The Deathbed Confession

Confessions, if one is a reformed Christian, are the place where a church stands and makes a statement about a crisis facing the church.  Who are we, and how do we retain our integrity as God's people given a moral challenge that faces us right now?  What is it that subverts our discipleship?  What must we declare together, if we are to follow Jesus as authentically as we can?

It is, in that, a declaration intended to be both unifying and integrative.  

Like the Barmen Declaration, which challenged the usurpation of the church by the Nazi regime, or the Belhar Confession, which renounces the spiritual blight of racist segregationism from the depths of South African apartheid, most confessions rise from a condition of conflict, and give the faithful a clear vision of where the Beloved Community must stand.

They are a fierce call to integrity in life together.  It's why Presbyterians remember confessions, and why the Book of Confessions is part of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Constitution.

Our era poses plenty of challenges for the church, and so...Presbyterians being who we are...we've convened a committee to come up with a statement that speaks powerfully to where God is calling us right now.  They've done the work, and now we've been asked, by that committee, to give that confession a read.  

Then, we have been asked to sit with it a while.  Where it troubles us, reflect meaningfully on why, and then consider it some more.  When we've done that, respond.

The confession they've drafted for our consideration does not yet have a name, other than "Proposed New Confession." This doesn't quite have the ring of "Second Helvetic" or "Westminster," although it's probably already catchier than "Brief Statement."  Were I a marketer, I'd really want us to have a stronger brand identity at launch.

So how does it read?  What does it say?  What are we called to affirm, and what crisis calls us to a moment of choosing and shared witness?

The language is reflective of the academic-progressive character of the PC(USA), and marks our denomination's continued emphasis on inclusion and welcome.  It has four sections.  The first, entitled Image of the Triune God, lays out our understanding of the nature of...surprise surprise...the Triune God.  It does so in language that moves even further down the inclusive language path than the Brief Statement of Faith.  In tone and semiotic choices, it's fuzzier and more prone to poesy than other confessions, but nonetheless retains a vital and necessary core witness to the nature of our Creator. 

I particularly appreciated its Augustinian expression of the Trinity as Love, which shows some solid theological chops cast with concision and poetry.  It's in essence the same understanding of an interrelationship of love that C.S. Lewis expresses in Mere Christianity, even if it's wearing some soft flannel pajamas.  

One could quibble, I suppose, with some of the language.  Like, say, the use of the word "affection" as a wiffle-ball euphemism for "sexual orientation."  Them's ain't the same things, y'all, not by a long shot.  στοργή is not Ἔρως is not ἀγάπη, right?  

Generally speaking, it's perfectly fine.

The second section, Turning Away From God's Image, establishes the nature of the crisis.  

In four powerful paragraphs, it lays the essence of the challenge of our age.  The first three name that challenge: that humankind has once again lost itself in the thrall of wealth and power.  This love of Mammon and the sword has corrupted the witness of faith, and as a prophetic critique, it's dead on.  It stings like Amos and Micah, and delivers the sort of uppercut to heresy that would do Saint Nicolas proud.

In the final paragraphs, there's a clear naming of our deepest moral and spiritual challenge: the mutual careening towards the sabotage of our entire ecosystem.  Taken together, those paragraphs are succinct, cogent, and complete.  

But in the midst of that fierce declaration, the confession takes a detour.  There's an abrupt tonal shift, the punch is pulled, and instead we get the rote neo-Cistercian self-flagellation of the Presbyterian People's Front.  

Meaning, all of a sudden we've donned our best intersectional sackcloth, mourning our Complicity in such pressing contemporary crises as...checks notes..."manifest destiny."  What follows, if one knows generic progressive discourse, is the usual performative litany of historical wrongs.  We're colonialist, and racist, and sexist, ableist and queer-o-phobic, all of us damnable sinners, pie Crenshaw domine, dona eis requiem, whack. 

I find this both baffling and frustrating, for a variety of reasons, three of which I'll pitch out here.   

First, all of these lamentations seem to operate under the assumption that the PC(USA) is made up entirely of cisgender White men who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.

"We have," the Proposed New Confession intones, again and again, but that "We" is not a "We" that the church as a whole can confess together.  Sure, our demographic skew is heavily towards being the Presbyterian Home of Honkeytown, but...and I don't know if you've noticed this...that's not who all of us are now.

