MyQuest

Ex-Gay Story on Channel 4

Well, the ex-gay story on Channel 4 just aired.  I knew all along the story would be slanted, but that it needed to have some response or comment from our side.  We spent around 35-40 minutes in the interview for the little bit you see in the story.

For the record, I did NOT say that I had no problem with an organization like First Stone.  I said that I had no problem with people going their own journey and that if they were unhappy with who they are, then I understand why that would create a spiritual and psychological crisis.  I repeated more than once that a ministry like First Stone's is theologically unnecessary and medically inappropriate.

The story isn't up yet on their website.

Oklahoman Editorial Denouncing Rinehart

You can read it here.

The Comic Book

It is on-line, here.

Oklahoma politician produces anti-gay comic book

When you read this you will want to move to Oklahoma and join us in the adventure that it is to live here.

Completely freaky and discredited Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart, who has two GOP opponents in the primary and is opposed by the establishment in Oklahoma, has produced a comic book as part of his re-election campaign.  In it he is supported by angels in his fight against the evil doers, including gays.

The comic book itself isn't out yet, but the Oklahoman did an article about it here.  An excerpt:

Toga-wearing gays, political figures, trench coat-clad henchmen, concerned residents and Rinehart round out the comic's cast.

"This is one of the strangest things I've ever seen,” said Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma . "I've never seen a comic book with the phrase ‘anal sodomy' in it before. That was a new one for me.” Gaddie said comics were common political campaign tools decades ago, but not for today. "He's pretty much grinding every ax he's got from his days in the county commission,” Gaddie said. "In a way, it's a sophisticated piece.”

In one sequence, Satan says: "If I can get the kids to believe homosexuality is normal!”

The angel replies: "Hey Satan, not with Brent around you won't!”

Rinehart

said he doesn't think the depiction is inappropriate and that he is proud of the comic.

"The history of my office is that I do expose the homosexual agenda, and that it does exist in the state of Oklahoma, and my history also would show that I am very much opposed to the homosexual agenda,” Rinehart said.

Rinehart

said he spent two months writing the comic. He said his friend Shane Suiters did the illustrations. Rinehart wouldn't say who is managing his campaign, and wouldn't say if he's running it himself.

Resolution on Eugenics

Here is a resolution that Nance and I are working on. We are submitting it to the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference.

 

A Call for Study of Our Church's Involvement

in the Eugenics Movement

 

Offered by members of the Cathedral of Hope, Oklahoma City, including Pastor Scott Jones, Nance Cunningham, and Neill Spurgin.

Background

Issues of genetics, immigration, race, and sexual orientation are central to current public policy discussions.

One concern is the possibility that genetic therapies might be used in a way that is prejudiced against difference. People with physical and mental disabilities could be targeted. Sexual orientation could also be targeted (see the call by Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for the use of genetic therapies to alter the sexual orientation of gay fetuses, http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=891).

There is also a growing anti-immigrant attitude in the United States, which occasionally ventures close to language about racial purity.

Even the measurements used in our current No Child Left Behind education policy may be grouping and categorizing people in unjust ways with lasting effects.

As a society we must dialogue about the ethical issues involved, and the Church should participate in the theological conversation by looking at its own history within the eugenics movement, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The purpose of eugenics was to support the births of desirable hereditary stock and lessen or prevent the births of those with undesirable hereditary stock, in an effort to prevent degeneration of particular races and nations.

Christine Rosen's book Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, documents the involvement of many churches in the United States, including churches which later became members of the United Church of Christ. As Rosen explains, eugenicists and ministers of the progressive Social Gospel Movement had the complementary aims of preservation of particular races and social salvation. Rosen's volume led us to explore further on our own. Among the many startling facts which we have researched are these:

Congregational clergyman and social gospel pioneer Rev. Josiah Strong wrote Our Country in 1885, praising Anglo-Saxons as "the standard bearers of Christianity and civilization."

One of the first eugenics studies in the United States was conducted by the Rev. Oscar Carleton McCulloch of Plymouth Congregational Church in Indianapolis in 1877. His efforts arose in an attempt to cope with local poverty and the conditions which gave rise to it. He made a hobby of tracking "hereditary degeneracy." McCulloch argued that charity and philanthropy furthered these conditions rather than alleviating them, and must be approached with new scientific methods, namely eugenics.

