I interrupt this poetry series to bring you some thoughts sparked by arguments on Twitter. (Clearly I know how to engage readers…)
I say “arguments” because attempts at discussion or conversation on that platform invariably lead to arguments—not necessarily because people are terrible, but more, I think, because the limited number of characters tends to produce terse bursts of expression that end up sounding argumentative. In my experience, anyway.
[I say “Twitter” because, well, who cares about the official rebranding. Here in Detroit, we kept calling Pine Knob “Pine Knob” for how many decades? Finally the name was changed back.]
So first a story.
Years ago, I was sick, and lying on my couch watching TV. I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke up, “The Apprentice” had come on. It may have been the very first episode. At any rate, I woke up just as Mr. Trump was giving the contestants a tour of his New York apartment. Maybe they were just trying to impress the man, but they were ooh-ing and aah-ing and calling everything beautiful. As I recall, there was marble and gold everywhere. Were it a civic building, it might have been beautiful, maybe. But it was purportedly a home, a dwelling—and it was cold and hard and essentially colorless, as I recall.
See, the reason people think something like that is beautiful is that here in the US, we’ve ceded all judgment to the Market, including aesthetic judgment. Anything that’s expensive, and/or shiny, and/or new is deemed “beautiful.” This works well for an economy that needs people to keep buying things, and for a social order that requires people to admire the rich and imagine they could be too, some day, if they just work hard enough subjugate themselves to the principalities and powers that we pretend we think is a providential “invisible hand.”
This matters. It matters deeply, because aesthetics is not at all trivial. I say this so often that it might wind up being my last words on this planet, but Charles Sanders Peirce was right when he called aesthetics the “normative science of the admirable” and identified it as the foundation on which ethics and logic are built. We behave according to what we love; and aesthetics is indeed as normative as ethics and logic. When we call something “beautiful,” we generally mean at least that we are drawn to it, that we admire it. We usually also mean that we recommend it to others. In her essay, On Beauty and Being Wrong, Elaine Scarry points out that beauty creates an impulse in us to reproduce that beauty somehow, whether to photograph it, draw it, write about it, collect it, or simply point it out to someone else. In fact, she notes, this is the very basis of education: beauty prompts us to place ourselves where we are likely to encounter it again. (To connect the dots, knowledge and wisdom are admirable, some might say beautiful; and to place yourself under the tutelage of a teacher, whether in person or by reading books, e.g., stems from our desire to repeat an encounter with the beautiful.)
Scarry also warns that this impulse can become perverse, and does so when we try to hoard beautiful things. The desire to repeat our encounter with the beautiful, when interpreted through the (very American) lens of individualism, can certainly thwart the healthy impulse to reproduce, proliferate, and share it. But hoarding, collecting, and privatizing not only makes the proliferation of beauty unlikely; it also serves the logic—perhaps it might be better to say, the worship—of the market economy. Ours is a social order in which those who have, who own, who hoard are considered the role models, the saints if you will, who we are supposed to want to imitate—a perversion of the imitation or reproduction of beauty.
All of this is background to what I came here to say, or rather to clarify.
Most, or probably all, of you who read this will not have been party to the conversation I was having on Twitter. I’m not actually writing this post to try to justify myself or pull the argument over here where I can “win” it. This post isn’t really about the argument, but rather that argument has left me thinking about these things. So I’m telling you about it for the context; but it’s just the prompt for this essay.
The crux was that a fellow Christian was accusing LGBTQIA+ affirming Christians of adapting to the spirit of the age. (He said “sensibilities of the age,” but “spirit” is a term I hear more often.) And obviously, the Church should not do that, right?
I asked, rhetorically, When has the Church not adapted to the sensibilities of the age?
The way the discussion went—and I certainly went off track in the process—was that my conversation partner interpreted the things I was saying as an attack on catholicity itself. See, I had pointed to the very early adoption of the sensibilities of Empire that has affected the Church, very much for the worse, ever since. We don’t even seem to see that seeking power and status, wealth, unquestioned influence, or the approval of the Powers That Be isn’t normal, or perhaps I should say normative, for Christians.
I tried to point out that very early on, the Church adapted itself to the very things Jesus and his earliest followers opposed; I was accused of being a liberal/progressive Christian who takes it upon themselves to say what the true Gospel is. Fair point, perhaps.
But as a theologian, I think it is incumbent upon Christians to use the tools we have to parse out what the Gospel is, in relation to our time and culture. I suspect my interlocutor wouldn’t disagree with that. While this hasn’t been central to my studies, I do believe there is a very strong case to make that full inclusion and affirmation of LGBTQIA+ persons in the Church is very much the Gospel—not the whole of the Gospel, obviously; but no less Gospel than bringing healing to the sick and good news to the poor.
