camaraderie we felt, the victories we won, the hope we were washed in, the songs we sang and the tears we cried. First, it may be helpful to ask the first question. Why did we need to go? Or more to the point: Why did Soulforce have this weeklong vigil outside the United Methodist 2008 General Conference in the first place? You know your actions are most effective when they’re aimed at the source of a particular issue. If I’ve got a leak in my ceiling, I can either keep cleaning up the water, or I can patch the hole in my roof. In the case of hate and violence against gays, the source tends to be pseudo-literal biblical interpretations. Our churches unfortunately empower and even encourage all anti-gay violence, from the mildest but insidious spiritual violence, to egregious laws against our human rights, to the most grotesque murders and assassinations. When preachers say that, “Homosexuality is incompatible with Christianity,” our religious institutions grant license for violence. They are therefore a primary interest to gay activists. And by “gay,” our meaning is inclusive, not leaving out lesbians, bisexual or transgender people. InclusionThis is a crucial point, because many of us still want to leave out the transgender community. But we do this at our own peril. We must believe that our goal is equal treatment for all people. Since transgender people suffer the most severe discriminations, we have a special duty to always include them in our quest for equality. So when I say “gay,” I’m talking about all of us. The footnote is that transgender people have long been fighting for your rights. When I went to Equality Texas’ “Lobby Day” late in 2006, I found that nearly half of the lobbyists were transgender people. Transgender people always show their activism more than the rest of us – they put us to shame… maybe because they are the brunt of the worst discriminations. They “get it,” they understand the urgent need for change, and so they are more likely to do something about it. Many gays, by contrast, don’t personally feel discrimination, so they don’t understand the need for activism. Every year, on the 18th of November, there’s a vigil called “The Day of Remembrance,” for all those transgender people who were slain the previous year. We either stand up against this violence, or by our inaction or exclusion, we tacitly condone it. Which side would you rather stand on? Slow to ChangeIt’s best to think of activist events in terms of making a dent in prejudice, rather than ending it. Like world hunger, maltreatment of gays tends to be too big an issue to hope that any one of our activist activities might actually stomp it out altogether. Furthermore, even this “dent” we’re hoping to make is likely going to take place long after we’ve left, in some private space removed from our sight or knowledge. There’s something about human nature that makes us change our minds in personal places and in the sanctuary of our own reflective times. It is a gradual process – one that resists force. This makes change a very slow process. There’s a long history of sanctioned church violence against gays in America, which only makes it slower to change. In spite of great leaps in other areas, we continue to suffer tremendous backlash and reversals. Almost without exception this is a direct result of efforts by religious leaders. A brief history of the United Methodist General conference, which is held every four years, shows just how slow this change is. At the 2000 Conference, held in Cleveland, “Police arrested 27 gay-rights protesters who took the stage at the United Methodists General Conference yesterday and sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ moments after delegates reaffirmed the church's ban on clergy performing same-sex marriages.”1 By the conclusion of that convention, some 200 protesters would be arrested. And 2004, in Pittsburgh, the Conference once again reaffirmed the church’s position against gays.2 The issue was especially poignant for us with the United Methodist Church, or UMC, because these were supposed to be the “good guys.” Having adopted a slogan of “Open hearts, open minds, open doors,” many church-goers were shocked to discover that their church was still employing the language of exclusion, calling gays “incompatible” with Christian teaching, barring pastors from performing same-sex commitment ceremonies, disallowing gay or transgender people from ordination, and turning away gay people who wanted to join, sing in the choir, teach classes and even refusing transfer of church membership. Sometimes it helps to realize how long it took the church to give blacks equal consideration, and to realize that even today there is work to be done. At the General Conference of 1836, prominent Methodists such as Dr. Olin, Bishop Soule, Dr. Bond and Bishop Hedding argued that blacks did not deserve to be treated as equals, one of them going as far as to say that slave owners should be allowed to be bishops.3 Yet gradually, these attitudes and perceptions gave way to the idea that we should not draw lines between “classes” of people. Even so, as recently as 1968, we see that many Methodist leaders were still arguing