Cross Hands
File Photo by Kathleen Barry, UM News
What do you think of when you hear the word “integrity”?
According to sources I checked, “integrity” has two meanings. Its second meaning has to do with whether a structure holds together. Its primary meaning refers to “the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions” (Wikipedia).
After reading a recent blog post by the Rev. Dr. Stephen Rankin, I’ve come to the conclusion that we United Methodists have deluded ourselves into thinking that the UMC’s integrity rests upon adherence to its structure – obedience to a set of institutional rules – when in reality we’re tussling over two sets of morality whose matrices don’t mesh. The result: We’re savaging one another for not following a moral code that the other finds immoral and repugnant. Both perspectives are complicated by the fact that each can cite scriptural authority for a preferred moral matrix. We don’t agree on common threads of morality – even though there are values we share.
Moral Foundations Theory
In trying to puzzle out what’s next for United Methodism, I came across an idea developed by a group of psychologists and sociologists that they call Moral Foundations Theory. Perhaps the most famous proponent of this idea is Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Here’s a verbatim summary of the core concepts from the Moral Foundations website:
“1) Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
“2) Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]
“3) Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's ‘one for all, and all for one.’
“4) Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
“5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
“We think there are several other very good candidates for "foundationhood," especially:
“6) Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. We report some preliminary work on this potential foundation in this paper, on the psychology of libertarianism and liberty.”
What can this mean to the UMC?
Based on my readings across the divide, here’s my take on what Moral Foundations scholarship might mean for The United Methodist Church at this juncture:
I think it’s fair to say that Traditionalists make moral decisions on the basis of all five original foundations, but not on the sixth potential value. As a result, their arguments aren’t merely that prohibitions of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination are “faithful to God’s word.” According to Moral Foundations Theory, Traditionalists’ decision-making process sees LGBTQ intimate relationships as 1) harmful to a predominantly heterosexual community; 2) out of proportion to heterosexual practice; 3) a betrayal of the Christian “tribe” [“incompatible with Christian teaching”]; 4) a subversion of the authority of scripture and tradition; and 5) a degradation of sexual purity.
On the other hand, Progressives’ moral matrix is less complex. Their primary moral foundations are 1) whether LGBTQ people are harmed by the church’s actions; and 2) whether LGBTQ bans unfairly single out one “sin” in comparison to all other human failings – war, violence, drug and alcohol addiction, divorce, abortion, lying, theft, and so on. A secondary, but increasingly important, moral tenet for Progressives: liberty/oppression, the sense that while secular society is becoming more tolerant of sexual minorities, a majority of church leaders and members continues to condemn people for their sexual orientation (let’s not pretend otherwise, given that one 2019 General Conference delegate was called out by another for saying we should “drown all the gays” to solve our problem).
Structure won’t solve it
Through this examination, it becomes even more obvious that the constitutional, legislative, parliamentary United Methodist structure – that political construct of rules that Dr. Rankin cites as having lost its integrity – can’t resolve the war between these two moralities. Each set of moral foundations has its own internal integrity. Actions taken according to each morality become “evil” only when forced into the alternative matrix. The One Church Plan attempted to let these opposing moralities co-exist, but it was a structural solution to a moral dilemma. Any vision of an overarching unity – such as loving God and one another – has been lost in fragmentation resulting from the two matrices.
Our structure, in which each paragraph of the Book of Discipline can be amended or removed every four years, reinforces fragmentation. United Methodism’s polity, fashioned using an 18th century hierarchical mindset, exacerbates our populist 21st century reality, increasingly pressured by the borderless demands of technology, globalization, economic disparity and other ills. The result: those with command of the established political model, dysfunctional as it proved, use our structure to maintain their preferred morality at the top when change is fermenting at the grassroots.
Would keeping the status quo really hold the denomination together – give it “integrity”? Judging from growing resistance, organizational integrity appears unlikely because individuals and church units (congregations and conferences) are employing a different moral matrix from the authority in which the status quo roots.
However, it’s highly likely that in a month the Judicial Council will invalidate two-thirds of the petitions that enacted the Traditional Plan, given that the council advised the 2019 General Conference of their probable unconstitutionality. Such a declaration will leave us where we were before, banning same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination through a degraded parliamentary process that only creates more conflict.
Thus, we’re still left with a dilemma: what matrix ought we use to govern the UMC’s official morality? Do love, justice, and liberty supersede authority, loyalty, and purity? Or vice versa? Our zero-sum “game of thrones” can’t even appeal to the Bible as the ultimate authority because it’s possible to pick out consistent threads of scripture to support each of the values used by both Traditionalists and Progressives. The One Church Plan tried to provide a Solomonic model of co-existence, but failed when the politically stronger faction refused to accept the overarching ethic of “room for all.”
So where is God in all my peroration about moral foundations? As Carl Jung said, bidden or unbidden, God is still present, and active, but so are rebellious humans with the free will to resist God’s inspiration. Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves not how to preserve our organization for the sake of human moral integrity, but how we can better open ourselves spiritually to God’s guidance. Assuredly, we aren’t going to solve this impasse on our own, no matter how much integrity any of our moral matrices appear to have.
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.