Ben Barringham The Importance of Openness in the Social Functions of an LGBT Church [Article #2]

Barringham 1 Ben Barringham Prof. Kasmir ANTH 191 15 May 2014 The Importance of Openness in the Social Functions of an LGBT Church Introduction Traditional religious teachings and scriptural interpretations of the Abrahamic religions popular in the West have condemned same-sex genital acts and romantic intimacies for the majority of recent history. Additionally, these religions have also dictated strict gender roles for how men and women may behave and essentialist ideas regarding gender as a pair of mutually exclusive, divinely established categories of humanity. These teachings have made these organized religions a major source of justification for the discrimination against and animus toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and other queer people1. In fact, some religious groups and congregations have been actively involved in the persecution and demonization of queer people.

However, this has not prevented all queer people from being religious. Furthermore, queer people have not simply been content to exist silently within congregations espousing antiqueer animus, but have often challenged the traditional teachings and scriptural interpretations used to marginalize them. Queer organizing within Christian denominations, particularly those that have been resistant to calls for change, has resulted in the creation of support and activist groups, such as the Catholic group Dignity, for queer people within existing religious groups and denominations. In other denominations that have been responsive to calls for change, LGBT people are now accepted as full members in church life and functions. These denominations,

Barringham 2 which mostly fall in the tradition of mainline Protestantism, have changed their positions on issues of same-sex intimacy resulting in the adoption of theological positions that affirm the identities of queer people and most now describe themselves as “open and affirming�. But before these changes began to take place in earnest, queer people began creating separate denominations dedicated to ministering to other queer people. The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) is the most prominent of these denominations.

Likely because of the traditional condemnations and modern changes surrounding these issues, extensive research has been done on religious LGBT people and groups. Previous research on LGBT people practicing or raised in typically conservative or anti-queer denominations has shed light on the unique experiences of these individuals and helps to explain the choices they make regarding religious practices and affiliations or lack thereof. A noticeably smaller amount of research has been done on LGBT people practicing or raised in denominations that do not condemn same-sex intimacies and identities. The research at hand hopes to address this discrepancy by examining what social, functional, theological, or other factors the congregants of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York (MCCNY), an LGBT church in midtown Manhattan affiliated with the UFMCC, believe makes their church unique. The research also examines these beliefs to determine how they contribute to why congregants choose to practice their religion at MCCNY instead of at other churches, specifically other churches in New York City that are affiliated with open and affirming denominations instead of with the UFMCC. Background & Literature Review Extensive research on how LGBT people negotiate the intersection of spirituality or religiosity and sexuality in general has examined this issue from many particular perspectives.

Barringham 3 Investigations of LGBT people’s ideas and practices regarding religiosity and sexuality have found that LGBT people think spirituality, which they defined as a sense of transcendence or the interconnectedness of existence, is more important than religiosity, which they identified as an affiliation with or acceptance of an organized religion (Halkitis, et al., 2009). As spirituality is seen as unconnected to established religious communities and organizations, the increased importance placed on it relative to religiosity can be seen as a sign of a greater propensity toward religious individualism that may exist within the LGBT community. This concept, which refers to a personal way individuals can develop their religious, spiritual, and moral senses outside of organized religion, was first developed in the mid-eighties and was seen as a result of personal self-absorption on one hand and a societal emphasis on individualism on the other; in more recent times it has been it has been stripped of its negative connotations and value judgments and reconsidered in many ways, including as being a potential way LGBT people can cope with rejection or expulsion from their religious groups (Wilcox, 2002). Because young men who have sex with men and LGBT people in general perceive homophobic messages from religious sources (Barton, 2010; Kubicek, et al., 2009; Pitt, 2010; Rodriguez & Ouellette, 2000; Sherry, Adelman, Whilde, & Quick, 2010; Subhi & Geelan, 2012; Ward, 2005; Wilcox, 2002; Yip, 1997a; Yip, 1997b), they may be especially likely to adopt a strategy of religious individualism in comparison to straight people in society at large (Wilcox, 2002).

Furthermore, the propensity of LGBT people to deemphasize religiosity could also help to explain the finding that they are comparatively likely to have changed religious affiliations, beliefs, or practices, or to have given up religious practice altogether since childhood (Halkitis, et al., 2009; Sherry, et al., 2010; Kubicek, et al., 2009; Yip, 1997a). Changing religious affiliation might be enabled by assigning greater importance to spirituality than to religiosity, but it is also

Barringham 4 possible that changing religious affiliation causes people to assign more importance to spirituality than to religiosity, or that some other variable influences both. For example, perceiving homophobic messages coming from religious sources could lead LGBT people to change religious beliefs, interpretations, affiliations, or practices, and to distrust or deemphasize the importance of religiosity in general.

Regardless, homophobic religious messages can have a greater impact on LGBT people than simply motivating them to change their religious beliefs and practices. In a study that drew participants from across the United States, Sherry, Adelman, Whilde, & Quick (2010) found that self-reported religious variables, such as liberal or conservative theology and the importance placed on religion by LGBT people and those around them, were correlated with the results from measures of shame, guilt, and internalized heterosexism, and that participants often reported feelings of oppression and rejection when asked about their experiences with religion. This shows that homophobic religious messages from conservative theological sources can affect how LGBT people view themselves and their sexuality. Furthermore, because many participants reported having converted from non-affirming religions, this study shows that these messages can continue to affect LGBT people’s thoughts and views even after they are no longer exposed to the homophobic messages. The internalization of these homophobic religious messages has also been linked to negative cognitive and behavioral outcomes, such as depression and eating disorders (Kubicek, et al., 2009).

