Chapter Two: Statements and Walls: Persons Associated With a Group Calling Itself Pink Mennos
The experience of Pink Mennos at Columbus in 2009 introduced a new level of engagement in controversial matters. ... The techniques of social advocacy and confrontation that we have taught young adults in our schools has come to haunt our church’s most visible gathering, to the end that convention-goers feel immense pressure to take up sides against one another on [homosexuality].
—Ervin Stutzman, Executive Director, Mennonite Church USA81
To be unacceptable because one tries to live the values one was taught by one's family's elders—this is a great sin against the young.
—Ruth Krall82
A group of Mennonites is gathered in the expansive hallway of a large, modern conference center, singing hymns printed in a pink booklet. Some sing obviously from memory. Inside the rooms around them are other Mennonites, attending bureaucratic meetings, structured dialogues, and worship services. These Mennonites in the hallway stand in a circle, but they self-consciously arrange their bodies to make the circle permeable. Some face outward; some angle themselves in an attempt to be present both inside and outside the circle; some hold stacks of pink hymn booklets while watching passers-by attentively; some passers-by will take the offered booklets and join the circle to sing. Many of those in the circle are wearing pink: scarves, bandannas, plastic bracelets, and t-shirts with inclusive slogans.
By almost any theoretical or popular definition one could invoke, the circle is
queer. Its place in space is simultaneously marginal and central. It exists outside the doors
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81 Quoted in Everett Thomas, “Unconventional Conventions?,” The Mennonite, May 1, 2011, http://www.themennonite.org/issues/14-5/articles/Unconventional_conventions.
82 Ruth Krall, Comment, March 4, 2015. In Kauffman, Richard A., “Opinion: Mistakes, Regrets, Lessons,” Mennonite World Review, March 2, 2015, http://mennoworld.org/2015/03/02/latest-issue/opinion-mistakes-regrets-lessons/.
Page 65
of the conference rooms, the sites of officially sanctioned Mennonite religious and communal practices, in the hallway. Almost all of the other Mennonites have to pass it as they go from room to room, to see and hear those within it and to decide how they will place their own bodies in relationship to it. Fear, discomfort, disgust and curiosity are all palpable in the area around the circle. The music is coming from queer mouths: gay and lesbian Mennonites, bisexual and gender non-conforming Mennonites, single Mennonites, Mennonites like myself who aspire to be straight allies and thus identify themselves in relationship with queer people and queer communities. Almost all of us know how to sing four-part harmony, and sing well. Many of these people are in tears, or have been, or will be at least once during the time that they spend in the circle.
This is a scene that has played out multiple times, in multiple settings: in 2009 in Columbus, Ohio; in 2011 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in 2013 in Phoenix, Arizona, at the national, biennial conventions of Mennonite Church USA. Most of the members of these circles identify with Pink Menno, a loose, mostly web-maintained network of queer- and ally- identified Mennonites. While people of all ages at Mennonite conventions wear Pink Menno t-shirts and stand in such circles to sing hymns, the network is strongly associated with youth. This is in part because the original organizers of Pink Menno were in their twenties at the time of its founding, but just as much, the association has to do with the fact that a conspicuously large percentage of people who are drawn to Pink Menno at conventions are teenagers and adults under thirty. Pink Menno operates with the financial and organizational help of Brethren Mennonite Council on LGBT Interests; it is not a discrete organization so much as it is the public face of current LGBTQ Mennonite activism. “I think we're uniquely poised in the
Page 66
Mennonite church,” Carol Wise said to me in our 2013 interview, several months after the Phoenix convention. “We have the activist piece of Pink Menno. BMC's the infrastructure. We have the educational resources; we have the connections.”83
Despite or perhaps because of its contribution to this enviable position, Pink Menno has both confounded and infuriated Mennonite denominational leaders and process brokers for the duration of its existence. The visible youth of the movement lays bear an uncomfortable, undeniable truth to church leaders: the millennial generation of churchgoers are the most LGBTQ-accepting demographic in the Mennonite church and also the most likely to leave the church. This translocal trend towards queer-friendly youth exists alongside an adamant faction of anti-queer churches, located primarily (but not exclusively) in the northeastern U.S. and within historically MC area conferences, that seems poised to leave MCUSA over what they see as its excessive tolerance of homosexuality and overly permissive sexual politics. In defending their claims, the leaders of these churches refer to denominational statements of conservative sexual ethics as proof that queer-friendly churches have betrayed their commitments to MCUSA.
There is much to be learned about the workings of power in the absence of unambiguous hierarchies by observing the ways in which MCUSA leaders have interacted with, avoided interacting with, and attempted to discursively manage Pink Menno in face of this overwhelming generational reality and its backlash. These have included: portraying Pink Menno as a general danger to youth, portraying Pink Menno leaders and supporters as exclusively white agents of racial discord,84 portraying Pink
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
83 Carol Wise, interview with author, October 22, 2013.
84 Based on my observations at MCUSA conventions, I would state at least anecdotally that the younger Pink Menno members are, the less homogeneously white they are. (I
Page 67
Menno as pushers of an irrelevant political agenda that is “of the world,” reducing Pink Menno to its relative youth and assuming a parental voice in relation to it, portraying Pink Menno as vengeful abusers of social media, isolating Pink Menno from its larger context as part of a forty-year movement, and above all, resisting and silencing intersectional analysis that takes LGBTQ identities seriously as a category of marginalized existence.
Taken in total, I refer to these techniques as “managing difference,” and Mennonites did not, obviously, invent them. Because so much of the power of executive Mennonite leaders is exerted through denominational publications and press releases, the most conspicuous means through which these techniques have been practiced are public instances of what M. Jacqui Alexander calls “subordinating speech acts.” Such acts accrue power when “the speakers in question have authority and when, through that authority, they can stop another’s speech from counting as the action it was intended to be.”85 The struggle between Pink Mennos and denominational representatives has been fought over the questions of “who has authority, what is its source, who confers or denies it, and who struggles to gain ownership of it all.”86 In these discursive battlegrounds, denominational statements overwhelmingly operate as an anti-queer cudgel within a larger arsenal of heterosexist weaponry. This chapter is an attempt to understand the nature and effects of that cudgeling. I argue that the historical context and even the actual
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
have also observed that my own generation, approximately ages thirty-five to forty-five, is conspicuously absent from Pink Menno, with the exception of pastors. I see far more Pink Menno t-shirts on people who appear to be in their fifties, sixties, and seventies.)
85 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 123-24.
86 Ibid, 122.
Page 68
words of these statements matter far less than the social and symbolic meanings they have been given in battles over LGBTQ inclusion.
The wall and the arm
As I noted in the first chapter, Sara Ahmed writes in her work on institutional diversity practices of the frequency with which her informants, diversity workers at universities, used “the wall” as a metaphor for their experiences trying to facilitate the kind of inclusive transformations that they were ostensibly employed to create.87 The wall is that which is resistant to any genuine disruption of the power relations already in place. The wall hurts when you come up against it: “No wonder that when the wall keeps its place, it is you that becomes sore.”88 Almost by definition, those for whom institutional power is easily obtained and retained cannot perceive the wall. In fact, they are often baffled by the insistence that the wall exists, and will even at times insist that the wall is a fabrication of those who define themselves through unnecessary opposition.
In recent work that builds on her diversity research, Ahmed follows the concept of “willfulness” through multiple cultural and historical sources.89 Notably, “willfulness” is rarely attributed to those who speak with authority that is affirmed by cultural norms. It is a childish quality, one to be overcome through wisdom and maturity. In Mennonite contexts, authority means the power to assert what is best for the common good: the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
87 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 26.