On June 3, 1913 the Rev. Henry E. Jackson of the Christian Union Congregational Church of Montclair, New Jersey, officiated at the "first eugenic wedding." According to the June 4 New York Times, Rev. Jackson "announced that he would require the bridegroom in all marriage ceremonies that he performed to furnish a medical certificate."

Newell Dwight Hillis, pastor of Brooklyn's prominent Plymouth Congregational Church, was one of the organizers of the First National Conference on Race Betterment in 1914. Also during this time Hillis spoke routinely around the country of the Mayflower Studies, which decried the dying out of the "old New England families": "Considering the role which the Mayflower descendants have played in the history of our nation, this result is certainly one to be greatly deplored." He was concerned about the loss of Mayflower descendents' good stock and poor stock of immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Many ministers of a wide variety of denominations participated in annual preaching contests promoting eugenics. The first of these contests was hosted by the American Eugenics Society Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen in 1926 with ministers submitting sermons on the topic "Religion and Eugenics: Does the church have a responsibility for improving the human stock?" One of the contest judges was Ozora S. Davis, President of Chicago Theological Seminary. Two years later, as this contest continued, Rev. Edwin W. Bishop of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Lansing, Michigan, won third prize with his sermon "Eugenics and the Church," which includes this passage:

Jesus plainly taught that individuals differed widely in their innate capacities, that there were one-talent men and two-talent men and five-talent men, and that capacity self-fulfillment would come in realizing the inherent endowment. . . Enter therefore eugenics.

One of the founders of marriage and family therapy in the United State was eugenicist Paul Popenoe. He also founded the Human Betterment Foundation which assisted California in sterilizing 60,000 people. Popenoe came from the Congregational Church, where he had been a Sunday school teacher. He was convinced of the usefulness of churches in the eugenics education effort. Many church ministries appear to have been involved in the movement. One example is the Life Adjustment Institute of the Mount Pleasant Congregational Church of Washington, D. C. which taught eugenics as a part of marriage and family education, as did much of the health education in public schools. This was part of a larger movement supported by President Hoover and the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection which declared that "there shall be no child in America that has not the complete birthright of a sound mind in a sound body," an idea supported by the American Child Health Association and a national sterilization organization called "Birthright."

Prominent names such as Revs. Charles Sheldon and Harry Emerson Fosdick are implicated in this history. Rev. Fosdick was a member of the American Eugenics Society Advisory Council, believing that eugenics could get at the cause of social degeneration, whereas philanthropy could deal only with the symptoms. The person elected Executive Secretary of the American Eugenics Society in 1934 was Congregational minister George Reid Andrews.

In 1931 Pilgrim Press published Young People's Relationships, the transcripts of the Conference on Preparation for Marriage and Homemaking, sponsored by the American Eugenics Society; the conference advocated women staying in the home and breeding well.

In 1935, Rosen explains, Dr. Alexis Carrel advocated in Man, the Unknown, a national bestseller, "the creation of a utopia autocratically ruled by an 'enlightened elite' in which the 'unfit' would be euthanisitically disposed of in gas chambers." A Google search of Alexis Carrel turned up many Carrel quotes on the web pages of UCC churches and even his image in the stained glass windows of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles.

An awareness of our history will assist us in the contemporary conversations on similar issues. Federal government, state governments, charities, as well as many other churches were involved in the eugenics movement, but that does not lessen our responsibility to examine our own history of involvement.

Theological Rationale

According to Ann Gibson Winfield in Eugenics and Education in America, our institutional memory continues to affect us in the present, even when we have consciously rejected particular ideologies. Barbara Brown Zikmund, writing in Hidden Histories, on the UCC website, agrees. She writes,

History is not always neat and fair. And the UCC history is more complex than the historical orthodoxy that informs its self-image. The United Church of Christ is an extremely pluralistic and diverse denomination that is nourished by many "hidden histories." These important stories out of its past do not appear within the traditional fourfold history. Yet, as Gunnemann says, only when churchpeople know the beliefs, movements, and events that make up their history will they be able to accept ownership and be shaped by that history.

We pride ourselves on our historic firsts, breaking new ground in the realms of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Yet, welcome, inclusion, and affirmation are not the only aspects of our faith tradition's history. We must examine the darker side, express contrition, and evaluate the extent to which we or other members of society may still hold the tenets of eugenics.

