Law in the United Methodist Church (UMC) is a product of democracy, written by elected delegates to a legislative body, recorded in a book entitled The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church. As “a Book of Law,” the Book of Discipline is “the only official and authoritative Book of Law of The Methodist Church,” according to the Methodist Church's Judicial Council in a landmark 1953 ruling.Footnote ¹ Despite this declaration, the Judicial Council had no idea in 1953 that it had addressed a question that in 20 years would divide not just the Methodists, but Americans and American Christians generally. In the last 30 years of the twentieth century, controversies over homosexuality led American Christians into debates over the role law should play in their churches, while Americans as a whole debated the role churches should play in their law. United Methodist conservatives discovered that by rallying populist majorities to rewrite church law, they could then use church trials to roll back what they saw as excesses from the 1960s still plaguing American society.Footnote ² Writing any law is necessarily a political process, but in the UMC, church trials became political battlegrounds as well, contests to determine if rank-and-file clergy approved church rules against anything resembling a same-sex marriage.

The traditional “villains” of the religious Right played little or no role in this process; hostility to homosexual rights emanated from the mainstream, rank-and-file members of the church, not Jerry Falwell or Anita Bryant.Footnote ³ Nor can the prejudice be blamed on a bureaucratic apparatus, as Margot Canaday has argued in her study of the federal government's relations with sexual minorities. In the Methodist Church, the promoters of discrimination can be accurately called ordinary Methodists, speaking in voices that “welled up from the streets” (or the pews) against a bureaucracy often inclined to defend even unpopular civil rights principles as fundamentals of social justice.Footnote ⁴ Few or none had leadership positions in the national church structure, and whereas some of them were preachers, with access to pulpits that set them apart as community leaders, not all had even that status. Lay members of the church pressed for the discrimination. In 1992, one visitor to a California UMC wrote on her worship response form that she was “concerned” about welcoming homosexuals into her church, as the minister had advocated. She wrote that she did “not want to raise my child in an environment which promotes homosexuality as an ‘alternative’ life style.” Describing herself as a “frequent visitor,” this worshipper was the kind of almost-member that local ministers very much liked to lure into their membership classes and full membership. Her comments alarmed local clergy enough that they saved and filed a form that is usually tabulated and quickly discarded.Footnote ⁵ Sometimes whole congregations rebelled against ministers seeking to welcome gay and lesbian members.Footnote ⁶ Ministers favoring the discrimination sometimes followed rather than led their congregations.

This seems an all the more plausible proposition because the UMC debated homosexuality amidst a serious decline in numbers and influence that forced church leaders to ask what they could do to entice worshippers back into the pews. Since 1965, the five largest denominations usually considered the core of mainstream Protestantism have suffered steep reductions in membership. The Presbyterians have lost one third of their members, the Episcopalians nearly 30%, and the United Methodists one quarter.Footnote ⁷ Those clergy and lay members favoring discrimination insisted that unless their church took a harder line against homosexuality, it would continue to lose numbers. They pointed to Africa and Asia, where Christianity used a traditionalist message, male dominated and unsympathetic to women's rights or the gay cause, to aggressively expand, rapidly gaining converts.Footnote ⁸

Aside from the crisis of declining numbers, the UMC has long been structured to respond to its membership. “The United Methodist Church,” one bishop has written, “is more democratic than any other organization.”Footnote ⁹ That may be an exaggeration, but this tradition of democratic lawmaking has allowed conservatives to condemn homosexuality through church law supported by majorities of Methodists demanding that the law be enforced against progressive clergy.Footnote ¹⁰

Traditionalists did not see church law or biblical teaching as undemocratic or divorced from majority rule. “Classical Christian teaching,” one theologian explained, “proceeds on the premise that the whole community of faith is being guided by the Holy Spirit into all truth amid the hazards of history.”Footnote ¹¹ Through the 1970s and after, church conservatives—both clergy and lay members—made populist appeals against gay rights that won majorities. In the UMC, and in other denominations, they have vigorously argued that churches dedicated to strictness of doctrine and discipline thrive while progressive churches have withered. The church could survive, they said, only by faithfully following scripture, which they saw as an unambiguous and sure bulwark against human uncertainty. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, some in the UMC have increasingly used church law as a tool to enforce majority will against those progressives inside the church seeking to protect the rights of homosexuals. Conservatives made populist political appeals, acting, they said, to save the church from decline, but nonetheless based their principles on scripture. Majorities will naturally form around biblical doctrine, they said.Footnote ¹²

In the United States, conservatives had considerable success organizing majorities behind efforts to mobilize church law as a tool to enforce traditional values. Although these trials took place in church courts, they followed procedures closely patterned after those found in secular courts. Bishops presided as judges, with ministers making up the juries and serving as prosecutors and defense counsel, advised by attorneys. Convicted clergy faced loss of their credentials or suspension.Footnote ¹³ Most of these trials took place in secret, not reported in the press, and documented in records not open to the public. Most prosecuted conduct the church and the larger society found reprehensible, including sexual offenses similar to those the Roman Catholic Church tried to handle administratively, and financial misconduct, such as embezzlement. In 1998 and 1999, however, the church's legal pursuit of three ministers for the “crime” of blessing same-sex couples, grabbed headlines and national attention. These trials became battlegrounds where factions in the church fought not only over the legitimacy of democratically enacted church laws denouncing homosexuality, but over the legitimacy of the trial process itself as an appropriate tool for enforcing a majority's will on questions of justice and rights.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American churches put “deviants” on trial in church courts, enforcing moral rules that most Americans, in and out of church, thought reasonable. Churches stood shoulder to shoulder with secular institutions. There was, or appeared to be, moral agreement between the religious and the larger society. In the twentieth century, however, this consensus faded and church trials largely disappeared. This was true for the Methodists also, even though the Methodist denominations (both Northern and Southern) included law-like language in their church disciplines.Footnote ¹⁴ No one thought to worry about homosexuality, but the church seemed to want to set limits on who could be married by a Methodist minister. At least since the 1880s, Methodist churches prohibited ministers from marrying divorced persons. In 1916, the Methodist Book of Discipline, containing the law and doctrine of the church enacted at General Conference, hardened its rule, specifically noting that the prohibition was not advisory but obligatory. Even putting such language in the church law books offended some clergy; one Methodist grumbled that ministers had “never taken kindly to mandatory provisions in the Discipline.” When Northern Methodists joined with Southern Methodists in 1939, the new denomination continued the prohibition; however, during this period “you could count the number of church trials on the fingers of one hand,” Bishop Jack Tuell, a leading authority on Methodist polity and a frequent judge at church trials at the end of the twentieth century, said later. Bishop Dan Solomon remembers that when he entered the ministry in 1962, church trials were “almost unheard of.” Tuell explained that instead of prosecuting errant ministers, “you find some way at arriving at a resolution without a trial.” Solomon recalls that bishops and district superintendents simply asked errant clergy to hand in their credentials. Such requests were not often refused, he remembers.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1998 a retired UMC minister said he had no way of knowing how many, if any, ministers went on trial for marrying divorced persons. He could not remember any. But he did say that when he became a minister in 1951, his superiors reminded him of the prohibition, but that he always made his own decisions about whom to marry. The general understanding was that the prohibition was advisory only. Older ministers counseled younger ministers, maintaining what the Methodists call their connectionalism or loyalty to church doctrine, informally, outside legal process. Tuell believes this system did not easily accommodate women entering the clergy in large numbers. At first they faced such crude discrimination in pay and in job opportunities that they had good reason to demand access to law and formal procedure. Such demands gained force for coming at a time when all people guarded their rights more carefully. Solomon recalls that “The whole culture of the country changed” as people began asserting their rights.Footnote ¹⁶

