Hate Mail Disguised As Love Letters

I’ve kept a file since my first General Conference in 1988 of the letters, phone calls, conversations and emails detailing the “concerns” individuals and congregations raised in preparation of the quadrennial meeting. This file is a reminder of the diversity of opinion in our denomination, the level of fear and disrespect still rampant in our churches and conferences, the heartfelt passion people bring to various issues, and just how far we still are from the kingdom/kin-dom/realm of the Almighty. I will make this statement at the outset — knowing it will do little good — to frame my comments. I do not think we should frame our disagreements in battle terms: win/lose, right/wrong, us/them. We are human beings and we will have very strong opinions and beliefs which will be in conflict from time to time. This is healthy and good. It is when we resort to hateful rhetoric, angry contempt, petty bigotry and spiteful attack dressed up in self-righteousness and fake Christian piety that I feel we have a serious problem. Is the majority of it lodged in simple ignorance? Certainly, but it goes beyond that.

The following examples may illustrate:

From 1988 (Northern New Jersey)

If any of our Christian money goes to support people with AIDS my family will leave the church. They get what they deserve.

Why do we have to support minorities? Why can’t they have their own churches? They think and talk differently than we do, and I am afraid they are taking over… We should never have let our (italics mine) slaves go to church.

Why are we even talking about gays? The Bible says ‘NO’

I don’t know if General Conference is the right place to bring this up, but are we ever going to ask the question, “Should women be allowed to be ministers. The Bible says they should not be allowed to speak up in church.

Please, please, please protect us from the Religious Right. Have you seen their agenda? We must not let the lunatics run the asylum. These people must be stopped now!

From 1996 (Nashville, Tennessee and from all across America — I was working for the General Board of Discipleship at the time)

God hates fags. If Methodists love God, they will hate fags, too.

I don’t know how a Democrat can claim to be a Christian. They want to kill babies, give condoms to children, protect serial killers, promote homosexuality, kill big business, and raise our taxes. In what universe are any of these things Christian?

We have to stop the liberal agenda to destroy the church and undermine God’s kingdom. We may quickly be coming to a time where violence is our only alternative. When people don’t listen, Christians need to act.

What will it take to make Church and Society go away? It would be nice if we could do it with legislative action at General Conference, but it may only be possible with explosives.

From 2004 (Nashville, and points global — still at GBOD )

Perhaps it is time for the Methodist church to wake up to the fact that we live in Bush’s America. We don’t tolerate sin, we don’t coddle terrorists, we don’t take crap from anybody, and we aren’t bleeding heart Socialists. The time has come for our church to take a stand and BE CHRISTIAN!

You need to understand that if the church votes to tolerate gays it will split the church. I guarantee you, the 99% of us who love the Lord will be out the door if you let the other 1% have their way.

I love God, I love my church and I would do anything for Jesus. I believe sinners go to hell, and I do not want them running the church. This is why I oppose homosexuals in church.

No to abortion! No to queers! Yes to the death penalty! No to science that plays God. You have been warned!

And, now again, in 2012 it starts all over. I am not going to quote the current batch, because they are no different from any of those above. I count 127 different messages all of a similar stripe; all couched in terms of loving Christians speaking their heart before General Conference. I assume most of these people to be normal, well-meaning, sincere individuals who are motivated by what they believe to be solid, accurate, valid and moral worldviews. To me, this is our greatest challenge. We speak of diversity in terms of face, gender, age, education and economics, but we do not fully engage the concept of our theological and ecclesial diversity. This is the diversity that may actually destroy us, because we are not working to foster structures and processes that allow us to disagree well in true fellowship and Christian love.

