United Methodist Church officials in central Pennsylvania have defrocked a pastor who officiated at his gay son’s wedding in Massachusetts.
There are a small number of hate groups masquerading as religious congregations. They are innocent of modern research and science, stuck in a medieval time-warp, where atavistic notions culled from the past trump modern ideas of human rights and the truths of biology.
We should pity them – eventually they will die out. What is truly troublesome and provocative about this piece of news is that some “christian” people seem to be unable to recognise that, for a father, the happiness of his son trumps some dry ecclesiastical dogma.
Congratulations to both father and son – you have escaped a prison of the mind.
Frank Schaefer, the pastor concerned, has now joined a District of Columbia United Methodist congregation with more accepting and modern view, sparking a big debate among Methodists. Methodists are now split. A similar split occurred in the 1960s over racial discrimination. At the time many Methodists believed blacks were racially inferior – some may still think so, but keep quiet about it. This illustrates the fact that much church doctrine is mutable, a function of tribal culture.
Yes, and it illustrates another fact — if there’s one thing on Planet Earth that’s “mutable,” it’s the human mind (thank heavens!)
I wish we had better strategies for pushing back against these pathologies, i.e., the scourge of dogmatists that afflict our culture.