Even for those LGBT people who do switch religions or cease to practice, doing such may not be enough to counteract the homophobic stigma imparted by religious sources. In some places, such as the American Bible Belt region, conservative Christianity is not confined to Sunday church services, but pervades the culture (Barton, 2010). In such places, homophobic

Barringham 5 messages from religions like Christianity can continue to harm LGBT individuals even after they leave conservative churches by reinforcing internalized heterosexism or turning friends and family members against them (Barton, 2010). It has also been theorized that the conflict between the values and norms of minority groups, like the LGBT community, and those of the socially dominant group can put persons who identify with the minority group in a constant state of stress; the negative effects of this long term stress in conjunction with personal experiences of discrimination can cause “minority stress” (Meyer, 1995). This is a state of decreased mental health and increased negative cognitions that manifests in the internalization of negative societal messages about LGBT people, expectations of rejection or discrimination, and feelings of despair, anxiety, and other negative emotions. It is possible that, simply existing in a cultural context like the Bible Belt, where the conflicts between dominant and minority values are so pronounced, could easily cause LGBT people to experience the psychological struggles of minority stress.

Such distress could help to explain why some people seek sexual reorientation or conversion therapy. In fact, those who advocate for and provide such services often target LGBT people who have become distressed regarding their sexual orientation, likely as a result of living in homophobic environments (Grace, 2008). Such therapy is one of the most dramatic ways some LGBT people seek to resolve the perceived conflict between their Christian faith and their non-heterosexual sexual orientation, and is supported by a theological position that holds even celibate homosexuality to be a perversion of God’s will and thus sinful and incompatible with living a Christian life (Grace, 2008). These therapies have been denounced by both the American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association as not only ineffective, but potentially harmful, but they persist anyhow (Grace, 2008). As such, it is

Barringham 6 difficult to view these practices as legitimate therapy. They do however make sense as a continuation of the historical regulation of sexuality by religion that has occurred in the West and is outlined by Foucault in the first volume of his seminal History of Sexuality. Foucault (1979) argued that sexual expression was historically regulated by the Catholic Church through rituals such as confession, in which participants are urged to recall every one of their sins, including, and often especially, sexual ones, so that they could report their sins to a priest who would forgive them and expect them to strive not to sin any longer. As science began to challenge religion as the arbiter of truth during the Victorian era, the regulation of sexuality shifted from being primarily religious to primarily medico-scientific, which turned people from generic sinners into patients identifiable by their particular perversions (Foucault, 1979). In the context of this history, reparative therapy is very interesting. While the motivations behind these practices are primarily religious, they get their supposed authority from the pseudoscience they utilize to support their claims (Grace, 2008). As such, these practices could be seen as religious authorities co-opting science to attempt to continue regulating sexuality, even though religion has otherwise lost the social power to do so.

While these practices are an extreme way in which some LGBT deal with the conflict between Christianity and sexuality, there are many other ways, positive and negative, that LGBT people negotiate these issues. An interesting negative way that some queer people deal with the conflict is to become hostile to religion altogether. Subhi & Geelan (2012) noticed that most of the religious LGBT people in their study experienced conflict between their religion and sexuality, and that one lesbian was very clear that he LGBT friends had more problems with her Catholicism than her church had with her sexuality. Another negative way some religious queer people deal with the conflict is to marginalize others. For example, religious queer men have

Barringham 7 been found to often dominate the leadership and membership of LGBT religious organizations over time (Sumerau, 2012). These men construct what are known as “compensatory manhood acts” when their religious organization or leaders provide tacit support for them to do so (Sumerau, 2012). These acts are ways marginalized men attempt to mitigate the stigma from being a member of a marginalized group by asserting their privilege as men and repressing women by doing so. Some of these acts that Sumerau’s observed queer men constructing during his study in an LGBT church include the public expression of the idea that gay men are superior Christians than lesbians because the men claim to be less promiscuous than lesbians and the public expression of paternalistic ideas that emphasize the importance of men’s supposedly natural leadership abilities in sustaining the church and helping lesbians to develop as people.

However, these men only began to construct these acts when a new male pastor from a more conservative religious background was hired and began preaching about traditional gender roles (Sumerau, 2012).

Not only is this a clearly negative way some LGBT people may seek to deal with the perceived conflicts around sexuality and religion, it also highlights the importance of major social categories such as gender, race, and class when looking at these issues. Similarly, Ward (2005) studied African-American LGBT Christians and congregations and found that black, queer Christians not only face marginalization within American society as a whole because of their race and sexuality, but even face different and unique forms of marginalization within African-American communities and churches because of their sexuality. For example, the homophobia perpetuated by the black church is notable for fostering a hypermasculine ideal that is supposedly transgressed by male homosexuality; this particular form of homophobia is supported within some black churches, not only by traditional Christian dogma, but also by

Barringham 8 unique notions of black racial survival and the historic sexual exploitation of African-Americans, especially through stereotypes of lasciviousness (Ward, 2005). Notions of black racial survival contribute to homophobia by emphasizing the importance of getting married and having a family; stereotypes of black people as lasciviousness contribute to homophobia by causing black churches to encourage black people to fight those stereotypes and asserting that LGBT people are inherently lascivious. These unique forms of homophobia provide extra challenges to black queer Christians when they attempt to deal with the issues surrounding their sexuality, religiosity, spirituality, and their intersections.