Sometimes, when an individual or community thinks that it understands a situation, it may realize later that it lacked wisdom totally (Matt. 11:16-19).

Even when a community unintentionally commits a sin, it is still guilty and must try to make the situation right (Lev. 4:13).

The point of the eugenics movement was to reject the stranger, because of the threat to purity. However, Christians are called to accept and be hospitable to the stranger (Heb. 13:2, Matt. 25:35).

As Rosen records in her book, with the emergence of Christian realism with such figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, it was understood that the social improvements offered by science might not be in sympathy with the aims of the Christian Church. Among these aims of the United Church of Christ are:

• Concerns about our stewardship of creation
• Concerns about contemporary threats to diversity and difference in the realms of race, ability, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
• Our historic stances on inclusion
• Our criticisms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination against the disabled
• Our struggles for economic and social justice
• Our support of more humane immigration policy
• Our desire to express the compassion and righteousness of God
• Our efforts to seek truth and reconciliation for past wrongs

Resolution

WHEREAS, current public policy debates center around issues of difference with regard to race, immigration, gender, sexual orientation, genetic therapies, education, etc.;

WHEREAS, the Church should be involved in these debates and conversations;

WHEREAS, the church and society previously debated these issues during the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;

WHEREAS, the moral and theological wrongs of the eugenics movement are legion;

WHEREAS, the predecessor denominations of the United Church of Christ, their churches, and clergy were intimately involved in the eugenics movement; and

WHEREAS, the United Church has claimed in previous resolutions that institutionalized injustices continue to affect contemporary society;

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of the United Church of Christ calls for the Twenty-seventh General Synod of the United Church of Christ to enact the following:

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Twenty-seventh General Synod of the United Church of Christ encourages conferences, associations, congregations, agencies, and ministries of the United Church of Christ to join in active study and education on issues dealing with our history of involvement in the eugenics movement;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ be called on to develop a study paper concerned with our history of involvement in the eugenics movement with the goal of determining whether an apology for that involvement ought to be offered by the Church; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ develop a study packet for individual churches so that each might study its own history, as well as that of the UCC and the larger society.

Financial implications

Funding for this action will be made in accordance with the overall mandates of the affected agencies and the funds available.

Contact

Nance Cunningham: 405-590-8230 or ncghm@cox.net with questions or for additional information.

Source Materials

Carel, Alexis. Man, the Unknown. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1935.

Currell, Susan and Christina Cogdell, Editors. Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930's. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.

Groves, Ernest R. "The Family" in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 6 (May, 1930) pp. 1017-1026.

Mohler, Albert. "Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?" http://www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=891

Popenoe, Paul. Applied Eugenics. NY: Macmillan Company, 1927.

Rosen, Christine. Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Winfield, Ann Gibson. Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History, Ideology, and Memory. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

Adventure

I came across this quote during my morning reading, and I loved it.  It is by G. K. Chesterton:

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.  An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

From Race to Church

From Race to Church

Romans 11:13-24; Numbers 25:1-13

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

Cathedral of Hope – Oklahoma City

13 July 2008

 

    I am able to stand here in 2008 and safely say that we in America have entered new territory when it comes to race.

Currently the only movie star who is consistently successful is Will Smith.

For ten years we have watched a mixed-race young man dominate golf; a WASPier sport surely does not exist. Yet Tiger Woods may be the greatest player in its history.

And a bi-racial black man is currently a candidate for president of one of the major parties.

Even our popular entertainment has changed. There has been a trend in television over the past five years of the multi-racial, multi-ethnic cast, with Grey's Anatomy, Lost, and Heroes serving as examples.

In fact Lost has been one of the cultural touchstones of this decade. A group of strangers must work together after their plane crashes on a mysterious island. This group includes a Korean couple who speak mostly in Korean. A veteran of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. An African drug runner turned priest. And more. Lost demonstrated that we are clearly beyond the token black supporting character.

Beyond its multi-cultural cast, Lost represents something else. It represents a world in which we understand that all of our stories are interconnected, no matter where we might come from. And it demonstrates that in order to survive in this chaotic and violent world, we must pull together despite our differences. It has been the perfect television show for the post-9/11 world.

In August this city will celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the sit-in of Clara Luper and her students at Katz Drugstore, a moment that helped to launch the American Civil Rights Movement. We have come a long way since that time, maybe best evidenced by the fact that the area around the state capitol is now named in honor of Clara Luper and her achievements.