America's shift to the left in the 1960s raised questions in the Methodist Church about seeming contradictions between public opinion, natural law, and scripture. Said another way, the sexual revolution challenged traditional Methodist connectionalism. Nowhere was this truer than in San Francisco.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1962, John V. Moore, a progressive-minded small-town minister, became pastor at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco's notorious Tenderloin District. The big city shocked Moore. There were only approximately 5000 Methodists in a city of 740,000; 200 attended Glide's large sanctuary designed for 500. Few families came to church and the single men (and a few women) drifting in and out of the building to sleep, beg for money, vomit, urinate, and steal, scarcely resembled the worshipers in his previous small-town congregations. This unfamiliar urban landscape challenged and confused Moore's commitment to universal rights and majority rule, as his sermons show. Law, a gift from the founders, articulated moral values, he told the alienated young men huddled in his pews. Rule by law, he orated, was superior to rule by men, but his thinking on this point was conflicted and uncertain. Law should support our values, he said, and those values came from the Judeo-Christian tradition, not contemporary politics. At the same time, law had to have the “inner consent of the people” to have any force at all. In one sermon praising the rule of law over rule by man, Moore also announced—in the next paragraph—that “we really are ruled by men” because laws can only be enacted with the consent of the majority. Those who showed up on Sunday morning apparently did not find such ruminations particularly appealing, and attendance at Glide declined under Moore's leadership.Footnote ¹⁸

What Moore encountered in the Tenderloin epitomized what many Americans, including church leaders, had come to see as an alarming national crisis, urban youth alienated from the nation's values. It was to solve this problem that the Reverend Ted McIlvenna became Glide Foundation's Young Adult Director, assigned to execute a plan Methodist leaders called “research and action.” The national church dispatched ministers to urban areas across the nation and directed them to experiment with innovative church programs of their own design.Footnote ¹⁹ No one felt more liberated by these instructions than McIlvenna, who took to the streets where he discovered that in San Francisco many of those troubled urban youth the church hoped to reach were homosexual. This he took in stride. He explains his unusually early openness to homosexuality by saying he grew up isolated on an Indian reservation, the son of an itinerant Methodist minister based in Oregon, Robert McIlvenna, never learning the prejudice against homosexuality especially virulent among straight men in the 1950s. Lacking the bias common among his fellow clergymen, he spent 2 years visiting gay bars and clubs, making himself so much a presence on Polk Street that some called him the “Gay Priest of Fairyland.” (He was actually married and has remained married.)Footnote ²⁰ One historian explains that McIlvenna “took a crash course on society's treatment of gay men and women.”Footnote ²¹ His own narrative tells a slightly different story. He began by trying to find a way to change homosexuals into heterosexuals before realizing it could not be done. “By the time we are two or three years old,” McIvenna finally concluded, “we don't have any choice at all.” To McIlvenna, this was an intellectual breakthrough: homosexuality was a product of nature, natural law, God's law. However much a majority might despise homosexuality, gay men and lesbians had natural law on their side, he decided.Footnote ²² McIlvenna repudiated national public opinion in favor of the humanity he found on the streets.

McIlvenna also discovered the hostility many gay men and lesbians felt toward organized religion. He made contact with the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) and the Daughters of Bilitis, homosexual rights organizations that stunned the San Francisco Methodists with their rage toward the church. The president of the Daughters of Bilitis said she had to dismiss organized religion to retain her sanity. Lesbians and gays with a strong church background faced such cruel rejection that some turned to suicide. This point of view upset the progressive Methodist clergy in San Francisco, who saw their church as dedicated to humanity and uplift. “A mind-blowing experience,” Moore remembered later. To heal the anger against the church, McIlvenna and other clergy organized workshops or “consultations” attended by equal numbers of straight men and women and gays and lesbians. Glide Foundation published a pamphlet detailing the first “consultation.” San Francisco Methodists organized the landmark Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH).Footnote ²³ Among northern California clergy, McIlvenna eventually became something of an outcast for his openness to sexuality (he published explicit books about sexFootnote ²⁴), whereas the more conventional Moore carried what he learned from McIlvenna's “consultations” to the larger society of clergy. “John,” Robert Moon, a leading minister among northern California Methodists, told Moore at the end of his Glide tenure, “you went to Glide to help all of us come to a new understanding of homosexuality.”Footnote ²⁵

Nationally, the public was not ready for such a “new understanding.” Inevitably a conservative backlash formed against the kind of progressive accommodation to sexuality that Moore and McIlvenna advocated. By 1967, forces within Methodism had begun to organize for a sterner enforcement of church law as a reflection of the natural law found in the Bible that they hoped would one day turn their minority of true believers into a majority. In that year, Charles W. Keysor (1925–1985), the one-time editor of Kiwanis Magazine who found Christ in a 1959 Billy Graham crusade, launched Good News magazine as a voice for evangelical conservative Methodists, which he saw as a small group within the church abhorred by Methodist “officialdom.” At this point, Keysor claimed support from only a “silent minority” of public opinion, a phrase that foreshadowed President Richard Nixon's appeal for support from “a great silent majority” in a speech he would deliver on November 3, 1969, after months of thinking about how to create a “new majority,” and some months after Kevin Phillips had published The Emerging Republican Majority, “that statistical Bible of the Nixon Administration” according to Tom Wicker. Nixon felt beleaguered by an intolerant liberal popular culture, as did Keysor. To Keysor, the need for a conservative voice became more urgent when he saw clamorous young men attending the 1968 General Conference, youth who “seemed to have drifted up out of the counter-culture,” to jeer traditional Methodist values, including temperance. The problem went beyond a few rowdy youngsters, Keysor believed; the 1960s counterculture had poisoned the top echelons of the whole denomination, taking it too far to the left. Good News announced its intentions to promote evangelical thought and action and a life of faith based on the Scripture. Although Keysor began by thinking of conservatives as a silent minority, one entirely unrepresented in “the higher councils of the church,” he had confidence in their potential power. It was hard to know how many orthodox believers called themselves Methodist, he mused in 1966, but “probably there are quite a few.”Footnote ²⁶

Converting church law into an instrument on behalf of evangelical thought based on scripture was a political process designed to shift public opinion that took decades. An important turning point came in 1968. Like the larger society, United Methodists organized the formal apparatus of their church into judicial, executive, and legislative branches with a national structure, headquartered in Nashville, supervising state-like bodies called “annual conferences.” The United Methodist executive is a committee of bishops, headed by a “president,” called the “Council of Bishops,” but no bishop outranks another bishop. The United Methodists' judiciary, called the Judicial Council, wields more authority than the bishops, but does not establish precedents that govern church trials. Unlike secular courts, the Judicial Council can issue advisory opinions and meets as the United Methodist legislature meets, ready to answer questions and offer opinions as the lawmakers debate proposed bills. The United Methodists' version of Congress is the General Conference. Meeting quadrennially, in presidential election years, the General Conference sets “the main course for the church” and defines and fixes ministers' “powers and duties.” For the vast majority of lay Methodists and many clergy, their pronouncements are advisory, often unknown, and largely irrelevant in their day-to-day lives. Most of the work of enforcing laws passed in General Conference falls to the annual conferences, collections of churches spread over entire states or parts of states supervised by district superintendents answerable to bishops.Footnote ²⁷

