Conservative language removed from ‘Families’ paper

Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

And what should the church say, both pastorally and prophetically, to people — and there are zillions of them — who aren’t married but aren’t celibate?

It’s questions such as these, and many more arising from the complexities of American family life today, that are making difficult the work of the advisory committee, which proposes social policy statements for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on everything from environmental matters to the war with Iraq. Right now, the committee is frantically trying to complete revisions of “Transforming Families,” a report that last year’s General Assembly refused to approve and sent back for more theological work.

But the most recent round of editing, done in Louisville Jan. 21-23, might have moved things forward but didn’t necessarily bring the kind of consensus that may be needed to get the report through the General Assembly. Some months ago, Alan Wisdom, vice-president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and a persistent critic of the version of “Transforming Families” sent to the Assembly last year, was brought on board as part of the writing team.

But at the January meeting, the committee voted to take out some of the language Wisdom wanted to put in — language that reflected the broader, ongoing Presbyterian debate about whether to ordain gays and lesbians or what to say about committed, lifelong relationships among lesbian and gay couples. Not as prominent in that debate — but an issue definitely close to the lives of many Presbyterian families and the work of Presbyterian pastors — is what to say about heterosexuals who aren’t married but are also sexually active.

In an interview, Wisdom said of the changes the committee made: “They imperil the broad support we were hoping the paper would get.” Wisdom said he does not want the paper to endorse same-sex relations or sex outside of marriage. And “the changes that were made may contribute to the appearance that this policy statement has the same flaws” — some would say too liberal, not orthodox enough — that made last year’s Assembly unwilling to approve it.

The whole thing is still far from polished, with sections being moved forward and back, things being added in and taken out. The report has gone through more than a dozen revisions already — with substantial input from the PC(USA)’s Office of Theology and Worship, which added language such as: “The church affirms that marriage is instituted by God, that marriage is good for human society, and that marriage is a form of family life that provides a suitable context for the nurture of all children. (The same section also states that single people should be respected and that “God works in and through all kinds of families.”)

Comments were collected from dozens of people, in person and in writing. Wisdom was asked to join the writing team, and Nile Harper, a retired minister from Ann Arbor, Mich., and the advisory committee chair, recently praised Wisdom’s contributions.

But the committee still is struggling with what, exactly, to say — and its most recent conversations reflect the complexities of trying to satisfy a broad Christian constituency. In some churches or denominations — in the Southern Baptist Convention or at some prominent megachurches — there is no debate over issues such as these. Homosexual practice and sex outside of marriage are condemned. People are told to remain virgins until they marry. There is not too much worrying over shades of gray.

But in a big-tent denomination such as the PC(USA), there’s always a struggle over issues of morality and sexuality, sometimes even over theology. And there is in the debate over this paper also a struggle over how the church should speak. Should it call Christians to some kind of moral purity — speak of sin, what’s right and what’s wrong? Should it speak pastorally to the needs and realities of families today — acknowledging, for example, that many people do have sex outside of marriage and that single-parent families, perhaps through divorce or because women had children but didn’t choose to marry, are becoming increasingly common.

Here’s a example of the kind of debate the committee went through.

Ronald Stone, a retired professor of Christian ethics from Pittsburgh Seminary, recommended substituting the word “responsible” every time the words “chaste and disciplined” appeared in the report. Stone said he talked to his own four children about being responsible in their sexual behavior, and said, “Every pastor I talk to tells me the people they’re marrying are not virgins … Unless we are teaching our children to be virgins until they are in their 30s, I don’t think it makes any sense to keep that language in our paper. I respect that there may be some who do teach their children to be virgins into their 30s but I don’t think that’s the common Presbyterian practice any more.”

Stone said later that a document that makes young people feel “guilty and excluded” won’t serve the cause of evangelism at all.

There was also considerable conversation about what the paper should say about couples who live together outside of marriage. Some people do cohabit in committed heterosexual relationships but don’t intend to marry — some for financial reasons, some because they’re not interested in marriage, said Donna Bradley, a lawyer from Tucson. The paper makes it sounds like the committee is only talking about young people or poor people, “kids shacking up. That’s not true anymore,” Bradley said — there also are unmarried professionals or retired people who live together and consider themselves family, but do not plan to marry.

Leslie Klingensmith, a pastor from Silver Spring, Md., said she knows of undocumented immigrants who fit that category — they don’t want to attract the government’s attention by applying for a marriage license — but also had a relative in her 80s who lived with a man but didn’t marry for fear of losing pension or medical benefits.

But that kind of talk also leads straight back to the political difficulties in getting a policy paper approved by the Assembly.

Harper — clearly cognizant of the six-and-a-half years of work that already have gone into writing this paper — encouraged a subgroup that was working on the paper to avoid the word “cohabitation,” saying that word is “a red flag and it stirs up a lot of negative response.”

Harper also told the subgroup that “if we don’t have Alan’s participation, it won’t pass” the Assembly. Last year, the Assembly wouldn’t pass the paper with support from the left and the middle, so ‘we are moving from center to the right,” Harper said. “That’s where the denomination resides, that’s where the commissioners are.”

But Bradley said that while living together outside of marriage is “hard for a church-based paper to condone, that’s the reality” — many people do live together in committed relationships, and don’t think it’s wrong. The church misses a chance to be pastoral, she said, if it sends the message that “everyone needs to be happily married.”

And Eric Mount, a retired theology professor from Centre College in Kentucky, who now lives in Davidson, N.C., said: “The church needs to see these committed relationships as places of ministry.”

The church sometime presents the idea “that if you’re having sex outside of marriage, there’s something wrong with you,” that “you’re some kind of sex maniac,” said Gloria Albrecht, a sociology professor from Mercy University in Detroit. But many Presbyterians know people — in some cases their own children — who are not married but are sexually active.

Just because it’s true, Harper answered back, “doesn’t mean they approve of it,” or that they want a Presbyterian report that seems to endorse such behavior. Last year’s General Assembly was not willing to approve a document, he said, that seemed to favor or at least accept cohabitation.

“That’s what underlies so much of this,” Albrecht said. “That we are unwilling to confront the new sexual ethic.” Yet she acknowledged that “there’s no way you can justify cohabitation from a conservative viewpoint.”

And Wisdom clearly wants the Presbyterian church to send a clear message in favor of fidelity within marriage between a man and a woman, and against extramarital sex of any kind — even while saying God can work in the lives of those who make other kinds of moral decisions. The language he’d proposed said, for example, that “God can and does work in and through persons in all kinds of families, even those established contrary to God’s will.”

Wisdom told the committee that “one of the bottom-line concerns of some of the people who opposed last year’s proposal … was the appearance that all forms of family were being endorsed,” that marriage was being presented as exactly on the same moral footing as same-sex couples or heterosexuals who live together.

Others on the committee found Wisdom’s language too judgmental.

“God does indeed work through all kinds of people, because we are all sinners,” said Jack Terry, a pastor from Portland, Ore.

Klingensmith said she worried that the phrase “contrary to God’s will” was “an oblique and underhanded reference” to families where same-sex partners are raising children together.

And Peter Sulyok, the denomination’s staff member who coordinates the advisory committee’s work, said the language Wisdom recommended weakens the affirmation of the Reformed tradition “that God is sovereign. Of course God can work through any family that is in place, because God is already at work there.”