88 Sara Ahmed, “Feeling Depleted?,” Feministkilljoys, accessed September 2, 2014, http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/11/17/feeling-depleted/.
89 Sara Ahmed, “A Willfulness Archive,” Theory & Event 15, no. 3 (2012), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v015/15.3.ahmed.html.
Page 69
common good is what is in accordance with God’s will. And thus, expressions of will must be ranked. Not all individuals are fit to speak for the common good.
To illustrate the difference between willfulness and will, Ahmed uses a Grimm’s fairy tale about a child whom God causes to die because she refuses to mind her mother. When the child is buried, her arm repeatedly shoots up from beneath the ground, defiant of the death it has been dealt. The arm, in fact, will not stay buried, not until the mother of the willful child takes a rod and beats the arm back into the ground. Finally, the child stays dead. The willful arm remains buried, forced into submission by the rod, the stronger will of the mother and by extension, of a parental God.90
Ahmed writes of the story, “it teaches us to read the distinction between will and willfulness as a grammar, as a way of ordering human experience, as a way of distributing moral worth."91 Furthermore, it invokes “the promissory logic of the family” as a means of interpreting different acts of will, a logic that imposes heteropatriarchal order on sex and reproduction and casts “queerness as self-regard” (or in the more prevalent Mennonite language, “individualism”). The parent represents God’s will, and those who deviate from God’s will must be punished as children.
I am drawn to this story as an interpretive map for Mennonite institutional discourse on difference and diversity because of its unflinching portrayal of violence at the hands of a parent. In Mennonite discussions about LGBTQ people, as is the case in many Christian settings, familial logic is rarely far from the surface; the rejection of LGBTQ people is often delivered in a parental language of loving disapproval. Familial logic allows heterosexist Christians to subvert the accusations of bigotry that they often
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
Page 70
receive. Bigots commit violence out of hate; parents enact discipline out of love. While such expressions of disapproving love for queer Mennonites may well be genuine at times, they are also subordinating acts of power that attempt to reduce queer people to a state of rhetorical adolescence.
As a means of social regulation, parental logic works in concert with the currently dominant U.S. political ideology that grants citizenship and social legitimacy through the private lens of family and heteronormative relations.92 It also falls into a specifically Anabaptist genealogy of disciplinary action against nonconforming community members, expressed through the practices of shunning, excommunication, or the withholding of communion. Menno Simons, the sixteenth century Anabaptist leader from whom Mennonites take their name, labeled such practice as “Loving Admonition.”93 Anabaptists demanded the freedom to practice religious faith without authoritarian intervention, but the realities of persecution and forced migration meant that much of Anabaptist praxis developed within small, separatist communities within which some community members were granted considerable authority over others. The irony of this legacy is that while powerful Mennonites almost always employ a rhetoric of separation from “the world” to justify their power and manage dissent, their ability to theologically distance themselves from power simultaneously primes them to accept and reproduce patterns of social inequality that are much bigger than Mennonites.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
92 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
93 John Horsch, Menno Simons, His Life, Labors, and Teachings (Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1916), 275.
Page 71
Breaking silence
It may be that God is ready to use revolution as a prelude to resurrection...Most of our people will never be ready for the requirements of the hour, and we cannot longer wait for them.
—Vincent Harding, “Record of the Meeting of Church Leaders for a Discussion on Racial and Civil Rights Problems.”94
On New Year’s Eve in 2008, Jennifer Yoder, a queer sexual violence survivors’ advocate in her mid-twenties, wrote down a plan. She and her older brother, Luke Yoder, had been hanging out over the holiday break, trying the think of ways that they could create queer visibility and activism at the upcoming Mennonite Church USA convention in Columbus, Ohio. The Yoders were aware of the history of BMC, and of the work of pro-inclusion straight pastors. Only a month earlier, a group of these pastors had circulated an “Open Letter to MCUSA” among other Mennonite pastors, calling for support for LGBTQ inclusion.95 “We must acknowledge that the Church is already divided,” the letter read. “We have been willing to sacrifice our LGBT brothers and sisters, their families and friends to preserve a presumed unity.”96 The first draft of Jennifer Yoder’s document was entitled, “Gaying Up the Mennos.”97 Once the document started to circulate, she changed the title to “Pink Campaign.”98
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
94 Memo from September 14, 1963, quoted in Tobin Miller Shearer, “Moving Beyond Charisma in Civil RIghts Scholarship: Vincent Harding’s Sojourn with the Mennonites, 1958-1966,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 82, April 2008: 213–48.
95 Cynthia Lapp, Sheri Hostetler, Weldon Nisly, “Open Letter to Mennonite Church USA,” Open Letter to MCUSA, April 1, 2009, http://openlettertomcusa.blogspot.com/search/label/letter.
96 Ibid.
97 Jennifer Yoder, email message to author, September 18, 2014, used with permission.
98 Jennifer Yoder, “Pink Campaign,” January 2009.
Page 72
At the top of the page, Jennifer Yoder wrote the Martin Luther King quote, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”99 The quote, taken from King’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,”100 was a revealing choice. The speech was delivered a year to the day before his assassination, marking the public moment when King linked what the violence committed by the United States against the poor of Vietnam with the segregated, racialized poverty of the United States itself. For Mennonites aware of the speech and its history, it had a particular and not entirely comfortable resonance: “Beyond Vietnam” was drafted by King’s close friend, the civil rights leader and historian Vincent Harding. For most of the sixties, Harding and his wife, Rosemarie, were the foremost voices in U.S. Mennonite communities advocating for activism against racist oppression. Rosemarie Harding was a graduate of Goshen College, a Mennonite school, and her husband came to the Mennonite church through her influence. The Hardings worked for many years with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), but after a series of disillusionments with white Mennonites’ reticence to involve themselves in civil rights action, they left their MCC positions and the Mennonite church. “Beyond Vietnam” was penned around the same time that the Hardings were departing from the Mennonite world, and in its linkage of U.S. militarism to the domestic sins of racism and poverty, white Mennonites could well hear a subtext of rebuke of their own failures to live their nonviolent commitments with consistency.101
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
99 Ibid.
100 King, Martin Luther, “Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967, http://mlk- kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/.
101 For more on the Hardings and Mennonites, see Tobin Miller Shearer, Daily Demonstrators: The Civil Rights Movement in Mennonite Homes and Sanctuaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Page 73
Jennifer Yoder knew this history. Like the Hardings, her definition of violence was expansive and intersectional102, and perhaps most saliently for the task at hand, encompassed not only what was done but also what wasn’t. After the merger of the Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church into MCUSA, in an effort to control public expressions of disagreement over LGBTQ inclusion, the denominational magazine, The Mennonite, announced a “moratorium” on articles and letters from readers addressing “Mennonite Church USA’s teaching position on sexuality.”103 While this action was presented as politically neutral, even as an act of healing, Yoder’s plan made it clear that at least in some corners, it was not experienced as such. Under the first section of her plan, “Goals,” she wrote, “Moratorium on queer issues in The Mennonite lifted.”104 This silence—the action of inaction—was not neutral, as Yoder made clear with another goal: “Apology from Mennonite church for silencing and/or committing spiritual violence against queers.”105
Yoder’s goals also included queer ordination and queer marriage (neither of which had been particularly central to the work of BMC106). While they were on her list, they were only two of nine bullet points that included conference-wide acceptance for queer members107, “queer issues addressed at home congregations,” and the ambiguous goal to have statements and delegate votes “on these issues.”108 But her most immediate
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102 Harding also spoke out for LGBTQ rights. See
103 Thomas, Everett, “Conflict Is Normal,” The Mennonite, January 1, 2013, https://themennonite.org/opinion/conflict-normal/.
