Sociologists Find LGBTQ United Methodists, Allies Stay in UMC Out of Hope

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A United Methodist Insight Exclusive

Sociologist Nancy Malcom, a United Methodist, attended a professional conference in 2019 not long after the fateful special General Conference at which delegates voted by a slim margin to tighten penalties for transgressing the UMC's bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage. While participating in a section on religion and sexuality, a colleague asked a provocative question:

Why do LGBTQ persons and their allies stay in a church that officially condemns "homosexual practice" as "incompatible with Christian teaching?"

"None of the researchers on the panel had asked that question"  Dr. Malcom told Insight in a Zoom interview.

Although her previous studies had been mostly with girls and childhood gender issues, Dr. Malcom said the question "planted a seed" that kept growing. The fruit of that seed has been nurtured in the personal experiences of Dr Malcom and her colleague, Dr. A.J. Ramirez, in their respective United Methodist memberships.

Nancy's story

"From 2016 on, I thought about what was happening in the United Methodist Church," she said. "I thought, 'well, the South (where she lives in Statesboro, Ga.) is slow; the rest of the U.S. will save us. Then, after the 2019 conference, I'm ashamed that I had this feeling: nobody's going to save us, we have to save ourselves."

After that realization, "I was this close to leaving," Dr. Malcom said, pinching her thumb and index finger together.

Dr. Malcom describes herself as "very involved" in her local church, Pittman Park UMC in Statesboro, Ga., where over the past 20 years she has served on mission projects, church committees and currently co-chairs the board of trustees. The sociologist said she hadn't participated in the South Georgia Annual Conference and hadn't attended the 2019 General Conference in St. Louis, Mo. The 2019 conference shook her so, she said, that she began to question continuing her membership.  She even talked the situation over with her colleagues at Georgia Southern University, many of whom she identified as queer.

In an online compilation, "Resist Harm," Dr. Malcom told her own family's story of how her eldest sister came out as lesbian after leaving for college when Nancy was around nine years old. "It was a rough time for our family, but we made it through, and that shaped me."

Now she has her own close family tie to the LGBTQ community. "My younger son is gay," she said. "I think we kinda knew that before he came out.  We talked with him [after the 2019 conference] and told him that if he wanted to leave the church, we were out.

"But he's very comfortable in the church –– hee he feels a lot of love and support from many people." Even so, Dr. Malcom said she worries that those who support her son privately won't stand up for him in a public conflict.

Dr. Malcom said she decided then that the only way she could stay in The United Methodist Church was if she became an active LGBTQ ally and "a voice for change." She attended a conference held by UMC Next, a group advocating LGBTQ inclusion, and helped organize a Reconciling Community in Statesboro for Reconciling Ministries Network.

As her church activism grew, her Georgia Southern colleagues encouraged her to take up the United Methodist situation as a research project. She said she struggled with the idea for nearly a year because "I thought it would be too emotionally difficult for me. I thought I couldn't handle the 'feels'."

A. J.'s story

By that time, Dr. Malcom had met another sociologist, A.J. Ramirez, who teaches Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies at Valdosta State University, through the South Georgia Reconciling Community. In in a Zoom interview with Insight, Dr. Ramirez identified as a Christian, lesbian, and a United Methodist.

"Just listening to Nancy tell her story, there were moments when I wasn't sure I could do this (research) emotionally," said Dr. Ramirez in the Zoom interview. " I have to admit that even in the research there has been some hard times for me, especially in the last six or seven months, of finding that motivation to keep doing (the study)."

Dr. Ramirez said she and her wife Gayle originally attended First UMC in Valdosta, GA, but moved to a new congregation, The Porch Community Church (a UMC congregation), which was a group from First UMC who split away. The turmoil around the UMC's stances and the lack of integration of diversity at the Porch Community church lead them to seek other options.

"After 2019, it was hard to swallow those results from General Conference," Dr. Ramirez said. "It was hard to watch that so much movement didn't get where it needed to go. It reminded me of the women's suffrage movement and the struggles they faced."

During an online RMN meeting when she acknowledged being "at the end of my rope" regarding LGBTQ inclusion in the UMC, Dr. Ramirez met the Rev. Timothy Bagwell, a longtime progressive activist in the South Georgia Conference who was then pastor at Centenary UMC in Macon, Ga. As their rapport grew, Rev. Bagwell invited A.J. and Gayle to start a Reconciling group in Valdosta with Centenary as its sponsor.

"I said, 'Wow! Are you sure you want to do that?' Dr. Ramirez recalled. “I had so much concern for Tim and his congregation, I did not want them to take on too much, as I had witnessed so much turmoil within the UMC, not to mention I did not want to put my family through any more spiritual abuse.”

Dr. Ramirez said it took about two years of conversation, prayer and discernment to move forward with Rev. Bagwell's proposal. As he retired, his successor, the Rev. Sarah Pugh Montgomery, took A.J. and Gayle "under her wing" and blessed the enterprise. Since then, the fledgling congregation has welcomed "overflows" from the 11 United Methodist churches around Valdosta that have or are considering disaffiliation from the UMC.

"This is kind of John Wesley stuff," Dr. Ramirez said.

As the Valdosta community developed, the UMC's institutional constraints began to exert an influence. South Georgia UMC officials noticed the Valdosta group, partly because it was a new church plant that crossed districts. Dr. Ramirez's identity as a married lesbian also became an issue as she served as the "lead person" at the Valdosta community.

