“Turning Away from Jesus: Gay Rights and the War for the Episcopal Church” (subscription required) in the June issue of Harper’s gave me the chills. It was that good. The magazine sat on my desk for over a week. I’d look at the cover (a detail from a Prague altarpiece), and put it down, loath to read yet another piece about the Episcopal sex crisis. Thanks in no small part to the mainstream media, homosexuality has been the defining issue for Episcopalians (as well as Methodists and Presbyterians) for the past 20 years. As a result, mainline Protestantism’s (potentially) prophetic voice has been drowned out in the debate over who can sleep with whom and still do God’s work. Yes, it’s a big deal but so is the war in Iraq, public education, the environment, New Orleans, poverty, and the imperial presidency. At times, I wonder if it’s an easier fight than the ones with less obvious (depending on your side) heroes and villains.
Evidently Garret Keizer agrees: “How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and environmental rape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson [the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, a gay man, whose election to the episcopacy is the focal point of current divisions between so-called liberals and conservatives domestically and abroad]. Or on the flip side, by making approval of Gene Robinson the litmus test of progressive integrity, a stance that I have good reason to believe would impress no one so little as Gene Robinson.”
In his quest to understand why homosexuality is dividing the church communion, Keizer speaks with African prelates, Anglican parish priests and American laity. He contextualizes his search by considering history, theology and sociology. Amazingly, and in spite of his own affinities, he is able to discuss all sides with deep sympathy and respect. But he decides that the current crisis is, at best, a sideshow or, at worst, a distraction from vexing problems whose solution would require more than arms’ length indignation.
For that reason, the church’s predicament holds a mirror to society’s shortcomings:
“Yes, the eucharist has meanings peculiar to Christians—but it also can be taken as a universal symbol of how any community shares its wealth, its bread and wine, what the old socialists used to call the roses and the bread. The consecrated wafers placed on the tongue or in the upturned hands of the faithful, one per person and all the same size, have a secular equivalent in the basic allotments of health, education and welfare—of life, liberty and the off chance of happiness—that every citizen at the common table can expect as his or her due. If the obvious implications don’t make you squirm, if they fail to explain why I resolutely refuse to apply the word ‘left’ to the progressive side of ‘the gay debate’; in my church or to just about any debate going on outside the church, then nothing will.”
What do we owe each other? What constitutes communion and community? Keizer pushes so hard on religious questions that they turn into secular conundrums. His beautiful, provocative piece—I hardly do justice to his eloquence and thoughtfulness—confronts the church’s sex crisis by taking that confrontation one step further to demand “Why?” His answer—“we’re all Episcopalians now”—was unexpected, unwelcome, but not entirely unjustified.