104 Yoder, Jennifer, “Pink Campaign.”
105 Ibid.
106 Wise, interview, October 22, 2013.
107 Yoder, Jennifer, “Pink Campaign.”
108 Ibid.
Page 74
and comprehensive aspiration was the most achievable and fully developed: “To demonstrate a queer and ally presence at the Mennonite convention in Columbus.”109
Possible Actions at the Convention: ALL ACTIONS ARE OPTIONAL. PINK BLOC MEMBERS CHOOSE HOW
INVOLVED THEY WILL BE IN EACH ACTION. IT IS NOT NECESSARY THAT PINK BLOC MEMBERS AGREE WITH EVERY ACTION BEING TAKEN. THEY MAY DISSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM ANY ACTIONS THEY CHOOSE NOT TO PARTICIPATE IN.
• Wearing excessive amounts of pink at all times!
o Providing extra pink for forgetful folks and people who decide to join us there• Pink sheets of paper with talking points
o Varying tactics including sitting together in a bloc, spreading out to spread the pink love, telling everyone in sight why you’re wearing pink, etc.
o Special “I’m pink and I vote!” shirts for the delegates
o Repeating talking points ad nauseum to everyone in sight
o Excessive cheerfulness in the delivery
• We do not engage in hate or with hate
• If hate is encountered, text other pink bloc members and they will come with back-up cheer!
• Block hateful presentations with loving songs like Kumbayao Presenting talking points formally in workshops and/or worship services
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
109 Ibid.
Page 75
o Hold formal or informal workshops to present the talking points...
o Contact the press!...110
The list was longer than what I have included here, and contained ideas for continuing the campaign beyond Columbus: withholding tithes from non-inclusive churches, formal withdrawals of membership until the church became more inclusive, “wear[ing] pink to church every Sunday until goals are met.”111 The plan balanced a relentless determination for cheerfulness with a refusal of shame or apology.
The Yoders put their plan into action. After recruiting a few queer and ally Mennonite friends, they started a social network site, contacted the congregations and pastors they knew to be inclusive, and contacted leadership in BMC, which quickly became their main source of financial support. By July, the month of the MCUSA convention, they had implemented many of their plans. They were prepared with talking points, hymnbooks, custom pink t-shirts, and a name: Pink Menno. On July 2, near the beginning of the convention, they held a press conference with nearly one hundred pink- clad Mennonites in attendance. Cynthia Lapp, pastor of the Hyattsville Mennonite Church in Hyattsville, Maryland, was among the speakers there, and reflected on the experience:
So I made a statement at the press conference, and the MCUSA people did not
like—I mean, we don't air our dirty laundry like this in public. This is something
that we deal with internally. Then the AP picked it up, so it was in all the local
papers where there are big Mennonite communities. It was brilliant. It really
kickstarted stuff. It really made people have to start talking. But it upset people in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
Page 76
leadership because they didn't know how to deal with it. They would much rather just not talk about it.112From the standpoint of the denominational leaders who only ten years earlier had negotiated a denominational merger with an anti-gay policy as the final bargaining chip, Pink Menno was terrifyingly successful in terms of its visibility and its impact.
In addition to wearing pink t-shirts and holding a press conference, Pink Menno members sang a cappella113 hymns in the hallways of the convention center during high- traffic moments when people were passing from one event to the next. As a strategy for establishing themselves as a non-threatening but persistent presence, hymn-singing had many advantages, not the least of which was its traditionally central role in Mennonite worship. Mennonite hymnologists Marlene Kropf and Kenneth Nafziger have written that, “In the absence of a weekly eucharistic tradition, singing functions for Mennonites as sacraments do in liturgical churches.”114 Pink Menno also boasted a number of gifted singers and songleaders. At the very least, their singing was an affective presence for Mennonites who grew up with the kind of four-part singing that they were doing.
I did not attend the Columbus convention, which happened the summer before I began my doctoral studies, though I followed the Pink Menno social networking site closely, as well as the official church press coverage of the week. In interviews as well as casual conversations over the intervening years, a number of queer Mennonites and their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
112 Cynthia Lapp, interview with author, July 6, 2011.
113 Singing a cappella is part of the Swiss Mennonite worship tradition of the pre-2002 Mennonite Church. General Conference congregations generally used organ, piano, or other instrumental accompaniment. The practices of MCUSA congregations tend to reflect their previous conference affiliations, but hybrid approaches to worship music are not uncommon.
114 Marlene Kropf, Kenneth Nafziger, and John Bell, Singing: A Mennonite Voice (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001), 27.
Page 77
supporters have related to me traumatic and upsetting stories of their encounters in Columbus. “It was our first year,” Jennifer Yoder said, “And so we surprised and scared the shit out of everybody with our sheer numbers. It brought out the fury.”115 Audrey Roth Kraybill, a self-described “Pink Menno Mom” who became involved in LGBTQ activism after her young adult son came out as gay, described “hate stares” from onlookers in Columbus; the only time she saw hate that palpable, she said, was when a KKK rally came to her town.116 Jennifer Yoder, like a number of Pink Mennos, had daily encounters with verbal harassment and hate speech. In a letter written after the convention, Luke Yoder and his Pink Menno colleague Luke Miller described the incidents to James Schrag, the Executive Director of MCUSA:
[The incidents] included being browbeaten with the Bible, being called fag, being verbally abused, and in many instances being driven to tears. Please take a minute to picture the numerous youth and adults, both gay and straight that had been verbally attacked to the point of tears. This is what we witnessed all week.117
The intensity of these attacks, combined with the indifference to them from denominational authorities, signaled the limit for Jennifer Yoder. The queer co-founder of Pink Menno stepped away from both the movement and the Mennonite church, leaving Pink Menno strategy for the next two conventions in the hands of her straight brother and another wave of young (and for several years, mostly male-identified) leaders. Looking back on the group emails that came through my inbox in the weeks after Columbus, I saw her work already being overlooked. “Maybe it took a non-cynical straight young person
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
115 Jennifer Yoder, Facebook message to author, July 3, 2014.
116 Audrey Roth Kraybill, interview with author, July 9, 2011.
117 Luke Miller and Luke Yoder, “Letter to James Schrag,” July 21, 2009.
Page 78
with good political instincts like Luke Yoder to help us realize what is possible today and how to achieve it!” wrote one person.118 The events of the next few years would show that in founding Pink Menno, both of the Yoders displayed remarkable political instincts. But the price of engagement with church institutions was almost always steeper for queer people than it was for their supporters. “Columbus was damaging enough that I needed a break,” Jennifer Yoder wrote to me in 2014.119 It was through non-Mennonite queer communities, friendships, and secular social justice work that she found enough healing and strength to consider confronting Mennonites again.
The social life of church statements
While Pink Menno worked to transform unofficial convention spaces in Columbus, the other site of possibility for pro-LGBTQ activists was in the delegate session, where a statement entitled “Resolution on Following Christ and Growing Together as Communities Even in Conflict” was up for passage.120 Despite this broad title, the text named the specific purpose of the resolution as “current and ongoing debate about the issue of human sexuality.”121 By the pre-determined code of Mennonite decision-making, “the issue of human sexuality” referred to LGBTQ people (for historical reasons I will explain below). After the convention was over, queer-friendly delegates and observers had one minor victory to celebrate, contained in the phrase, “We
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
118 Email to Brethen Mennonite Council listserv, July 12, 2009.
119 Jennifer Yoder, Facebook message to author, July 3, 2014. Used with permission.
120 Mennonite Church USA Delegate Assembly, Columbus, Ohio, “Resolution on Following Christ and Growing Together as Communities Even in Conflict,” July 4, 2009, http://resources.mennoniteusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Resolution_full_even-in- conflict.pdf.