But like any other LGBT Christian, there are a variety of positive ways LGBT Christians of African descent can deal with these issues. One study of religious LGBT people identified four strategies that LGBT Christians affiliated with denominations that are not affirmative of gay persons and intimacies use to deal with the stigmatizing teachings of their religion. The first strategy is attacking the stigma, in which traditionally condemnatory interpretations of scripture are questioned and critiqued. The second is attacking the stigmatizer, in which LGBT people challenge the authority of the church or pastors to judge them. The third is using positive personal experiences to assert that the church is condemnatory without truly understanding modern queer people’s situations and relationships; an example of this is arguing that the church does not understand that modern relationships between LGBT are the sort of loving, committed relationships that the church encourages, and not the sorts of dominating or transactional queer relationships condemned in scripture. The last is by arguing that being gay must be okay because God made them that way (Yip, 1997a). Furthermore, within these various strategies there is the potential for the existence of numerous sub-strategies. For example, Pitt (2010) found that religious black gay men criticize their pastors or churches on the basis of several

Barringham 9 different flaws when using the attacking the stigmatizer strategy. The first of these is on the basis of flawed knowledge of the Bible or of modern science (Pitt, 2010); men using this strategy might argue that their pastors use the story of Sodom to condemn queer people when the story is actually about inhospitality, or they may argue that their pastors do not understand that modern science shows homosexuality is not a choice and that it therefore could not be a sin. The second is on the basis of flawed morality; men using this strategy might argue that a pastor has no authority to judge LGBT people when he is promiscuous (Pitt, 2010). The third is on the basis of flawed motivations; men using this strategy might argue that a pastor does not actually believe what he is saying about LGBT people and that he is just trying to please wealthy or conservative church members so they will hopefully donate more money (Pitt, 2010). The fourth is on the basis of a flawed focus; men using this strategy might argue that their pastor is focusing inappropriately on the few parts of the Bible that condemn instead of on the pervasive teachings to love everyone (Pitt, 2010). These are all examples of positive strategies that LGBT Christians can use to fight stigma from religious sources because they do not involve marginalizing others, as constructing compensatory manhood acts does, or harm themselves, as internalizing the homophobic teachings and accepting the as true does. These strategies may also be useful in helping LGBT Christians to integrate their religious and sexual identities, which is one of the most positive ways that individuals can deal with the oft perceived conflict between religion and sexuality. One factor that has been shown to definitely play an important role in identity integration in queer Christians is involvement with an LGBT church; in their study at MCCNY, Rodriguez and Oullette (2000) found that individuals who were more open about their sexuality were more likely to have integrated religious and sexual identities and that most people with such identities reported that the church helped them construct and maintain these identities.

Barringham 10 Forming such identities is preferable to dealing with the conflict in other ways because it saves individuals from having to choose between two identities that could be very important to them and it prevents them from experiencing the unpleasant effects of cognitive dissonance, a psychosocial stress caused by holding to inconsistent beliefs at the same time or by acting in a way that is discordant with one’s beliefs, that may occur if identities are only compartmentalized.

It is important, however, to keep in mind that individuals do not deal with the conflicts between LGBT identities and restrictive Christian dogma in a vacuum. Rather, churches and denominations must confront these issues as a group and in doing so establish contexts in which personal debates on these matters take place. In the debates surrounding the issue of human sexuality, some liberal, mainline Protestant denominations, which now tend to describe themselves as open and affirming, have come to support queer people and the view that they and their intimate expressions of romantic love are not inherently sinful. Many other denominations, including most of those that describe themselves as evangelical, have maintained traditional views and continue to regard sexual relations between members of the same sex to be sinful.

Analyzing how these denominations support these positions has produced remarkable results.

Discourses produced by conservative denominations revolved around ideas that nonheterosexual sexualities are unnatural productions of sin, that people can change their sexuality through prayer and therapy because God is all powerful and sexuality is fluid nature, and that men and women have complementary natures that together form a whole in marriage; drawing authority from historical teachings and the personal testimonies of “ex-gays�, people who claim to have gone from homosexuals to heterosexuals through therapy gives these discourses the power to convince churchgoers that it is impossible to be a happy, Christian LGBT person who is acceptable to God (Moon, 2005; Sullivan-Blum, 2006). This is very similar to how Boellstorf

Barringham 11 (2005) used the concept of “incommensurability� to understand his finding about gay Muslims in Indonesia. This term means that two concepts, subjects, or states of being not only cannot exist together, but do not even make sense together, similar to a grammatically nonsensical sentence as opposed to a counterfactual sentence (Boellstorf, 2005). From his study, Boellstorf (2005) concluded that being gay and Muslim were incommensurable to Indonesians because they see Islam as placing so much importance on creating and preserving the sanctity of traditional families and see homosexuality as precluding someone from having a family. In contrast, liberal discourses, which congregants view as legitimate because these discourses invoke science and Biblical scholarship as sources of authority, focus on how the fixed and innate nature of homosexuality is evidence that it and its expression cannot be sinful because being innate implies that homosexuality is intended by God. (Moon, 2005; Sullivan-Blum, 2006). Unfortunately, these discourses establish a dichotomy in which fixed sexualities are favored over fluid ones because these discourses require sexuality to be fixed in order to justify not viewing homosexuality as sinful; this makes the lives of people who experience their sexualities as fluid, whether they identify with the bi/pan/fluid community or as ex-gays, or as something else entirely, unlivable (Moon, 2005; Sullivan-Blum, 2006). Furthermore, how bisexual and trans lives are situated within discourses varies from one liberal discourse to another. For example, the liberal Protestants Moon (2005) interviewed constructed bisexual and trans lives unlivable because their fluidity challenged the views they had regarding the fixed nature of sexuality that allowed them to make gay and lesbian live livable. Furthermore, these liberal protestants shifted a great deal of traditional anti-gay stigma, like the common view that homosexual people are sexually confused or just going through a stage, onto bisexual and trans persons. In contrast, the liberal Protestants Sullivan-Blum (2006) conducted her research with had no issues with bisexual

Barringham 12 and trans people, and actually thought evangelicals would have more problems with them because they believed evangelical opposition to queer people was based in bias. It is unclear what unique discourses allowed this second group of liberal protestants to construct bisexual and trans lives as livable.