In pointing out that the Church acquiesced to Empire pretty much as soon as the Empire officially tolerated the Church, I didn’t mean to attack catholicity, although I can understand why it came across that way. (Except…what is it saying if the two are so hard to distinguish?) Again, I’m not writing about this here to try to win that argument over there.
What I had intended to clarify was that we have come to accept some of the particular accommodations to Empire that we’ve now inherited through many centuries of Church history. They were so integrated into the Church that we seem to forget they aren’t actually part of our DNA. Fortunately, this is a somewhat hot topic right now, and you can find a lot to read on the subject. Let me offer a few specifics—with the caveat that this is by no means an exhaustive list.
One of the more superficial elements the Church adopted under Constantine’s influence [and whether or not he truly converted to Christianity is debatable] is terminology; although terminology can lead to different understandings of what the terms are meant to describe. Christian ministers were not called “priests,” for example; that was a term taken over from paganism—which Constantine did not want to throw out completely. Similarly, a “pontiff” was a higher-up in pagan religion; it came to ultimately refer to the Bishop of Rome later understood as the one person at the very top of the Church hierarchy, representing Christ himself on earth. That hierarchy is modeled after Empire. It may be a decent way of organizing an institution; but Jesus told his disciples,
“The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.” (Luke 22:25-27, ESV)
Many of our Church leaders (in every denomination) excel at this servant leadership; but many exercise their leadership in exactly the way Jesus says not to. [Notice too that Jesus speaks directly to our social order when he says, “and those in authority over them are called benefactors”—”job creators,” anyone?]
All this is to say that accusations of adopting the “spirit of the age” seem to only get trotted out when we’re talking about including, with no strings attached, someone the Church previously had excluded. But isn’t that radical inclusion precisely what we see in, for example, the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch? My friend Sean D. Burke has analyzed the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, concluding that is in fact the interpretive key to the whole book of Acts. Acts, by the way, really is the second half of Luke’s Gospel. Luke structures his Gospel to show Jesus moving from the periphery of Israel to its center in Jerusalem; Acts shows Jesus’ disciples moving from the periphery of the Roman Empire to its center in Rome—a continuation of Jesus’ work, carried out through the Holy Spirit Jesus gave to his disciples precisely for that purpose: continuing his mission. Jesus’ actions in Jerusalem got him in trouble with the empire, so he was crucified, which is what Rome did to anyone it saw as a threat to the empire’s hegemonic social order. And yet Christians somehow eventually came to interpret the Church’s movement to Rome as one of worldly triumph—the institutional Church taking over the Empire. Sadly, history has always tended to be told in ways that justify the prevailing authorities.
But the earliest Christians proclaimed that Jesus is Lord not to affirm the world’s understanding of what lordship means and simply plug Jesus in there in place of Caesar; they were saying that lordship is completely redefined by Jesus. This really was a threat to Rome’s hegemony, as it continues to be a threat to the hegemony of our Market-centered social order today.
And yet the acceptance of our LGBTQIA+ family, who our present social order actually does not accept either, is considered a concession to the “spirit of the age.”
The Church, where it does affirm LGBTQIA+ persons, does not take that stance from the world. We take it from two sources: (1) our faith, as received through Scripture, tradition, and reason; and (2) the witness of the LGBTQIA+ community themselves. Since Stonewall, that community has been asserting first their right to exist, then other rights such as healthcare and marriage. The world has been resisting them this entire time. Where our political and civic leaders appear to be doing so on the basis of Christian faith, it’s not hard to scratch the surface and see the spirit of Empire in place of that faith.
As Burke has pointed out, the Ethiopian Eunuch was nothing if not queer. He straddled every kind of boundary. As a eunuch, he was male, but not masculine (especially in the Roman construction of gender); he was a slave, but had authority in his master’s home and was able to freely travel and to represent his master. As a “God-fearing” Ethiopian, he was not Jewish either ethnically nor religiously, but was on his way home from Jerusalem, where he’d been for the feast of Pentecost, and he was reading the Hebrew Scriptures. Despite all these ambiguities about him, when he saw water and asked Philip, “Look! There’s water—what’s stopping me being baptized right now?” Philip didn’t tell him he had to change in any way, or even that he had to be catechized properly. He baptized him.
The spirit of our age would have us reject anyone our social order marginalizes or minoritizes, whether LGBTQIA+ persons, people of color, immigrants, women trying to attain roles in leadership, poor folks, unhoused persons, the uneducated, the working class, the disabled, the mentally ill… we could make a very long list.
The Gospel—and maybe I am taking it upon myself to say what the “real” Gospel is, but I don’t think I am—the Gospel compels us to include all those people, without condition. There should be no distinction between “them” and “us.” Radical inclusion is about as antithetical to the spirit of our age as you can get.
I now return you to the poetry series (starting with my next post).
The Sound 
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