Nineteen sixty-eight was the year the Methodist Church joined with the Evangelical United Brethren to form the UMC, prompting many United Methodist leaders to think that the new alliance called for a reconsideration of their core principles and beliefs.Footnote ²⁸ The 1968 Methodist General Conference created the Social Principles Commission, chaired by Bishop James S. Thomas, which would rewrite the 1908 Social Creed, a social gospel document urging justice for children, women, and laboring people. As the commissioners debated what to include in the Social Principles, holding hearings and commissioning research papers, homosexuals increasingly pressed for their civil rights. In 1968, Troy D. Perry launched the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Church in his Los Angeles home with a congregation of twelve people. A native of Florida, Perry grew up in the Pentecostal tradition and had started preaching in the charismatic style at age 13. He tried to suppress his homosexuality and when he found he could not do that, gave up preaching for a time, but by 1968 he was ready to organize a church for homosexuals. Perry created not just a single church, but a denomination. Within months, the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches began organizing in other cities.Footnote ²⁹

Perry helped make same-sex marriage an issue the United Methodists could not ignore. Gays and lesbians had been living as couples and considering themselves “married” for many years—there had been elaborate homosexual marriage ceremonies as early as the 1920s in Harlem—but shortly after the United Methodist commission began its negotiations, homosexual couples began new efforts for formal recognition of their relationships. In 1970, Minnesota authorities fired a university librarian named Mike McConnell from his job after he publicly applied for a marriage license to marry another man, Jack Baker (their union would be blessed by a United Methodist minister). Two months later, two women sought a marriage license from the county clerk in Louisville, Kentucky. Then other gay and lesbian pairs demanded marriage licenses in Tampa, Hartford, Chicago, and Milwaukee. McConnell and Baker's case received the most attention; they sued in federal court. To no avail; the Eighth Circuit called their application for a marriage license an “antic” and approved McConnell's firing as reasonable.Footnote ³⁰ Although some disdained the whole idea of marriage, these setbacks did not deter large numbers of gays and lesbians determined to win community sanction for partnerships. In 1971, a United Methodist toured New York City gay and lesbian gathering places, confronted gay liberation, and reported back to his fellow United Methodists that “the prospect of homosexual marriage is growing in the gay liberation movement.”Footnote ³¹

That same year, New York newspapers reported that gay men and lesbian women regularly wed in the Church of the Beloved Discipline. Father Robert Clement told a New York Post reporter that he had performed over twenty holy unions for gay men and lesbians. In San Francisco, Glide Memorial Church performed so many holy unions after John V. Moore left that the local newspaper headlined its story, “Gay Nuptial Rites Get to be Routine.” Metropolitan Community churches, and other independent churches, also performed same-sex wedding ceremonies. In 1972 Troy Perry reported that he “regularly” performed holy unions. The Metropolitan Community Church minister in San Francisco performed four a day, according to his church's newsletter. Perry and his fellows counseled couples wanting their unions blessed much as churches traditionally counseled heterosexual couples seeking marriage. Perry also provided for “divorces” when the unions failed.Footnote ³²

Their working papers no longer survive, but there is little evidence that the United Methodist commissioners attempted to measure public approval of homosexuality, although they apparently understood that their denomination would not approve unions between same- sex couples. Instead, the commissioners considered whether homosexuals chose their orientation, responding to the increasingly sexualized popular culture, or if their sexuality came from nature, or God, putting them in the category of innocent victims of majority prejudice not unlike African Americans or women. Members of the commission most sympathetic to the second position seemed to have science on their side. The most dramatic evidence for biological determinism had come from the New York psychiatrist Franz Kallmann in 1952. Kallmann studied identical and fraternal twins of gay and bisexual men, finding that of thirty identical (monozygotic) twins, twenty-five fell at the far end of Kinsey's scale of sexual orientation. Fraternal twins were less likely to share the same sexual orientation. Genetics seemed decisive. Commission member Melvin Talbert remembers researching the science of sexual orientation before settling on biological determinism. Discrimination against something determined in nature was plainly wrong; science seemingly furnished a sturdy foundation for gay rights. In 1970, however, researchers attacked Kallmann's research methods as unsound. David Rosenthal, chief of the laboratory of psychology at the National Institute for Mental Health, concluded that homosexuality was “a serious abnormality that probably arises from a combination of unfortunate genetic propensities and a warped psychosexual rearing environment.” Talbert remembered this as a setback, the “medical community came out with their findings and it blew our plan to shreds.” The commission nonetheless forged ahead with its plan to defend homosexuals' civil rights, but it had lost an important weapon from its arsenal.Footnote ³³

Some leading United Methodists worried that the commission had made a mistake by neglecting public opinion. This became particularly clear to the commission in 1971, when the members shared their thinking with the Council of Bishops at a meeting in Des Moines, Iowa. Hearing what the commissioners wanted to do, the bishops expressed alarm: “we reject the assumption that homosexuality can be accepted as normative in the Christian community on the same level with the male-female relationship.” The bishops certainly knew that conservatives critical of overly liberal Methodist bureaucrats had become a force in their denomination, but they also made a judgment about what ordinary United Methodists would accept. Despite the bishops' warning, the commission forged ahead. “We went through a long struggle,” Talbert remembered later, “and thought we had the answer.” The commission presented its draft Social Principles to the 1972 General Conference, meeting in Dallas.Footnote ³⁴

In Dallas, their work directly confronted rank-and-file United Methodists, including lay members, ordinary worshippers. At first, however, things went well. The commission's draft first went to a legislative committee where it got a friendly review. Robert W. Moon, the minister in the California–Nevada Annual Conference who had once thanked John V. Moore for educating him about homosexuality, headed the subcommittee that reviewed and then embraced the commission's draft language on sexuality. Moon had a long association with progressive issues, beginning in World War II, when he had objected to the War on moral grounds. In the McCarthy era, the California legislature had enacted legislation requiring every pastor in the state to take a loyalty oath. One Methodist minister defied the law and fought the issue to victory in the United States Supreme Court: Moon. Now, he brought his progressive thinking to the issue of homosexuality. Moon was no Methodist bureaucrat. He had spent his entire career in pulpits around the Bay Area and he had been progressive long before the 1960s, but his thinking in 1972 represented the church hierarchy's move to the left during the late 1960s and early 1970s, partly in response to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.Footnote ³⁵

The draft Moon brought to the floor described homosexuals as persons of sacred worth entitled to their civil rights. Moon explained later that he wanted his church to denounce employment discrimination against homosexuals; that was the civil right he had in mind, the one he understood as most threatened, and no doubt the one most likely to attract sympathy from middle-class United Methodist General Conference delegates. He did not dare broach marriage.Footnote ³⁶