Establishing discourses on sexuality that refute traditional teachings are not, however, the only way queer Christians and their allies challenge homophobic dogma, and it is important to pay attention to these various other ways as well. For example, LGBT Catholics have founded support groups like Quest for queer Catholics and have rejected the Church’s official positions for a variety of reasons (Yip, 1997b). LGBT Christians affiliated with the Anglican Communion in 2008 had several groups with an official presence at the Lambeth Conference, a decennial gathering of the bishops of the various Anglican churches to debate matters theological (Vanderbeck, Andersson, Valentine, Sadgrove, & Ward, 2011). These groups used their positions to challenge homophobic regulations passed at the previous conference in 1998, in various confrontational and non-confrontational ways, receiving significant media attention for doing so (Vanderbeck, et al., 2011). Furthermore, these Christians drew on their religious heritage by situating themselves and their presence within the Christian tradition of bearing witness to truth and to God and by emphasizing that their positions are based on sound theology and Christian values, effectively addressing the common claims made by people opposed to including LGBT people in religious life that petitions for LGBT rights within churches are not religious in nature and are merely incursions of secular values into the religious domain (Vanderbeck, et al., 2011).

In addition to forming groups to support and advance their interests within existing Christian groups, LGBT people have even founded some of their own churches and denominations. One such denomination is the United Fellowship of Metropolitan Community

Barringham 13 Churches (UFMCC). The history of the UFMCC begins with the founding of its first church in 1968. The first service was held in the house of the church’s founder, Reverend Troy Perry.

Formerly a Pentecostal minister, Perry was forced to leave his church after he came out as gay to some ministers higher up in the Pentecostal denomination’s hierarchy. As time passed, he began to feel as though God was still calling him to serve and to minister, and so he decided to found the church. The first several services had fairly low attendance, but both the congregation and denomination soon began expanding. Despite multiple arson attacks against churches affiliated with UFMCC, the church had grown by the mid-nineties to have roughly 300 churches and 30,000 members (Wilcox, 2001).

Hypotheses about this rapid growth hold that there are several internal and external factors that have played a major role in the denomination’s success (Kane, 2013; Wilcox, 2001).

One hypothesis is that the timing of its founding contributed to its success because the civil rights movement had made Americans more accustomed to seeing the importance in the political roles churches could play in affecting social change (Wilcox, 2001). The coincidence of the emergence of the gay rights movement with the birth of the denomination played a similarly important role in facilitating the denomination’s growth because the gay rights movement encouraged LGBT people to begin to assert their worth and rights instead of continuing believe the dominant society’s negative views of them. Two theological factors that are hypothesized to have aided the church’s growth were the emergence of liberation theology, a theological perspective that emphasizes the rights of oppressed peoples and God’s love for them, and ecumenism, a movement within churches that seeks to bring different denominations together.

Furthermore, other hypotheses hold that factors like the dynamic leadership of the church and its

Barringham 14 combination of Pentecostal and Evangelical practices also helped the denomination to grow (Wilcox, 2001).

Other research has also examined more concrete factors that have influenced the growth and geographic distribution of churches affiliated with the UFMCC. Kane (2013) examined how effectively organizational ecology, resource mobilization, political opportunity, and factors affecting religious switching are able to predict the number and geographic distribution of UFMCC churches across the United States. Organizational ecology is the set of environmental factors that contribute to an organization’s success or failure including the size of the population the organization intends to serve and the strength and number of competing institutions seeking to provide the same services to the same population. Resource mobilization is the ability of a given group of people to use what resources they have to form organizations for themselves; political opportunity is similar, except instead of dealing with concrete resources, such as money, man power or knowledge, it deals with intangible resources like the receptiveness of the dominant group to LGBT people. Religious switching is conversion between denominations of a single religion, and in this context factors affecting religious switching include variables like how similar the denomination a person might seek to join is to his or her old one, with the understanding that people will be more willing to join denominations that are similar enough to their old ones that they will still feel comfortable in the new one. Significant findings indicate that areas with larger Catholic and black populations have fewer UFMCC churches, likely because these two groups are less likely to switch religions because of the comparatively unique natures of their churches; areas that are more conservative have more UFMCC churches, likely because they can provide a support system to LGBT people who experience more societal discrimination than their peers in more liberal areas; areas that have many open and affirming

Barringham 15 churches had fewer UFMCC churches; areas with strong LGBT communities have more UFMCC churches.

The uniformity in these findings is rather surprising considering the diversity that exists within the churches that make up the UFMCC. While these churches share a denominational affiliation, the leadership of the UFMCC places relatively few standards on what individual churches can and cannot do and teach (Lukenbill, 1998). A possible reason for this is that the leaders understand that most members of UFMCC churches are converts and wants to allow individual churches to be flexible enough to make their congregants feel at home. As such, UFMCC churches vary from being rather conservative and even evangelical, like those described in research by Sumerau (2012) and by Thomas & Olson (2012) to liberal, like the one described

by Lukenbill (1998) that shared many similarities with MCCNY where I conducted my own research.

Research Methods & Design The research was conducted at the Metropolitan Community Church of New York (MCCNY), an LGBT church in midtown Manhattan community. LGBT churches are those that seek to minister to LGBT people and help to address their unique issues. In contrast, open and affirming churches are those that welcome LGBT members and do not hold non-heterosexual identities and practices to be sinful, but do not put particular emphasis on serving LGBT people in most of their activities. MCCNY was chosen because it seems to be the most well known LGBT church in New York, open to participating in research, and is the only LGBT church in New York affiliated with the UFMCC. During February 2014, I conducted background research to locate and contact those responsible for allowing research at the field site. Research began during the first weekend in March and continued until the last weekend in April.

