May 24 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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During his church trial for defying the United Methodist Church's official ban on blessing same-sex unions, the Reverend Gregory Dell told the jury that if they were to remove him, they would set in motion "the dynamic of denominational cleansing."

Apparently, cleansing has replaced witch hunt, McCarthyism, and Inquisition as a term of opprobrium for those with whom one disagrees. But associating the church court's guilty verdict with a horrifying allusion to the racist ethnic cleansings of our decade is not merely over-the-top rhetoric or a clever, made-for-the-media soundbite. It is serious misrepresentation of what is happening in the United Methodist Church.

First, denominational cleansing misrepresents what happened in Dell's own case: Dell was not the victim of a McCarthyesqe purge mounted by the denomination's conservative activists. After the UMC's highest judicial body had made it clear that the denomination's ban on blessing same-sex unions had the force of church law, Dell created a test case, and his own bishop, a liberal who publicly agreed with Dell's stance, filed the charges against him. The trial was entirely Dell's doing.

Second, it misrepresents the realistic and restrained mood among the UMC's conservatives. As CT reported in its April 26, 1999, issue (p. 16), while Dell's supporters demonstrated outside the trial venue, conservatives chose not to mount any organized counterdemonstration because "it would only fan divisiveness and be seen as a personal attack on a brother in Christ." Similarly, conservatives have avoided triumphalist comments following Dell's suspension, but have spoken realistically about the debate that lies ahead. "This restraint is a sign that conservative forces … know how fragile ...