Therefore you should not be surprised to learn that very little of business slated for the upcoming General Convention addresses this issue. Indeed, as you can also guess, most of it has to do with the pet issues of the American progressive upper middle class. I am not going to go over every proposed resolution as Scott Gunn is doing, if only because I do not have the time nor the stomach to read through fourteen resolutions on the Palestine/Israel conflict. I'm going to have to deal with things in broader terms.
Those Middle Eastern political positions are a good place to start, though, for all of the usual reasons. First, hopefully nobody who wasn't at GC will care how they play out. It's hard to imagine anyone outside the church will care except for right wing loudmouths who want to tar us as hopeless leftists. Nobody, anywhere, is going to say, "well, now that TEC has spoken, I must reconsider my views." We have no moral authority left. And I do not think we can get it back by taking sides in what is a very old, fraught, and complex struggle, especially considering that, if we aren't as immediately culpable as a body as we are with American slavery, we are historically hardly free from the taint of antisemitism.
But beyond that, I don't agreewith the answers given in these resolutions. It would be for the good of everyone if Netanahu were out of power as quickly as legally possible, but it seems to me that a realistic resolution has to accept that Israelis face an existential threat. I am quite repulsed by various progressive voices playing down the savagery of the attack that set the whole thing off. And so, OK, maybe they will be rejected on that basis; but the large and constantly presenting issue here is that the content of these resolutions comes from outside the church. We put a little TEC color on the language, but the fact is that these are the views of one subculture, and they are being put in the church's mouth.
This comes up all over the place. Just the fact of which committees exist is telling. For example, we have a Environmental stewardship and care of creation, which is OK except that there are four resolutions toward carbon neutrality. On one level I have no issue with that, and as I've said many times, if we're taking this seriously we have to go beyond that and re-bind the carbon that's already up there. The issue again is that we have no authority other than to place demands upon ourselves; not only that, but it's hard to imagine that a church convention brings sufficient technical expertise to the issue to be credible. And looking over our shoulders at all those rural parishes that have to worry more about having a roof at all than caring whether it gets solar panels placed on it, again, this is the project of a certain upper class group, particularly those who can set aside the issue that making all those solar panels is sure to involve a great deal of environmentally destructive mining in third world countries whose people have no power to complain.
We also have committees on Social justice and United States policy, Stewardship and socially responsible investing, Safety, wellness and mental health, Accessibility and inclusion.... And this is not to say that none of these should be concerns brought before the convention, but that the very names of the committees bespeak a certain mindset. And indeed, looking inside, we find, besides the usual self-affirming "commend" resolutions that neither I nor Gunn has much use for, we find for instance a resolution to urge those in prison ministries to urge their fellows from other churches to hold the same views on various sexuality etc. topics if they are to work together. Personally I suspect this is completely divorced from the realities of such ministries, not the least of which is that those fellows are likely to be Roman Catholics or Baptists whose church policies are less enlightened than ours. And I cannot imagine any chaplain worth his or her salt paying the least attention to this directive. But it makes people of a certain subculture feel good to have urged it.
Meanwhile, there are two resolutions on mission, and here the problem isn't so much the lack of resolution, as it were, as it is that church planting isn't so much a matter of Directives From 815 as it is a diocesan response to a myriad of local conditions. The big issue I see from my examination of the statistics some years back was that the character/quality of the rector was nearly all-important. The ideal priest is a serious celebrant, a gifted preacher, and a caring pastor; but since Rev. Mary Poppinses are uncommon, just getting one of these characteristics goes a long ways towards making a vital parish; and conversely, a priest is aggressively off-putting in one of these areas can hut a parish very badly. And this isn't something that is addressed well through resolutions; it has to be part of church and especially clerical culture.
This brushes up agqinst another issue which I want to hold off on until I deal with things liturgical, but for now, consider all this positioning from the perspective of someone outside that certain upper middle class progressive viewpoint. Some of us who are outside this worldview are just stubborn and dismiss all this, and bully for us. But the church's adoption of this outside worldview, which is out-of-step with so very much of the population, is intrinsically exclusive. We focus too much on obvious differences like race and sexuality and ignore the far stronger (in this age) divisions of wealth and especially of class and politics. And when we enthrone the values and opinions of one class/subculture, it is alienating to outsiders. And it comes to look like a control issue, which makes the exlusion more real.
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