THE SERVICE FOR GAY EPISCOPALIANS and their supporters held at the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany in downtown Philadelphia last week could have been a reenactment of a civil-rights rally from 35 years ago, and in some sense it was. Sweating parishioners fanned themselves with programs as the preacher, Rev. Elizabeth Kaeton, gazed heavenward and broke into a stirring a capella spiritual about the struggle for freedom of an oppressed people. ” Stand together in solidarity one with the other,” commanded Kaeton, and a forest of clasped hands rose in response above the pews. For a moment it seemed like Montgomery, 1961.
It was meant to, of course. At the Episcopal church’s triennial General Convention in the City of Brotherly Love, the church’s leading gay theologians and most visible gay clergy gathered to argue that gay liberation — eliminating any remaining religious taboos against homosexuality — is the spiritual heir to the civil-rights movement. The task, they claim, is as morally significant as defeating segregation, as Godinspired as the Exodus.
Kaeton, a lesbian priest from Newark, began her sermon by explaining how, because of bigotry and homophobia, gay people in the Episcopal church have for centuries “had our identity as children of God reduced to a single sex act.” That said, she went on to reduce the entire Christian experience to a single sex act, or at best several. “The pathway to our spiritual selves is through our erotic selves,” Kaeton announced with gravity. “The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest understanding.” It is, therefore, the task of gay Episcopalians “to reclaim sensuality in our liturgy,” to ” help ourselves and the church to reclaim the erotic as a special part of our spiritual lives.” How to fulfill the God-given duty to become “our best erotic selves”? Kaeton recommended beginning “with awkward strokes to touch the strength of our erotic power.” For, “when we step into and embrace our erotic selves, we have touched our deepest spirituality.”
It’s not clear exactly what any of this means, much less what it has to do with Christianity. But Kaeton didn’t bother to explain herself further. She didn’t have to. “This is ancient wisdom,” she proclaimed, and just about everyone in the room, including Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning, the outgoing head of the Episcopal church, seemed to nod in profound agreement. Later that night, in the bar at the Marriott near the convention center, two mustachioed priests, each festooned with pink triangle pins, red AIDS ribbons, and gay pride rainbows, sat drinking scotch and mulling over the highlights of the sermon. The bartender, a woman about 30 with a thick Philadelphia accent, looked on in confusion. “I grew up in the Episcopal church,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “but I don’t remember anything like this.”
A lot of people don’t, but then a lot of people don’t go to the church’s main convention every three years, where Episcopal doctrine is hammered out and voted on. The most contentious topic under discussion this year is gay marriage. A number of proposed resolutions would add a new rite to the Episcopal liturgy, allowing priests to conduct wedding-like blessings of ” committed same-sex unions” with the official sanction of the national church. It seems unlikely the resolutions will pass, at least this year. But that may not matter much; many priests already conduct such services and simply invent the liturgy themselves.
But the resolutions did provoke a vigorous debate and hours of testimony. Virtually all of the gay Episcopalians who spoke in favor of the new rite came off as sincere. Many spoke poignantly of their tortured relationships with the church. It was hard not to be moved by much of their testimony, and even some of those who had come to argue against the gay proposals said later that they had been. But it was equally hard not to notice that the gay movement within the Episcopal church has not thought particularly hard about its own positions.
Consider Rt. Rev. Otis Charles, the Rosa Parks of the Episcopal gay liberation movement. In 1993, after serving as both the bishop of Utah and the head of an Episcopal seminary in Boston, Charles, a married father of five, publicly declared his homosexuality. Though he was close to 70 at the time, Charles left his wife of 42 years, renounced the straight world and moved to San Francisco to become a gay activist. At the General Assembly, Charles is a bona fide celebrity. He is also utterly inarticulate about the specifics of the proposed gay blessings, for which he testified last week. What, for instance, does it mean for homosexuals to enter into a “faithful, committed relationship,” of the kind the church may soon sanction? Charles readily admits he doesn’t know. “Does faithfulness mean monogamy?” he asks rhetorically. It may sound like an academic debate, but these are the sorts of questions — Should homosexuals be held to the same moral standards as heterosexuals? Does God sanction promiscuous gay sex? — whose answers can tear a church in two. And may someday soon tear apart the Episcopal church.
Charles seems unconcerned. “We need to develop an ethical sensibility that comes out of the gay sensibility,” he says firmly, as if this settles the question. I’m still trying to unravel exactly what he’s talking about — though it’s becoming clear that he doesn’t think monogamy has much to do with faithfulness — when a much younger priest named Chip Barker enters the conversation to help clarify things.
Not long ago, says Barker, who is also gay and from San Francisco, a homosexual couple came to him to talk about having their relationship blessed. Barker himself is in a committed relationship (which he says he expects to ” last for the rest of our lives, unless something happens”), so he says he could tell right away that this was “a deeply committed couple,” together a long time, and happy. Over the course of conversation, however, Barker says it emerged that the two men weren’t in the union alone. There was a third man whom they both regularly had sex with. He’d been in the picture for seven years. The whole arrangement, Barker admits cheerfully, is a little confusing, but, well, “the conversation is just beginning.” Or ending.
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