Although United Methodist leaders like Moon reflected progressive thinking that characterized many at the top of the church hierarchy, it did not represent the thinking of most rank-and-file United Methodists as represented by the 1000 delegates attending the General Conference, half of whom were not ministers but rather lay members of the church.Footnote ³⁷ When Moon presented the commission's handiwork to the General Conference, objections immediately boiled up from the laity on the floor. Challenging Moon first was Russell Kibler of the South Indiana Annual Conference. He began by asking what Moon and his colleagues meant by the language insuring human and civil rights for homosexuals. Kibler asked, “My question is, what do we mean by this?” Moon made his argument that homosexuals sometimes lost their jobs, once their sexual orientation became known. “This seems unjust,” Moon concluded. Kibler did not answer Moon directly, but he certainly thought homosexuals should lose their jobs, at least in some instances. To him, homosexuals were criminals. He made an emotional argument, telling the delegates that “if this in any way gives them a license to continue in their activities of preying upon the young men of our community, I want it eliminated.” To support this demand he said the church should not “license” homosexuals “to take a 14-year-old boy, as happened…as he was delivering his papers. Two days later they found his body in an isolated place, murdered.”Footnote ³⁸ As for the sentence urging protection of homosexuals' civil rights, Kibler said, “I want it stricken out of here.” Other lay delegates followed Kibler to make similar arguments. Carlton Dodge of Pennsylvania did not want the church to “accommodate all kinds of immorality and lawlessness.” Too many youth—including small children—had been victimized by homosexuals, Dodge orated, echoing Kibler.Footnote ³⁹ Kenneth Cooper of the Alabama–West Florida Conference had been a state prosecutor for 20 years, “and I saw some of the results of what homosexuals do to young boys.” He continued, “Sure, the Church wants to take everybody in. But…I have a twelve year old boy and I have problems—I'm worried what I would do if a homosexual violated my young son.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Charles W. Hancock demanded to know if Moon and his committee believed homosexuality to be “normal and acceptable?” To answer that question, Moon chose his words carefully: “I have a feeling that the General Conference would not want to say that.” Moon countered Dodge and Cooper by observing that heterosexuals sometimes kidnapped young girls. The evidence suggested that heterosexuals might be more prone to violence against girls than were homosexuals against boys, he said.Footnote ⁴¹

Efforts to delete the sentence supporting civil rights for homosexuals failed and that language remains in the United Methodists' Social Principles today. Don J. Hand of Southwest Texas, an attorney and lay delegate, then proposed adding a sentence saying “we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian doctrine.” The Bible does not approve homosexuality, he said, adding, “our experience in history has shown that it is something that should not be encouraged for it has proved that it does nothing for the good of humanity to have homosexuality…” Hammell P. Shipps of Southern New Jersey wanted the General Conference to resolve that the Bible condemns homosexuality. Homosexuality, Shipps asserted, “is a reversion to paganism.” While both Hand and Shipps argued—for the first time at the Conference—that homosexuality violated Biblical teachings, both preferred talking about the homosexuals' supposed innate criminality. “Do you want a homosexual leading your Boy Scouts?” Shipps demanded.Footnote ⁴²

Both Hand and Shipps actually intended their condemnation of homosexuality as a compromise. Unlike Kibler's faction, they did not suggest removing from the Social Principles support for homosexuals' civil rights. “Christ died for the homosexuals as well as for any other sinner,” Shipps said, but then added, “His grace can redeem and change the homosexual.”Footnote ⁴³ Although they did not push to eliminate the civil rights language, they did agree with the fundamental beliefs held by the faction trying to remove protection for homosexuals' civil rights: homosexuality was a malady, albeit one that could be remedied. After this discussion, Hand's amendment passed and became part of the United Methodists' Social Principles, where it remains to this day.

When lay delegates to the General Conference spontaneously objected to their leadership's efforts to protect homosexuals' civil rights, conservatives felt vindicated. They had confirmed “Classical Christian teaching…that the whole community of faith is being guided by the Holy Spirit into all truth amid the hazards of history.”Footnote ⁴⁴ They had public opinion on their side.

Challenges to this consensus came from homosexual writers asserting biblical principles calling for inclusion. In a 1976 book entitled The Church and the Homosexual, the gay Catholic priest John McNeill called on churches to include homosexuals, an appeal read by many, including Virginia Mollenkott, a Christian fundamentalist educated at Bob Jones University and a lesbian. McNeill's book initiated Mollenkott to the whole idea of civil rights for homosexuals. Two years later Mollenkott, joined by Letha Scanzoni, continued and expanded McNeill's argument in their own book, Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Footnote ⁴⁵ Mollenkott and Scanzoni turned the traditional Bible-based argument of the sort often used to discriminate against gays and lesbians on its head. The Bible, they said, required inclusion and not exclusion, repeatedly calling on every Christian to “Love thy neighbor.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Inclusion did not mean accepting “brief, barren assignations.” Scanzoni and Mollenkott wanted to bring gay men and lesbians under church law, under the Christian ethic. Scanzoni and Mollenkott thought gay marriages should have the same moral sanction afforded to traditional marriage, with promiscuity bearing the same onus for gay persons as for straight persons. Their evident distaste for the “‘do your own thing’ crowd”Footnote ⁴⁷ challenged some gay men. To many gay men and lesbians, the idea that Christians could be their allies rather than their enemies came out of left field, bizarre and unexpected. The Boston Gay Community News headlined its skeptical review “Is the Christian My Neighbor?” Its reviewer wondered if Christianity and a gay lifestyle really could be reconciled.Footnote ⁴⁸

Organized efforts to campaign for public opinion on behalf of gay rights could not easily capitalize on Mollenkott and Scanzoni's book. Gay men and lesbians formed a lobbying organization they initially called the United Methodist Gay Caucus, later Gay United Methodists, and ultimately Affirmation. By whatever name, the caucus at first gained a reputation for disorderly ineffectiveness. In 1975, a United Methodist bureaucrat dismissed the Gay Caucus as “a special interest sideshow” unable to “even get a mailing list together.” The criticism stung. Privately, one gay organizer complained that “Somehow people do not seem to be able to remember or communicate that the sloppy administration, ineffective organizing, and bad political strategy is centered around a lack of resources and no availability to the power structures that exist.” In 1980, a student at Boston University School of Theology, Mark Bowman, went to General Conference eager to meet Affirmation's national leadership. Bowman had gone to that conference hopeful that the church would reverse its stand against homosexuality, knowing that dissidents had prepared numerous petitions calling on the church to change course, and he knew that Affirmation planned a vigorous lobbying campaign. “I had this image of Affirmation being this huge monolithic group…a huge, powerful group within the church.” Bowman remembers being “giddy” with optimism only to find that Affirmation was “this motley crew” of thirty people, with only two that were “real church people.” By contrast, Good News spent more than $50,000 lobbying the conference, sent sixty-five lobbyists, prepared seventeen position papers, and mailed 14,000 petition packets in advance. At the 1980 meeting, every attempt to liberalize United Methodist rules went down to crashing defeat, and Bowman never again expected so much from the United Methodist legislative process. To Bowman, public opinion had proven itself a dauntingly powerful enemy, at least nationally. Working inside Affirmation, he began in 1984 to form a grassroots organizing effort that would not depend upon legislation, the Reconciling Congregations Program.Footnote ⁴⁹

Ironically, members of the Good News movement came away from the 1980 meeting just as unhappy as Bowman. “We left feeling we'd been hit by a truck,” one said later, regretting that they had not been able to do more than resist further advances by the liberal side. Keysor left the UMC for good, but others took up where he left off, and unlike Bowman, remained confident that they would one day win a majority to their cause. They wanted to get control of lawmaking and law enforcement and compel tighter discipline, “stricter standards” of the sort supported by 77% of Good News members, according to polling. Pluralism was an affront to the Bible, they said; the church needed a more Bible-based theology less tolerant of dissent.Footnote ⁵⁰ By 1980, they had a model for effective organizing: Richard Viguerie, master of direct mail appeals since the 1960s and the New Right's chief fundraiser by the mid-1970s. Viguerie made the notion of changing the law by rallying a majority behind social conservatism seem plausible. In 1980, the New York Times described Viguerie as “a central figure” in conservatives' success in mobilizing ordinary people into a populist revolt against 1960s social values. Viguerie told journalists he fought for family, religion, and home, a message he confidently felt would work politically.Footnote ⁵¹