Barringham 16 Data was primarily collected using participant observation, informal interviews, and formal interviews. Attending Sunday worship services and other events organized by MCCNY as a participant-observer allowed me to get a sense of what makes the church different from and similar to other churches that I have experience with and helped me to understand how its services, rituals, and activities are understood by its members. Additionally, I conducted a substantial number of informal interviews while doing participant observation; these interviews allowed me to gather valuable data about the church’s history and programs and its members’ general perceptions of and experiences with the church. Formal interviews were conducted with one of the church’s pastors and five other key informants, who gave informed consent and were selected based on interest, availability, and results from informal interviews. I logged data collected from interviews and participant observation in notes that were taken during the formal interviews and events I participated in and shortly after the informal interviews.

I worked to establish rapport with the church community members while engaging in participant observation at Sunday church services and social events and was fortunate to have the senior pastor introduce me and my research to the attendees of one of the first services I was able to attend in early March. Over the course of my research, I attended the 9:00AM and 11:00AM services on each Sunday except for the first and last when I only attended the 11:00AM service.

In addition to these services, I attended a Taize service celebrating Holy Thursday on the evening of April 17, and the opening gala of the drag queen Hedda Lettuce’s art show on April 4.

A small reception to socialize and enjoy refreshments was held after each service, and I conducted the majority of my informal interviews at these gatherings. In my informal interviews, the attendees and I tended to discuss how long they have been going to MCCNY, what they liked about it, what they thought made it different from other churches, and other more

Barringham 17 immediate issues, such as thoughts on the morning’s sermon or music. I addressed the research problem in my formal interviews by asking church community members questions about how they participate in church functions, how they first got involved with the church, what experiences they have had with other religions and churches, why they continue to participate in church life, what social factors affect their involvement with the church, and what they knew or thought about open and affirming churches in comparison to MCCNY. I also asked the pastor additional questions regarding church demographics, why new members tend to join and if anything makes them unique, how the church conducts outreach to potential new members, how the church deals with issues that might make some people feel unwelcome, what the church leaders try to do differently from other churches, and theological issues and positions that members did not have sufficient information to comment on.

Setting The church is located in the lowermost section of Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The postindustrial area that it is in seems quite typical for much of New York City and does not show signs of having been particularly affected by gentrification. The church building itself has three floors; the first floor houses Sylvia’s Place, a crisis center for homeless LGBT youth, the second floor contains the main worship hall, and the third floor consists of an art gallery, office spaces, and a gathering hall. Sylvia’s Place is run by MCCNY Charities, Inc., a special philanthropic arm of the church. Due to the nature of my research I did not do participant observation here because its physical separation from the other floors of the church made it seem distinct from the church and its goal to serve homeless LGBT youth made me feel that research conducted here would not help to address the particular issues I designed my research to explore.

Barringham 18 The upper floors of the church building, where my research was conducted had plain white walls and simple wooden floors. The altar in the second floor worship hall is located at the back of the church next to an assortment of instruments for the music ministry. Rows of chairs face the altar all the way to the front of the church, the wall of which holds a large set of stained glass windows with an art deco motif that is present in several locations throughout the building and features prominently in the church’s website and physical publications. The main social space of the third floor is divided into two major sections. The gallery, which features the art from any current exhibition, contains a row of chairs in the center from which to view the artwork on the walls and several tables with free materials ranging from HIV positive magazines and bulletins on church activities to condoms and pamphlets on veganism. The reception area has a large central table for the snacks and finger foods that are put out after services, some basic kitchen amenities, and some desks and bookshelves along the walls.

Data & Analysis The church is located in the lowermost section of Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The postindustrial area that it is in seems quite typical for much of New York City and does not show signs of having been particularly affected by gentrification. The church building itself has three floors; the first floor houses Sylvia’s Place, a crisis center for homeless LGBT youth, the second floor contains the main worship hall, and the third floor consists of an art gallery, office spaces, and a gathering hall. Sylvia’s Place is run by MCCNY Charities, Inc., a special philanthropic arm of the church and due to the nature of my research I did not do participant research here as it seemed somewhat removed from most of the church’s congregants and was physically separated from the other floors of the church.

Barringham 19 The upper floors of the church building, where my research was conducted had plain white walls and simple wooden floors. The altar in the second floor worship hall is located at the back of the church next to an assortment of instruments for the music ministry. Rows of chairs face the altar all the way to the front of the church, the wall of which holds a large set of stained glass windows with an art deco motif that is present in several locations throughout the building and features prominently in the church’s website and physical publications. The main social space of the third floor is divided into two major sections. The gallery, which features the art from any current exhibition, contains a row of chairs in the center from which to view the artwork on the walls and several tables with free materials ranging from HIV positive magazines and bulletins on church activities to condoms and pamphlets on veganism. The reception area has a large central table where snacks and finger foods are put out after services, some basic kitchen amenities, and some desks and bookshelves along the walls.

Every Sunday there are three different worship services. The service at 9:00 AM, called the Traditional Liturgy, was usually attended by a dozen or so people. This service was typically about an hour long and was intentionally similar to a Roman Catholic mass in a number of ways.

