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Where I Stand
June 18, 2005 - 12:08 a.m.

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Poor Amy. The concert hall she works at is the venue for the conference I mentioned in my last entry. Because she's dating a seminarian, (that would be me, in case you're new here) the staff knows that she's Anglican. So now there are ushers who think that Amy believes the ideology expressed at the conference.

The ushering staff are, to put it mildly, appalled by what they're hearing from this group. It's as if every negative stereotype that they've harboured about Christianity has just shown up to party at their workplace. It doesn't take much for people to put two and two together and get five. Amy hears a lot of, "So...you're Anglican, too, aren't you?"

It's actually a relief for her when that happens, because she then has a chance to claim her own ground, or at least avoid the assumption that she's agreeing with what's being said. The frustrating part is when she can tell that a co-worker is thinking it, but they don't ask.

Amy put it very well: Everyone has a crazy Uncle Hank, who has some embarrassing trait or another. He flies the Confederate flag, or tells lewd jokes, or hits on college girls, or shoots at geese in his back yard, or roots for the Yankees. Whatever. You still invite him to Thanksgiving, because he's family and you love him no matter what. But imagine if your friends met Uncle Hank and just assumed that if he's racist or sexist or nuts then you must be, too.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, such misperceptions about one's beliefs are enormously frustrating. If you disagree with me, fine. I'm more than happy to defend my beliefs...so long as they're really mine.

I've had less of this than Amy, at least here in Toronto. The people who know me here are mostly at Trinity, where everyone's involved in theology and the assumption is that you're liberal unless you state or act otherwise. St. Anne's church is very much the same. When I attend classes at another seminary, people learn that I'm from Trinity and know where I (probably) stand. The only people I associate with, by circumstance, are liberal Anglicans or people who know that I'm a liberal Anglican.

Amy's experience of this conference has taught me a very valuable lesson. I understand more clearly now why conservative Anglicans are so upset by the church ordaining gay priests and blessing same-sex unions. In the same way that Amy and I are uncomfortable being associated with the ideology of this conference, conservative Anglicans must be uncomfortable being seen as members of a church that performs what they think are "unholy" acts. I believe they have the wrong notion of "unholy," but that's what they think and neither group wants to be tarred with the other's brush.

Where I really have trouble, though, is when I hear someone saying that they don't want to be associated with a liberal church because liberals are going to hell, or that liberals are unbelievers. As awful as that sounds, it's just what was said at this evening's session and the crowd was eating it up.

I hope and pray that I would never condemn someone to hell, even for the sin of denying love, the sin of rejecting a fellow child of God or the sin of trying to thwart God's voice when He calls a servant to ordination. These are grave matters, indeed, but never once have I thought that someone truly struggling to follow Christ would be damned to hell for following where he or she thought Christ was leading, no matter how mistaken he or she might be.

Nor do all conservatives take such a stand. There are many clear-headed people on both sides of the issue. But sadly the vitriol of politics infests even the church. "Liberals are unbelievers" is very close to Anne Coulter's crass barking that liberals are traitors to America.

That kind of vitriol comes not from a loving church but out of fear and ignorance, and ignorance has been plentiful at this conference. In fact, ignorance seems almost enshrined for this group. Whenever a speaker mentions theological colleges, a murmur of clucking and tut-tutting and hissing goes through the crowd. It's an infuriatingly self-righteous wave of "such a shame" sanctimony, all directed at those evil schools of higher learning. The Ivory Tower remains a favourite bogeyman of the fundamentalist mind.

That's why this evening, when all of the divinity students were called on to stand for applause and recognition (an act of alarming hypocrisy, considering the crowd's opinion of theological schools), I remained seated. I sat and watched and made no move to claim my status as a divinity student. I refused to be lumped in with a mentality that only accepts education when it produces safe and self-reassuring results.

And there it is. In the face of misperception, in a situation in which my standing up would associate me with a school of thought I find abhorrent, I chose to sit. As proud as I am to be a student of Trinity College, as proud as I am to be a student of Christ, I chose to sit. I know that I ought to have stood, if for no other reason than to silently assert my place in the conversation - to assert that there's still a conversation worth having. But I simply couldn't do it. I couldn't stand and receive that kind of applause and recognition.

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