I recently read an excellent book, Fintan O’Toole’s, We Don’t Know Ourselves. It is a personal narrative of growing up in Ireland from the late ’50s to the present. It’s a wide-ranging book, covering politics, culture, social issues, economics, and religion, written with an engaging and compelling style.

One of the recurring themes of the book is the way Irish society cultivated the practice of affirming one thing publicly and officially (often legally) while tacitly allowing the opposite of that thing in practice. The key to this system’s endurance and practicality was the unspoken agreement that no one would mention the discrepancy between word and practice in public. Ireland was thus a place where certain things could be done but not discussed.

For instance: In 1974 there was a referendum to amend the Irish constitution in a way that would categorically outlaw abortion:

Yet here, too, there was the Irish solution to an Irish problem: distance and silence. The unspoken and unspeakable compact was that Irish women would have their abortions elsewhere, mostly in England. And, when they came back, they would not talk about it. This had obviously gone on for a long time.… In its way, this was a perfect system. It did what Catholic Ireland always wanted to do — to construct two parallel universes, two truths. It could be said, with reasonable accuracy, that there was no abortion in Ireland, unlike, of course, in godless England. But Irish women, provided they could afford to travel, could have abortions and be grateful for England’s godlessness. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t bring these two worlds into contact with each other, and the system can carry on for a very long time to come.

One does not have to search hard for comparable examples in my denomination.

• Officially, we require, when it comes to alcohol, total abstinence. In the last 40 years, I have never (and I use the word advisedly and deliberately) heard a sermon on the subject of alcohol. I have no doubt that many long-term attenders have no idea what our stance really is. I suspect that we have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy: If asked, we refer to the official policy. Otherwise, we’ve stopped caring what you do.

• Or, take remarriage after divorce: Officially, my denomination’s policy is that pastors may perform marriage ceremonies only for those who have “a biblical basis for marriage.” This is code language for stating that “a valid marriage after divorce is possible only if your spouse committed adultery,” language based on what Jesus says in Matthew. Why is this policy stated in code? I’m pretty sure it’s because, with divorce and remarriage so prevalent today, pastors were simply performing marriages without inquiring too closely into the details of the previous divorce. As with alcohol, if someone asks whether my denomination adheres to the biblical teaching on divorce, we can proudly and honestly point them to our official statement. In practice, pastors can do their work without the burden of determining whether actually do possess a “biblical basis for marriage.” Once again, don’t ask, don’t tell.

As in Irish society, my church has devised careful ways of dealing with the realities of changing American social norms while officially retaining our historic beliefs.

As O’Toole relates, there came a time when Irish society learned honesty. In 1992 a bishop was found to have been having an affair with a woman, producing a child. Shortly thereafter,

The Irish Catholic bishops began to say something that most Irish people had been saying to themselves all along, as they did their best to negotiate the incompatible demands of exemplary piety and actual life: that we must try not to judge others, that what happened to Casey was a matter for his conscience, that none of us know the secret suffering of human beings. They were recognizing, for the first time perhaps, that morality was not about a set of rules but about the dark and difficult choices that face real people in their own hearts…. All over the country there were hundreds of thousands of lay Catholics who had been forced to learn to do the same thing, to come, when faced with the suffering of those close to them, to conclusions different from the ones they knew they were supposed to arrive at. They had to say ‘sex outside marriage is wrong’ but ‘of course I will help Mary with the baby’ or ‘divorce is wrong’ but ‘my Johnny should be allowed to remarry’ or ‘I hate abortion’ but ‘Sharon just can’t go through with this pregnancy’. Mothers like my own had learned that their sons who stopped going to Mass weren’t necessarily on the road to perdition. Fathers had learned that the daughter who was living with that fellow wasn’t a tramp and that the child they had together was a joy, not a shame. They had all learned that their children who loved others of the same sex as themselves were not perverts but ordinary people.

It’s an open question whether modern Christianity of the Evangelical variety can arrive at this degree of honesty.

In my ideal world, the church would be a community of dialogue–a place where people talk about important things. (Yeah–I know it sounds like I want the church to be a college, but I’m an academic–what do you expect?) By “people talk about important things” I don’t mean ecclesiastical leaders issuing edicts that everyone else is supposed to receive and accept. I mean that the church should be a place where real and responsible discussion occurs.

Readers can decide for themselves whether their own churches are or are not such places. My denomination is not. A notable example of our incapacity for discussion is LGBTQIA matters. But there are others where the official view seems to be, “Oh, that matter is settled. What’s there to talk about?”

This official attitude is based on the quaint but utterly mistaken notion that theology is a static body of truth and that once Those In Authority declare the truth, it is established for all time.

In fact, however, the Bible itself shows us that the doctrinal and ethical teaching of the people of God is more dynamic than the official view allows.

• Pastors seem to regard the law of tithing, which existed to maintain the Jewish temple, as an eternal law inscribed in the fabric of the universe. And yet, tithing disappears in Paul’s letters because his Gentile congregations had no connection with the temple.
• Matthew’s Gospel is convinced that the kingdoms of this world belong to Satan, yet Paul teaches that human government is really God’s servant.
• Does one need to be Jewish to be a Christian? Turns out first century Christians did not all agree on this matter and that a consensus emerged only through–guess what–discussion.

In other words, while the official view is that truth never changes, the reality is different–it takes a while for God’s people to figure out what to believe and do. It took 1800+ years for Christians universally to get the point that God doesn’t like slavery. It took longer for Christians to realize that women ought to be legally and political equal to men and some Christians are still not there. It took quite a while for Christians to get comfortable with the idea that the earth (indeed, the universe) is more than a few thousand years old, and even today there is a substantial portion of American Christians who refuse to accept this well-established scientific fact.

In short, what looks like eternal truth in one era sometimes looks like a relic from the past to a later era. Conservative sorts will lament this claim. It is, however, the indisputable result of studying history. No generation of Christians possesses perfect wisdom or unchangeable insight into divine revelation.

That is why it is astonishing that public discourse about very important issues is practically nonexistent in my church. The reason can only be institutional fear: Fear that, if we allow public discussion, we may end up having to change our stance publicly. If this happens, the illusion of eternal truth will disappear and, with it, perhaps Christianity. (This fear seems odd: since Christianity in America is disappearing with great rapidity anyway, what do we really have to lose by allowing honest discussion? How much faster can people leave the church?)

What this means is that, for all our proclaiming that we stand against the tides of culture, the leadership and much of the laity of my church is actually just a mirror image of that portion of America that is driven be fear: fear of women having rights, fear of minorities speaking up for themselves, fear of immigrants, fear of science, fear of anything that suggests change.

So, when it comes to LGBTQIA issues, I don’t expect the church to become a community of open dialogue anytime soon. My guess is that, like Ireland, we will gradually adopt the same strategy we’ve adopted on alcohol and remarriage after divorce: don’t ask, don’t tell. Congregations that are LGBTQIA-friendly will be allowed to continue on as long as everyone respects the unspoken agreement not to state the obvious truth. (It will help if those congregations are large and contribute significantly to denominational budgets.) It’s not exactly honest discourse, but at least it would be consistent with our historic practice.