121 Ibid.
Page 79
acknowledge the statements by Mennonite Church USA on Human Sexuality, which have been previously passed and are currently in place, while we also acknowledge the presence of dissenting voices within our denomination.”122 In the original proposed text, the first “acknowledge” in this sentence was “affirm,” so that the statement read, “We affirm the statements by Mennonite Church USA....”123 The change from “affirm” to “acknowledge” signaled a subtle recognition that the statements in question did not hold the same authority for everybody. Given how little attention the resolution has received since 2009, it is reasonable to conclude that this small change made little difference to anybody who was not actually physically present in the delegate session. “It appears that they've washed the bucket into which they have poured the same old excrement,” wrote one gay observer in a group email.124
To interpret these events, it helps to understand the ambiguous role of statements and resolutions in the history of Mennonite denominations. In my previous chapter, I explained this ambiguity as it came to bear during the denominational merger of the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church into MCUSA, particularly within the context of the 2001 Membership Guidelines. The Membership Guidelines, however, are part of a complicated lineage of corporate statements tracing back to the 1980s that codify married heterosexuality as the baseline of Mennonite sexual ethics, and map sexual deviance onto queerness (constructed as homosexuality).
Anabaptist practice is shaped by a rejection of the idea that any church institution can produce authoritative or permanent doctrine. That rejection was crafted in the very
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
122 Ibid.
123 Email to Brethren Mennonite Council listserv, July 4, 2009.
124 Email to Brethren Mennonite Council listserv, July 4, 2009.
Page 80
specific historical context of sixteenth-century Western Europe, when the doctrines that Anabaptists were rejecting were indistinguishable from the dictates of the state. To trace the complicated history of how Anabaptists interpreted the role of authoritative statements within the multiple communal formations that they have created in the intervening centuries is beyond the scope of this project. What is most relevant from that history, perhaps, is the constancy of questions related to power. How does power survive and reconfigure after the dissolution of a particular legalistic structure or hierarchy? When the idea of doctrine is rejected, what happens next? Do we recreate doctrine under different names? And, returning to the question of the previous chapter: who is granted the authority to answer such questions? How does power survive the death of doctrine?
In Mennonite contexts, corporate statements come to contain the competing wills of the multiple and overlapping communities into which they are deployed: the will to be done with a social disruption that is deemed inappropriate; the will to contain that disruption within manageable parameters; the will to enable social transformation. At the denominational level, such statements are created through a process in which congregations or coalitions of congregations propose resolutions, which are then vetted by a committee that decides whether or not they will presented to a delegate body at the denominational convention, made up of representatives from every church in the denomination. After some moderated discussion on the delegate floor, the delegates vote. The statements are then theoretically operative, but there is no shared understanding of how they are interpreted, who is held accountable for breaking them, and how long they are intended to be in effect.
Page 81
In my time talking to Mennonites about the series of corporate statements that cemented the practices of LGBTQ exclusion in the General Conference, pre-2002 Mennonite Church, and post-2002 MCUSA, I learned that few Mennonites have any knowledge of any such statements that do not somehow pertain to regulation of sexuality. Yet MCUSA delegates do propose and pass resolutions on other things. In 2009, the “affirm/acknowledge” debate happened within the same delegate body that passed two other resolutions as well, one stating opposition to human trafficking,125 and one on “National Healthcare Policy” that, given the embattled context of healthcare debates before and during the Obama administration, could be perceived as astoundingly partisan.126 One line, for instance, reads, “We will ask our members and congregations to urge their congressional representatives to support legislation that would extend access to healthcare to all Americans, particularly the poor and disadvantaged, while we engage local healthcare needs.”127 How could a line with this much political specificity pass with little lasting controversy, while the difference between “affirm” and “acknowledge” in a vaguely-worded statement about sexuality generated lasting rancor and even despair?
I contend that the symbolism projected onto queer bodies holds more power in MCUSA than any statement or polity arrangement. The general waning of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
125 Mennonite Church USA Delegate Assembly, Columbus, Ohio, “Statement against Human Trafficking, Modern Day Slavery,” Mennonite Church USA, July 4, 2009, http://resources.mennoniteusa.org/resource-center/resources/statements-and- resolutions/statement-against-human-trafficking/.
126 Mennonite Church USA Delegate Assembly, Columbus, Ohio, “Resolution on National Healthcare Policy: Next Step,” Mennonite Church USA, July 4, 2009, http://resources.mennoniteusa.org/resource-center/resources/statements-and- resolutions/national-healthcare-policy/.
127 Ibid.
Page 82
denominational identity in U.S. Christianity128 and rise of sexual and reproductive politics as identity-defining factors for U.S. Christians are part of the broader context that has made this the case. Mennonites have their own particular history within that context. For Mennonites who are old enough to remember the 1980s, I learned that the surest way to hear about that history was to say, “Tell me about Saskatoon and Purdue.”
Sex and symbols
The space was a little bit open, to actually talk about this stuff. To me, that was part of the travesty of Saskatoon and Purdue. Those statements were what backed people into corners.
—Su Flickinger129
In early 1980s, the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church commissioned a jointly-run study of human sexuality, which was to conclude with a report that might then be disseminated to congregations for educational purposes.130 For four years, a committee of carefully selected professionals (psychologists, pastors, theologians and other church leaders) in both conferences met regularly to discuss what belonged in the document. Su Flickinger, who later came out as gay and became active in Brethren Mennonite Council on LGBT Interests, was a college student when the study began, and by far the youngest member of the committee.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
128 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
129 Su Flickinger, interview with the author, November 23, 2013.
130 Loren Johns, “Homosexuality and the Mennonite Church,” Homosexuality and the Mennonite Church, accessed February 14, 2015, http://ljohns.ambs.edu/H&MC.htm.
Page 83
The report they produced, released in 1985, was entitled Human Sexuality and the Christian Life: A Working Document for Study and Dialogue.131 Its contents—which I never encountered as a Mennonite churchgoer, only as a researcher—took me by surprise with their relative lack of rule-based dogma. Its emphasis was less on conclusions and more on pinpointing the relevant questions that a congregation might discuss in the context of sexual education. At the time that I first encountered the document in my research, my level of frustration with purity discourses and theological inattentiveness to questions of power and consent in sexuality was at an all-time high. But the study guide did not focus on purity as an ethical barometer. Even the chapter on homosexuality was far more nuanced than I expected. “[Homophobia] can arise from lack of acquaintance with homosexual persons,” read one section. “In other cases, where heterosexual persons have difficulty accepting their own sexual feelings, they find it confusing to come to terms with feelings so different from their own.”132 In addition to this discreet suggestion that homophobic straight people turn the mirror of examination onto themselves, the section worked to discredit dominant fictions about gay people: “Homosexual persons are neither child molesters nor given to violence because of their sexual orientation. They are not necessarily driven by their sexual desires to any greater degree than are heterosexuals.”133 The closest the section comes to a definitive “ruling” is the following:
The Committee on Human Sexuality in the Christian Life calls on Mennonite congregations to prayerfully study and discern their response to homosexual persons. The material in this section of the report is intended to be helpful in this
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
131 Human Sexuality in the Christian Life (Newton, KS and Scottdale, PA: Faith and Life Press and the Mennonite Publishing House, 1985), http://ljohns.ambs.edu/hscl/hscl0.htm.
