Conclusion
It is often in the spaces between belonging and exclusion where the politics of religious life compel us to work for what is possible.290
—Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture
Don’t look over it, if you can’t get over it. —Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life291
Scenes from a movement
On a cold Chicago afternoon this past November, Jennifer Yoder, Tim Nafziger, and I walked down a hallway in the Cenagle Retreat and Conference Center in Lincoln Park to greet Carol Wise, who stood in the lobby, grinning at us. “Oh, here comes trouble,” she said.
It was the beginning of three full days of a queer Mennonite gathering that drew over 120 people to Chicago. Organized jointly by Pink Menno, BMC, and the Inclusive Pastors Network, the gathering was dubbed Fabulous, Fierce, and Sacred: A Gathering of the Anabaptist lgbtqa* Community. The purpose was to be together and worship together. The purpose was also to plan. The Mennonite Church USA will hold its next biennial national conference in July 2015, in Kansas City. Throughout the time that I have worked on this dissertation, I have kept one eye on the plans for Kansas City, both from the queer organizers I have written of, and from MCUSA. The latest development is a coalition of around one hundred conservative churches, mostly located in Ohio and Pennsylvania, calling themselves the Anabaptist Renewal Movement. Their
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290 Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 220.
291 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham; Duke University Press Books, 2012), 187.
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spokesperson, Matt Hamsher, has stated that their commitment to staying within MCUSA hinges on how executive leadership deals with the Mountain States Mennonite Conference (MSMC), an MCUSA area conference that licensed pastor Theda Good— who lives with her spouse, Dawn Kreider—to serve First Mennonite Church in Denver, Colorado. Another Mennonite area conference has also announced its intention to license and ordain an openly gay pastor, Mark Rupp, who is already serving as Pastor of Christian Formation for Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio. The implicit threat in the formation of Anabaptist Renewal Movement seems to be that if executive MCUSA leadership does not condemn these actions in more explicit terms than they have used up until now, then its churches will leave, and presumably form a new institution of their own.
Persons Associated With a Group Calling Itself Anabaptist Renewal Movement, I thought glibly when I read their announcement. Then I wondered what I thought I was doing playing Anabaptist authenticity games. There was no point in casting them out of the figurative Anabaptist body; in their threats, their selective invocation of church statements, their identification with a renewal (alluding to a better, purer past), they fell squarely into an Anabaptist historical pattern. When the world is everywhere, it’s hard to stay separate from it. But Anabaptists can always form another group, and give it another try.
On Friday night, Jennifer Yoder took the pulpit in the first worship service of the weekend. I noticed, in the startling way we often notice things about people we know primarily online, that she knew exactly how to command the room like a preacher.
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My beloved community members. My queer folks. My gender queers. My lesbians, gay folks, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, trans folks, intersex, two-spirit, gender variant, androgynous, butches, femmes, studs, third gender, multi-gender, genderless, single folks, partnered folks, and folks in solidarity with us, those my limits have failed to name, and names we have yet to find together: The state of our movement is sacred. The state of our movement is fierce and it is fabulous: look around you! Are we not fierce? Are we not fabulous? And the state of our movement is brave.292
There was a lot of singing. There were, as usual, some tears. After the service, I loitered around the pews with Jennifer, Katie Hochstetler, Patrick Ressler, and Audrey Roth Kraybill, where we discussed which Lincoln Park bar to hit. Though it was close to nine in the evening, a small group had gathered in the alcove off of the sanctuary to sing more hymns. “There are two kinds of Mennonites,” Audrey said. “The ones who hang around to sing more hymns, and the ones who go out drinking.”
On Saturday, November 23, the second day of the gathering, we convened in a large conference room for a debriefing before splitting into caucuses: LGBTQIA+ (Pink Menno’s first official foray into this more expansive initialization), Pastors, Parents (of queer people), People of Color, Ally, and LGBT Over 60. Each caucus had an appointed leader, and each leader was supposed to briefly talk about what they thought they had to offer the movement for LGBTQ justice.
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292 Jennifer Yoder, “State of the Movement,” QueerMenno, March 6, 2015, accessed April 5, 2105, https://queermenno.wordpress.com/2015/03/06/state-of-the- movement/#more-420.
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When it was Frank Trnka’s turn to speak for the LGBT Over 60 group, he stood up first and took a long pause before addressing the approximately one hundred people sitting in the room.
“I’m going to describe some people, and I want you to stand if you know who I’m talking about,” he said.
“Stand if you know the name of the person who wrote many articles on inclusive theology, throughout the eighties and nineties, for BMC’s Dialogue, as well for as the ecumenical magazine The Other Side.”
I knew that it was John Linscheid. I had read many of those articles. I grew up going to the same church as John’s mother. My personal archives had pages of letters that she had written to denominational leaders over the decades since John had come out and lost his ministerial credentials. But I knew that Frank knew that I knew. These questions weren’t for me. I sat on my hands. A handful of people stood; all of them looked to be over fifty.
“Stand if you know the name of the BMC member who spent decades involved in the wimmin’s music scene.” Wilma Harder, I thought, turning in my seat to look for her. Frank was not naming the names; he was letting people wonder, and notice who was standing up.
