portraits by Chris Hildreth

[A member of the audience asks:] I've been reading your book, Resident Aliens, and it's really cool. I only got through like maybe the first couple chapters, but--You hear that? It was called "cool"!

[Another member of the audience asks:] What's the point of defending a society that's built on spending? We've been terrorized by Madison Avenue for how long, through the television and such?

Be careful with that kind of language. You've been manipulated by Madison Avenue--I'm not sure you've been terrorized. And it's very important to get the description right. As a response to September 11, for academics to roll out all the things that they've thought have been wrong with America and American foreign policy is--the word I'm close to is "duplicitous." It is morally inappropriate. Nothing that America has done in the world justifies, excuses, or explains September 11.

It is therefore all the more important for us--and this is the use of the word "us"--to try to understand why it is that many people in the world find it satisfying that this has happened to America. On September 11, America was dragged kicking and screaming into the world. We think of ourselves as global, but our globalization has remained safe within the boundaries of our ocean, and now the reality of the world has been brought home. We're mad as hell because we didn't really want to deal with this kind of world on an everyday basis. It's a very important moment for national self-examination, and I would like to be as helpful to that as I can as a Christian. If you are a pacifist, you don't want to withdraw--you want to be as helpful to your neighbor as you can.

On the church, marriage, and sexuality

[Another member of the audience asks:] Talking about the unity of the church, how might that apply to the current debates concerning homosexuality in the United Methodist Church, in the Presbyterian USA church, and the Reconciling Congregations movement within the United Methodist Church?

The problem with debates about homosexuality is they have been devoid of any linguistic discipline that might give you some indication what is at stake. Methodism, for example, is more concerned with being inclusive than being the church. We do not have the slightest idea what we mean by being inclusive other than some vague idea that inclusivity has something to do with being accepting and loving. Inclusivity is, of course, a necessary strategy for survival in what is religiously a buyers' market. Even worse, the inclusive church is captured by romantic notions of marriage. Combine inclusivity and romanticism and you have no reason to deny marriage between gay people.

When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremonies, ministers think it's interesting to ask if they love one another. What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage isn't about whether you're in love. Christian marriage is giving you the practice of fidelity over a lifetime in which you can look back upon the marriage and call it love. It is a hard discipline over many years.

The difficulty, therefore, is that Christians, when they approach this issue, no longer know what marriage is. For centuries, Christians married people who didn't know one another until the marriage ceremony, and we knew they were going to have sex that night. They didn't know one another. Where does all this love stuff come from? They could have sex because they were married.

Now, when marriage becomes a mutually enhancing arrangement until something goes wrong, then it makes no sense at all to oppose homosexual marriages. If marriage is a calling that makes promises of lifelong monogamous fidelity in which children are welcomed, then we've got a problem. But we can't even get to a discussion there, because Christians no longer practice Christian marriage.

What has made it particularly hard is that the divorce culture has made it impossible for us to talk about these matters--and many of you know, I'm divorced and remarried. It has made it impossible for us to talk about these matters with an honesty and candor that is required if you are not to indulge in self-deceptive, sentimental lies.

For gay Christians who I know and love, I wish we as Christians could come up with some way to help them, like we need to help one another, to avoid the sexual wilderness in which we live. That's a worthy task. I probably sound like a conservative on these matters, not because I've got some deep animosity toward gay people, but because I don't know how to go forward given the current marriage practices of our culture.

A question from Stanley Hauerwas

[Dean Jones asks:] Bill has asked you a lot of questions, others have asked you several questions. What question would you like those of us gathered here to be thinking about as we depart from here?

What do I need, or what do we need, to be a community of friends that can not only tell one another the truth, but want to be told the truth?

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