for continued segregation of the church. Friday was a celebration of SoulforceOur long weekend served two purposes. Aside from voicing our opinions to the Methodist Conference, we were also celebrating the ten-year (almost to the day) anniversary of Soulforce itself. I had met Soulforce founder, author and religious leader, Reverend Doctor Mel White, Friday afternoon at the first scheduled event of the weekend, Picnic in the Park with Transgender People of Faith – held directly across the street from the Methodist Conference headquarters. For me, seeing Mel White in person was like meeting a rock star. Author of the influential books, Stranger at the Gate and Religion Gone Bad, Mel is an itinerant, long-time activist’s activist, and a modern-day bearer of the torch for the brand of non-violent protest originally carried by such visionaries as Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Those are pretty large shoes to fill… which may help explain why I was tongue-tied when I met him. When he asked me whether I was from Dallas, I awkwardly responded, “No, er, we just drove in from Houston, uh, I mean Tyler….” All during the transgender presentation, the rhythm of drums played, like a human pulse, from across the street, where a Methodist gay & lesbian youth group held a drumming circle. This drumming circle would play non-stop for the first two days after we arrived. They played through the night, taking shifts, the beat not stopping even in the night time hours, when they were forced to endure hateful slurs by drunk visitors. The police were called, but thankfully, there was no violent incident. Friday evening, Soulforce volunteers were setting up the registration tables, and I offered to help. Soon, people were filling the Marriott’s ballroom, as a piano player laid into fun renditions of Broadway tunes. I consider myself an activist, yet here, in this room, I felt small next to the celebrities and the gathering cadre of regulars, most of whom were long-time Soulforce “peace-niks.” The anniversary program included a tribute to Soulforce co-founders, Mel White and Gary Nixon; executive director, Jeff Lutes; and to the entire Soulforce board and staff. There was also a video presentation, chronicling ten years of Soulforce actions. For ten years, they’ve continued a steady stream of actions, several per year, which is all the more impressive when you realize how small the Soulforce staff is. In my book, that makes all of them true heroes. Saturday, we learned how to draw lines, and then how to erase themTom, Earnest and I shared a room to save expenses, and we were up at 4:30 a.m. Saturday morning preparing for our first vigil. We dressed in the special T-Shirts, designed to help explain our purpose there. These were simple, white T’s, the backs of which were printed with: “Soulforce Vigil for Justice – United Methodist General Conference ’08.” And on the front, the slogan: “Open your: HEARTS to marriage; MINDS to ministry; DOORS to membership… for lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender people.” The hotel had promised to have coffee ready for us, but the employee assigned to this task had failed to show up, so the joke began to circulate that we’d be hearing all weekend. “Coffee failure” was to be our first act of “redemptive suffering,” a concept first mentioned during the anniversary celebration the night before, when Mel White had urged us to reconcile ourselves that most of the “change” we’d likely experience would be the change in our own hearts and souls. We didn’t yet realize how profound this transformation might become for us. For now, it was a cause for a simple chuckle. And the coffee was made shortly anyhow, offering some welcome respite to this so-called “redemption.”
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Troy Carlyle |
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1Source: http://www.thepost.ohiou.edu/archives/archives3/may00/051200/brief9.html. The Post is a student-run daily newspaper serving Ohio University, Athens and Athens County. 2Source: NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1851374. 3The Methodist Convention of 1870: Who wrote that last resolution? How came it to be adopted? Thanks to Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Research Center, Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection. |
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We sang several songs at the anniversary celebration on Friday. Thankfully, they projected the words onto the wall, and I noticed that most of them seem to have been borrowed from the civil rights movement. Some, in fact, were old black spiritual songs. |
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Mel White at the Soulforce Tenth Anniversary Celebration on Friday. |
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Mel White (L) and Jimmy Creech shortly before our “Non-Violent Activist Training” on Saturday morning. It is essential that Soulforce activist/volunteers convey peace and love, and “refrain from violence of fist, tongue, and heart.” |
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"Valor lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice." |