A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Donald MacLeod is senior pastor of Newton Presbyterian Church in Newton, MA, and former chair of The Renewal Fellowship. The issue of human sexuality will be coming up at The General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church in Canada this year.
The Joy of Presbyterian Sex is the title of a recent retrospective on the Report of the Special Committee on Sexuality of the Presbyterian Church (USA) titled Keeping Body and Soul Together, and presented to the last (203rd) General Assembly. That report, which put Presbyterians to the forefront of public attention (and ridicule), made the Assembly a media circus. It was finally and decisively rejected by a vote of 534 to 31.
“The Joy of Presbyterian Sex,” however, is no accolade for permissiveness. It is, rather, an analysis of what is called “the liberal-Protestant axis” from one of the most prestigious magazines of the politically correct: The New Republic. The author, Camille Paglia, describes herself as “a lapsed Catholic of wavering sexual orientation.” As Dr. Richard Hutcheson, in a review of the review in The Presbyterian Outlook, comments she is a representative of that “secular, non-puritan culture” that the Committee set out to reach. Dr. Hutcheson, presently with the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City, will be well known to members of The Renewal Fellowship Within The Presbyterian Church in Canada as the speaker at an epochal 1985 Conference we sponsored at Crieff that brought together various persuasions within our own denomination in dialogue.
Paglia is scathing in her denunciation: “Orwellian logic approaching lunacy” is one reflection on the rationality of the main-stream Protestant sexual ethic. Another: “an orgy of lugubrious soap opera.” And she asks the pointed question: “Why remain Christian at all?” “The Seventh Commandment forbidding adultery is never mentioned, while the overwhelming evidence that the Bible condemns homosexuality is blandly argued away, piece by piece.”
“This technique of disinformation,” she continues, “has got to stop.” “We must accept history for what it is, neither lightening nor darkening it to fit a ready-made political agenda. Like the current proponents of academic speech codes, the Presbyterian committee wants to soften, to cushion, to shield minority groups from any rebuff to their self-esteem. Such pampering is demeaning.”
What is the remedy? Ms. Paglia suggests: “The Presbyterian report, so mawkish and muddled, dramatizes the pressing need for education in the great world religions, the repository of thousands of years of spiritual experience and wisdom. When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.”
She concludes by noting that her background music as she read Keeping Body and Soul Together was the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil. The song, which speaks of “a force of evil spiraling through history, inciting riots, wars, and assassinations” seemed considerably more truthful than the Report “with its optimistic patter about ‘empowerment’ and ‘mutuality’ and its blissful obliviousness about human perversity. The Presbyterian committee, seeing evil only in institutions and society rather than in our hearts, strips from us the possibility of heroic conflict. The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.”
Hutcheson itemizes the lessons that the Presbyterian Church (USA) can learn from the debacle of Keeping Body and Soul Together. Obviously the process was deeply flawed. “Papers, prepared for General Assemblies in recent years by committees of ‘experts’ have an abysmal record.” Most are ignored, even when approved. This may be an even worse fate than the kind of passionate and emotional outburst that accompanied the work of the Special Committee on Human Sexuality.
What was highlighted was the “painful distrust of the General Assembly” and “the cry of the church for an Assembly that listens to the grass roots” and the Theology and Worship Ministry Unit is attempting to trailblaze a new approach which will be consensus-forming, and from the bottom up, rather than the top-down.
Unfortunately such a hopeful attitude may not necessarily prevail. “Quite frankly,” The Presbyterian Layman recently opined, “we had hoped that (the General Assembly action) would end the matter. We’re weary of the subject and would prefer to report that the church is addressing issues of greater moment.” But the issues raised in the report will not go away: whether they are being pushed on the church by a persistent politically correct lobby with their own agenda or not. Perhaps the church is simply reflecting issues in our society that will not disappear. We are a part of our culture: a culture where sexual norms are rapidly disappearing and where the temptation is always to capitulate either in the interests of “communication” or “relevance.”
Two issues have focussed this concern. On January 6 the Presbytery of Genesee Valley, by a vote of 105 to 66, voted not to rescind a call to Jane Adams Spahr to serve as co-pastor of the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Rochester, NY. Downtown Church is one of a number of PC(USA) “More Light” churches who have declared themselves open to ordination of homosexuals as ministers and church officers. Rev. Spahr is a self-proclaimed lesbian, having declared herself in 1979 shortly after the San Diego General
Assembly had ruled against homosexuals in ministry. She had had a fourteen year marriage with two children. Her present partner, a coach in a California college sports team, had determined to continue to live on the West Coast, from which they would conduct a transcontinental “marriage.”
