Umbrellas and Their Meaning

1.
I was on a business trip Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was raining.  I had a meeting and a walk to get to that meeting, so I went into the hotel gift shop and bought an umbrella.  I bought the smallest and least expensive (I would say cheapest, but it was not cheap) umbrella they had, without really looking at it.  After I had completed the purchase and got ready to get out into the rain, I noticed that it was a Kate Spade umbrella, one of those transparent plastic bubble-type domes.  As I made my way through the streets of Atlanta, I felt overwhelmingly, profoundly self-conscious.  I noticed I wasn't willing to make eye contact with dudes carrying their more macho black umbrellas, as if I was avoiding their judgment for my umbrella and its femininity.

How dumb is that?  Here I am, in a city that I know no one, which I hadn't been to in fifteen years and probably won't be back to for another fifteen, and I am worried about what random strangers think of my umbrella?  And what that umbrella might say about me?  About my sexuality?  As if anyone cares about me, let alone what an umbrella, for God's sake, might signify or mean.

Once I realized what I was doing, I was really disappointed and angry with myself.  I felt like I was better than that, and I clearly wasn't.  It was like the line from Dancing in the Dark by the Boss--"I aint nothin' but tired; man, I'm just tired and bored with myself."  I was bored with this fear of what others think, bored with feeling like I had to put on a show to prove to others that I was "really" a guy, and super bored with the fact that the pressure came from the inside, from the critical, judgmental voice in my head.  Tired and bored with all of it.

2.
On Tuesday, an organization with the ludicrous name of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood released a document with the pretentious moniker of the "Nashville Statement."  On one level, the statement was a recitation of standard and predictable talking points from the conservative Evangelical establishment regarding gender and sexuality, especially as it relates to LGBT folks.  Because it was so standard and predictable, many people asked what the purpose of such a statement was--why bother simply restating all of the stuff that you have been saying for so long?

I think there are three answers to this question.  There is a secondary target, a primary target, and a, for lack of a better term, "metaphysical" target.  Let's take them in that order.

The secondary target of the Nashville Statement is the cadre of progressive and/or former Evangelicals who have become increasingly numerous and vocal in their rejection of the conservative line on gender and sexuality questions.  Here we have the Jen Hatmakers and Rob Bells and Rachel Held Evanses of the world, along with a host of anonymous folks who are similarly situated to those people.  We can see that they are the target of this effort by looking at Article X of the statement, which is really the heart of the whole thing:

We Affirm that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

We Deny that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.

This is interesting primarily for the insight it grants as to the mindset of the Evangelical establishment at this point in time.  After spending 30 years telling us that progressive Christians are irrelevant and on the verge of extinction at any moment, the new Party Line appears to be that such people are an existential threat to the Christian message, to the point that they must be formally condemned with explicit anathemas.  Some, clearly irony-challenged, have gone so far as to compare these statements to an Ecumenical Council, which is interesting from folks who reject the idea of Creeds and other products of said councils.  "We are at war with Eastasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia," with "Eastasia" in this context meaning "annoying (from their perspective) female bloggers, but also the huge number of people who have left conservative churches in the last 15 years."  The Evangelical establishment, as the kids would say, is shook.

The thing is, though, that these people are long gone.  Rob Bell and Rachel Held Evans are never coming back to the conservative Evangelical fold, and neither are their fellow travelers.  And, notwithstanding pro forma references to "winning back the culture for Christ" or whatever, the authors of the Nashville Statement know that.

That's why the primary target of the Nashville Statement are people within the conservative Evangelical fold.  The message of Article X is that it is not good enough to shun neighbors, friends, and family who are openly LGBT; now, you must shun neighbors, friends, and family who themselves refuse to shun LGBT people.  Lest you miss the message, one of the organizers of the project made it absolutely explicit that the Nashville Statement is designed to be a "line in the sand." 

In a way, all of this is of a piece of the vision outlined by our buddy Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option. [Edit:  Apparently Rod Dreher agrees].  However much Dreher and his cohort want to make this about how they have been pushed to the margins by Evil Gays and their lackeys, The Benedict Option vision is about retreating into protected fortifications and pulling up the drawbridge behind them.  The Nashville Statement is the sound of the drawbridge being raised, and it wants everyone still in the castle to know that they will soon be cut off from the rest of the world.  Once the drawbridge is up, the conservative Evangelical leadership is going police the walls that stand between themselves and anyone who does not reject LGBT expression in an unqualified way.  If you want to stay within the conservative Evangelical tribe, this statement is telling you in no uncertain terms that you too are going to have to pick up a weapon and man a post.  And they are going to be watching you to make sure you are not having any contact with anyone over the wall.

