By Tom Lee
The banner went up during Holy Week on the side of my United Methodist church in Nashville. Color-coded in bright hues, it proclaimed our welcome to persons of all “genders, races, sexual orientations, economic or family status, mental or physical ability.”
It was beautiful. Our church has another banner, smaller and etched into an old stone tucked into the church's cloister garden. It commemorates the founding of the congregation.
“West End, M.E. Church South, 1887.”
It is from another building, another time. “M.E. Church South” is code echoes across the chasm of time. The Methodist Episcopal Church South was born when America’s largest Protestant denomination split in 1844 over slavery — or, to be more accurate, over whether one could own people and still claim to be Christian. Some Methodists, including some of my forebears, said yes. They divided over a chattel war rather than challenge the powers and principalities of this world.
Forty-three years later — undaunted by Appomattox, the 13th Amendment, the repudiation of history, and the staggering cost the South had paid and would yet pay for its intransigence — the separate-but-equal M.E. Church South still stood. Into that, my church was born.
Schism is not news in the South. All of us live in its shadow, one way or another. For some, schism is welcome news. I think of plantation slaves in Georgia hearing the hoofbeats of Sherman’s approaching army, so vividly depicted in E.L. Doctorow’s The March. For some, schism means tragedy. For others, deliverance.
But if we tend to think of schism as a 19th-century thing, we are wrong. Schism is back. We can feel it everywhere, tugging at our national politics, half of us certain one direction leads to tragedy and half of us equally certain it leads to deliverance. And it is back in the United Methodist Church, my church. The particulars are different — same-gender marriages and the ordination of openly LGBTQ ministers are the questions of our day — but our 19th-century forebears would recognize the broad strokes.
I would like to put some distance between me and those days, those struggles, those powers and principalities. But our “M.E. Church South” cornerstone is only about 70 feet from the rainbow banner. They both still stand at my church. They both still stand for something, and for someone. What is it, I wonder? And, more importantly, who is it?
As a journalist, then a lawyer, and then a lobbyist for the past 38 years, I am a practitioner of narrative. I am intrigued by the way in which the stories we tell — and the credit we give them — shapes our understanding of who we are and what is true. As I have been shaped by this experience, so too has my faith. I have come to believe no idea, sacred or secular, is credible without a story against which to test it. Whether Holy Writ, judicial precedent, or public policymaking, the test is the same.
We all need a foundation, a frame of reference. For me, scripture is the principal means against which I test the validity of our own experience, collective tradition, and reason. Its frames, though, can be tricky. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural, just one month before the Confederate surrender in Virginia: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God — and each invokes his aid against the other.” Read more via Bitter Southerner