"It has been in those moments when I've really questioned whether I wanted to continue with the research," Dr. Ramirez said. She noted that the South Central district superintendent has been supportive, as has Centenary UMC, which engages in many "envelope-pushing" social justice ministries.

The research goes forward

Despite their mutual misgivings personally, the two sociologists decided to go ahead with their research. The first phase of their study was a survey, Dr. Malcom said.

"Creating a survey can be challenging, but I knew I wanted it to be an 'action' research project to help RMN," Dr. Malcom said. "I only wanted to survey affirming United Methodists because that was the question: "Given the vote for the Traditionalist Plan in 2019, why do you stay in the UMC?"

Reconciling Ministries helped Drs. Malcom and Ramirez recruit participants for the survey by emailing and posting social media links to their online survey, said Dr. Malcom. Dr. Ramirez also posted the survey link on her social media pages.

The resulting 1,500 responses shocked the two social scientists to the point they had to cut off the survey.

"We were hoping if we could just get 200 responses," Dr. Ramirez said. "We got well over a thousand responses in a short time, and we had to cut it off. There were only two of us (to process the results)."

Dr. Malcom added that the survey "was always designed to be qualitative, not quantitative."

Out of the 1,500 people who completed the online survey, 500 of them volunteered for follow-up interviews, Dr. Malcom said. "In sociology, if you can interview 50 people for a project like this, that's a nice big number, a gold standard."

The two sociologists ended up performing 114 Zoom interviews.

"I think it shows how many people wanted to share their stories," Dr. Ramirez said.

Common themes

A common theme among the interviewees was their devotion to Methodism, Dr. Ramirez said. "They would indicate they were, 'born a Methodist,' and there was such a strong foundation involved, that even though they were being spiritually abused, (they stayed in the church.)"

Dr. Ramirez, who is also a licensed psychotherapist, said that many interviewees reminded her of her clients caught in domestic abuse situations.

"Even though they're being abused, they're able to look past so much of the deficit seeing that there's still good there, and sometimes there is," she said. "It created for me this sense of 'this is one reason why I'm still here.'"

Among themes that Dr. Malcom said she noticed were:

  • Activism. Interviewees said, 'I want to change the church from within, and if I don't stay, who will be left to work for change??"
  • Same-sex marriages. "People brought it up so often," Dr. Malcom said.
  • Allies. Many of the interviewees were heterosexual, older United Methodists.

"We thought it would be the older white generation who weren't okay with LGBTQ inclusion, but it was actually a younger generation who were creating more of an issue in some of the congregations," said Dr. Ramirez.

Regarding the last point, Dr. Malcom cautioned not to assume from the interviews that all older United Methodists are LGBTQ-affirming because the survey included only self-selected persons who support full inclusion.

"But there are lots of allies out there," she added.

Interviewees in their 70s and 80s, plus a 90-year-old, all had histories of activism, Dr. Malcom said. "They talked about protesting the Vietnam War, about their time marching for the Equal Rights Amendment -- a lifetime of activism in social justice which was something that brought them to the UMC."

The two sociologists said the interviews also uncovered two characteristics that they believe could be studied further:

  • Exposure to a social injustice such as racial equality can help people see injustices among other groups such as LGBTQ persons, women and ethnic minorities;
  • Getting to know LGBTQ persons in relationships enlightens others about the discriminations they face.

"A good number of clergy encountered gay people in seminary," Dr. Malcom said. "They'd say, "if I were to choose who's going to be the best minister, it's that person, and that person's gay."

Bible study brought inclusion

At lot of interviewees also said they came to LGBTQ inclusion through Bible study.

"They said they got into what the Bible says about sexuality," Dr. Malcom said. "A clergyperson said, 'I want people to know that (LGBTQ inclusion) comes from Bible study, because the Bible is the authority."

The two sociologists had different perspectives on whether their research will have lasting influence on the future of The United Methodist Church.

Dr. Ramirez said she sees a parallel between the UMC's current situation with past conflicts over the abolition of slavery and women's rights. Since non-affirming United Methodists are disaffiliating from the denomination, it's possible that the stories of LGBTQ people who stay in the UMC will influence its future, she concluded.

Dr. Malcom said she sees "a lot of hope" from their interviews.

"People who have more hope (for LGBTQ inclusion in the UMC) want to talk about it," she said.

Most all, Dr. Malcom said she hopes their interviewees' stories will enlighten United Methodists "that we're talking about people and not an 'issue'" when it comes to human sexuality.

Dr. Ramirez concurred. "These are lives, these are human beings, these are souls. If we're going to be the Methodists we say we are, it goes back to those three simple rules: do no harm, do good, love God. It just feels like we've moved away from that in so many ways."

Surprisingly, many of the interviewees who said they were leaving or had left the UMC saw racism in the church as a bigger problem than even LGBTQ inclusion, Dr. Malcom said. Most of those departing are younger people who can't or don't want to cope any more with the church's failure to address its own institutional injustices, she said.

The two social scientists said the initial publication of representative interviews only shows the tip of their research. Dr. Malcom foresees years of academic papers resulting from their study, but her personal goal is simply to share the stories they've collected with other United Methodists and with the public at large.

Dr. Ramirez would like to turn their research into a book, "almost like a handbook, of 'this is what happened and let's not let it happen again.'

"Listen to the stories."

Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011 as a communications channel for marginalized and under-served United Methodists.