3.
But while all of that is true in a descriptive sense, it doesn't really get at the more fundamental reason for statements like this.  Conservative Evangelicals make it clear that gender and sexuality are lines in the sand, but why?  Why draw the line here?  This question gets to the heart of the more metaphysical reason, and it is here that my umbrella story comes into play.

I am coming around to the idea than no one is, truly, "comfortable with their sexuality."  Some are more comfortable than others, each person is more or less comfortable with different elements of his or her sexuality, and hopefully we grow into a greater level of comfort with time and effort.  But this complex and multifaceted part of ourselves that is labeled with the ambiguous term "sexuality" is at bottom a mystery to us, and in some fundamental way it always will be.

The easiest and simplest response to mystery is to try to create rules to keep it at bay.  Since we don't really understand ourselves and our own sexuality, we try to control it through the imposition of some kind of scheme.  This scheme acts as a kind of shield, a way to keep us from dealing with or engaging with the existential question mark that lives inside of us.  I don't have to face the possibility that I don't really understand myself on a fundamental level by asserting that there is a set of universal, ontological categories that actually govern this part of myself.  God created two completely distinct, utterly clear buckets to which all people fit, and so long as we hold on to that idea we will never have to open that very scary closet door that lies in the back of our consciousness and reality.

But the thing about schemes like this is that they act like a kind of collective hypnosis.  As long as everyone agrees that there are only two buckets that are utterly simple and clear, there is a way in which that becomes true.  Because, if there is no one out there challenging the scheme, then your consciousness will take over the hard work of enforcing the scheme.  No matter how much we like to think of ourselves as self-confident, autonomous individuals, we are all desperately afraid to be different, to be outside of the norm.  The moment you can convince people that everyone has accepted some idea is the moment that everyone will impose that standard on themselves, in fear of being the only one sitting on the outside.  And if you tell them that God set it up that way, then it becomes easier to convince people of that fact.

The traditional gender scheme that we have inherited more or less works, or at least can be made to work, for the majority of people in the world.  There are sharp edges that the boxes will shear off, to be sure, but most people can make themselves fit into their assigned box without too much violence to who they are.  But, the key word here is "most."  There are, and always have been, people who just can't fit into the buckets which are at the heart of the scheme.  For those people, being stuffed into the boxes is an act of violence to their person--they cannot be made to fit without cutting off a massive chunk of who they are.

Again, there have always been folks who have refused to be stuffed into the box.  But, in more recent days, people who don't fit are increasingly refusing to be made to fit, and are embracing the prospect of living in the liminal space where our sexuality truly lurks, without compromise and without being afraid.  For these people, this development is a move toward personal wholeness and integrity.  But there is another dimension to that move.  The more people there are that refuse to follow along with the imposition of the scheme, the less powerful the collective hypnosis that enforces the scheme becomes.  The existence of people who reject the scheme in public, uncompromising ways encourages people who would otherwise just go-along-to-get-along to question whether they need to do so.  "Sure, you could fit into the box," they ask those for whom challenging the scheme is not a matter of survival, "but why?"

Upon reflection, what is interesting and relevant about my umbrella story is not the fact that I felt self-conscious about walking the streets of Atlanta in a "girly" umbrella.  What is interesting and relevant is the fact that it bummed me out afterward--that I was "tired and bored with myself" for spending any time worrying about that kind of crap.  It would be relatively easy for me to be more conscientious about staying within the standard male heterosexual gender lines, because my default, unaffected posture is mostly within those lines anyway.  It's not that much work for me to go along and get along.  But even that relatively limited effort expenditure seems stupid and not worth it.

And that sense that it is not worth the effort is a product of other people, people for whom staying within the lines would be an enormous burden, showing that all of this is bullshit and none of it matters anyway.  LGBT people living in a more ambiguous, liminal space in terms of gender and sexuality create space for straight people to be unafraid of entering that liminal space themselves, even in tiny and utterly trivial ways like having the wrong kind of umbrella.  The fact that I am fighting against my own internalized version of the scheme is a direct result, I think, of the folks who have thrown off the scheme altogether or in the main.