The case has caused a fire storm and the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Synod of the Northeast has stopped the process until further appeals can be made. The legalities will probably be debated for at least three years, and seems destined to go to the highest judicatory, General Assembly. Meanwhile, further bloodletting from the denomination will proceed.
Concurrent with the Spahr case, there is also the certification of Lisa Larges, described as “a practicing homosexual,” to be ready for a call to the ministry by the Presbytery of Twin Cities on November 12. A member of the evangelical Knox Church in Minneapolis, Ms. Larges is a graduate of San Francisco Seminary in San Anselmo, CA. Her pastor, Kenneth Kleidon, opposed the certification saying that “The documents of the church are very clear that Lisa’s sexual practice renders her ‘not ready’ to be certified.” The vote in her case was 108 in favour of certification with 86 opposed.
Does our Presbyterian Church have a death wish? I posed the question to one of the leaders of the evangelical cause within our denomination. The analogy that he drew was that of a dysfunctional family, where hostility and anger seem almost pathological and self-destructive. What he raised was a further question: “How far do you go with civility?”
The Presbyterian Layman has adopted one approach: a strident, negative, attitude that has been the butt of much criticism. But aside from The Presbyterian Outlook, The Layman provides one of the few sources of hard, factual information. Unlike its Canadian counterpart, the American Church is vast in its complexities and diversity. Canadian evangelicals can also identify with the concern of how adequately to respond to these issues. Time and again the question surfaces, as the church — at least the denomination — seems bent on suicide: “How far do you go with civility?”
Presbyterians For Renewal seems more in keeping with the approach taken by The Renewal Fellowship Within The Presbyterian Church in Canada. It has twin foci, explained Board member Rev. David Searfoss of Louisville’s Calvin Presbyterian Church, and author of last year’s minority report of the Special Committee on Human Sexuality. Searfoss, who served in Montreal and Ottawa with the United Church of Canada in the 1960’s, before returning to the United States, identified them as “renewal committed and politically persuasive.” Presbyterians For Renewal has a positive role in the defeat of Keeping Body and Soul Together. It edits a magazine called Renews to which our Channels can be positively compared. The approach is often muted, but the organization — which brought together the Southern Covenant Fellowship and the Northern Presbyterians United For Biblical Concerns in St. Louis in 1989 — maintains a Louisville office and has raised over five million dollars since its inception.
The real concern among evangelicals within the Presbyterian Church (USA) is the special interest groups, such as Presbyterians Pro Life, who have a special brief, and whose single-mindedness over a specific issue can weaken the overall impact of the whole. The report on abortion, which is to be brought to General Assembly this June, has a minority statement composed largely by Professor Elizabeth Achtemeier. Due to be released on March 1, it is said that her comments will fail to please either side, and so the divisive issue of abortion wreaks its havoc on evangelicals as well as increasing what Time magazine recently called “the fraying of America.”
For it is a divisive time in which we live — as recent events have proven in both Canada and the United States. The Lilly Report, commissioned by the Lilly Foundation to provide some answers as to the future of the Presbyterian Church, is providing some fascinating insights. On the one side, there are those who are stating that the Report will affirm that we needn’t worry about the massive defections from our denomination as we’re finding out who is really faithful, and we will, in the end, have a leaner but better church.
But what the Report will reveal, insiders have confirmed, is that churches “need to pray more, read the Bible more, and tell people about Jesus more.” The massive cutbacks in denominational giving across the spectrum of mainline churches, and the likelihood of a serious shortfall in money sent by Presbyterian churches to our headquarters in Louisville, is probably more than the impact of a serious global recession.
What we are hearing, after the sexuality report, is that the days of denominations are increasingly over. The action, it is becoming apparent, is in the local congregation. As Richard Hutcheson pointed out at that conference at Crieff in 1985 and wrote in his Mainline Churches and the Evangelicals “headquarters” and “bureaucracy” have forfeited the confidence of many — if not most — laypeople. We may deplore the decline of “connectionalism” — a favourite expression in the American Church. But it perhaps represents a reality of the time in which we live. It might even be the Spirit’s warning to a church that has lost its first Love.
As Ms. Paglia concludes: “The report (Keeping Body and Soul Together) laments ‘the erosion of intimacy.’ Alas, we have not too little intimacy but too much. Now the sexes, freely mingling, know each other too well, and both have lost their allure… The culture has split but not fragmented.”
As the Presbyterian Church (USA) enters the twenty-first century there is too much intimacy among its various parts. We know each other too well. As one observer stated categorically: “There will be another sexuality report in five years. This time it will be more subtle, for ‘they’ [that ubiquitous word] have learned from their 1991 disaster.” And with that challenge evangelicals are forced to confront the question — both in Canada (which will surely not be far behind) and in the United States — “How far do you go with civility?”