The committee members worked hard, were civil and respectful across their differences, and produced a competent and helpful summary of the issues. Yet the committee’s recommendations make almost no discernable progress in the church’s consideration of these questions.
From the outset the committee had a charge and a commitment that almost guaranteed that nothing new would come out of their deliberations. They were charged not to change the PC(USA)’s definition of Christian marriage as being between one man and one woman. The commitment that the group brought to their task was their commendable desire that the committee, and the church, should stay together, despite their differences.
In the committee’s preliminary report, issued in September 2009, they concluded that civil unions or domestic partnerships offer “ … no true solution to the struggle around same-gender partnerships … [because they] provide neither the state-sanctioned benefits nor the societal acceptance that marriage … offers.” The PC(USA) has long supported civil unions as a policy for the state. They did not offer a rich discussion of why they think civil unions are not good enough for the church. I believe this is because they do not have a “good enough” category. The options they were gingerly dealing with were “homosexual practice is a sin” or full “societal acceptance,” with nothing in between. This seems to me an important lost opportunity to make progress.
One of the few substantive recommendations the committee made was, of course, to create another committee. This committee would “develop guidelines for Biblical interpretation concerning matters of human sexuality, paying particular attention to the interpretive role of personal experience.” When this recommendation sailed through, one of the liberal members said, “I thought there would be more argument about that.” Appeals to personal experience are the usual way advocates in the church set aside inconvenient texts in Scripture. However, by this point in the committee’s deliberations, the conservative minority had withdrawn from debating the recommendations.
The committee’s final important deliberations were over whether they should make any recommendations at all. As I read the debate, the centrists were ready to follow the conservatives in not making any recommendations. However, the committee’s excellent moderator, Jim Szeyller, who had kept out of almost all previous debate, handed the gavel to another so that he could make an impassioned plea to go ahead with their draft recommendations. He argued that the church entrusted them with the onerous task to seek a way forward. To recommend only that the church read the committee’s summary of the debate, he contended, would be shirking the duty for which the church had chosen them. That turned a 4 – 6 split not to recommend anything into a 7 – 3 margin to make several mild recommendations.
As the meeting closed the conservative minority were debating among themselves whether to issue a minority report. Given the very modest recommendations contained in the majority report, it hardly seems worth dissenting from – or celebrating.
WILLIAM (BEAU) WESTON, Van Winkle Professor of Sociology at Centre College in Danville, Ky., is an elder and the author of Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, Leading From the Center, and other studies of the PC(USA).