Some of these similarities that I observed include the length and flow of the service and the times in the service at which hymns were sung. The service at 11:00 AM, called the Worship Liturgy, was much more well attended every time I conducted my observations, with a crowd ranging from about four dozen to six dozen people. This service ran a bit longer than Traditional Liturgy and was different from it in many easily apparent ways. Some of these differences, like the fact that the Worship Liturgy normally had a much larger choir, seem trivial, but others, like the fact that scripture readings in the Worship Liturgy are read in both Spanish and English, provide a window into important facets of the church, its operations, and its goals. The attendees of these

Barringham 20 two services included a mix of people from many racial and ethnic backgrounds, different genders, and apparent socioeconomic statuses that one might expect in a diverse, cosmopolitan city such as New York. That said, there were few young adults present2 and I saw no children at either of the services, although this might reflect the fact that the church has a Sunday school program at the Worship Liturgy and so the children would be there instead of in the service. The services share the same general order of events; service opens with an entrance hymn, announcements are read, the two scripture readings are read, a collection is taken, and finally communion is prepared and offered, after which the service is over and most people head up to the reception on the third floor that follows. I was unable to attend the 7:00 PM Praise and Worship Service myself, however I was told that the crowd at this service consists of more men than the other two and that many attendees are of a lower socioeconomic status.

The services that I did attend also shared many notable similarities that, again, range from seemingly trivial to clearly important. One of the readily apparent important similarities was the substitution of gender neutral language in traditional prayers and proceedings in place of words with sexist or patriarchal connotations. For example, in the Lord’s Prayer, which MCCNY calls the prayer that Jesus taught instead, the congregation used the terms “Our God” and “commonwealth” when most churches would use “Our Father” and “kingdom”, respectively.

Apparently, the use of this sort of gender neutral or anti-patriarchal language is mandated by the leadership of the UFMCC, which itself was convinced to adopt this position by one of the denomination’s earliest female bishops (Lukenbill, 1998). These changes in terms challenge notions that God is male and a king underneath whom all humans exist in a hierarchy, asserting gender equality and egalitarianism instead. Additionally, the leadership of the UFMCC requires all MCC churches to celebrate an open communion; this means that anyone can receive

Barringham 21 communion at an MCC church, regardless of religious history, lack thereof, expressed beliefs, or any other reason. Also of note is the way sermons are used to deemphasize the theological importance of sin. Instead of the sins that separate people from God, the focus is placed on God’s loving, merciful nature and infinite abilities to love and forgive that allow everyone to be close to God. Considering MCCNY seeks to serve a community that has historically been marginalized and demonized by discourses of sin that claimed their very existence was abhorrent to God, this pattern of emphasis is not surprising.

An appreciation of this rather unique emphasis was expressed by many of my formal and informal interview informants, who noted that they liked the fact that the church is more about guidance than judgment. In my interview with Reverend Boon3 he explained to me that it is not the church’s goal to make people to follow blindly, instead it seeks to teach people how to read the Bible and consider the cultural and historical contexts that existed at the time of its writing so that they may draw their own conclusions. In the view of the church’s leadership, faith is something personal. This view is fairly similar to the views the leadership of an evangelical MCC congregation in the Midwest espouse in order to deal with the discordance between the sexual ethics they dictated to their church members and the actual sexual behavior of their church members (Thomas & Olson, 2012). However, whereas the researchers at that church found that the pastoral leadership espoused this view while believing that that any honest Biblical interpretation would lead the members to agree with them on sexual ethics and reform their behavior accordingly, the sense I got from Reverend Boon was that MCCNY’s leadership honestly believes people can reach different conclusions on these matters and as such will not judge the members of MCCNY for disagreeing with them.

Barringham 22 All of these observations and responses simultaneously result from and help to create what seems to be the church’s main principle, openness. In all of my interviews, this theme of the church being open emerged more frequently than any other and was talked about by participants more than any other single theme. Yet, when I conducted an informal interview with Annie, who had only recently begun attending services, she described the church as “open” but was unable to tell me what she meant by that. This shows that the word open as it is used in everyday English does not fully convey what “open” means at MCCNY. Had she meant open in its typical usage, Annie would have been able to tell me what she meant because open is typically a simple word to define; instead she thought about what she meant for several moments before informing me that she could provide no clearer definition. In her brief time at the church, Annie had been able to ascertain that “openness” is a key symbol at MCCNY, but had not yet had the time to grasp exactly what it means. To the people and leadership of MCCNY, openness is not merely about accepting or tolerating anyone regardless of their differences, it is about embracing everyone and appreciating their differences. This is why it is important that the church use gender neutral and anti-patriarchal language; it is not enough to just say women are welcome and equal to men, that equality must be fought for and the ways in which men in our society have dominated women challenged. This is why it is important that during the Worship Liturgy the scriptures are read in Spanish before English; it is not enough to tell Hispanic people and immigrants that they are welcome, true inclusion requires that their language be appreciated, that resources be made available to them, and that they be made to feel that they are not being relegated yet again to a secondary position within the society. This is why it is important that everyone be allowed to partake in communion; it is impossible to be truly open to people while not allowing them to participate in the community as full and equal human beings. And this is

Barringham 23 why it is important to deemphasize sin in favor of love; when the discourse addresses itself to all the ways other people say a person fails and affronts God, that person is not free to be the beloved child of God that he or she was intended to be.

This openness is further encouraged within the church and outside of it by its many programs aimed at particular groups of marginalized people. Such ministries include the groups Christians of African Descent and Gender People, which focuses on trans people, their lives, and their issues. The church also has a great deal of social justice programs and outreach that can be interpreted as a way the church tries to push all of American society to be more open. In addition to running the LGBT homeless youth shelter Sylvia’s Place, the church provides rapid HIV testing services, works to help local food pantries, and uses its independent social justice arm, the Global Justice Institute, to advance equality across the globe. It also works with other independent secular and religious progressive organizations to advance social justice causes.