I have said before that my default position is this: everyone is right… to some degree. The corollaries to this are:

no one is 100% right 100% or the time
no one defends a position that they know or believe to be false
being misguided, ignorant, biased, stubborn, recalcitrant and opinionated = being human
together we are better off than divided
focusing on what we hold in common offers more possibilities than focusing on our differences
we all benefit when we put the good of the community ahead of individual agendas

If our God is a God of love whose primary desire is reconciliation and restoration, who sent a Savior as a bridge to extend the offer of grace to humankind, and who continues to empower and inspire through the Holy Spirit to destroy the dividing walls and bring us to unity in one body, then who are we to work so hard to thwart this will? I mean, let’s get over ourselves. The vision God delivers to God’s people is to become Christ’s own body in the world. All of our energy, efforts, engagement and enthusiasm should be to create, to heal, to connect, to build rapport, and to become one in Christ. If sin, brokenness, bad-behavior, ill-will, judgmentalism, disrespect and open hostility exempt us from the kingdom, we are in deep doo-doo. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and since this is true, why do we waste so much time trying to find a reason to hate someone else?

The irrational paradox I have never been able to reconcile is simply this: for Christians who judge the person or practices of another to be sinner or sin, shouldn’t we want those we deem sinners IN the church rather than OUT? If our purpose on earth is to bring people to Jesus the Christ, creating barriers to keep those who need God most from the church is indefensible. There should be a place for everyone in church — all of us are in the act of becoming. This is not to say anything goes, or that we tolerate any and all behavior and simply say, “Well, what can you expect? We’re all just sinners!” In true community, we are constantly striving to determine what it means for us to “do no harm, do all the good we can, and to attend to the ordinances of God.” We don’t let embezzlers manage the books, child molesters teach children’s Sunday school, or those with criminal records take the youth group on retreat. We use some common sense, and we make decisions together as a community. This is the heart of accountability. We do it together, and we do it with everyone inside instead of deciding who belongs and who doesn’t. Were we to simply accept the fact that there is no “them,” there in ONLY “us” we would be a different kind of people, a different kind of church.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if General Conference could be a model of true community instead of a mere legislative body? Wouldn’t it be cool if we would spend as much time discerning God’s will for God’s church as we do trying to institutionalize the church we want? Wouldn’t it be wonderful is “God is love” were more than a bumper sticker or a coffee mug slogan? You know what? We could make it happen if we really wanted it to. Problem is, we simply don’t like some of “those people,” and if we let “them” in then we don’t think we’ll stay…

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19 responses to “Hate Mail Disguised As Love Letters”

Shannon

March 6, 2012

While I appreciate the desire to get past binaries and an us/them mentality, I worry that there’s a false equivalency trap here.

This reminds me of the current Republican and Democratic parties. One party consistently uses a rhetoric of hate across the base, across the leadership, and across the media. The other doesn’t. But then people say “we” have to make our dialogue more civil and both sides need to stop.

Similarly, I hear one side expressing *hate* and the other side expressing *love*. That’s not to say that love is compromise. For instance, there can be no compromise that says that some Christians are second-class citizens. That’s against everything that Christ taught us. There’s no need to be hateful about it, but we can’t say that it’s okay for some members of the body of Christ to be excluded while others are embraced.

I understand that some of my friends see this very differently, believing that they can’t compromise with immorality. I still love them. They still love me. But we don’t share a vision of the church.

How are we supposed to get past this? I was a member of a church in my youth that split because the new worship director moved the organ to the other side of the church and because the pastor introduced other translations besides the KJV. (This was not a Methodist church).

This isn’t that.

This is not majoring in the minors.

This is a fundamental disagreement over who God is, what love means, what Jesus calls us to be and do, the basic way we interpret the Bible, and what the church IS.

I can’t say this strongly enough. I honestly believe that their god is not my God, that they have been blinded by small-mindedness and evil, and that they have deliberately chosen to embrace our selfish culture rather than the community mindset the Bible demands.

I fully welcome everyone in the church–and I mean it. But that doesn’t mean that we can vote on whether some people have the right to be Christians and serve God while others don’t.

Bishop Willimon said once, some time ago, in my hearing, that the GLBT question was a distraction from the business of the church.

I could not disagree more. Some people genuinely believe that GLBT persons are in complete and total defiance of God. That’s serious stuff. Others genuinely believe that GLBT persons reflect the image of God just as much as heterosexuals and that to deny them is to cast people out of the church and out of leadership whom God accepts and even calls. This is also serious stuff.

They can’t both be right. And there is no way in heaven that God is straddling this issue seeing both sides. God’s on one side of this argument.