With great joy we can celebrate that we are in a different world. Yet, with realism, we must admit that we still have distance to travel. Maybe America's original sin of white supremacist racism is fading from public life, but the larger issues of prejudice remain. Humans seem naturally inclined to distrust those who are different from ourselves, whether by race, culture, religion, gender, physical handicap, sexual orientation, or even such mundane issues as a difficult personality or an outrageous hair color. These prejudices may have developed as survival mechanisms for primitive humans, yet we can rise above them with compassion and reason.

This year we have also been reminded of how far we still have to journey. Race, religion, and their nexus have become central issues in the campaign for the presidency. On the Republican side, John McCain first sought and then repudiated the endorsements of Religious Right leaders John Hagee and Rod Parsley. He repudiated them after inflammatory comments surfaced of Hagee's against Roman Catholics and Parsley's against Islam.

And on the Democratic side, we've all be aware of the issue of Barack Obama's church, Trinity United, and its former pastor Jeremiah Wright. I was greatly disturbed by this episode. If you read my personal blog or my columns on HNO, you know that I experienced this moment as a crisis in American religion because it demonstrated such ignorance on the part of the media and the larger culture of core issues of Christian practice and theology. Rev. Wright's now infamous presentation to the National Press Club began with one of the most articulate, intelligent, and compelling introductions of black liberation theology which I have ever heard. Of course his dramatics during the q & a became the focus of the media's attention and not the compelling presentation of race and spirituality which had preceded it. Our own denomination, the United Church of Christ, has called for a sacred conversation on race this summer. This sermon is part of our effort to fulfill this call. I also direct you to the UCC website and the quarterly printed newsletter for further resources on this critical issue.

Religion has so often held hands with prejudice against difference, working to exclude people in the most extreme and sometimes violent ways. Many Southern churches enabled the horrors of segregation by their silent cowardice. The established church in Germany refused to denounce Hitler when called to do so by leading theologians like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Anglican church and its missionaries furthered the cause of British colonialism, the after-effects we are still coping with in places like Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and even Iraq.

St. Paul was himself personally acquainted with the power of religion to enable prejudice. After all, he was himself an agent of that prejudice. Prior to his conversion Paul was a fundamentalist religious zealot willing to use violence and coercion to stamp out those he labeled as heretics.

Michael Gorman, in his book Reading Paul, points out that Paul was following one line of his religious tradition in using violence to purify the faith. Read the stories of the Judges or of the prophet Elijah, and you see how religious zealotry can lead to violence. Gorman points to a more obscure story, that of Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, and one of the priests of Israel, that disturbing story we read earlier.

This story is a stereotype for how prejudice works in a society. Just ask yourselves some questions. How often is a plague or infection blamed upon the prejudiced population? How often is sex connected to group purity? How often is God invoked to support the majority's prejudice? How often does group-think lead to one individual acting irrationally and violently?

Numbers 25 is a true text of terror which we must ultimately reject, but not until we have engaged it and wrestled with what it has to say about us, about God, and about the connections between prejudice and religious practice.

In Psalm 106 the story of Phinehas is told a second time. And there were read in verses 30 and 31:

Then Phinehas stood up and interceded, and the plague was stopped. And that has been reckoned to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever.

According to this psalmist, we can receive the righteousness of God by engaging in violence on behalf of religious purity, just like the priest Phinehas. Michael Gorman believes that it was this understanding of God's righteousness which animated Paul prior to his conversion.

    With his conversion, Paul's understanding of God's righteousness dramatically changed. I invite you to look at Romans chapter 4. In this chapter Paul tells the story of Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people. In Genesis 15 we read that "Abraham believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." Besides the Phinehas story, this is the only other time that such language appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Romans 4 Paul interprets the Abraham story in order to say that God's righteousness is available to all of us through faith, not through anything that we can do. Romans 4 is a direct rebuke of the Phinehas story, the theology that we receive God's righteousness through violent action.

    Abraham represents not only the father of the Jewish people, but the father of most of the other nations of the Ancient Near East, including the Arabs. Because Abraham comes before Moses and the law, Abraham represents, for Paul, the true meaning of the Jewish law – that it is meant to develop faith in God. Abraham is the father of the nations and through him all humanity will be blessed. The converted Paul interpreted this to mean that faith in God is not to divide and exclude people. Rather, faith in God is meant to unite all people.

