Brian McLaren: On Sojourners LGBTQ Controversy…

In case you missed it, here’s Brian McLaren’s response to the LGBTQ/Sojourners drama.

McLaren hits the nail on the head in identifying the tension between my own progressive bridge-building friends, my progressive take-no-prisoner friends, and maybe my self: who reacts at that gut level to how issues affect my friends.  There are consequences for each and every stance, however.

He writes:

If Sojourners decides to lead on LGBTQ issues, someone else will have to arise to lead a broad coalition on poverty issues because Sojourners will be — as things stand — excluded from the table. Conversely, if Sojourners decides to lead a broad poverty-related coalition, others will need to lead on LGBTQ issues.

And that’s where I understand the frustration of those who are frustrated with Sojourners. They wish Sojourners would lead in this issue too. Frankly, so do I when I forget how hard it is to build coalitions, and when I forget that taking bold stands is only one important part of the complex process of social change.

If I were to boil down messy contemporary reality to an equation, here’s what it would be:

• You can’t lead a coalition of progressive Christians without being an outspoken leader on LGBTQ issues.
• You can’t lead a coalition that includes mainstream evangelical and conservative Catholic Christians if you are an outspoken leader on LGBTQ issues.

Politically, and perhaps pastorally, I get this.  I really do.  But when McLaren says Sojourners is focused “primarily around the issue of poverty reduction,” he’s conceding that a priority has been made: poverty over (in this case) oppression of the sexually marginalized.  I don’t think this is hyperbole.

Yet McLaren’s letter here also answers my own lament, recognizing:

I wouldn’t have moved from “conventional” to “accepting-but-not-affirming” to “internally-conflicted” to “coalition-building” to “being an ally/advocate” if it weren’t for a lot of this creative tension. And I’m still in process — unfinished, phasic — because my tensions are not resolved.

And I would be blind, hypocritical and intolerable to pretend my process has been any different.  If the only religious and social institutions around offered black-and-white, polar approaches to sexuality, I would have never left my bunker.  There must be safe places for people to test the waters, to stretch without jumping all the way in.  That’s just the reality of broken, imperfect humanity: we don’t all respond to truth with an immediate “AMEN.”  We whine and fuss and pout and stomp and shit all over the place… and then – MAYBE – we give a little ground.  And then – MAYBE – a little more… and then (God-willing) our eyes begin to open.

Moreover, I’ve actually said the same thing about my seminary, George Fox: as much as I find frustration with their conservative policy on sexuality, classrooms have often been (in my experience) challenging, healthy places to discuss these issues and to express divergent beliefs.  Most of the students at Fox would not enroll if the school was “open and affirming.”  As it is, they at least have to put up with me and a ragtag group of liberals providing some devil’s advocacy.  Hopefully, at our best, we allow the conservatives to do the same for us (and at our worst, neither party gives an inch, nobody listens, and there is no love and no grace).  The church needs commons: places to wrestle, where relationship is not broken for disagreement…

And yet… these are my friends being abused.  How do I tolerate that?  How do I reconcile when the majority oppresses the few?  In another response elsewhere, someone writes: “would you have so much grace – so much patience – if the issue were racism?”  I think not.  One of my best friends, who is queer, said to me, “I feel kind of thrown under the bus,” after reading McLaren’s response.  She said, “I get where he’s coming from, but…”  But when do LGBTQ people stop having to sit in the back seat?

McLaren’s letter here doesn’t make me want to start reading Sojourners again.  I certainly won’t donate money to them again.  But I get the tension.  I live in it.  I’m surrounded by folks – loving folks – who will only go so far.  I don’t like it, but I suppose there are plenty of things on which I will only go so far… Still, when I can see the very real faces of the friends these limitations – these boundaries impact directly, all of the theoretical compromises and “necessary measures” stop being theoretical, and I wonder how truly necessary they are.  I sound like my old Evangelical self, but: the Gospel is not about compromise.

Tomorrow I’ll post a similar response from Nadia Bolz-Weber.