Other events in 1980 boosted religious conservatives. The election of Ronald Reagan on November 4, 1980, promised a return to conservative values, including religious ones. Writing in the New York Times, Dorothy Samuels saw in Reagan's election “political upheaval” that would “provide fresh impetus for laws embodying the so-called Christian bill of rights of the new evangelical and anti-civil liberties movement, including measures supporting … discrimination against homosexuals.”Footnote ⁵² Not long after Reagan took office, medical science boosted his conservative cause when doctors in the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognized AIDS after finding purplish nodules on the skin and other organs of young homosexual men. This was Kaposi's sarcoma, and a host of other cancers and infections followed. Fear coursed through American society. In Oklahoma one UMC minister sat down to eat at a church supper where a gay member had helped prepare the meal. “Should we eat his food?” one person asked. Some churches expelled gay members and families expelled gay children. In Oklahoma City most ministers refused to minister to sick and dying AIDS patients or conduct their funerals.Footnote ⁵³ At exactly the moment when Americans had elected their first truly conservative president since the 1920s, a frightening disease seemingly validated their choice by striking at the immorality encouraged by the so-called sexual revolution that had coincided with the presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Reagan, at a time when AIDS seemingly revealed the uglier excesses of the sexual revolution, put together public support for a more conservative view of Americanism. Reagan's election encouraged his followers to more boldly use populist rhetoric to support their programs. In 1984, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan confidently predicted on CNN's Crossfire program that gay rights had become an “albatross” for Democrats.Footnote ⁵⁴

The UMC General Conferences closely tracked the resurgence of conservatism in the wider culture. After 1972, conservative United Methodists dominated every General Conference, winning vote after vote on homosexuality. In 1976, the conservatives had persuaded the General Conference to add language to the Book of Discipline forbidding the use of church money “to promote the acceptance of homosexuality.” Four years later, the General Conference voted to forbid ordination of any self-avowed homosexual. In 1984, the General Conference strengthened its rules against homosexual clergy. In 1988, the conservatives beat back, by a lopsided margin, efforts to remove the Book of Discipline's discriminatory language.Footnote ⁵⁵

Working outside that kind of high level politics, with his hopes of legislative accomplishment dashed and public opinion against him, Bowman sought a middle ground between the most ardent advocates of homosexual rights and their conservative opposition. He made sophisticated use of the inclusion argument. Disenchanted with the General Conference's legislative process and convinced that change came from the bottom up, Bowman planned to exploit the decentralized nature of Methodism by recruiting individual congregations willing to dedicate themselves to openness. To accomplish this, he intended to borrow techniques associated with Liberation Theology. Schooled at Boston University's School of Theology, Bowman found liberation theology through Paulo Freire's book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and learned community organizing as a youth on Cleveland's Near West Side. Freire admired Fidel Castro as an exemplar of his bottom-up approach, and insisted oppressed peoples had to “de-ideologize,” challenging “circles of certainty” to better themselves. Liberation Theology had its organizational roots in Catholic Action, a program that began as an effort to ameliorate the adverse social consequences of European industrialization. It went to South America where brutalizing poverty radicalized young priests, much to the consternation of their older and more conservative bishops. Absorbing elements of Marxist ideology, as well as Freire's teachings, they worked with small communities of worshippers called Christian base communities. Several writers associated gay liberation with liberation theology, including George R. Edwards, Robin Scroggs, and Chris Glaser. Bowman thought that a less radical version of liberation theology could work for American Methodists.Footnote ⁵⁶

To better achieve his goals, Bowman did not ask churches to endorse gay rights, but instead simply to welcome all kinds of people to their services, including homosexuals. On the last day of the 1984 General Conference, Bowman led a handful of Affirmation members to the Baltimore Civic Center where they passed out leaflets inviting delegates to go home and ask their congregations to make a statement that they welcomed homosexuals to their worship services. Though the idea was similar, they would not be called Christian base communities, but Reconciling Congregations. “It was totally an act of faith,” Bowman said later, “we had no idea if any church would ever respond.”Footnote ⁵⁷ A Methodist church in Fresno, California, led by Don Fado, was the first to join, quickly followed by a church in New York City. By the end of 1984, eight churches had become Reconciling Congregations. That number grew to fifteen in 1985, to nineteen the year after that, and to thirty the year after that.Footnote ⁵⁸

Although Bowman himself feared that pressing clergy to formally recognize same-sex couples might inflame opposition to gay rights, Reconciling nonetheless encouraged some Methodists to think in those terms. By the 1980s, the ranks of clergy seeking a way to publicly endorse individuals seeking to celebrate their love had swelled. They did so in ceremonies sometimes called “holy covenants,” or “covenant ceremonies,” but that came to be called “holy unions.” The earliest ceremonies occurred quietly with little press attention. In 1986, a researcher surveyed Protestant clergy in the Seattle area and found that 4% in ten denominations admitted to performing holy unions. These clergy did not consider themselves pioneers, sought no publicity, and performed this ministry “under the radar,” little noticed by the press. When their supervisors knew what they were doing, they very often did not object. One minister remembered attending a holy union at this time with seventeen UMC clergy attending with their bishop. At least one minister (and future bishop) consulted his bishop and the two worked together to revise the UMC marriage ritual to fit same-sex couples. Two divergent understandings of marriage had taken hold among clergy. Most believed the church had to confine itself to marriages sanctioned by the state but that the church had a greater interest in the quality of the relationship than did the state. By 1989, however, a minority of ministers saw their role as affirming what happened in nature and doubted that the church should confine itself to marriages sanctioned by the state. The state, these ministers said, naturally tended toward the majority view. The church should recognize couples with relationships despised by the majority, if the quality of those relationships seemed sound. This was the position taken by Troy Perry and his followers in the Metropolitan Community Church; they developed standards of fidelity for the same-sex partnerships they recognized.Footnote ⁵⁹

Some of the clergy celebrating same-sex unions resented state laws that forced them to call their services holy unions instead of marriages. Kathy McCallie encountered her first holy union in 1985 or 1986, while she attended seminary in Dallas. McCallie remembers bridling a little at the term “holy union”: “We certainly thought of it as a marriage…I don't want to use a different term, make it kind of like a second-class thing.” McCallie recalls, “I think we called it a holy union, but maybe marriage interchangeably.” The ceremony took place in a small Presbyterian church and attracted no press attention. Thereafter, McCallie herself performed so many holy unions in Oklahoma City that she lost count of the number.Footnote ⁶⁰

In Tulsa, Leslie Penrose founded a “base community” dedicated to justice and compassion where she performed holy unions. Her bishop, Dan Solomon, had been introduced to base communities on a trip to Brazil where he worshipped in a base community, leading him to read Liberation Theology. This seemed a useful approach to the alienated populations in Oklahoma's cities. To his cabinet, Solomon brought the idea of forming a base community in either Tulsa or Oklahoma City. After a district superintendent observed that Penrose had just returned from Nicaragua and her own encounter with base communities, Solomon arranged a meeting to discuss setting up one in Tulsa. The idea was to minister to the “least, lost and excluded,” and be open to all races with an acceptance of gays, straights, the poor, and the homeless. Solomon hoped, as he put it later, “to create an awareness of and an appreciation for the importance of this ministry as an expression of Christ's welcoming love.” Solomon and Penrose have different memories about the role that holy unions played in this new ministry. Penrose remembers reviewing the ritual she designed with her bishop; Solomon remembers having no knowledge of her performing holy unions at all. “If I had had direct knowledge that she was performing holy union services, I would have had to uphold my vows and adhere to the law of the church.”Footnote ⁶¹