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid.
Page 84
discernment process. While the committee could not come to one mind as to openness to all of the alternatives above, it does urge the church to continue to uphold the traditional sexual ethic which does not allow promiscuity or sexual relationships outside of a covenantal relationship.134
“Outside of a covenantal relationship”: some ambiguities are tolerable, but perhaps not this one. Why not write “outside of a heterosexual marriage?” My sense of surprise at the open-ended nature of the Study Guide was likely rooted in the fact that I grew up in a Mennonite church that was shaped by what happened next.
Flickinger described how, in the course of their creating the study guide, the boards of both denominations began to pressure the committee to make a statement on sexuality that could be voted on by delegates in the upcoming denominational conventions, held in, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for the General Conference in 1986, and Purdue, Indiana for the Mennonite Church in 1987.135 The committee challenged that demand, many of them pointing out that after four years of discussion, they were far from capable of drafting a statement that reflected the complexity of the material they had covered. The denominational leaders seemed determined to get a corporate statement out of the process, however, and when the committee did not forward their own version, the boards created their own. In Saskatoon in 1986 and in Purdue in 1987, each denomination passed a version of the same statement, against the advice of the study guide committee. The one-page statement contained three sections, an “Affirmation,” “Confession,” and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
134 Ibid. Emphasis mine.
135 Flickinger, interview with author, November 23, 2013. At this point, recall that before the mergers that created MCUSA and Mennonite Church Canada, the General Conference and the Mennonite Church were both bi-national denominations (though the GCMC had a much higher percentage of its population in Canada than the Mennonite Church).
Page 85
lastly, “Covenant,” which contained the text that was to have the most lasting effect on Mennonites’ denominational future:
We covenant with each other to study the Bible together and expand our insight into the biblical teachings relating to sexuality. We understand the Bible to teach that sexual intercourse is reserved for a man and woman united in marriage and that violation of this teaching is a sin. It is our understanding that this teaching also precludes premarital, extramarital and homosexual sexual activity.136
In his encyclopedia article, “Homosexuality and the Mennonite Church,” Loren Johns writes, “The original committee was disappointed with how few congregations actually studied their document.”137 Flickinger put it more bluntly: “A whole bunch of churches then said, well, if we're going to vote on a statement, why even bother with the guide? If the answer is going to be given to us, why study for the test?....Ever since then I've had very little belief in statements. All they do is cut off conversation.”138 For gay and lesbian Mennonites, the Saskatoon/Purdue debacle was further soured by the experiences that BMC representatives had with homophobic church members at the conventions themselves. Frank Trnka, a longtime BMC member, recalled his own experience at Saskatoon:
One of the most rabidly homophobic and dismissive people in the open mic discussions was a minister from Oklahoma who came up to the mic with his ten- year –old son and said, “Even my son can figure out that this isn’t natural!” The next day this minister came, I was sitting somewhere just having a cup of coffee
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
136 “Resolutions on Human Sexuality Compared,” accessed March 15, 2015, http://ljohns.ambs.edu/Resolutions.htm.
137 Loren Johns, “Homosexuality and the Mennonite Church.”
138 Su Flickinger, interview by Amy Short, video recording, Riverdale, MD, June 4, 2012.
Page 86
and this minister came over and sat and talked. He asked if I had dinner plans that night, and if I was interested in having dinner with him away from the conference. And that he’d always sort of wondered what it would be like to be with a man. I was like, oh really? [laughs] Yeah, I know where this is going. No, we’re not doing this, but thanks for letting me know that you’re really another closeted homophobe.139
Stories like Trnka’s are not uncommon among LGBTQ Mennonites who have lived through decades of church process. The effect of the Saskatoon/Purdue statements was a general trend away from discussions of sexuality and sexual ethics in general, despite the fact that the commissioned study guide contained twenty distinct sections on the subject, only one of which concerned homosexuality. It seemed that homosexuality was the only sexual topic that mattered. Thus it came to be that in the context of structured “dialogues about homosexuality,” which continued throughout the eighties and nineties, LGBTQ Mennonites bore the weight of their churches’ more general sexual repressions. “It was becoming creepy, and voyeuristic,” Carol Wise said. “We were being used for people to project all kinds of their own sexual stuff, to test out and work on it, on our bodies.”140 Queer Mennonites’ cynicism about denominational statements cannot be separated from their literal, embodied histories of absorbing the consequences of sexual silence.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
139 Frank Trnka, interview by Amy Short, video recording, Minneapolis, MN, June 11 and July 31, 2011.
140 Wise, interview.
Page 87
Persons associated with a group calling themselves PinkMennos [sic]
I think part of the silencing of LGBT people and women and communities of color is not because people aren't convinced intellectually or Biblically or theologically. I think it's because we don't want these people to talk. Because they know too much.
—Carol Wise
James Schrag, the first executive director of the Mennonite Church USA (he held the position from the denomination’s inception until the end of 2009) was a longtime Mennonite process broker. As a central figure in the negotiations of the General Conference/Mennonite Church merger, Schrag was one of the new denomination’s foremost spokespeople articulating the aspiration that a merged Mennonite denomination could become more formidable as a voice for nonviolence and peacemaking. In a July 2001 Associated Press article covering the Mennonite Church USA convention in Nashville (the meeting in which the merger was finalized) Schrag stated his vision:
James Schrag, executive director designate of Mennonite Church USA, said the new denomination will foster "a higher level of collaboration and cooperation than ever before," strengthening church members' efforts on mission work and political issues, such as capital punishment and human rights.
"We've simply grown more alike, and this is a culminating point where we can articulate a vision for the future," he said.
With the merger complete, denomination leaders now will focus on spreading peace and the teachings of the Christian faith, he said.141 At the same historical moment in which Schrag and others spread this optimistic message about Mennonites’ invigorated capacity for peacemaking, the convention
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
141 Associated Press, “Merger Gets Mennonites’ Blessing,” Lawrence Journal World, July 6, 2001, http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2001/jul/06/merger_gets_mennonites/?print.
Page 88
delegates inside the Opryland Hotel in Nashville were absorbing decidedly different messages about the meaning and purpose of the Membership Guidelines that ultimately cemented the merging of their denominations. The vote on this “compromise document,” to use Janeen Bertsche Johnson’s language, was nearly unanimous, but as the previous chapter indicates, this near-consensus rested on the carefully crafted ambiguity within it. Schrag’s public statements reflected a determination to focus away from the uncomfortable truths underlying that ambiguity. “The two groups really can’t be distinguished,” he told reporters, referring to GCMC and MC.142
But in their approaches to polity and authority, the two groups still could be distinguished, a sentiment that fourteen years later I still hear articulated by Mennonites who are old enough to remember the pre-merger denominational cultures. In casual conversations with older straight Mennonites about my research, I have been asked more times than I can count, “Isn’t this just all about the merger?”143 Given that my own background is General Conference, I am more likely to encounter GCMC Mennonites of my parents’ generation than MC ones, and this question is generally uttered in the context of lamenting what they see as the undue influence of authoritarian MC practices that, from their perspectives, have aggressively overtaken the more congregational approach of the General Conference. From older LGBTQ Mennonites, I generally hear more nuanced interpretations. As impactful as polity differences were for LGBTQ Mennonites before MCUSA was formed, queer people in GCMC churches knew that congregational
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
142Items compiled from Tribune news services, “2 Mennonite Groups Planning to Merge,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2001, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2001-07- 01/news/0107010311_1_general-conference-mennonite-church-merger-denominations.