There is a quote that gets circulated, one that I just found out comes from an Aborignal activist named Lilla Watson:  "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."  When LGBT folks work to overthrow the rigid gender and sexuality straight-jacket, it works most immediately for their own liberation, but it also works to the liberation of everyone, because it attacks the collective hypnosis that feeds the voice inside all of our heads that enforces the scheme.  Eventually, the scheme collapses, and everyone--LGBT and non-LGBT can live in that liminal space where everyone truly belongs anyway.

4.
It is precisely this process that is the ultimate, "metaphysical" target of the Nashville Statement and all of its ilk.  It is a target in part because many people have put an enormous investment into the scheme and all of its dimensions, and are afraid of seeing it all get washed away.  But the more fundamental reason is because there is a group of people, and they are especially prevalent among conservative Christians (and other conservative religious types as well) who are terrified of liminal spaces of any kind.  These folks build a wall to keep the mystery of sexuality at bay because they build walls to protect themselves from any kind of mystery.

We should not be surprised that the people who deny that there is ambiguity around human sexuality also deny ambiguity around, say, the meaning of particular Biblical verses, or the history of the Church, or the precise doctrinal contours of Papal authority, or what have you (or political ideology, or what kind of sandwich to have for lunch . . . .)  It is all of a piece--the postulate that everything is clear and tidy and fits into a pre-defined box that can be understood and handled and (most importantly) controlled.  There is a reason why mystics are generally not also systematic theologians.  There is a reason why Thomas Aquinas, the systematic theologian par excellance, stopped writing the Summa after his mystical experience.  The systematic theologian attempts to explain the things of God in a way that can be understood and handled and controlled, while the mystic has an encounter with a God that cannot be forced into that sort of box.  That doesn't make systematic theology bad, but it does make it limited.

Lots of folks don't want to hear that there are limits to their carefully built and tended system.  And they especially don't like to see living avatars of those limits, people who are living free and clear of the system and comfortable in liminal spaces.  It puts the whole thing into jeopardy, because the system is only powerful if everyone believes that it is unimpeachable and unchangeable.  If it is the case that we can live in liminal spaces regarding gender and sexuality and it is OK, then other sorts of liminal spaces are probably OK as well.

But there are people who simply can't or won't accept living in liminal spaces, no matter the context.  The Nashville Statement is a desperate, and ultimately futile, attempt to find some way to rebuild the collective hypnosis surrounding gender and sexuality.  Maybe, somehow, if they can just get everyone to believe that their One True Way is clear and God-ordained, it will make it true, and then they will not be confronted by any of these terrifying liminal spaces anymore.

Many of the critics of the Nashville Statement have, correctly, pointed to the ways in which statements like this imperil LGBT youth living in conservative Evangelical homes.  Conservative folks have no response to this argument, because they can't see it--all they can see is the fearful darkness of what would happen if they no longer had the reassurance of the rigid box and had to live in the liminal space of gender and sexuality.  I say that not to excuse their behavior, but as a description and prediction of future actions.  There are a group of folks who will never, ever be willing to go where the rest of us are moving, if haltingly and uncertainly.  Some people are just too afraid of liminal spaces.  Some people see the entire purpose of Christianity as building a bullwark against liminal spaces, making a Christianity that is comfortable in such places seem bizarre and grotesque and perverse.

Again, I say that not in any way to excuse the signers of the Nashville Statement.  But, to return to a idea that I become more and more convinced of every day, Christianity is splitting into two increasingly incompatible and mutually incomprehensible realities.  Things like the Liturgists Statement (which I signed, proudly) are not so much "responses" to the Nashville Statement and its signers as they are declarations of independence.  Whereas the Nashville Statement is inward focused, the Liturgists Statement and others like it are, at their heart, pleas to the broader culture not to tar all Christians with the same bigoted brush.  We are talking to different people, about different topics, in different ways.  We have gone our separate ways.

5.
What I liked most about the Liturgists Statement, and why I signed it, was the recognition of who everyone is one way or another on a journey.  We are all working through these murky waters.  We need to hold space for each other to do that, but we also need to insist that other hold space as well.  The Nashville Statement is a declaration of refusal to hold space.  So be it.

Comments

Wow, really good. Thanks!

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

A Reflection on the Past, and Also on Art