Inclusive to a Fault?
Just finished watching ‘American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel (2019)’, a very interesting and inspiring documentary, which focused ostensibly on the ministries of two social action churches, namely, the Mayflower Congregational UCC Church and All Souls Unitarian Church, both in the state of Oklahoma.
Although I find the ministries of both churches to be courageous within their context, I found the liberal and inclusive approaches championed by both churches, and the documentary as a whole, to be questionable, and what I mean by that I will seek to tease out in the following post.
A great deal is made of the fact that these churches operate in Oklahoma, in the South, in the Bible belt of America - which is to say within a context which has been dominated politically and culturally by white evangelicalism. A context which had often been characterized by its racism, homophobia, exclusivism, and dogmatism. Within such a context how could the discerning, free-thinking, and compassionate church-goer not want to define themselves in oppositional terms? My sympathies certainly lie with those that do, especially with Bishop Carlton Person, whose story was already known to me. His is an inspiring example of someone breaking free of dogma and permitting themselves to think for themselves.
For Jesus said, “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57)
This is what I perceive as the real strength of liberalism, a permission to think freely, to not, as a prerequisite, be confined to the conclusions bestowed. Robin Meyers defines the term in the documentary as being, “open-minded, tolerant of divergent opinions, and exceedingly generous.” And in as far as this defines liberalism, I am most certainly a liberal.
However, where I start getting uncomfortable is where liberalism becomes its own dogma, where certain conclusions and perspectives become the only acceptable positions to hold. This is where it begins to look less like liberation from dogma, and more like throwing off one dogma for another.
Liberalism as an ideology seems to be at odds with the very notion of communal identity. Is it not appropriate for a church or denomination to have a distinct cultural identity? And is it possible to maintain such an identity if the throng cry but one word: “inclusion”. Inclusion, or inclusivity in all things, seems at odds with the very notion of communal identity. As the cliche goes… “if you stand for everything you stand for nothing.”
Let’s take a simple, yet extreme example: the church which holds up Jesus as an example to be emulated. It is difficult to maintain this distinct identifier as a church and remain truly inclusive in the most radical sense. As Paul said, “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). In order to be truly inclusive, which is to say to create a context in which any and everyone can feel at home (included/validated), one must at the very least hold Jesus up as an exemplar within a broad pluralistic context which equally recognizes other individuals/philosophies/and ideas. The trouble is, by affirming such an amorphous pluralism, there is really no identity being affirmed at all, merely the identity of non-identity, this being inclusivity’s natural end point.
This binary, with inclusion for inclusions sake on one side and distinct communal identity on the other, seems to me to play into the polarization problem. There is an ever stronger push to not consider what we all hold in common, but rather how different we, in our own liberal tribal identity, are to those on the other side - those who the documentary are more than happy to define as being racist, homophobic, exclusivist, and dogmatic - and no matter how true or un-true that is, it seems to me that this is a real problem. To state the obvious, it feels like in more ways than one, the most important work in the coming years is to rediscover common ground, to even, dare I say, seek to understand, or try on, the other’s point of view.
When we fail to understand why the other thinks like they do, it is we who have failed, not them.