143 Official denominational language seems to generally eschew the word “merger” in favor of “transformation,” which draws attention away from the corporate overtones of the former. The practice has not, in my observation, caught on with Mennonite laypeople.
Page 89
polity didn’t protect them from homophobia, and queer people in MC congregations did not want to deal with patriarchal, authoritarian traditions in isolation from other queer Anabaptists. If the problems of the present-day MCUSA were “all about the merger,” queer Mennonites had the unfortunate privilege of knowing that the conflicts over which the merger was formed were all about them.
To Schrag, LGBTQ people and queer organizing seemed to represent a division that he had tried to relegate to the past. Their vigorous, pink appearance in Columbus, combined with the virulence of the backlash against them, made it clear that the past and the present were not as separate as he would like. On July 17, 2009, less than two weeks after the Columbus convention had ended, Schrag sent a damage control email to area conference leaders, encouraging them to share it with their congregations:
During the final session of the Delegate Assembly in Columbus, delegates adopted a resolution calling the church to find ways to be in dialogue with those who do not agree with parts of our Confession of Faith.
While we were trying to model a more open posture to diverse perspectives during the Columbus assembly, there were certain occurrences at Columbus that were problematic, primarily related to the distribution of literature by persons associated with a group calling itself PinkMennos. PinkMennos is a group which is advocating for the full inclusion of lesbians and gays into the life and expression of our church.
Our convention staff did not authorize or approve this distribution of literature. When they learned about the unauthorized distribution of literature in the exhibit area, they repeatedly requested that this activity
Page 90
stop. These requests were followed for a time but then continued again later in the week.
Some may have also read the Associated Press story in their local or regional newspaper that reported a one-sided and sometimes inaccurate view of our attempts within Mennonite Church USA, its conferences and its congregations, to recognize and practice our commitment to be in dialogue when we disagree. Leaders of the Executive Board and its Executive Leadership staff do not accept the inaccurate account presented in the secular press.144 Schrag’s letter is evidence of how successfully the notion of dissent from
denominational statements had been grafted onto LGBTQ Mennonites and their supporters. While the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective contains twenty-four separate articles, only one of which is explicitly pertinent to LGBTQ identity145, it is rare to hear any other part of the Confession invoked. Of the LGBTQ student group on their campus, one Mennonite college professor told me, “I can tell you that the ONLY time the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective is EVER discussed on our campus is in relationship to this organization. Suddenly, the conservatives, who otherwise have absolutely zero interest in this confessional document, are convinced that its jot and tittle, namely paragraph three of article 19 forbids such an organization on our campus.”146 When Schrag referred to “those who do not agree with parts of our Confession of Faith,” he was using a well-established Mennonite code. “Our
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
144 James Schrag, email to Mennonite pastors, July 17, 2009.
145 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press 1995).
146 Email message to author, February 29, 2015, used with permission.
Page 91
Confession of Faith” referred to the third paragraph of article nineteen of that document. “Those who do not agree” were those who were queer, and those willing to wear pink t- shirts to support those who were queer. Schrag could be assured that his readers would know exactly what he was talking about. The association between the Confession of Faith and heterosexist theology was so thoroughly cemented in MCUSA dominant discourse that its one article condemning homosexuality was often quite literally the only thing that Mennonites knew about its contents.
From the perspective of many Pink Menno readers, however, what was even more hurtful was Schrag’s use of the phrase “Persons associated with a group calling itself PinkMennos.” Through this alienating language, intentionally or non-intentionally, Schrag evoked what Shane Phelan has called the “sexual stranger.” Phelan writes, “Any binary scheme produces ‘undecidables’....Strangers are not like enemies, who are clearly other; they both are and are not ‘us’....Thus they produce a challenge to identities.”147 In their letter responding to Schrag, Luke Yoder and Luke Miller identify the same pattern: “It feels like an attempt to define us as ‘other,’ belonging outside of the church.”148 In my own communication with Schrag, in which I confronted him about his choice of words, he rushed to assure me that Pink Mennos were in fact a part of the church and that he cared deeply about them.149 However, Schrag never publicly apologized for these words, and his panicked duplicitousness reinforced Pink Menno’s strange, liminal status within MCUSA.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
147 Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 29.
148 Luke Miller and Luke Yoder, “Letter to James Schrag.”
149 James Schrag, email message to author, July 20, 2009.
Page 92
Magisterial managers
Mennonite leaders learned from Columbus, though perhaps not the lessons that BMC or Pink Menno representatives would have hoped. What they did seem to learn was that the resolution process was too volatile for their fragile denomination to sustain at that moment. At the next MCUSA convention in July 2011, the MCUSA’s Executive Board made a highly publicized proposal, approved by the approximately 800 delegates at the beginning of the convention, to abstain from any voting on resolutions. This decision, promoted as a one-convention break from the divisiveness of resolutions, was given its own brand name: “The Pittsburgh Experiment.”150 The MCUSA moderator at the time, Ed Diller, explained the proposal: “Our meetings on the work of the church should look less like the world around us.”151
They had also learned Pink Menno needed to be contained, at least at the level of denominational image control. In the lead-up to the next MCUSA Convention, in Pittsburgh in July 2011, The Mennonite editor Everett Thomas wrote an editorial in which he quoted Stutzman referring to Pink Menno as a “haunting” presence at conventions (see epigraph quote).152 Stutzman’s comment communicated multiple layers of meaning; the liminality of “haunting” kept Pink Menno in the realm of sexual strangers, but by referencing “the techniques of social advocacy and confrontation that we have taught young adults in our schools,” Stutzman suggested a related possibility: that Pink Mennos were misguided youth, abusing the knowledge they were given by their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150 Thomas, Everett, “Delegate Assembly Tries Pittsburgh Experiment - The Mennonite,” The Mennonite, August 1, 2011, http://www.themennonite.org/issues/14- 8/articles/Delegate_Assembly_tries_Pittsburgh_Experiment.
151 Ibid.
152 Thomas, Everett, “Unconventional Conventions?”
Page 93
elders. Pink Menno leaders, with a subversive approach to rhetoric that Stutzman clearly found irritating, responded with a t-shirt design that many wore at the Pittsburgh convention. Against a blue background was a pink Pacman-like ghost and the phrase, “Haunting the Church Since 1525.”
It was a classic Anabaptist sting. The year 1525 referred to the year known at least colloquially as the date of the first defiant “re-baptisms” in early modern Europe (in Zurich, Switzerland), and thus, arguably, the moment of the founding of Anabaptism as a religious movement. The provocation that adult baptism represented to the Holy Roman Empire and to Lutheran magisterial Protestantism led to intense persecution of early Anabaptists, in Switzerland and later, in the Low Countries as well. Anabaptists have long lived with the paradox of authoritarianism within communities defined by anti- authoritarian thought; thus the accusation of complicity with magisterial forces has become, in effect, a foundational charge against other Anabaptists, one that in the same breath claims Anabaptist authenticity for itself. The message could not have been clearer. If it were the sixteenth century, the t-shirt suggested, Stutzman would not be the one re- baptizing.
“Ervin hates Pink Menno,” one pastor told me several years after the Pittsburgh convention. “He really hates Pink Menno.”
