“The Plight of the Progressive Church” March 26, 2023 Dr. Roger Ray
"The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O." — Martin Mull
Soon it will have been 20 years since I was a fellow at Harvard Divinity School. That was a wonderful time in my life, my first time to sit in a classroom as a student since my grad school days in the 1980’s. As I was preparing to leave, the late Harvard chaplain, the Reverend Peter Gomes, surprised me by calling me aside to privately say “good-bye.” He said, “I have enjoyed having you in my class this year, but I realize that none of this was new to you.” I hadn’t expected to have personal conversation with Professor Gomes, and I just nervously said the first thing that came to mind, “No, it was all familiar material, but I think that I was finally ready to hear it in a new way.”
Please forgive me if I to take too much of your time giving you my personal life story but suffice it to say that, like you, I have not always been the person that I am today. I grew up in rural Kentucky, the youngest child of a working class family that had been shaped by their own rural Kentucky childhoods; barely surviving the Great Depression, World War II and the massive technological changes that took them from dirt roads, horseback transportation, and oil lamps into what we call the modern world with the arrival of cars, electric lights and appliances, telephones, television, air conditioning, and finally a strange child who went to college, and then went to college again, and again, and again.
I presided over their funerals early in this century, extolling their ability to adjust to so many massive changes in the world they inhabited. But the other side of that coin was the things they had been unwilling to change.
I spent many Sunday afternoons of my childhood in the living room of the old plantation house of my family’s former slave plantation listening to my father and his siblings literally still grieving the end of slavery and mourning the poverty that the Civil War brought to my family for many generations. They were convinced of the inferiority of the black race, but their prejudice didn’t end there. They also despised Asians, and Jews, and Catholics, and any non-British foreigners, as well as anyone who used drugs or drank alcohol or who smoked. For their entire lives, it was as if the Civil War was just last year, and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had been that morning. Their hatred and judgement were intense and life defining.
My college career nearly ended when I came home during my freshman year and shared with them the emotional trauma of having my gay English professor make a sexual pass at me. I had never even heard of homosexuality prior to that day but I sure heard a lot about it after that . . . and it wasn’t good.
Sadly, many of my family members and high school peers have never ventured very far from that world. My initial escape from that tiny mental cage came to me through the Christian faith that had me reading the Bible, and what it showed me was that the culture of my hometown was Christian in name only; with a hypocrisy that was obvious to me and apparently invisible to almost all of my peers.
My second salvific influence was education. I earned a degree in philosophy without really understanding any of it. But, like the gospels, the things that I read in those years eventually revealed themselves to me as I grew older and changed more.
I took my largely traditional faith to seminary with me at Vanderbilt where, through a masters and doctoral program, virtually everything I had been certain of was revealed to be theologically and historically, as well as ethically, false.
I can credit the faculty at Vanderbilt with exposing us to the best of religious scholarship while leaving us some room to hold onto enough of traditional Christian language to be able to keep our jobs as ministers in the more liberal Christian churches around the country. I think now that it was a mistake, but we were taught how to keep a foot in academic theology and another foot in the church that needed to believe that their pastor believed in the supremacy of the Christian religion, and that the Bible, for all of its human frailties, was still somehow, the word of God. At funerals they needed for us to assure them that heaven was real and hell, though real, was not a threat to the people that we love, the people who shared our narrow world view.
I managed to straddle that fence for almost 30 years, focusing on mental health, opposition to war, promoting poverty projects, and fighting prejudice, still clad in religious vestments and surrounded by the hymns, symbols, and rituals of Protestant Christianity.
What finally broke me out of that compromise was when I was fired in 2007. The multiple traumas I experienced in that year destroyed any loyalty I had felt to institutional religion. My denominational judicatories revealed themselves to be dishonest in ways that would have shamed the mafia, and the church members who were offended by my public conduct of same sex marriages, protests of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, in the mix were people who took moral stances against my decision to drive a convertible and to live in a loft downtown rather than a suburban neighborhood. It was an ecclesial dumpster fire that would have embarrassed Charles Darwin.
Some very sincere friends who were outraged by this miscarriage of justice were determined to put me back into a pulpit. Many of them sacrificed tens of thousands of dollars that they arguably could not really afford to donate, to employ me and buy a small church building to keep me in the ministry.
Still, even after all of that, our first services looked a lot like the last services I had conducted in my former denomination. I followed the lectionary, wore vestments, I even did a few baptisms. But we were trying to figure out what it meant to be an entirely honest spiritual community that owed no fealty to denominations or traditions.
It took me years to demythologize my own language, to move beyond trinitarian holidays and songs, to fully embrace an interfaith approach to spirituality. We initially described ourselves as being “progressive” Christians. We named our church, “the Community Christian Church,” and we even tried to grow into a traditional church with Sunday School classes, youth groups, a choir, and holiday special services.
But the council of churches initially lumped us in with the Unitarians and wouldn’t let us join because we were not “Christians,” even though we supplied more volunteers and donated goods than any other church in town. Years later they changed their minds and extended an invitation to us to join but by then I felt it necessary to ask the director of the Council of Churches to come and stand in our pulpit and tell us why we should join…. Something he declined to do.
