Presbyterians Vote to Allow Same-Sex Marriages

While votes are still required in each local presbytery, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted on Thursday to change its constitution’s definition of marriage from “a man and a woman” to “two people,” and to allow its ministers to perform same-sex marriages.  The change will likely trigger hate and division in local presbyteries as far right elements selectively cling to hand picked passages even as the ignore the larger Gospel message.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the development.  Here are highlights:

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted at its General Assembly on Thursday to change its constitution’s definition of marriage from “a man and a woman” to “two people,” and to allow its ministers to perform same-sex marriages where it is legal.

Both measures, passed by large majorities, are a reversal for a church that in 1991 and in 2008 barred its pastors from performing same-sex marriages, and that has held ecclesiastical trials for ministers who violated the ban and blessed gay couples.

The Presbyterian Church, a historic mainline Protestant denomination that spans a broad spectrum from liberal to conservative evangelicals, has been mired in the debate over homosexuality for about three decades. The General Assembly’s decision in 2010 to ordain openly gay ministers caused many congregations, including some of the largest, to depart.

“There were some of us with tears of joy, and some of us with tears of grief,” said the Rev. Susan De George, stated clerk of the Hudson River Presbytery, in New York, a lesbian minister who years ago was among those brought up on charges for blessing same-sex unions. “After the vote, the first thing I did was to text a friend on the other side of the issue.”

But changing the definition of marriage in the church’s Book of Order would still require ratification by a majority of the church’s 172 regions, or presbyteries — a yearlong process. At the assembly in Detroit, the measure passed overwhelmingly — 71 percent to 29 percent — but only after an amendment that altered the language of the change from “two people” to “two people, traditionally a man and a woman,” a nod to conservatives who would otherwise have voted against it.

The Presbyterians follow other religious groups that have taken similar steps, including the United Church of Christ, which affirmed “equal marriage rights for couples regardless of gender” in 2005; Quakers; the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations; and the Reform and Conservative movements in Judaism.

The vote giving discretion to ministers to marry gay couples takes effect on Sunday, at the close of the General Assembly.

[I]t deeply pained those Presbyterian commissioners in the church’s conservative wing, who warned that congregations that have been on the brink of departure would leave.

About 350 of the denomination’s congregations have left since 2010, when the General Assembly voted to ordain openly gay clergy members, said the Rev. Gradye Parsons, the church’s stated clerk, in an interview. But it is still the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination, with 10,038 churches in 2013 and about 1.8 million members.

With respect to the "conservatives" within the denomination, it is a sad testimony that they can only be happy and feel sufficiently superior only when they are condemning others and trampling on the religious freedom of others. 

Is Gay Bashing By Churches Driving the Flight From Organized Religion?

I have frequently made the argument that the flight of the under 30 generations from organized religion bears a direct correlation to the anti-gay jihad that many denominations continue to conduct against LGBT citizens.  Many more of this age bracket have LGBT friends and/or know LGBT individuals.  As a result, they are repulsed by the standard depiction of gays disseminated daily by "family values" groups and church organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Church (both of which are suffering from membership losses - especially if non-active members are stripped from church rosters).  Indeed, many of these supposed Christian groups and churches represent the strongest argument for not being a Christian that one can find.  Wayne Besen has a column in Huffington Post that sets forth thoughts like my own on this topic.  Here are some highlights:

A new poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals that a record number of Americans (19.3 percent) have abandoned faith and now consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular religion. According to USA Today:

This group, called "Nones," is now the nation's second-largest category only to Catholics, and outnumbers the top Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptists.

If you want to understand the reasons behind this trend, take a moment to read a disturbing letter that Twin Cities Catholic Archbishop John Nienstedt sent to the mother of a gay son. In it, the holy man told the mother that her "eternal salvation" might depend on whether or not she embraced the anti-gay teachings of the Catholic Church, thus rejecting her own child. Talk about family values!

Such a callous admonition might have worked in the past, when people had little education. It might have resonated in bygone eras, when gays and lesbians were invisible and easy to demonize as the "other." It might have held sway had the Catholic Church's credibility not been left in tatters after the church spent more than $2.5 billion to clean up the wreckage wrought by pedophile priests and their enablers.

While Nienstedt's arrogance and cruelty stands out as particularly odious, it isn't just Catholicism that is in decline.

I, for one, believe that the 19.3-percent figure for Nones is too low. A substantial number of people identify themselves in surveys as belonging to a particular faith for one of three reasons:

• Habit: People over 30 were brought up in a world where everyone was presumed to have a religious affiliation as both a mark of faith and cultural identity. So, when asked whether they belong to a faith group, they reflexively check the box, with little thought to their own belief system or actual adherence to the religious convictions they claim. As the "Nones" make themselves more visible, it gives these folks a new box to check -- and many of them will.
• Fear: For centuries it was dangerous for people to acknowledge their genuine beliefs. "Today, there's no shame in saying you're an unbeliever," Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler complained in USA Today.
•  Politics: Even today, if an ambitious person wants a successful career in politics, it is easier to fake having faith than to acknowledge being a nonbeliever. The result is that politicians appear significantly more devout than the general population. Once this taboo falls, which is likely to occur in the next decade, it will open the door to a more honest dialogue about the role of religion in public life.

When people see their own sons and daughters and friends and co-workers coming out, it creates a crisis of credibility for religious institutions. It leads to countless situations where mean-spirited men like Nienstedt demand blind, irrational obedience and say "take it or leave it" -- and more people are now following their consciences and walking away.  

Add to this premise the reality that science is proving that the Adam and Eve of the Bible are fictional characters and that, therefore, there was no Fall through Adam, and the whole literalistic approach to the Bible begins to collapse.   And it is happening most rapidly in the mainline churches which as I have noted before have the highest levels of education (see the charts below).  It is no coincidence that anti-gay bigotry and Bible inerrancy are increasingly confined to the most conservative denominations which also happened to be those with the lowest educational levels.    

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