A Plan with a Purpose
The last several years have seen rapid changes in our nation’s attitudes toward same sex attraction. For the first time, as reported in a May 2011 Gallup Poll, more than half of the respondents supported the legalization of same sex marriage. This social shift is reflected to some extent in Mennonite Church USA; our church reflects the divide in our nation. We cannot afford to ignore these differences of conviction; neither can we afford to allow this issue to become the most important
Page 94
issue in our life together.153 —from “Desiring God’s Coming Kingdom: A Missional Vision and
Purposeful Plan for the Mennonite Church USA”
In 2011, the Executive Board of the MCUSA, together with Stutzman, produced a document entitled “Desiring God’s Coming Kingdom: A Missional Vision and Purposeful Plan for the Mennonite Church USA.” This title itself reflects a strong will: the will on the part of denominational leadership to hold together an ideologically disparate collection of people and communities under the umbrella of “Mennonite,” and to assert what their reason was for being together, knowing, perhaps, how fragile the bond might be. The Plan was first presented at the Pittsburgh convention in 2011 during the resolution-free delegate sessions.
Before I go further, I must speak to limits of my own knowledge about how thoroughly integrated the Purposeful Plan has been into Mennonite congregational life. I came to the document after I had finished the bulk of my ethnographic fieldwork, in the process of attempting to interpret the behavior of Stutzman and MCUSA’s executive board, who spoke regularly about the limits of their own regulatory power while at the same time pouring considerable disciplinary and bureaucratic energy into regulating the behavior of LGBTQ-friendly congregations. My suspicions are that the majority of Mennonite laity does not know or particularly care about the Plan’s contents. At the same time, as a “living document,” the Purposeful Plan’s original authors designed it to be revised and edited by congregational delegates at biennial denominational meetings, a process that has happened once, in Phoenix in July 2014. (The available copy of the Purposeful Plan does not make clear what parts of it are delegate-modified.)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
153 Mennonite Church USA, “Our Purposeful Plan,” February 25, 2014, http://www.mennoniteusa.org/about-us/our-purposeful-plan/, 13.
Page 95
Denominational leaders are clearly invested in promoting the Plan throughout the denomination, and even encourage congregations to create their own Purposeful Plans. But the Purposeful Plan interests me primarily as a document that reflects the thought of MCUSA executive leaders, particularly as it pertains to their ideas about politics and diversity.
In the Purposeful Plan, the word “missional” operates as the primary descriptor for the church’s central priorities. The documents opens: “In 2011, through prayer and discernment, the Executive Board sensed that God was calling Mennonite Church USA to move more deliberately toward fulfillment of our missional purpose as a church.”154 But “missional” is far from a universally accepted or well-defined term in Mennonite congregations. Writing in 2012, Mennonite pastor and LGBTQ inclusion advocate Ron Adams wrote the following in the denominational publication The Mennonite:
We Mennonites have been using this word for at least the last 10 years. Yet we always need to explain what we mean whenever we use it. We preface every missional conversation with a definition, with what we don’t mean and what we do mean when we say the word.
Something is wrong here. We are reasonably smart people. Well-educated and diligent in our church work. Yet, with the exception of a few experts among us, we can’t seem to find our way toward a comfortable usage of missional. This
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
154 Ibid, 1.
Page 96
suggests that the problem is not with us. The word is the problem. And words matter.155
Adams’ conclusion, that the word “missional” is more trouble than it is worth, is not necessarily shared across the denomination, and certainly not by executive leaders, but his description of the confusion it engenders is relevant to the Purposeful Plan, which places missional identity at the heart of MCUSA’s reason for existence.
The Purposeful Plan aims to give ideological focus to an institution in a way that assigns particular meanings to particular human bodies. It maps the worth of those bodies through means of binaries that reflect a deep grounding in the theological dualism that separates “God’s kingdom” from “the world.” In a listing of “missional character traits” and corresponding “signposts” within the Plan, one reads as follows: “Missional character trait: The church understands itself as different from the world because of its participation in the life, death, and resurrection of its Lord. Signpost: In its corporate life and public witness, the church is consciously seeking to conform to its Lord instead of the multitude of cultures in which it finds itself.”156
In Mennonite discourse as in many other Christian settings, “the world” is a fluid category, occupying the same conceptual territory as “society” or “culture.” Often Christian speakers will modify “world” with “secular,” implying a clean division between what is church and what is not. A discourse that places politics in the realm of the world and places the world in binary opposition to church is particularly treacherous for those
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155 Ron Adams, “Bearing Witness to Our Missional God,” The Mennonite, accessed September 2, 2014, http://www.themennonite.org/issues/15- 6/articles/Bearing_witness_to_our_missional_God. 156 Mennonite Church USA, “Our Purposeful Plan”, 6.
Page 97
church members whose politics are formed in response to the specific vulnerabilities of their bodies.
In turn, “missional” occupies the same conceptual territory as the word “common”: common as in “common vision,” “common mind,” or simply, “what we have in common.” These themes are grafted onto “the church.” One could easily read the Plan through a grammar of willfulness: if God’s will is contained within the missional church, then the willful child inhabits the world, swayed by the things the Plan identifies as external to the church, such as “individualism” and “partisan politics.”
The Purposeful Plan portrays “partisan politics” as unfortunate distractions from what really matters. “Since we increasingly identify with political parties, our church is increasingly divided along the same lines as the nation,” the document reads. The divisions in the denominational body are thus diagnosed: they exist not because of the content of values and issues that draw people to one political party or the other, but rather, quite simply, because the nation is divided into political parties and thus, through thoughtless assimilation, the church is as well. The cure, then, is not to resolve but to refocus: not on political causes but on the church, not on division but on what is held in common. “The church must focus on the main thing that unites us—the vision, purpose and priorities of our missional church—lest we leave our assemblies as winners and losers on the issues that deeply divide us.”157
In her ethnography of Methodists debating acceptance of gay and lesbian people, sociologist Dawne Moon found that both conservatives and liberals in the churches she studied tried to defend their beliefs about gay sexuality by blaming their ideological
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
157 Ibid.15.
Page 98
opponents for being political. Their attempts, Moon argues, reflected a wider American tendency to denigrate the entire category of the political as irredeemably tainted. Moon places her conclusions in the larger context of sociological and anthropological studies showing that Americans define politics as “divisive, exhausting, mean, or worldly rather than humane and conducive to building community.”158
Of course, in a context in which the status quo is disapproving of non- heteronormative relationships, the strategy of maligning politics works somewhat better for those who are opposed to inclusive change. People who embody difference are generally more likely to be labeled as political when advocating for their own interests. Perhaps this is as good of a definition as any for what it means to come up against the wall: the truth of one’s lived experience is negated through the category into which it is placed. They have an axe to grind; they’re playing the race card; they’re pushing a political agenda. In religious settings particularly, such categorizing slams one’s very body against the specter of eternal truth. It is always easier to perform distance from politics when the existing political regimes support one’s own claims to personhood.
Mennonites have a somewhat different relationship with the category of the political than do many other Christians, due in part to their historical connection to nonviolent activism. Even this connection is fraught; Mennonite peacemaking has long been expressed through a dialectic relationship between social justice activism and separatist retreat. Still, in many Mennonite circles the concept of “politics” rings not only with the potential for worldly corruption but also with the possibility for transforming that corruption through peaceful, Christ-like intervention. In the Mennonite world,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
158 Dawne Moon, God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). p. 26.
Page 99
“politics” is not a universal ill. The renowned Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder became famous for his 1972 book The Politics of Jesus, which argued that Jesus himself had identifiable politics to be emulated.159 In a similar vein, writing in 2012, Paul Schrag, editor of the international paper Mennonite World Review, argued the following: “Separating church and state is different from separating faith and politics. The former is the cornerstone of U.S. religious liberty. The latter would remove a source of moral guidance from politicians’ and voters’ decisions. The first is essential, the second impossible.”160 But Mennonite criteria for what appropriate politics should look like are still largely in the hands of straight white men, whose are most able to embody and perform the norms that are perceived as politically impartial.