Other ministers performed holy unions, sometimes with the support of their supervisors. On December 16, 1986, University United Methodist Church in Madison, Wisconsin, considered the question, “Shall University Church offer a service of celebration for lesbian and gay relationships?” The answer was yes, and the United Methodist leadership in Wisconsin agreed that such services violated no church law and could be allowed. In 1990, one Washington, D.C. congregation declared “The elements of a holy union are basically the same as any service of marriage” (emphasis in original.). As the United Methodist leadership in Wisconsin candidly explained, the term “holy union” was a substitute for marriage. “Holy” implies God's sanction; “union” implies marriage.Footnote ⁶²

Conservatives organized against the Reconciling Congregation Program. One of their leaders was California clergyman Robert Kuyper. By his own account, Kuyper came to oppose the Reconciling Congregation Program only after he rejected the sexual revolution. In the 1960s, Kuyper heard Ted McIlvenna speak and “I agreed with him. And was pro-gay.” A product of the South, Kuyper recalls when he first sat in a theater with African Americans. It made him nervous, but he could laugh about it later: “That didn't hurt us at all,” one of his companions observed and Kuyper knew exactly what she meant. Basic social structures seemed undermined, and yet “The world didn't blow up.” Finding that such a basic and accepted societal imperative had been wrong all along raised questions about other rules, including rules about sex. Open marriage seemed reasonable; Kuyper attended a retreat where a UMC minister talked of living in a commune where he and his wife had sex with other people. However, Kuyper came to repudiate the sexual revolution. According to his account, his journey began with one of his first appointments in youth education. “We tried doing some sex education…and discovered that [the] sex education we were doing was pretty tame because some of the kids were way beyond us.” Kuyper found out later that one of the high school girls had moved in with an adult man. So much sexuality hurt children, Kuyper realized. For one thing, it led to divorce, and children suffered when their parents divorced. Clergy friends got divorced. Kuyper tells of encountering former homosexuals and hearing their stories about how homosexuality is “not everything it's cracked up to be.” In Chicago, Kuyper heard a former lesbian talk about her experiences converting from homosexuality in 1988, a message that inspired Kuyper. This, he thought, was a “much needed ministry.” Kuyper, based in northern California, quickly made connections with Good News, which donated $10,000 to the cause. Kuyper raised $20,000 from other sources. Homosexuality, Kuyper believed, was a sin and he wanted to help homosexuals escape their sin. “We do not help the debate by framing it in the issues of civil rights,” he told an interviewer. Like other conservatives, Kuyper understood the problem as a basic failure of the church, which had drifted away a clear stance against homosexuality as sin. As one close student of the Transforming Congregation Program has written, it believed society had mistakenly shifted from seeing homosexuality in moral terms, as a wrong, to seeing it in terms of rights. Kuyper and his supporters blamed the gay rights movement for encouraging this shift when its members left the closet to demand their rights.Footnote ⁶³ Conservatives saw this transition as a real tragedy. By setting the context for the struggle, public opinion largely determined homosexuals' success at winning “freedom” from their sin. From the conservative perspective, the chances for those homosexuals silently struggling to achieve heterosexuality depended on separating them from their gay support network and surrounding them with caring Christians. Winning homosexuals to heterosexuality, Kuyper believed, was much like breaking alcoholics' addiction to alcohol.Footnote ⁶⁴

Conservatives' efforts at winning the public relations battle began clearly bearing fruit by the end of the 1980s. After 1990, United Methodist bishops became less tolerant of same-sex union ceremonies, a shift that happened after journalists discovered the phenomenon. A May 18, 1990, article in a Wisconsin newspaper on holy unions initiated angry calls and letters to the bishop and district superintendent. Six days later, the bishop and his cabinet met and said the services must be discontinued.Footnote ⁶⁵ Some in the press thought that they had found mainline Protestant ministers marrying homosexuals. At the Associated Press, editors privately complained to reporter Martha Irvine that her use of the term “holy union” sounded “jargony”: “It's a wedding,” they said.Footnote ⁶⁶ The term “holy union,” which had once seemed perhaps not strong enough, not close enough to marriage, now seemed too provocative. After the story broke, the United Methodist leadership in Wisconsin backtracked, calling the term “holy union” inflammatory, it declared that the December 16, 1986 resolution had sanctioned only “Services of Celebration,” not “holy unions.” Changing the nomenclature to “holy union” justified terminating the practice of celebrating same-sex couples, the Wisconsin leadership decided in 1990. Other bishops agreed, and issued orders forbidding the practice.Footnote ⁶⁷

Public opinion shifted further away from same-sex rights after the 1992 election cycle. Bill Clinton exacerbated the already-simmering controversy when he clumsily tried to increase toleration for homosexuals in uniform willing to hide their sexuality with his “Don't ask, don't tell” policy. Where Clinton sought toleration and acceptance, the Republicans saw an opportunity to advance themselves politically, and raised the issue early and often, tagging the president with an unpopular cause. The Democrats lost the next election cycle after Clinton announced his policy. Inside the church, the conservative movement drew renewed strength from secular conservatives' success, organizing the Confessing Movement to call on bishops to assert doctrinal teaching authority. The Confessing Movement took aim at the Reconciling Congregations movement when it blasted “teachings and practices that misuse principles of inclusiveness and tolerance.” Some attributed their power to widespread concerns that feminism and agitation for gay rights threatened traditional gender roles.Footnote ⁶⁸

Such changes in public opinion strengthened the conservatives' hand at General Conference. At the 1996 General Conference, conservatives and progressive United Methodists clashed over the Social Principles, a battleground the conservatives chose. Probably they went to the Social Principles because that was where the church had taken its stand on sexuality and gay rights in 1972. Much of the language in the Social Principles was progressive and discretionary rather than mandatory. The Principles regretted, but no longer condemned, divorce. The Principles endorsed the “sanctity of unborn human life” but this made the church only “reluctant” rather than unwilling to approve abortion, because “we are equally bound to respect…the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from an unacceptable pregnancy.” Every person had a right to die with dignity, the Principles said, “without efforts to prolong terminal illnesses.” None of this language was mandatory.Footnote ⁶⁹

To this optional and discretionary language, conservatives wanted to add a rule carrying the command of law, a prospect that threatened ministries serving congregations with a prominent and explicit gay presence. Gregory Dell, a Chicago minister, pleaded with his fellow United Methodists to permit him to continue his ministry with the homosexual members of his congregation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Some delegates questioned whether they could put a chargeable offense into the Social Principles. Philip Wogaman called the Social Principles only a teaching tool, not a juridical document. “I doubt there's anybody in this room who fully agrees with everything in all the Social Principles,” he said.Footnote ⁷¹ Despite such arguments, the conservatives easily won every vote in 1996, as they had in other years. The United Methodists put protections for “former homosexuals” in the Book of Discipline, refused to acknowledge that the church disagreed over the question of homosexuality, and forbid clergy to perform same-sex unions. This rule became known as 65C, for the paragraph in the Social Principles where it appeared.Footnote ⁷²