These programs and the church’s general commitment to social justice further its goal being open by showing that the church is dedicated to embracing everyone as full and equal human beings.

While I interpret the church’s social justice outreach as being a manifestation of the church’s commitment to openness, the discourses my informants generated surrounding these programs often emphasized another theme. Hank, a very involved church member who helps a great deal in its day-to-day operations, explained to me that the church has relatively few members of a younger, white, gay male demographic because many of them are looking for what he called a “Sex and the City” type church that is presumably more glamorous and less diverse than MCCNY and also presumably lacks MCCNY’s commitments to diversity, social justice, and service. This example typifies the theme of the church’s social justice mission costing it some members. While an outsider might see this as a paradoxical way in the church closes itself off to

Barringham 24 some people by trying to be open, this does not seem to be how congregants view this issue.

Reverend Boon explained that the church is open to everyone and that people who do not like that are free to leave. Additionally, he told that the church tries to educate people about their social justice mission and why it is important so that anyone who is initially repelled by it can become more comfortable with it if they are willing to give it a chance. At the same time, he also made it clear that the church holds nothing against people who leave and that people leave for many other reasons, such as the semi-transient nature of many people living in New York City or the feeling that some people develop that the church has helped them to fix or overcome their problems and so they no longer need to continue being involved.

Beyond its social justice programs, the church’s commitment to openness is made manifest in a variety of other ways. Allowing people to bring their pets is one of the most notable ways this is done at Sunday services. This is particularly interesting within the context of an LGBT church because of the important roles pets play as surrogate children for some LGBT people who never experienced becoming a parent. The different Sunday services can even themselves be seen as part of the church’s dedication to openness; according to Reverend Boon, one of the reasons the church’s services differ is to cater to people from various religious backgrounds. The 9:00 AM Traditional Liturgy, for example, is a shorter service that shares many commonalities with Roman Catholic mass. Likewise, openness is strived for at the receptions following services. Hank, who organizes these receptions, told me about how he tries to provide a selection of foods that can be enjoyed by everyone, including people with allergies, people who try to avoid eating products that contain gluten, people who are careful about their sugar, sodium, or caloric intake, and vegans. Furthermore, he also tries to make sure to provide enough food so that there are leftovers for members who could use them.

Barringham 25 Several of my participants also talked about why the church must try to be so open.

During his interview, Geoffrey explained to me that Jesus worked to unite all people and actively went to many of the people of his day who were outcasts or considered undesirable, such as lepers, prostitutes, and Samaritans. Likewise, when discussing the church’s practice of an open communion, Reverend Boon explained that they believe that people come to God’s table during communion, so it is not the church’s place to turn anyone away. This theme makes it clear that the MCCNY’s openness and resultant practices and ministries are not simply motivated by secular values like equality, but by interpretations of the Bible and of God’s will. One reason this observation is important is because it shows how the church is distinct from both secular social justice organizations and other churches who view God as either a more judgmental figure or one who is made unapproachable by an individual’s sinfulness. Furthermore, this observation is also important because of the somewhat frequent criticism that LGBT religious groups and theological positions that affirm LGBT identities and intimacies are invasions of the secular world into religious life (Vanderbeck, et al., 2011). It is also possible that the personal experiences of rejection that many LGBT Christians have provides some of the impetus behind the church’s policy of openness and inclusion because those who have personally felt the pain of being rejected might be unwilling to make other people feel that same pain.

This openness seems to be a large part of the reason why MCCNY congregants choose to attend MCCNY over churches that describe themselves as open and affirming. Tanya, a Hispanic lesbian who was one of my few informants who had experience attending an open and affirming church, explained to me that she never really felt comfortable there because of her working-class upbringing. The open and affirming church she attended was in Greenwich Village and catered primarily the middle and upper class people who could afford to live there.

Barringham 26 Reverend Boon expressed similar thoughts about many open and affirming churches being white and middle class. He also told me that many of such churches have unwritten policies similar to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell because their congregations are dominated by straight people, which makes it hard for many queer people to feel comfortable expressing themselves. He felt this was especially true of trans people because even though many straight people and open and affirming churches have come to accept gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, they are still uncomfortable around trans people and do not know how to deal with trans issues.

While the concept of openness plays an incredibly important role in the operations of the church, there are other reasons why some individuals affiliate with this church over open and affirming ones. When I asked Vincent why he became involved with MCCNY, he told me that he had been coming for years and that when he started coming there were no other churches that LGBT Christians could go to. In this instance, the church’s current emphasis on a very deep concept of openness was not a particularly important factor because the positions of other churches gave him no other options. Likewise, several other older informal interview informants expressed similar notions about not having any options besides MCCNY when they first came out and left the churches they were raised in and about having no desire to leave or look for any other churches now that there are options.

The church’s openness can also help to explain another theme that came up frequently in my interviews and one of my observations regarding the church’s congregants. A large proportion of my informants used the phrase “spiritual home” to describe MCCNY. The church’s commitment to being open instead of pushing specific dogmas and beliefs helps to make it possible for so many people from diverse religious backgrounds to feel at home in the church. This is particularly interesting in light of the view that heightened religious

Barringham 27 individualism tends to lead people away from organized religion (Wilcox, 2002) and could help to change perspectives on this issue. It has been hypothesized that LGBT individuals might be more likely to adopt strategies of religious individualism than the general population due to homophobic religious teachings that they are under more pressure to neutralize. So while a congregation of LGBT people referring to their church as a spiritual home might challenge this hypothesis, it is possible that the individuals who expend the effort to find a denomination that will accept them when the denomination they are raised in turns hostile are not inclined towards religious individualism.

