Change is tough, but women and homosexuals are truly the ministry's best hope, says Mark Oppenheimer

Sunday, August 10, 2003

Over the Fourth of July weekend, my friend Katie got married outside Portland, Ore. The officiant was a gay Episcopal priest, performing his first marriage. He had an earring in each ear and a rainbow-colored stole about his neck. After readings from the Bible -- as we expect from weddings, the Old Testament reading was from the Song of Songs -- came the priest's homily.

	Mark Oppenheimer (oppenheimer@aya.yale.edu) is the author of "Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture" to be published this fall by Yale University Press. He recently completed a Ph.D. in religious studies at Yale and will be in residence at Stanford University on a Koret Foundation fellowship.

He closed his prayer book, took a deep breath and did something unusual, even by the standards of liberal Oregon Protestants: He sang several bars of Valjean and Eponine's tear-jerking finale from "Les Miserables": "And remember/the truth that once was spoken/To love another person is to see the face of God!" Then he took a step back, resumed his normal homiletic mien, and delivered a touching, perfectly ordinary homily about the institution of marriage.

As a student of liberal religion, I have seen my share of unusual, outre, flaky liturgical moments. The priest's moment as Jean Valjean did not compare with the paeans to the Goddess-mother or the deep-breathing yoga-based Shabbos prayers. It was barely in my Top Ten Craziest Liturgical Strategies. But it was -- there is no other way to say this -- the gayest church moment I had seen. It was my first Broadway show-tune church moment. Clergy are famous for being failed actors; 18th-century revivalist George Whitefield rejected his childhood love, the stage, as too sinful. But this was the first time I had seen the pulpit as piano bar.

Last week, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church met in Minneapolis -- the city where in 1976 it approved the ordination of women -- and approved the consecration of the Rev. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire. At the last minute, a Vermont man accused Robinson of something like sexual harassment, but the charge, quickly deemed spurious, was not enough to thwart the nomination of the hugely popular priest. Not even the desperate charge, leveled by church conservatives, that Robinson supports pornography -- apparently, an organization that he once belonged to has a Web site that had Internet hyperlinks to racy pictures -- could keep Robinson from becoming the church's first openly gay bishop.

In an elegant bit of symmetry, the General Convention also paused to honor clergy who have died in the past year, among whom was the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, late bishop of New York City. Moore, who died in May at age 83, was a high-WASP crusading liberal in the John Lindsay mode, given to the bold gesture and an enemies-be-damned management style. At the 1976 assembly, his was a forceful voice for the ordination of women; and Moore ordained the first openly gay priest, the lesbian Ellen Barrett, the next year.

Though he did not live long enough to see the consecration of Bishop Robinson, Bishop Moore must have been proud of the changes he helped foment. What he surely did not suspect, 25 years ago, was just how much change there would be. By 1998, there were 2,000 woman clergy in the Episcopal Church, 14 percent of the total. That compares favorably with the United Church of Christ (26 percent of active clergy, and 50 percent of those preparing for ordination) and Reform Jews (21 percent of all rabbis).

In the mainline Protestant churches, and in Reform and Conservative Judaism, the female percentage of the clergy increases every year. At the University of Chicago, 43 percent of divinity students are women; at Harvard Div, 57 percent are. Though not as quantifiable as the feminization of the clergy, the "queering" of the clergy -- as gay-studies scholars would call it -- is, too, very real. The Congregationalists and the Unitarians ordain homosexuals, and Presbyterians, Methodists and Lutherans may follow soon.

The top divinity schools -- Yale, Harvard, Chicago -- are not as gay as, say, architecture schools, but they are far gayer than law or medical schools. West Coast seminaries like those of the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, are queerer still. This trend has not hit the Southern Baptist Convention, but it's a fact of life in the liberal mainline churches, from which we still draw an outsized share of our educated elite.

What do more female and gay ministers mean? First, they mean fewer straight male ministers. The liberal Christian churches, which have low birth rates and are at best reluctant in their missionary efforts, are shrinking -- which means fewer jobs for all clergy. As more women and homosexuals enter the clergy, fewer straight (or closeted) men get jobs. This argument was once used, by some rather vile folk, to argue against women's ordination ("Men need the work!"), but its provenance does not make it less true.