That the church would so decisively follow public opinion came as a blow to those United Methodist clergy dedicated to equal rights, but equally committed to their church as a democratic institution. One revealing source for this reaction to the 1996 General Conference is the memory of Elane O'Rourke. O'Rourke came to the United Methodist denomination late in life, by attending San Francisco's Glide Church, and, therefore, considered herself something of an outsider, even as she studied at Berkeley's Pacific School of Religion to become a United Methodist minister. “What I remember more than anything,” she recalled later, “was watching it from a distance and watching my pastoral friends who I knew had a vested interest in the outcome.” O'Rourke knew that some gays and lesbians served as clergy and for them, the ruling insulted their calling to the church. But the 1996 General Conference pained the majority of clergy in northern California. Many lifelong Methodists, deeply attached to the church as an institution, believed in the fundamental equality of humanity, “and so really felt the tension of that,” O'Rourke remembered. “There was a just a lot of sadness and pain around it. And anger.”Footnote ⁷³

The anger was not confined to northern California. In Oklahoma City, Kathy McCallie had come to Epworth United Methodist Church in June 1995, attracting attention for her willingness to welcome gay men and lesbians to her services. One hundred new members joined the first year and another hundred the next. Oklahoma clergy buzzed about McCallie's success. It was “a very heady, exciting, happy time,” she remembered later. “It was seen as this wonderful thing in the gay community, that there could be this mainline church where people could go.” Epworth completely supported holy unions, seeing holy unions as its mission. Of the 1996 ban on holy unions, McCallie says, “I didn't see it coming” and felt “devastated” by it. “Here I am pastoring this group of people [and] they're saying to me, you mean there's really a church where we can be? Where we can be equal members? I was saying, yes!” The new rule came like lightning, “because [Epworth] turned out not to be a safe place at all.” McCallie recalls being summoned by her bishop, Bruce Blake, to a meeting where he gave her three choices: promise to quit performing holy unions, resign, or go on trial. According to McCallie, the bishop warned that if she chose trial, “I will appoint the people on the trial [court], and you will lose.” McCallie's district superintendent attended the meeting and confirms McCallie's memory as basically correct although he remembers the threat as more subtle than direct. But he understood the threat: “I told her – I said, I'm not ready to end my association with the Methodist Church over this issue but if you want to have a trial, I would be happy to stand with you to bring the issue to the attention of the church in Oklahoma and maybe to the larger church.” McCallie remembers him saying, “if there is a trial, it'll be a big, huge, precedent setting thing” and asking, “do you want to be that trial?” McCallie had been in conversation with a network of other ministers performing holy unions in New York, Texas, and elsewhere. This network of friends had worried about the possibility of a trial, knowing that a conviction would set a precedent. Friends in her church nonetheless urged McCallie to stay and fight. Divorced and in the midst of coming to terms with her bisexuality, McCallie decided she would not be the ideal person to take on the church's rule. She resigned.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Tulsa, Leslie Penrose lived through similarly stressful times. Another minister drily remembered later that she “took a lot of flak.” At the time she wrote of her rage at the silent majority and frustration with the Methodist structure. The pain came at very personal level too: 43 members died in the first 4 years of her ministry; approximately 90 attended services in 1998. Pressure came from Bishop Blake as well. She reflected, “we have been confronted with and asked to explain or justify our ‘unacceptableness,’ subtly threatened with unknown consequences and then ‘allowed’ to stay until the next outbreak of fear causes the same thing again.” Penrose and her congregation worried about charges for at least 2 years; some members put off or cancelled their holy unions for fear their minister might be put on trial. After a television station broadcast one of the holy unions she had conducted, Penrose remembers receiving the same three choices as McCallie. She too was not prepared to go through a trial and resigned.Footnote ⁷⁵

In North Carolina the Reverend Jimmy Creech was prepared to go on trial. He objected to the 1996 ban because he had come to equate “heterosexism” with racism. He had heard his own father, “a good, honest, and kind person” blame Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964, for their own deaths, “it was their fault; they shouldn't have meddled.” Creech remembers being shocked by this, calling it “a sobering wake-up call.” Good people could do evil by accepting what they thought was the will of God. Good people who resist change can support evil, sometimes by remaining silent. Creech found support in the Bible for his commitment to inclusion. Paul had proclaimed “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” Paul continued, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer enslaved or free, there is no longer male and female, for you are one in Christ Jesus.” Creech decided he could not be faithful to Christ unless he denounced heterosexism.Footnote ⁷⁶

Ousted from his church in North Carolina, Creech happily moved to the leading UMC church in Nebraska, satisfied that he could once again lead a church and do so already well known as a supporter of gay and lesbian rights. Creech later described Omaha's First Methodist Church as the flagship of Nebraska Methodism, a church of 1900 members moving toward inclusion. Some members disagreed with that assessment and insisted that most members rejected the kind of inclusion Creech favored. Creech's sympathy for gay and lesbian rights made his bishop uneasy. In April 1997, Bishop Joel Nestali Martinez asked Creech to alert him if he planned to celebrate a same-sex union. According to Creech, Martinez displayed uncertainty, saying “I don't know what I will do, I don't know where I am on this issue.” In July two women in his congregation asked him to celebrate their union and he agreed to do so, setting the date for September. On September 1, Bishop Martinez telephoned. Creech remembers him as “very collegial and respectful” but that because of the Book of Discipline he would have to forbid the ceremony. Creech answered that he could not say no to the couple, and explained that he considered the prohibition unjust. Subsequently, Martinez sent Creech a letter formally instructing him not to preside over the ceremony. On September 14, Creech celebrated the two women's union; 2 days later the Reverend Glenn Loy of the First United Methodist Church in Ogallala, Nebraska, filed a judicial complaint against him; in January the Committee on Investigation referred the complaint to a church trial to be prosecuted as a chargeable offense.Footnote ⁷⁷

Bishop Leroy Hodapp (1923–2006), retired as bishop in Indiana and Illinois, presided over Jimmy Creech's trial beginning March 12, 1998. Hodapp had no law degree and had never practiced law, but attorney Stanley C. Goodwin served as his advisor and Hodapp conducted Creech's trial in ways that resembled a secular trial. Both sides made motions before the proceedings began and the trial started with jury selection, although in a church trial the jury is not called a “jury” but rather a “trial court” (despite this, Methodists routinely refer to trial courts as juries in conversation and writing). Hodapp started with a trial court pool of thirty-five ministers, selected by Martinez's cabinet. Each potential member of the trial court received a number, ranging from 1 to 35, by drawing numbers from a hat. The two sides questioned them for 2 hours in open court. Creech's counsel asked them to describe relationships with relatives or friends who were homosexuals. By Hodapp's count, twenty of the thirty-five responded with statements that displayed no homophobic attitudes. In fact, Hodapp said later, he found the opposite: sympathy, understanding, and concern for homosexuals. (Critics of the verdict later complained that “evangelical pastors were systematically excluded from the jury pool.”)Footnote ⁷⁸ Neither counsel sought to dismiss a potential trial court member for cause. Each used their four pre-emptory challenges and the lowest thirteen numbers remaining became the trial court and the next two lowest numbers became the alternates.Footnote ⁷⁹

