Dear UMC, Progressives and Conservatives are not ‘The Other’, we are family.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while now, wondering how to write it. I want to be fair to all sides of the conversation here. I also want to formost uphold the rights and humanization of lgbtq peoples, who are a marginalized group and as such deserve my full solidarity. So I guess it goes without saying that in the current UMC conversation on lgbtq persons, I am fully 100% affirming.

I want to talk a little about myself before I get into the meat of this post. I came to my current views on lgbtq persons over a 10 year period, starting with initial questioning of “othering” type attitudes my evangelical friends had towards gay people in particular, from my dad making the limp hand/lispy voice joke to friends at school calling “weak” boys gay or whatever. I never felt too okay with this, I always felt like we were treating other human beings wrong. Perhaps I was sensitive to this being rather bullied in school myself.

But I didn’t really begin questioning the theology til I began to know lgbtq people. This started with a friend on an internet forum who was lesbian. We became good friends after a talk with other members of the forum on how Christians could be more loving in their approach to lgbtq people. She messaged me afterward, and we began texting rather frequently. She’d ask me for relationship advice and I would get uncomfortable, and finally I said “____ I really value our friendship, but I can’t help you with your girlfriend anymore, I don’t want your relationship to work out you see, I find it sinful.” This of course really hurt her, and she stopped texting me and we didn’t talk for years til after I repented to her of being a bad friend. I continued to meet other gay friends, one an old friend of my wifes sent me a long message outlining his story, how he faced depression and suicidal thoughts daily and never felt loved or accepted by the church, but always as a project to fix. This hit me hard since I had recently endured the suicide of my own father. I knew I could never wish that or even the thoughts toward it on anyone. I began wondering if Christian theology on homosexuality is good. I began to question “why is it a sin? why is it an abomination”, for pretty much my whole life I’d just taken it for granted, unfortunately mostly because I found it gross.

The more I studied the less convinced I felt, and I came across the Side A arguments for lgbtq affirmation on Justin Lee’s site The Gay Christian Network, and they made a lot of sense to me. You must understand I’d been in the church my whole life and had bible verses and the whole bible drilled into me going to fundamentalist baptist schools. I knew it backward and forwards pretty much. I knew all the arguments, and they just didn’t make sense to me anymore. But Justin Lee’s affirming arguments did. This was further helped by an essay my friend wrote for one of her classes at Liberty University. Within her essay, coming from both a scientific and biblical exegesis standpoint, the flaws with the traditional interpretation of anti lgbtq orthodoxy were laid bare to me, and I finally without any regret or fear of being wrong said “I am fully lgbtq affirming.” I can’t say I was 100% affirming overnight, some of the other acronyms like the ‘t’ took a best friend coming out to me as transgender (when I had known her as male) and the paradigm shift that took me through. But I did get there.

I wanna say my story reinforces the narrative that gradual change is the only kind of change, but the truth is I don’t quite believe that. I think life itself is full of paradigm shifts, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die we are constantly learning new things about the universe and correcting old ways of seeing it that were wrong, in humility and teachableness. The more we learn about human sexuality and gender identity, the more we must shift in our paradigm of how we understand these things theologically. This is similar to heliocentrism, or flat earth, evolution vs literal creationism, or how we engage racial reality. These aren’t gradual changes, they are continual little bursts of immediate change. This is especially true in how we approach systems of oppression and marginalization. We cannot gradually seek to harm others less (and yes I know part of the conversation is proving there is harm at all), we must immediately stop. IF there is harm done to lgbtq people by current theological stances in the UMC church and Book of Discipline (and I believe there are), then we must change these things now, and not ten years from now. Gradual change is a privilege that all people cannot benefit from.

But where does that leave our relationships across the board? How do we have these conversations without othering one another? I read a post recently by one of the founders of Reconciling Church Ministries, Jeremy Smith, a Methodist pastor and blogger, that purports that there is a lot of ‘othering’ happening to Progressives in the United Methodist Church by conservatives. And he’s right. I see it often, in the parody accounts made to insult and demean another progressive UMC pastor friend of mine, Morgan Guyton, to some of the ways that progressives protesting at the General Conference were spoken of.

