The Elephant in the Room
Alan F.H. Wisdom
June 25, 2009
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As its name implies, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Special Committee on Civil Unions and Christian Marriage is supposed to study “the relationship between civil union and Christian marriage.” Likewise, the 2008 PCUSA General Assembly instructed the committee to consider “the place of covenanted same-gender partnerships in the Christian community.”
Both these topics point to an underlying question: What is the church’s moral evaluation of “covenanted same-gender partnerships”? Are they good or bad? Do they accord with God’s will as revealed in Scripture, or do they violate God’s will? Should society honor and favor such partnerships in the same way that it honors and favors marriage? Should the church celebrate and bless such partnerships in the same way that it celebrates and blesses marriage?
The oddest thing about the June 17-20 special committee meeting in Louisville was that these basic questions were never directly discussed. They were the elephant in the room that no one dared to mention. Even when the elephant stirred a bit and all eyes fixed on it, no one said a word in the open meeting.
In discussing early, incomplete drafts of their report, committee members several times referred to “my position,” implying that others held different positions. But none of them stated his or her position. Some lamented that their position had been misunderstood; however, they offered no further explanation of that position. It seems that committee members knew—or thought they knew—one another’s positions without asking. So they observed an informal “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t debate” policy on the central issue before their committee.
Disagreements surfaced on tangential points: Did Jesus take an unfavorable view of marriage? Is love the only reason why people marry today? Are current laws protecting the one man-one woman definition of marriage analogous to former segregationist statutes prohibiting interracial marriages? Such questions seemed to function as proxies for the main issue, as the two sides lined up fairly consistently. (Those who support same-sex marriage tended to answer “yes” to the three questions above; those opposed tended to answer “no.”) But after the disagreement had been briefly expressed, the topic was dropped without much actual debate on the merits of each question.
Two committee members, in separate ways, may have tried to provoke a franker discussion. But none of their colleagues took the bait. Tony De La Rosa, an attorney and elder from Los Angeles, wore t-shirts promoting the acceptance of homosexuality. “Stop H8,” one shirt proclaimed—in reference to the successful 2008 amendment enshrining the traditional definition of marriage in the California constitution. None of his colleagues took public issue with De La Rosa, and none of them wore articles of clothing advocating a contrary view.
Leading devotions before dinner on June 18, De La Rosa chose to read from Romans 14, in which the apostle Paul advises Christians not to “pass judgment on your brother or sister” in matters of “food and drink” where each has their “own conviction before God.” The implied message may have been that sexual orientation was a similar matter calling for toleration rather than judgment. But De La Rosa did not articulate that message, and none of his colleagues spoke to contest it.
Perhaps the tensest moment of the entire special committee meeting came in the Bible study after dinner that same evening. Dallas pastor Clayton Allard invited the group to read silently from I Corinthians 6. In that passage Paul urges believers to avoid bringing their disputes into secular courts and to “flee sexual immorality” because “your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.” Listed in verse 9 among various sins that the Corinthians formerly practiced (and perhaps still indulged) are two phrases referring to passive and active male homosexuals, respectively.
Since no one read the passage aloud, those two charged phrases were never spoken. But a footnote in Allard’s photocopied translation made their meaning clear. The Dallas pastor, in commenting on the passage, made no reference to homosexuality. Nor did other members of the committee in their responses to the passage.
The conversation focused instead on Allard’s question “Whose body is it?” The answer was that believers’ bodies individually belong to God and collectively they make up the body of Christ. Allard presented this insight as the key to Paul’s moral reasoning about both legal disputes and sexual morality: Christians were not to abuse their own bodies or one another because of their identity with Christ.
Allard alluded in general terms to the pressures the special committee was feeling to answer the questions put to it by the General Assembly. He then offered this elliptical conclusion: “We all want a solution. We have been given a body instead. Maybe that is Paul’s solution.” Allard also suggested, “The best we can do is to walk the way we see—and not try to win [disputes inside the church].”
It was not obvious how this lesson might apply to the committee’s assignment to discern “the place of covenanted same-gender partnerships in the Christian community.” A more direct conversation would have to wait for another day.