“Stand if you know who Franconia Dyck is.” There were scattered chuckles and more people standing. Franconia Dyck was Frank’s drag persona, named after a conservative Mennonite conference, and the most phallic of an uncomfortably high percentage of phallic ethnic Mennonite last names. I had entire CDs full of pictures of
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Franconia Dyck in Amish drag, performing at BMC conventions in her plain dress, cap and apron.
“Stand if you know what David Deutcher, Carson Glick and Roger Hochstetler had in common.” These answers, I didn’t know, but again, I saw older people standing and solemn again. When I asked Frank later for the answer to the question, he told me that all three of them were gay Mennonite men who had died of AIDS.
“Younger folks,” he said, “Please look around you. This is your history. You stand on these shoulders. We probably still have some things to teach you.” Frank didn’t look particularly comfortable up there, and I could hear the emotion in his throat, some of it tinged with anger. He wasn’t showboating or preaching. I had talked with Frank for hours about his own queer Mennonite history: his divorce from his wife, his abusive encounters at Saskatoon, his years of trying, as an adult Anabaptist convert, to navigate the baffling respectability codes of “ethnic” Mennonites. I knew he worried about people forgetting, ignoring, and erasing the history of which he had been a part. Building this movement had been so many decades of work, and to MCUSA leaders, that work was invisible. What would happen if that work was also invisible to successive generations of Mennonite queers and allies? What violence would that do?
I worry about history, too. There are dangers built into a movement that is so widely associated with youth, danger posed not only by the oppressive forces of the denomination but from within the queer movement itself. Older straight allies sometimes slip too easily into a parental role in relation to the entire movement; they want so badly to make the church welcoming for queer youth that they forget that not all Mennonite queers are young. I worry about older straight supporters who seem more comfortable
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with LGBTQ youth than with queer folks their own age. I know that those relationships between queers and straights of the baby boomer generation are layered and haunted with more stories than I will ever begin to make sense of as a researcher.
I worry about the uses to which queer young people can be put. I worry when I hear straight people praise queer youth for their lack of cynicism, knowing how easy it is to sound bitter when trying to tell the truth about how Mennonite churches have treated queer people for the past forty years. I get nervous around the constant repetition of words like “vibrant,” and “gifted” in relation to queer people in church, the implication that the only queers who matter are the ones with beautiful singing voices and skills to offer a worship planning committee.
I worry about all these things, and I still agree with Jennifer: the state of the movement is brave. And it needs to be. There are formidable challenges ahead.
Broader implications, future work
If the patterns I describe in this work continue to threaten queer Mennonites, it is in large part because those patterns extend far beyond the endlessly contested borders of the Mennonite world. This dissertation began with a description of my own upbringing in the last decade of the Cold War amidst social justice-oriented and even leftist Mennonites who rejected Reaganite economic policies and the militarism that went with them. But underlying this study is the neoliberal iteration of a phenomenon that Max Weber described in the early twentieth century in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which is that Mennonites, for all their refusals to participate in the most visible manifestations of state violence, have been quite prosperous under Western
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capitalist regimes.293 In the century since Weber wrote this, the missionary efforts supported by that prosperity have transformed the Mennonite world, from a scattering of ethnically bound separatist groups of European and Euro-Americans to a global network of churches defined largely through evangelical theology. To discuss the politics of the many communities that make up this network in relation to global capitalism is beyond the scope of this study; suffice it to say that the U.S. Mennonites featured in this study approach the imperialistic shape of that network with varying degrees of awareness and critique. In the complex web of power relations that they must negotiate within their churches, sexual politics seem to offer a seductive path to moral clarity, allowing people to state definitively what they are for, and what they are against.
All this is not to say that sexual politics are a distraction from matters. Indeed, to argue that would, I think, undermine one of the primary purposes of this dissertation, which is to challenge the persistent notion that sex and intimacy are irrelevant to the larger work of social justice. That challenge is nothing radical within feminist and queer activist circles. But it remains antithetical to the underlying logic of liberalism, a social and economic order that requires abstract masculine subjects to run things and subservient bodies to do the work of intimacy in private.
MCUSA represents a particular manifestation of that pattern in its approach to historically marginalized groups of people. Those who can be de-politicized into abstraction can be interpellated into the communal fold, however imperfectly; those who cannot must serve as the embodied representation of threat to the survival of the collective, particularly when they overstep the subservient roles to which they are
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293 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; repr., London: Routledge, 1992).
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assigned. Yet these complex processes of interpellation and exclusion are continually obscured by the binaries that I named in the introduction: church/world, sacred/secular, individual/community. As I work to transform this dissertation into a book, I plan to look more closely how and why Mennonites are so invested in these constructs, and what those investments might tell us more generally about the collusions of community and capitalism.
But this still leaves me with a question that I have barely addressed in this dissertation: Why do queer Mennonites stay Mennonite? Looking at the totality of the evidence and analysis that makes up this study, I imagine that many readers will wonder why the adult subjects of my study voluntarily endure the treatment I have described, and in my book, I hope to bring more ethnographic depth to that question. My best current response lies in the epigraph quotes at the beginning of this conclusion from Felipe Hinojosa and Sara Ahmed, statements that stood out to me for their resonance with the queer voices I have tried to represent in this work. I might summarize their reasons like this: We stay because we’re not over it. We stay because of what is possible.
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