Strongly related to my informants’ experience of MCCNY as a spiritual home is the very tight knit community I observed during services and the receptions after them. During services there is an opportunity for congregants to share a sign of peace with those around them; at almost all other churches I have experience with, people tend to shake hands with the individuals nearest them; at MCCNY many if not most of the people in attendance share peace with each other by hugging each other. Furthermore, many of the people who attend MCCNY are not content to simply share the sign of peace with those around them and instead walk up and down the better part of the center aisle to share peace with people sitting in parts of the church far removed from them. After service has ended, a large line tends to form in front of the exit because most attendees want to stop to hug the deacons and the reverends before going upstairs to the reception. And even during services there is always clapping for everyone who makes even a mundane announcement and for the choir and soloists after most songs. In the relatively short time that I was conducting my research, the church had multiple social events for its members to enjoy each others’ company. But what really most revealed the closeness of the church

Barringham 28 community was the joyful, loving manner with which the church members interacted with each other.

Despite its tremendous focus on being open and welcoming, I found that the church had surprisingly few outreach programs to specifically bring in new members. When I discussed this with Reverend Boon, he explained to me that the church is not really concerned with how many members it has because it is too busy focusing on promoting love and justice. He was also quick to point out the particularly capitalist way in which I phrased my question that implicitly positioned the church as a sort of service provider that might change its message or mission so as to be more marketable to a wider pool of potential customers. Unfortunately, I collected no other data that could suggest whether or not such an awareness of the capitalist assumptions that underpin Western society is shared by the rest of the church community. However, Reverend Boon’s quick recognition of this could be seen as a way he strives to be open, in this case to people who have become disillusioned with capitalism due to how it has marginalized them.

Because capitalism forces the workers of a society into competition and thus helps to establish social hierarchies, it is also possible the Reverend Boon noticed the peculiarly capitalist nature of my question because he clearly shares the church’s passion for social justice that opposes such hierarchies. However, it is important not to read too much into any single comment that cannot be strongly related to any other comments or themes. One of the only ways I experienced of the church conducting outreach was through its art gallery on the third floor. Hank explained to me that artists sometimes reach out to them about holding shows in the gallery and vice versa, and that these shows typically break even. These shows do however present the church with an opportunity to reach out to people who might not know about or otherwise come to the church.

For example, when I went to the opening of the drag queen Hedda Lettuce’s exhibit, I saw very

Barringham 29 few people from the services I had been to. Interestingly, this outreach can also be seen as a way the church strives to be open. Whereas other churches, even open and affirming ones, might want to avoid associating with drag queens due to their theatrics and the often subversive content of their performances, MCCNY welcomed the opportunity to work with Hedda.

Conclusion While MCCNY’s emphasis on a deep concept of openness becomes very clear when conducting research there, how this focus on openness can be fitted into theories about power and the social regulation of sex is less clear. Foucault (1978) argued that power divides sexual acts into categories of licit and illicit. This is the basis by which some lives are made livable and others unlivable. Yet MCCNY wields power, to influence the actions of its members through the teaching of scripture, to aid homeless LGBT youth through Sylvia’s Place, to change social attitudes and perceptions regarding race, gender, class, sexuality, and other sites of oppression through its social justice outreach, but does not seem to reinforce the division of licit and illicit that is at the heart of making lives livable or unlivable. In fact, the church seems to take an active stance against such divisions. In my interview with Reverend Boon, I tried to see where the church would take a stance, what factors would make the church reject someone, but there were none. Whereas many ways of fighting discrimination tend to simply draw the lines of exclusion differently, MCCNY’s commitment to openness seems more of an effort to demolish these lines altogether, a mission that the church sees as God-given.

But in order to be truly sure of this interpretation, future research should seek out former members and other people who have stopped attending in order to gain their perspectives and see why they left. Future research could also focus more on themes and concepts that my own research did not particularly focus on. For example, future research could delve more deeply

Barringham 30 into what people meant when they referred to MCCNY as a spiritual home, or it could analyze the particular social justice missions of the church. In particular, an examination of Sylvia’s Place and how it connect homeless LGBT youth to the church seems important considering my own research rather neglected this topic. Besides simply expanding the scope of human knowledge, such research could help bring attention to the plight of LGBT youth, who are significantly overrepresented among New York City’s young homeless population. Future research can also address diversity among LGBT churches. While I hope my research has helped to shed light on what makes this LGBT church unique from open and affirming churches and other LGBT churches, I started my research with the assumption that I would be able to determine definitively why queer people would choose to affiliate with an LGBT church over an open and affirming one because I assumed all LGBT churches would be more or less the same.

However, the differences I observed between MCCNY and other LGBT churches described in the literature, particularly the LGBT churches described in the studies by Sumerau (2012) and Thomas & Olson (2012), include important factors such as how theologically liberal or conservative the churches are, how the congregants within different churches interact with each other, and how the churches do or do not strive to regulate the behavior of their members, and these differences make it clear that there is a great deal of variation between LGBT churches. As such, to truly address my own research problem, more research must be conducted in LGBT churches in other areas with social, political, and cultural norms that are different from those in New York City.

Notes

Barringham 31 1.

While the term queer has a history as an antigay slur, it has been re-appropriated

in recent years. One of its uses since re-appropriation has been as an umbrella term for everyone who does not identify as straight and cisgender. In this text, I use this term and the acronym LGBT interchangeably to refer to this group of people or to describe institutions by and for these people.

2.

Because one of the pastors is also a professor, there was a substantial number of

young people working on an assignment who came to only one service during the time of my research. As such, I did not take them into consideration when observing church demographics.

3.

While all other participants are referred to pseudonymously, his position as one of

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