I don’t see a way forward except through dividing the church in two, painful as it is. Of course, the mass exodus among my friends to the UCC may be solving that problem.

(This is a long response. I appreciate your blog even when I disagree, and I feel passionately about this).

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1. Rex Nelson
  
  March 8, 2012
  
  “They can’t both be right.”
  Two opposing debaters were becoming increasingly extreme in rhetoric and emotion, finally coming to blows. “The door must be open! That is God’s Will!” “The door must be shut! All who believe otherwise are heretics!” The question? “What color is the barn?” The question the Pharisee posed to Jesus was “How do I get to heaven?” Not “How does my neighbor get to heaven?” Do you love your neighbor? I believe God’s will is in the loving, not the neighbor-choosing.
  Your humble servant in Christ,
  Rex+
  
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Joe

March 6, 2012

It’s great to talk with people who differ from us – when there’s a conversation to be had. The letters above are examples of folks who are, I’d say, “beyond conversation.” (You kind of know you’ve reached that state when you’re talking about explosives, or when you’re using epithets to talk about other groups.) What I’ve observed is that people are often willing to put these kinds of things down on paper, even if they would NEVER say them to you out loud. Speaking face-to-face requires more courage and requires you to choose your words more carefully (we hope).

I have friends who are very different from me politically and we can discuss the issues, because we trust each other. I recognize that there are good points to their arguments, just as there are good points in mine. I learn from them, and sometimes even change my thinking as a result. But let’s be clear: there are lots of folks out there – left and right – with whom conversation is just not possible.

I’m not sure of the truth of the statement: “I assume most of these people to be normal, well-meaning, sincere individuals…” I just can’t read the letters above and believe that’s the case. Sorry.

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Rebekah Simon-Peter

March 6, 2012

Agreed, Dick! Burning up bridges is a lot easier than building them! Upon revealing to a congregation that I am a Jewish/Christian hybrid who likes to help others understand the Jewishness of Jesus, I got this response from one of the up and coming church leaders who is also active in the community: “Well, why don’t you just go back to being Jewish?” In other words, we like “our” church the way it is, and “our” beliefs too.

It seems like we go way out of our way to make the inclusive message of Jesus somehow exclusive.

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Tom Bolton

March 6, 2012

“for Christians who judge the person or practices of another to be sinner or sin, shouldn’t we want those we deem sinners IN the church rather than OUT? ” Yes!
We have to keep focusing on this, because sometimes we get really carried away with trying to move out folks whom we perceive to be non-Christian sinners, or just people who are annoying us like crazy. We run into this in our committees sometimes, and when we start thinking about wishing people were out, we each need to gently call attention to that, I think.

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Rebecca

March 6, 2012

Thanks, Dick – wise words again. If we could only see ourselves more clearly…

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Cynthia Myers

March 6, 2012

Dan your points are well-taken and valid. The fact is, much of our preaching and lecturing about diversity and inclusion amounts to a lot of hot air! It looks good to have these high-mind ideals on posters or stationary, it is another thing entirely to attempt to live them. Far be it that we should actually sit down and try to listen to what others have to say lest we come to realize that their point(s) of views are more valid than our own. God forbid!

I submit that if we invested our time and lives in seeking God’s will, we would have far less time to find fault, name-call and point fingers at others. On the ‘day of the Lord’ these stupid, manmade barriers that we’ve spend a lifetime erecting will amount to nothing. The only thing that will matter is what we did for the kingdom.

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wesleywhite22

March 6, 2012

“Discerning God’s will for God’s church” may need a different scripture passage as an organizing principle. Instead of “making disciples…” (something that is more Spirit work, than ours, though we have our witness to make about the joy of being a disciple) we may need to back up to a pre-resurrectional prayer of Jesus’ that the way others will know we are disciples and thus be attracted to find out more, is to “love one another”. Loving one another is something we can do, making disciples is not.

As I look at petitions to General Conference it seems there is too great a percentage of them that are trying to control our way into heaven by setting up boundaries for others without really engaging their realities. Blessings on your continued call for community with all its messy movement that includes support along with correction.

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