But there’s a truth that Jeremy’s post sadly lays out, and one I wonder if it is even avoidable. His post itself ‘others’ the conservative or conservative supporting voices, like those of one of my other friends, Joel L Watts, and members of the Wesleyan Covenant Association in a way that almost paints them as the enemy of progress. I mean I suppose we wouldn’t be progressive if we thought conservative theology was a means of progression, but I still find in it far too much partisanship for lack of a better word, reminding me of the strong divides between Democrats and Republicans that you can see laid out in jokes like the one Bernie Sanders told about “mentally ill Republicans.”

We always practice an us vs them in our camps (I choose not to use ‘tribe’ like Jeremy did since there are racial and colonial implications here I choose not to make), and our parties. We think “they need to be like us in order to be fully accepted by us.” And in the process we take on an individualistic mindset that devalues community, even messy community. And I’m no fan of forced teaming, but I wonder if we didn’t want to be part of one team why we joined a denomination in the first place? And church denominations are just that, a team, a family.

Surely right now in the UMC parts of our family are being shunned and I agree with those saying that this is happening 100%, and I am appreciative of those standing in solidarity with them in this. I also wonder if it’s possible to speak of this from a ‘family’ standpoint and not ‘othered’ sides. I wonder if posts like Jeremy’s exacerbate the division more than help, by making conservatives seem like the people causing all the division. Can we find common ground in Christian love, if not agreement? I’m not even arguing for Third Way here as I think the continual push for full lgbtq affirmation is needed in the UMC Church, and I agree with even perhaps the more controversial tactics among progressive bishops and pastors, seeing it as a civil rights thing. But I want us to be careful that we don’t forget we are family. We are in this together. We are conversing together not behind each other’s backs. We are wrestling with each other and not against each other, in much the same way Jacob wrestled with God and not against God. We can’t divide ourselves into our comfortable little communities where we become echo chambers. Surely there is room for ‘safe space’ and I fully affirm this, but for us who aren’t lgbtq, to set ourselves off from each other entirely, forming our camps and othering the side we disagree with helps no one. And we definitely must not treat how we treat those marginalized like some kind of moral gold star on our scoreboard against those we disagree with. We might be right on this, but we are wrong, so wrong on other things. There is no room for self justification here that happens between progressives and conservatives. We are no better.

We are family. With all the flaws and mess that comes with. I can no more shun my friend Joel than I can pretend I am better than him just because we disagree on this, just because I stand in solidarity with lgbtq in a different way than he does.

Yes, there are better ways to do things, and in listening to lgbtq we learn what they want, rather than what we think is best, but I also believe that there can be a kind of arrogance among progressives that pretend they’re better people and not just doing something in perhaps a better way. We become smug and ironically, othering. We cannot do this to our conservative UMC family. In my disagreements and discussions with Joel, sometimes they’re messy, sometimes we hurt one another’s feelings (I get mine hurt more than he does, I do tend to be far more sensitive than he is haha) and sometimes I feel like parting ways, forming camps against him and drawing battle lines. To my regret I’ve followed those feelings before, even tried to drag in other friends while doing so, and I have hurt my friendship with Joel, and with another friend in that process. But I learned, I watched Joel talk to other progressives and I saw how even when their arguments got heated, they could end with “I love you brother, peace with you.” and I realized I had not treated Joel like family in Christ, but like the enemy, the ‘other’. It’s easy to choose sides, and honestly I do believe God chose sides with the marginalized, but I don’t believe this means we draw battle lines, that we cease to be a church with one another and become two warring camps. It means we don’t let this be, we continue to fight for the rights of lgbtq while also being in community with those we disagree, having our discussions and our debates, sometimes our conversations getting heated, and messy, and hurting each other’s feelings and not being comfortable, but not giving up on being with one another.

I think if there is any way we might just come out of this without schism, without breaking up the family, is that we be family. That means listening in respect to one another, talking it out, telling our stories, taking breaks if we need them, but coming back and not giving up on one another.

God Bless you all, and peace with you my UMC family.