https://youtu.be/Ehsg2UIMnHM

The Language of Open and Affirming

When I started this I knew enough that “Affirming” was a label. Yesterday I thought I’d try to figure out how the label is used. Apparently it isn’t use with precision. The “open and affirming” language and movement seemed to have begun with the mainline United Church of Christ a union of Congregational, Reformed and Lutheran congregations. In 1985 the protocol was established. Once a congregation decided they wanted to be “open and affirming” they would draft a statement themselves, usually posted on their church’s website, and then everyone would know that they are in this category or class of churches. This seems to be the practice that the RCA has adopted with its “Room for All” movement, complete with a roster of “affirming” congregations. The CRC has “All One Body” (website and Facebook). They seem to be more advocating and promoting (listen to the address by Amy Plantinga Pauw they sponsored). They don’t have a list of CRC congregations who “affirm” probably because there are none (to my knowledge).

“Open and Affirming” in Practice and Theory The “Open and Affirming” movement seems to try to bring binary clarity to a rather murky reality. The more I think about it the more I wonder if this is really going to be able to hold together in the long term as the “gender as construct” conversation continues to develop. Note this statement by a UCC Congregation in Maine.

In the context of our statement, affirming means that we go beyond tolerance. The policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” often leaves the impression that we must hide who we are in order to be accepted. To declare ourselves “Open and Affirming” means that we believe all persons are entitled to be treated with decency and respect—truly equals because we are all made by God and loved by God. We want to state clearly that no one needs to be afraid of judgment or exclusion from our church because of who they are. All persons who live respectfully and responsibly, and who want to join us in following Christ, are welcome.

So let’s break this down a bit.

Tolerance and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

While the “affirming” and “non-affirming” language pushes the conversation into a very binary space, “tolerance” and “don’t ask, don’t tell” betray the fact that in practice regular life in the church has been far more nuanced on this subject than most on either side of the polarized debate wish to admit. I’ve got lots of stories that I won’t/can’t share on a blog like this. Sexual minorities are nothing new.

Churches have tolerated, looked the other way, not pushed the issue with individuals with respect to their sexual and relational lives sometimes for better and sometimes for the worse. Churches in fact do this all the time with lots of issues. Churches and their leaders are not computer programs chugging the private lives of their membership according to church law. Churches are led by leaders who are always making judgment calls, calls that are sometimes good and calls that are sometimes wrong.

The clear change forced upon the church and its informal sometimes tolerance or “don’t ask, don’t tell”, or formal disciplinary practices has been the broader cultural movement of “openness” encouraging people to self-identify and “affirming”, no longer identifying some sexual minority conditions or practices as pathological. This comes out of what I think has become a broad consensus in our culture that past practices by churches, medical professionals and law enforcement regarding what we are currently calling “sexual minorities” did on the whole more harm than good. It is helpful to read the Wendy Vanderwall-Gritter’s experience with the Exodus movement in her book Generous Spaciousness.

I generally agree with this, as I think do many of my turtle friends in the ministry,  but I do so understanding that making these kinds of value judgments is based on impressions formed by the biases of my information sources. Broad cultural narratives of health and solutions are notoriously prone to error.

The United States in the later 19th and early 20th century was convinced that prohibition would help the poor, protect women and help men become cultured gentlemen instead of abusing thugs. This view was so overwhelmingly embraced that they were actually able to pass a constitutional amendment. Today that idea looks like stupidity or folly.

Skeptical about Progress Judgments in History

Many today are quick to declare what side of the issue history is on. You don’t have to do too much reading to realize that “history” is not so easily predicted or gamed. Count me as skeptical on this subject.

Having a context in which people come “out of the closet” and “into the light” is generally helpful and good. It can allow a person living in damaging and painful isolation to process their experience and gain wisdom from the broader community. The AA adage “you’re as sick as your secrets” is often true.

It is also true, however, that human sexual identity and behavior are incredibly fluid especially when we are young. When I was at Calvin Seminary in the late 80s I remember our Pastoral Care class pressing Mel Hugen for his thoughts on “homosexuality”. He was clearly reticent to get into the subject in depth with us. What he was willing to be clear on was this. “It is very difficult to say with much certainty how firm a person’s sexual identity is before age 25.” Both his reticence and his answer made us all go “hmmmm”.

His answer seemed reasonable especially given what we know about brain plasticity and the ongoing development of the brain in young adults in their early 20s. What do we make of the fact today, however, that in our present context “openness” almost encourages teenagers to self-identify as to their sexual orientation and publish their findings on social media and to their peers. In a individual pastoral relationship confusion, fluidity and identity are going to be pretty tough to distinguish. Locking in young and finding their lock change later will likely, in our norm feedback loop, continue to encourage people to imagine sexual identity as “constructed” which tends to undermine the now more dated paradigm of “both this way” where “this” is “straight, gay, lesbian”. The famous 52 Facebook terms for gender identity seems to concur.

“Norms” are part of a feedback loop for human beings, especially in a context of rapid social change in a democratic society. Norms change experience and experience changes norms. What was clear in 1930 is not so clear today when it comes to drugs and alcohol. What was clear in 1950 is not so clear today when it comes to sexuality. This 1950s educational video clearly reflects the ideas of the day that gay men are sexual predators preying on boys. It is progress that this misconception is broadly embraced as debunked. What norms and assumptions that we embrace today will be seen as offensive and foolish 50 years from now? We can make progress but we don’t always and we don’t always know when we are and when we’re not.