There will be fewer of the old, stereotypical vicars, the paternal figures like the Rev. Bunting in James Wood's new novel, "The Book Against God," or the imperious Dr. Prescott in Louis Auchincloss' "The Rector of Justin." Fewer preachers like Paul Moore himself: macho, deep of voice, a crew jock at St. Paul's and Yale, a man who stood nearly 7 feet tall in his miter. He was of a different era, a time of muscular Christians like his colleague William Sloane Coffin -- athlete, pianist, Yale chaplain and, for a brief time, CIA agent.

The women and gays affect not just the quantities but also the qualities of the clergy. True, straight men have no monopoly on deep voices or adamantine personas. Nor have they cornered the market on intellection; women and gays represent an increasing share of Bible scholars. But women and gays are more disposed to the "therapeutic" mode of ministry, emphasizing pastoral counseling and rule by consensus. They are more likely to resist hierarchicalism, shun clerical dress and ask to be called by their first names.

They tend to emphasize social justice in their ministries: it would be fair to say that gay ministers are inclined to care more about ministry to AIDS sufferers. "We entered the profession not to be ministers 'just like the men' but to bring women's gifts to the ministry," Suzanne Hiatt, one of the first female Episcopal priests, said in 1985. "Women's gifts of caring and making connections -- something to balance men's gifts for abstractions and insistence on standards of excellence." No doubt many women would be uncomfortable with Hiatt's generalizations, but some portion would not.

But these generalizations go only so far. For example, despite the stereotype that women and gays, spiteful of tradition, will hop onto some liberation theology train bound for the radical Marxist hinterlands, they seem to take a higher view of the Bible itself than straight and male Episcopalians -- who, like Catholics, emphasize liturgy. When they turn to the Bible to locate Jesus' love of the sick and the poor, or his socialist leanings, gay and female ministers actually resemble low-church Baptists and Methodists -- President Bush's church -- more than they resemble Episcopalians and Catholics, who are often politically liberal but have a conservative aversion to preaching straight from the Book, which is seen as rather declasse.

Is the clergy being feminized? Yes, and it's being queered, too. But the result will not be a hostility to tradition.

None of the gays or women I know want to do away with Holy Communion, and none of them support plural marriage or bestiality, no matter what Gary Bauer fears. Rather, insofar as they are liberals, they are reclaiming liberalism from the noblesse-oblige mold of Bishop Moore and William Sloane Coffin -- two sons of privilege I admire tremendously, and who suffered much for their convictions. (Bill Coffin, I should say, is alive and well and living in Vermont.) The new clerical liberalism is practiced by preachers who have more first-hand experience with oppression, and take as their models prophets like Amos and Jesus.

Whether their preaching will reverse the slide of liberal Christianity is harder to say. Men have always gone to church much less than women have, and it seems unlikely that women and gays will pull them in when preachers who looked like them couldn't. Others worry that if the ministry becomes seen as "women's work," it will lose prestige. Already, campus chaplains at secular schools are nearly insignificant -- we will never see another William Sloane Coffin, because ministers are no longer granted that moral authority. And as the clergy becomes more female, will it become even more underpaid, like teaching? Will parishioners be more parsimonious in paying their female rectors?

But women and homosexuals are truly the ministry's best hope. The ministry has for a long time faced a brain drain -- it is not a career of choice for the best and the brightest. An increased pool of interested candidates helps keeps standards high. When the Ivy League schools went co-ed, admission became much more competitive, and the average student became more, not less, intelligent. The future of the churches would look far worse but for the seminaries' educated, enthusiastic women and homosexuals.

I suspect, too, that even if show tunes became commonplace, the worship service would remain mostly unchanged. Most of the aesthetic liturgical crimes of the 1960s and '70s were perpetrated by heterosexual hippies.

By contrast, the pomp of the old liturgies, will, let's face it, have no better defender than the gay clergy. It's not for nothing that the Catholic and Episcopal churches, with their smells, bells and pageantry, historically had the largest closets for their bachelor priests. Now they have come out, singing Les Miz as they go.

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