Still Nothing to Celebrate
Ecumenical Student Conference Includes “Pro-Gay” Themes
by Mark Tooley
Four years ago, in what was my first article for Touchstone, I wrote about Celebrate II, an ecumenical student conference endorsed by six Protestant denominations and the National Catholic Student Coalition. In 1994, about 1,800 students and campus ministers met in St. Louis to listen to the musings of goddess proponents Edwina Gateley and Rita Nakashima Brock. Memories of the first Re-Imagining Conference, which occurred in 1993, were still fresh. Thanks to reporting by evangelical renewal publications within the endorsing mainline denominations and by Christianity Today, Celebrate II set off a minor controversy in early 1995.
Perhaps due to that controversy, Celebrate III was somewhat more subdued in its theological explorations. None of the plenary speakers was as openly provocative as Gateley or Brock. But traditional expressions of Christian orthodoxy from many of the speakers were counterbalanced by “pro-gay” advocacy and liberal political themes.
Over 1,300 students and campus ministers met December 30, 1998 through January 3, 1999, in Ridgecrest, North Carolina, for Celebrate III. It was the third quadrennial gathering organized by the Council for Ecumenical Student Christian Ministry, a partnership of college students and national denominational staff involved in higher education. The council includes the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). There was no official Roman Catholic participation in Celebrate III, ostensibly due to a schedule conflict with another conference.
Best known among the conference speakers at Celebrate III was South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who told of his years-long struggle against apartheid and racial prejudice. “God is biased,” said Tutu. “He always takes the side of the weakest.”
Tutu compared the struggle against racism to the fight for acceptance of homosexuality. “The passion that drove me to fight apartheid drives me to strive for justice for gays and lesbians,” he related. “We should celebrate sex as a wonderful gift of God. We should accept different sexual orientations,” Tutu proclaimed amid applause. “God made us who we are.” He urged the audience to “set our faces against homophobia.”
Tutu said he had “no truck with those who speak of pie in the sky when you die.” The Church has a responsibility to work for “compassion, caring, and gentleness” in this world, he insisted. Besides racism and justice for homosexuals, he mentioned environmentalism as a cause that Christians should embrace. Calling the earth “our mother,” Tutu said that “ecology is a deeply religious matter” and that we “should treat all space and matter reverently.”
Barbara Lundblad, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, spoke of the Incarnation of the Word as an affirmation of the flesh. “The Word made flesh seemed an oxymoron to the wise,” she said. And “the church has been trying to keep them apart.” She went on, “This Word should shock us . . . and sustain us. It talks about this world. These bodies. Everybody’s bodies.” Relating her point to the current debate over President Clinton’s infidelities and impeachment, she commented: “Flesh is not dirty or perverse. Flesh is not the source of all sin, even if the Congress votes it to be so. Flesh is not hostile to holiness.”
Noting that “flesh is made holy by the Incarnation,” Lundblad said she thought most of all about Matthew Shepard, the young homosexual murdered in Wyoming. “Some despised his flesh [and] who he was. Some flesh is dispensable [they think].” She asked the audience to wonder “what our words say that lead people to think that Matthew Shepard could be gotten rid of.” She said a hurting world is asking the Church: “If you are gay or straight or bisexual, will you harbor me in the flesh?”
Lundblad was a speaker at the Re-Imagining Community’s reunion last year, and she echoed some themes of feminist theology to the students. “Did God have a partner in creation?” she asked the audience. “Was this Wisdom known by the name of Sophia, God’s creative partner?”
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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