Tightening and Loosening

It is common under the sway of the powerful myth of progress today for both conservatives and progressives to imagine that things only go “one way” in church. It is easy to construct a narrative that involves items that may or may not be connected. Consider the following list:

• Norms on Sabbath Observance in the CRC
• Norms in the CRC on Worldly Amusements like card playing, movie going, etc.
• CRC practice of attending church twice on Sunday
• CRC practice of public confession of sins (often unwed pregnancies)
• CRC norms on divorce and remarriage
• CRC permitting women to serve in church office
• CRC implicit norms on appropriate dress for public worship

It’s easy to read this list and say “see, moral and religious decline!” Others might look at this list and say “progress!” We might look at that list and conclude “we’re less consecrated today than previous generations” in terms of a loosening, but we’ve also been tightening in areas that previous generations didn’t give a thought to.

• We’re far more vigilant with our language on race
• We’re more vigilant on tobacco and food
• We’re more vigilant on fairness in employment, compensation and benefits
• We’re more vigilant on relational problems in our communities. Old relational practices of anger and conflict are not tolerated like they were.

As I watch individuals move from a more traditional religious posture to the more fashionable spiritual language and practices today I don’t find them becoming less moralistic but often ironically MORE moralistic. They are tightening on all sorts of things that previous generations were flexible and pliable on. Is this “progress”? Sometimes. Sometimes not in my estimation.

The Deeper Trend of Attempts at Certainty and Control

I think the real trend is that we are continuing to try to gain knowledge and control of our broad world with the tools of science.

We want to categorize identity and behavior. “Please identify your orientation: straight, gay, lesbian?”

That might have passed 20 years ago but it doesn’t today. “Bi, Gender queer, cismale, cisfemale, transgender, a-sexual, declined to state”. Labels for identities seem to proliferate and increasingly with an implicit protest to the scientific ethos “I will define my own gender or sexuality as I see it today. I will refused to be identified, defined or contained by any external norm that limits my free exploration or discovery of my own self.”

The scientific ethos wishes to gain knowledge and control by taxonomy and exposing patterns embedded in an assumed natural order context. Science, however, is done by people who wish to increasingly both find themselves within for community sake AND transcend such limitations.

Public institutions are increasingly looking to science to expose for us a common natural order that can establish a broad consensus in this conversation. Individuals are resisting this. It’s not too hard to see where conflicts will arise. These issues get especially practical when the institutions are dependent upon large subscribing populations for their financial viability. Watch the opposite yet parallel developments in New Jersey and San Francisco on Roman Catholic teachers and morality clauses. Note William Salaten’s Slate piece on the inability of “free from judgment” to create a community or clarity. “Free from judgment” is a big feature in “Open and Affirming”.

 Exactly What Are You Affirming?

• Are you affirming an orientation? Which ones? Defined by whom?
• Are you affirming the freedom of the self to define their own sexuality?
• Are you affirming a type of relationship?

Many of these “open and affirming” statements are unclear. I imagine that given the present direction of gender and sexuality trends (“I define me and you’d better not judge me or expose me to any conversation or judgment that I might experience as hostile or threatening”) “open and affirming” will once again become and implicit tolerance and “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Many of these statements assume or presume monogamy. Will this hold? Our current practice seems implicitly to be “serial monogamy” rather than “lifelong monogamy” even in non-affirming churches. Will these groups embrace creative exploration of consenting adults to redefine sexuality going into the future? I would imagine the “limits” will again default, as they seem to be doing today, to a kind of “community standards” model.

Right now the “community standards” are in a dynamic relationship with tradition and norms but also in a dynamic relationship with media that seeks market growth by being provocative. Will “big love” or “polyamorous” or “personal sexuality is off limits for public norms between consenting adults” really take the day? Or are there structural, even natural law limitations that draw people back from the most destructive or expressive options available?

Has “Open and Affirming” Already Peaked? 

I wonder if the lack of clarity and the speed of re-definition isn’t going to make even these “open and affirming” declarations increasingly look like fig leaves. Community standards will increasingly be hard to find apart from broad, deep, and in some cases shallow and folk definitions and sources of authority. If the future looks like anything to me today it looks fragmented. Communities of all sorts will have difficulty maintaining themselves.

To me, right now “open and affirming” looks like a hoped for majoritarian fig leaf that probably won’t finally resolve or settle what its promoters are hoping it will. Yes there is applause today by a seemingly growing group, but these consensus positions themselves will likely continue to be stressed. I suspect that situational tolerance or intolerance will continue to rule the day. For this reason the attempt to categorize people into rigid scientistic gender castes may in the long run prove counter-productive. Will we figure out how to transcend the chosen/not-chosen antithesis in the realm of complex sexuality?

So where does this leave us? I don’t know. Where does this leave me? Probably a little less certain that the current “open and affirming” model will come to dominate the church landscape.

Factors in communities and situational community standards are going to force churches like City Church SF to work on their norms and policies in their context, but the day of “open and affirming” being a solution might already be drawing to an end.