    Of immediate concern to Paul was the relationship between Jews and the new Gentile Christians. The New Testament gives abundant evidence that the church of the first century was engaged in constant controversy on these issues. There were those who thought Jesus' message was only for Jews. There were those who believed that all followers of Jesus must obey the Jewish law. There were those who believed that the practices of Judaism were to be completely rejected and that the church was a completely new thing. And there were many who staked positions in the middle. The apostles themselves debated the issue, deciding for a middle of the road position, though we know that the controversy continued even after that Council.

    In the second century Marcion called for the rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures and everything that they taught about God. It is to the credit of orthodoxy that it rejected Marcion's position. Yet the church for 2000 years has continued to struggle over its relationship with Judaism. Some of Christianity's greatest sins – the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust – arose out of anti-Semitism.

    The Letter to the Romans was Paul's earnest and sincere attempt to prevent this violent history. For almost two thousand years Paul has been misunderstood, and even this letter has been used to justify religious persecution.

    For Paul these issues ultimately rest in how we understand the character of God. And as we've studied in previous weeks, Paul understood God's character to be filled with mercy. Paul also admitted that God's character is ultimately mysterious to us:

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (11:33)

    Paul first dealt with Jewish-Gentile relations. He taught that God had not abandoned the Jews -- that God's covenant with them remained. In fact, he states in Romans 11:25, "And so all Israel will be saved." This is a passage which has long confounded those who tried to limit the grace of God to their particular religious understanding.

Paul's teaching went beyond the question of Jewish-Gentile relations. Paul also proclaimed, "For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever, Amen" (11:36).

    God might be inscrutable, but Paul had confident faith in God's righteousness and that God would deal righteously with the entire creation. Paul didn't understand how God would do it, but he knew that all creation was in need of God's righteousness and that nothing could separate us from the love of God. Paul said, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (10:13), while also teaching that "we will all stand before the judgment seat of God . . . and every tongue shall give praise to God" (14:10-11).

    For Paul the Christian church presented a new opportunity for humankind. The church was to be a global, multi-cultural institution which brought people together despite their differences. And Paul set out to create that institution. He traveled from the Near East to Europe preaching the gospel. Don't overlook that he is writing this message to Rome, the capital of the empire and a cosmopolitan city. Paul was intending to create a new base of operations in Rome from which he could continue his mission work in new areas, particularly Spain. Nor was Paul's mission work like that of later centuries, which tried to impose an alien culture upon the mission field. Notice that everywhere he goes, Paul preaches the gospel in a way understood by the native populations. In Athens he preaches using the language of Greek of philosophy. In this letter to Rome he uses common concepts and literary techniques of Roman writers. Paul was truly the ancestor of those voices in our history which have called the church to a universal, multi-cultural approach.

    Paul would have loved the twenty-first century, in which Christianity has truly become a global, multi-cultural institution. Yet he would have been saddened that we still experience so much division and exclusion. African bishops cannot reconcile with northern liberals. European popes distrust the popular movements of the Latin American poor. And in the United States, whites react with fear and revulsion when they hear excerpts of sermons from black preachers.

    After the Holocaust, we finally began to work on our relations with Judaism. In this century we will hopefully work on our long, complicated, and violent relationship with Islam.

    We have begun to listen to the voices of feminist, queer, liberationist, and post-colonial thinkers. Though, as the Jeremiah Wright episode revealed, too much of this dialogue has been limited to the seminary and university and has not reached the wider membership of the American church.

    The motto of the United Church of Christ is "That they may all be one." It is more than a motto, it is a prayer -- a prayer that after 2,000 years we will draw even closer to God's dream for God's people.

The issues that Paul faced in his letter face the church in this century – how do we become united as the people of God, despite our differences? With hope, let us dream together and march boldly forward in this grand adventure, knowing that we have come a long way, but there is yet road to travel before we reach the comforts of home. Thankfully we have God to lead us.

      

    

    

Another Response to my Letter to the Editor

In yesterday's Oklahoman there was another response to my letter to the editor from a couple of weeks ago.  This latest response took me to task on my doctrine of sin.  For my teaching on the doctrine of sin, a good place is to start with this sermon from last year: What is Sin? 

On another note, I noticed that I am now a searchable term on the Oklahoman's website.