Can a Korean American choir director or a Ghanaian elder claim to have reviled their immigrant neighbors?  Can a historically Black church say that it has covered itself in racism's robes?  Can the women who make up a supermajority of our membership lament their complicitness in their own self-denigration?  Can the Queer folk who have fought for decades for inclusion declare themselves morally responsible for the harm inflicted upon them?  None of them can, not meaningfully.

All of these Christians are (and here I'll turn on all caps) PART OF THE (PC)USA.  They are not they.  They are us.  They are we. Yet those members of our shared fellowship are all positioned as the objects of the confession, not the ones proclaiming it.  It's an exclusionary, neosegregationist liturgy, which is jarring given the confession's stated purpose. 

Second, it just doesn't resemble the PC(USA) I've known for the entirety of my 57 years as a cradle Presbyterian.  Every Presbyterian congregation I have worshiped in, been a member of, or pastored?  None of them have lived out their lives together in a way that would justify these laments.  In the more recent cases, be it the civil rights movement, the ordination of women, the inclusion of Queer folk, or the embrace of those who live with disability?  In every one of those instances, we've fought our way through to an authentic witness, and at nontrivial cost in relationship and membership.  Saying, for example, "You took a consistent stand for women's voices, but, you know you could have done more, and you're part of The Patriarchy, so you are automatically complicit?"

I don't buy it.  I've looked at it, sat with it, thought about it, and...no.  One cannot repent for a sin they have not committed.  We have plenty of concrete and material sins to attend to, and repentance...understood from the whole witness of Scripture...just does not work that way.  Here, I'm very much aware that I'm not compliant with the demands of our particular denominational Newspeak. I still view persons as the fundamental unit of moral analysis, for example. I'm guilty of so many doubleplus ecclesiastical thoughtcrimes.  Mea culpa.

And finally, it feels, and here forgive me...Old.  Not just Old, but Old Old, in a very particular gerontological way.

The laments themselves are cast in semi-chronological order, a retelling-in-negation of the history of the Presbyterian church in this country.  They are decades out of date and centuries passed, sepia and crumbling.  None of them, not one, meaningfully reflects the PC(USA) now, or the specific crisis we inhabit.

It's almost like we don't know where we are anymore, like we can't remember what we did yesterday, or the names of the people around us.  But oh, do we remember the past, past struggles, past traumas, and past conflicts.  We remember when we mattered, back when we once shaped the direction of a nation, when our voice made a difference.  Remember at the General Assembly of 1818, when we let expediency and groupthink water down our witness, where we made a bold statement and then equivocated?  Remember when we marched at Selma?  No-one else remembers that, not anymore, but we're lost in the thrall of wouldacouldashoulda.  It's a little solipsistic, a little maudlin, and more than a little morbid.

This section reads, to be blunt, like the deathbed confession of White Liberal Christianity.  

"The Deathbed Confession?"

Do we want that to be what this is?  An end of life groan of regret at mistakes made and things left undone, croaked from dry and dying White throats as the denomination falls into the Consuming Fire?   Maybe we do.  Maybe that is what we want.  I know that's what some of y'all want.  

The time for that church is over, some folks say.  It should just cash out. Think of the things we could do with that money!  Choose any charity!  Give to the poor!  

But again,"The Deathbed Confession" has kind of a ring to it, if we're talking brand identity.

As a foundation on which to build, though, and a naming of the spiritual battle facing the church, this section might not be the best step forward.  

Because we're not dead yet.

To those who've labored long and hard over this work, in the unlikely event you find yourself reading these reflections: I recognize that some of these responses might feel uncomfortable.  But, you know, just sit with them for a little while.  And anyway, it's just one portion of one section, and y'all did ask for responses.  I mean, you did.

There's so much more to the Confession than this, though, and I'll get to that in another post.

Shame, Sexuality, and Presbyterians

My Presbytery met recently, as it does on a semi-regular basis, to go over items of business and approve and affirm various and sundry overtures to the General Assembly.  Those overtures are a semi-annual process that determines the direction and policy statements of the church.  Generally, these are as interesting to those outside of our shrinking fold as the census of tribal membership in Numbers 2.

The overtures before the body were four, and four was their number, and I read all of them, just as I always read every single action item all the way through.  Two dealt with matters of investment policy and grantmaking, together pushing for a reallocation of resources into sustainable and renewable energy production.  One was a paean to regenerative agriculture, encouraging Presbyterians to engage with systems of food production that don't rely on industrial and extractive methodologies.  These were all well and good, if a teensy little bit on the dry side.