Despite Mennonites’ somewhat more nuanced historical relationship with “politics,” the “vision” put forth in the Purposeful Plan performs a similar semantic trick to that of Moon’s informants, using “partisan politics” and “political parties” as phrases that speak of the commitments that it conceives as inappropriately distracting to the “common life” or “common vision” of the church. In other words, the possibility for appropriate political activity is left tentatively open, but with little guidance as to how it might actually look.
The problem with admonishing people to leave their partisan politics at the door is that political ideologies, like religious faith, are designed to engage people’s deepest convictions about how the world works and what their places in it should be. Political
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
159 John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994). The final chapter of this dissertation addresses Yoder’s legacy as a sexual predator whose abusive treatment of women was concealed and minimized for several decades by Mennonite institutions.
160 Paul Schrag, “MWR: Faith and Politics Freely Exercised,” accessed August 26, 2013, http://www.mennoworld.org/2012/3/12/faith-and-politics-freely-exercised/.
Page 100
affiliations are not, on the whole, trivial distractions from what is truly important to people so much as they are expressions of it. The Purposeful Plan suggests that those who participate in partisan politics are doing so not because they have meaningful convictions but because they have incorrect priorities. Partisanship is tantamount to the child’s willfulness, to the individual’s thoughtless disregard for the higher purposes of the church community. The authors of the Purposeful Plan seem unable to conceive of a partisan political orientation that could reflect the purpose of the church rather than detracting from it.
As a manifestation of the MCUSA institutional wall, the Purposeful Plan is a kind of circular fortress, built on tautologies that foreclose the possibility of queer people being heard as adults. God’s will is that we focus on what we have in common, and what we have in common are our priorities as a missional church. Our priorities as a missional church require that we discern together where God is leading us. And God is leading us to conform to his will rather than allowing ourselves to be shaped by the culture around us. Much like Schrag’s 2009 letter, the Purposeful Plan was an attempt at refocusing the energy generated by Pink Menno, back onto the church’s “real” work. The difficulty, for leaders, was that MCUSA Mennonites did not actually agree on what that work should be.
Managing difference
My experience in the Mennonite Church has often been being one of the ‘not- quite-as-bad-minorities,’ that Mennonites embrace and tokenize you to the point of being overly friendly or overly welcoming, just like, Oh my God, we’re so glad you’re at this church right now. What I noticed at Pittsburgh that was so fascinating was that putting on a pink shirt completely flipped it around. I could notice a big difference, on days when I wouldn’t wear the pink shirt and just people’s reactions to me, and then I’d put the pink
Page 101
shirt on and it was like a visible marker. I could just feel the glances change, the distance it created between people. It was really fascinating to feel that in a very visible way...There was something very weird about sort of transcribing that onto my body and having it visibly displayed.
—Pink Menno member161
Among the more specific priorities that the Purposeful Plan laid out for MCUSA was “Undoing Racism and Advancing Intercultural Transformation.”162 For people of color who served as diversity workers in MCUSA and the denominations that preceded it, the struggle to have antiracism recognized as a foundational priority of Mennonites was a long and hard one.163 It was fraught with the particularly formidable obstacle of working with a group of white people who used a small list of Swiss and German last names as a mark of in-group identity, who thought of themselves as categorically different from the powers that shaped “the world,” and who generally knew more about how their ancestors had suffered religious persecution in Europe than they knew about the American context of slavery, genocide, and land theft that enabled Mennonite migrations to the U.S. and Canada. White “ethnic” Mennonites had—and continue to have—a habit of rhetorically distancing themselves from hegemonic whiteness and assuming that their own institutions and communities were free of such problems. So it was not an inconsiderable victory to have a denominational document that claimed antiracism as a priority (even if the meaning of “priority” was hardly clear). To address “racism” was to push beyond the less power-specific categories of “multiculturalism” and “diversity.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
161 Interview with author, November 11, 2011.
162 Mennonite Church USA, “Our Purposeful Plan.”
163 For some of the history of this struggle as told by Mennonite anti-racism advocates, see Iris De Leon-Hartshorn, Tobin Miller Shearer, and Regina Shands Stoltzfus, Set Free: A Journey Toward Solidarity Against Racism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2001).
Page 102
But with racism as the only named category of systemic marginalization to be embraced as a church priority rather than portrayed as a “divisive issue,” the Purposeful Plan had the unfortunate effect of giving anti-queer white leaders another tool through which to categorize, rank, and divide the marginalized collectivities within their denomination. If LGBTQ identity was inherently white, Western, and imperialist—as some of the leaders of color within MCUSA contended—then conspicuous repression of queer Mennonites could stand as a visibly anti-racist act on the part of white leaders. Almost from the first appearance of Pink Menno, this triangulating political tactic was among their most formidable obstacles.
For instance, Everett Thomas, then editor of The Mennonite, wrote the following in 2011:
Pink Menno leaders and leaders of other groups working for change also spent time organizing for the Pittsburgh 2011 convention. However, these activists may have inadvertently energized another group that is emerging.
Although not gathering to specifically address the church’s teaching position on sexuality, a by-invitation-only gathering of racial/ethnic164 leaders in Tampa immediately after the Executive Board meeting is the first of its kind. This group will address the continuing racism many see within our church structures. An [sic] evidence: I’ve heard often from racial/ethnic leaders that the voices of people of color are at times discounted and ignored. Even more onerous,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
164 “Racial/ethnic” is official MCUSA terminology to refer to people of color.
Page 103
according to several of the racial/ethnic associate groups, is the appropriation of civil rights and justice language by LGBT activists for their cause.165 Thomas’s comment reflected a host of painful realities. Thomas himself was a veteran process broker who had for years been committed to antiracist work in the Mennonite church.166 In all likelihood, he had heard white LGBTQ advocates do what white people in the U.S. often do: speak of civil rights in terms of successive waves of liberation, with the reductive and dangerous assumption that the African-American-led movement had achieved its freedom and the queers were up next. Thomas lived in a conceptual world in which people of color in general could legitimately claim marginalization, while queer people could not; it was also a world in which all the people of color were straight and all the queers were white.167 He, like other Mennonite leaders, maintained this worldview by choosing which voices of color he would acknowledge, and ignoring the specific words of LGBTQ leaders in his denomination almost entirely.
Thomas’s comment, like so many authoritative, subordinating speech acts before it, helped to maintain a world of hauntings, of strangers, of invisible walls and liminal not-quite-Mennonites whose claims to truth could simply be spoken out of existence through the mechanisms of straight, white, masculine, parental authority—the only form of Mennonite authority that remained truly constant through the ideological and theological battles that I describe here. As my next chapter will show, the 2013 MCUSA convention in Phoenix made the violence of that world ever more apparent.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
165 Thomas, Everett, “Resolve in the New Year,” The Mennonite, January 1, 2011, https://themennonite.org/opinion/resolve-new-year/.
166 See Leon-Hartshorn, Shearer, and Stoltzfus, Set Free.
167 Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some Of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, N.Y: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993).
Page 104