I had eventually come to agree with the published essays of our critics, who insisted that we are not really Christian. We abandoned our original name and began to call ourselves the Emerging Church and I became a member of a Unitarian Church. Most of us have Christian roots but we are decidedly without theistic beliefs or practices. We have no sacraments, no holy writ, no authority beyond our appeal to critical thinking and testable reality.
There is an apocryphal saying attributed to Harriet Tubman that claims that she said that she could have freed a thousand more slaves if only they had known that they were slaves. She didn’t say that but, folks, maybe she should have.
Almost all of us were brought up in bondage, a mental prison from which only a few ever escape. Most of us have to keep kicking at the darkness of ignorance, mythology, guilt, fear, and prejudice for our whole lives. I have often tried to sum up this process of gradual escape by quoting the comedian, Martin Mull, who said "The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O."
For all of the things we inherited from our families of origin and the culture in which we were nurtured, almost all of us also know that there were many very dark and ignorant things we had to overcome. My parents never got over being embarrassed about my adoption of an Asian child and they found my friendships with gay people to be too painful to even acknowledge and, frankly, I don’t feel obligated, even posthumously, to forgive them for that. Sure, they didn’t know better, but the fact remains, they could have known better and therefore they should have put their backs into it and tried.
They never read any of the books I have written because they knew that they would be uncomfortable with what I said. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Mythology, superstition, prejudice, can only survive in intentional darkness. We can understand a child being afraid of the dark, but it is shameful when an adult is afraid of the light.
But, folks, this is not just a problem among conservatives and the untutored. Liberals can be bigots too. I was scheduled to speak next month in a Unitarian church in my home state, a church where I have spoken before, and I church that I have really wanted to help to grow and survive. But I canceled that engagement after I heard a recent recording of a service from that church in which a member delivered a sermon that was advertised as being an appeal for unity and tolerance but the body of the message was a very personal slanderous screed condemning me, in part, she explained, because my sermons are politically divisive but also because I was dismissive of my hometown when I said that the zip code there is e-i-e-i-o. She breathlessly talked about how embarrassed she would have been if any of her rural relatives had been visiting on the Sunday that I said that.
I didn’t cancel my engagement simply because these things were said but more because absolutely no one had pointed out to her that her sermon on reconciliation was really just a summary condemnation of me. Apparently, the only way to be an honestly spiritual person was to be just like her. In her mind, sermons should avoid political topics like opposing illegal wars, poverty, racism, denying health care, housing, and employment to poor people, and keeping gay and trans people deeply in the closet. She didn’t mention a word about how the prejudices of my native land had kept black people poor and engaged in menial labor, kept gay people deeply hidden in closets, or allowed our government to pursue illegal wars without challenge. She was only upset that I mentioned these things unfavorably.
In short, she wants to have a very liberal church that either endorses or, by silence, tacitly approves of all of the failures of fundamentalism with all of its moral indifference and irrelevance. And in as much as progressive churches would rather be polite than prophetic, then they should decline and close because they are morally irrelevant.
The worship chair evidently sent me the video to warn me not to step out of line again. You may recall me having said a few times in the past that I hope to live my life in a way that will cause the Westboro Baptist Church to come and demonstrate at my funeral. I want racists and homophobes to be made uncomfortable by my sermons. The last thing I want to do is to make people who perpetuate war, poverty, gender discrimination, and hypocritical piety to feel normal and acceptable.
We obviously are not invested in incarnational Christian theology but at the root of the gospel narrative is the fairly reliable historical reality of the execution of Jesus by the Roman government and you can’t possibly believe that he was crucified for being a moderate, right? If he had avoided “politics” and just told people to love one another, he would have been a useful friend to the Roman government, not a victim of state murder.
Being loudly and clearly opposed to oppression is not a political opinion that is the same as being in favor of oppression. The anti-slavery movement of the 19th century was not on the same moral footing as the pro-slavery advocates.
One was right and one was wrong. Those of us who worked for the civil rights of the gay community are not the same as those who opposed gay rights. One was right and the other was wrong. Being liberal doesn’t mean that you have abdicated from making moral judgements.
As Elie Wiesel said, “Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed.” Therefore, we must choose sides, and if you are a preacher, you had better make it painfully clear which side that you are on. It is not our goal to shame or embarrass bigots and racists, but it is our goal to make it plain that the ground they have staked out is unacceptable.
People try to dismiss progressive preachers by saying that they are too political or too divisive. We are all subject to being dismissed by being labeled as being too woke, or too liberal, or saying that we are socialists as if advocating for a living wage or universal healthcare makes us somehow the same as Stalin in the early Russian communist revolution. How you deliver universal healthcare or eradicate poverty may involve politics but if you are defending a healthcare system that leaves millions of people out of access to healthcare or an economic system that leaves people working two and three jobs and still sleeping on a park bench, then I submit, that’s not a political issue, that’s a moral issue and the church damn well better be talking about it.
Of course, that’s just my opinion, but it also has the added luxury of also being true.