The fourth was...unsettling.   I wrestled with it mightily, and struggled to process it.  

It is my responsibility, as the pastor, to report back on Presbytery goings-on to the elders who lead my little congregation.  When we met last week, I don't think I did the most effective job of it.  I hemmed.  I hawed.  I equivocated, struggling to find words that worked.  It was an awkward moment.

“On Confession, Repentance and Renewed Theological Engagement Regarding HIV/AIDS and Human Sexuality," or so it was named by the folks who want it adopted as the official policy of the church.  The essence of it is veiled in the circuitous semiotics of contemporary progressive language, but there were two primary action points.

Action point number one was a call for the church...by which the authors mean the PC(USA)...to formally confess culpability for causing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The logic behind this is a weensy bit convoluted, but as I grasp it, goes as follows:  In 1967, the PC(USA) formally affirmed that entropy in sexual relationships was destructive of human personhood, and that the culture of the "sexual revolution" was antithetical to human thriving.  This was defined using binary and heterosexual language.  This explicit heteronormativity shamed queer folk whose sexuality and desire for sexual expression was neither heterosexual or binary in nature, and the trauma of that shame led to actions that made them vulnerable to AIDS.  Therefore and quod erat demonstrandum, the Presbyterian Church USA and its moral theology are responsible for the AIDS epidemic, and must formally repent for all of the trauma, suffering, and death that it caused.

Action point number two was grounded in the first, and called for a revisiting of the nature of relationship itself, and a formal theological re-imagining of our understanding of the "...full spectrum of relational and family structures, exploring ethical approaches to consent, mutuality, and care."  This action point is a little more linguistically veiled, far less direct than the first.  It involves charging two General Assembly committees with establishing frameworks for the acceptance of "relationship structures beyond traditional monogamy" and "diverse intimate arrangements."

This, to the best of my capacity, is my reflecting back what I read.

To be utterly honest, one part of the reason I struggled to verbally convey this to the good souls on my Session was that the whole thing both alarmed and bugged the crap out of me.   

The call to covenant fidelity in relationship in a confession that's fundamentally about social justice is responsible for the AIDS epidemic?  The Book of Confessions, Section 9, paragraph 47, subsection D is the reason people were infected by HIV?  A denomination that sweated blood and tears and worked for decades to become a place of gracious inclusion of Queer folk must now repent in sackcloth and ashes for inflicting the spiritual trauma that caused AIDS?   Sweet Mary and Joseph, what a wild causal stretch all of that is.   

That most of it is argued using contemporary therapeutic trauma language and Newspeak was equally unsettling.  It doesn't read like theology.  It reads like carefully calibrated psychological manipulation, and in a very particular direction.

That first action point has a particular intent rhetorically.  It is, in design and argumentation, preparing the subject to accept the second action point as the necessary outcome.  Given the language used, the goal is not to get the denomination to affirm the covenant fidelity of Queer folk in their life partnerships.  There'd be no point in that, as that's what the PC(USA) already does.  This is pressing for something more.

The authors of this overture appear to be utilizing a trauma-forward shaming framework as the pretext for a wholesale re-imagining of the concepts of marriage, covenant and fidelity.  Or, to put it as my anger would put it, they're engaging in some weapons-grade gaslighting to coerce the church into blessing open, non-dyadic, and polyamorous relationships.  If you speak Presbyterian, that's what it says, depending on whether you're feeling more neutral or royally pissed off.

So, nothing controversial.  Can't imagine this proving disruptive to my community in any way.  Ahem.

And all of this got dropped on the meeting website just days before the meeting, and on which we were supposed to vote on over...Zoom.  Zoom, where discourse is constrained, and engagement is minimized, and tone and the reality of incarnate presence are missing.

It was recommended for concurrence by the committee responsible for such things.  So I realized, Lord help me, am I going to be That Guy in a hundred-plus-participant Zoom where I'm not really personally known, given my increasingly sparse connections to the Presbytery?   Still struggling to process this, I wrestled with participation mightily all day.  On the one hand, I had strong feelings.  On the other, I still had strong feelings.  I got more and more anxious about being That Guy, to where I finally couldn't bring myself to even engage in the meeting.

Which is the other reason I had so much trouble explaining it.  I felt more than a little cowardly, to be honest.

Shame does work, eh?