The Reverend Lauren Ekdahl prosecuted, assisted by United States Senior District Judge Warren Urbom. The prosecution team knew the outlines of Creech's defense strategy before the trial began. In motions and hearings before March 12, Creech's counsel revealed that they planned to deny that Creech knew the sexual orientation of the two women. To prove that Creech knowingly married two homosexuals, the church would have to prove that the two women—whose names church authorities never knew—actually were homosexuals. Douglas Williamson, a professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University defended Creech, assisted by Omaha attorney Michael D. McClellan. He told the trial court that the prosecution had the burden of proof and, he predicted, would not meet its burden.Footnote ⁸⁰

Despite Creech's clever strategy, the bulk of the trial focused not on the facts of the case but on whether the General Conference rule against blessing same-sex couples could or should be enforced. Both sides accepted this. When a member of Creech's church testified that “I think there was a great deal and still is a great deal of disagreement about whether…the Social Principles section of the Discipline are binding,” the prosecutor answered, “I believe that's what we're about in the midst of this trial.”Footnote ⁸¹ Ekdahl had to convince the trial court not only that Creech had violated church law but that the church law was legitimate. Williamson attacked the legitimacy of the law the prosecutors used against his client, saying it included ill-defined language and conflicted with the obligations ministers have to their congregations, the “primacy of a covenant of a pastor with a local congregation.”Footnote ⁸²

In secular trials, defendants cannot be made to testify against themselves, but in church trials, the prosecution commonly calls the defendant as a witness, and Ekdahl's star witness was Creech himself. Creech readily admitted that he conducted a “covenanting ceremony” for two women on September 14, 1997, in his church, First United Methodist Church of Omaha. Ekdahl knew how Creech would defend himself but nonetheless asked him if the covenanting ceremony “celebrate[d] the homosexual union of these two women?” Creech answered that it did not. Ekdahl wanted to know if either of the women had told him that they were homosexual. That Creech would not answer: “The conversation I had with the two women I considered confidential.” Knowing that Creech had told the press the women were lesbians, Ekdahl then asked Creech if he had spoken to the press about the ceremony. Williamson had already anticipated this line of inquiry and argued in his opening statement that newspaper reports were not “proof” in court. Creech did not deny that the newspaper reports described the two women as lesbians, but denied that he could control what journalists wrote. “They [the articles] were not reviewed by me beforehand.” Questioned by his own counsel, Creech drove home his point that he considered it inappropriate for the church to use its legal process against him. Williamson asked if he had ever filed charges against a fellow preacher. No. Williamson asked why not. Creech answered that the Social Principles should not be a basis for a complaint against a fellow clergyperson.Footnote ⁸³

In their battle over whether the Social Principles could be enforced as law, both sides called expert witnesses. The prosecution called retired bishop Kenneth Hicks to testify that he always felt bound by the Book of Discipline and would not violate it. If he felt he could not in good conscience follow it, he would reconsider being a Methodist minister, he told the court. Creech's attorney asked “How do we then deal with the overarching language at the beginning of the Social Principles that indicates that the Social Principles are intended to be instructive and persuasive…?” Hicks acknowledged that the “Social Principles as a whole are as you indicate,” but “once in a while there does creep into the Social Principles something that the General Conference clearly has indicated as a mandate.” Those parts of the Social Principles “must be adhered to, and enforced.” It was all a matter of the language used: “where it says shall, or shall not, then that's—that's different than the main body of the Social Principles.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Creech's expert, Roy Reed, a retired professor from Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio, warned against the precedent of prosecuting a minister for changing the church's rituals, specifically the marriage ritual. “It opens up the possibility of charging pastors for any kind of deviation that they make in that kind of service,” he said. Asked to hazard a guess as to how many ministers would be charged if changing the ritual became an offense against the church, Reed answered, “Well, almost everybody.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Reed took on the biblical argument against homosexuality, making Mollenkott's argument for inclusion. Paul, he explained, tried to lay down rules, such as a requirement that women keep their heads covered and their mouths shut. We do not follow that, Reed said, “because of Jesus Christ.” Paul was the greatest theologian and preacher the church ever had, Reed acknowledged, but “we do not follow his rules.” The Bible also urged Christians to be one in the spirit, one body, “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but one in the spirit.” We still have a long way to go, Reed observed, but the Gospel will win out in the Methodist churches eventually.”Footnote ⁸⁶

United Methodist trials do not require a unanimous verdict. Creech needed five votes to win. The trial court first voted on the specification that Creech had actually performed a same-sex union ceremony. Only two members of the trial court followed the defense line of reasoning that the church had to prove and could not prove the sexual orientation of the two women. The vote against Creech was eleven to two. Had those eleven votes held on the next vote, on whether to acquit or not, Creech would have been convicted. That did not happen; instead, three more members of the trial court voted with those two to produce a “not guilty” verdict. Three members thought Creech had done what the church accused him of doing, but nonetheless voted him not guilty of violating the church's order and discipline. To many this seemed like jury nullification, a slap at the General Conference. It meant that the Nebraska UMC conference had too much doubt about the legitimacy of the ban on holy unions to convict a minister for performing holy unions. To explain what happened, the presiding bishop wrote a memorandum entitled “Reflections on the Trial of Jimmy Creech,” but, in fact, he really had no explanation. It was, he said, impossible to determine what produced the other three “not guilty” votes.Footnote ⁸⁷

The verdict ran against public opinion. The five ministers voting “not guilty” offended a majority of Methodists by their votes, something they probably did not fully understood when they cast their votes. Their verdict unleashed a small storm of protest that rippled across the United Methodist polity. One minister complained that a “sort of a state of anarchy” wracked the church. Evangelicals threatened to leave the church.Footnote ⁸⁸ Letters from rank-and-file Methodists poured into the denomination's Nashville offices, almost all written by ordinary Methodists—some clergy but mostly lay members—and nearly all complaining that the church violated the Bible by acquitting Creech. Responding to complaint from the laity, the College of Bishops for the South Central Jurisdiction, an area running from New Mexico (and a small portion of Arizona) to Louisiana and from Nebraska to Texas, asked the Judicial Council for a declaratory decision on whether the language in the Social Principles forbidding same-sex ceremonies was law. To end the “anarchy” and determine, finally, if 65C was law, the Judicial Council agreed to hear the case in August; although their deliberations had been inspired by Creech's acquittal, they were not hearing an appeal from his case. Their decision would either announce that the church could not enforce its ban on same-sex holy unions, and therefore permit the ceremonies, or warn all the clergy not to perform them.Footnote ⁸⁹

Forty-one individuals, including lay members, and groups prepared letters and formal briefs for the Judicial Council. Some of these writings took the form of ordinary letters whereas others had been prepared by lawyer-Methodists exactly as they might petition an appeals court, replete with headings, subheadings, and citations to authority, in this case decisions by the Judicial Council. None cited precedents from secular courts, although certain types of rules, involving hearsay, for example, often did carry over from the secular world into church trials. Some of these documents supported Creech, indeed Creech himself wrote to the Council, but the majority asked the Council to confirm 65C as church law.

For some of those asking the Council to endorse the ban as law, Creech's acquittal confirmed suspicions they had long harbored toward their church leaders' liberal agenda. According to this narrative, ordinary United Methodists could hold their bishops to account by measuring their conduct against the Bible. One Ohio Methodist, for example, had little patience with quibbles over the Book of Discipline. “God's Book of Discipline” condemned homosexuality 2000 years ago in Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans, she wrote. Genesis defined marriage as between a man and a woman; Leviticus said “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman”; and Romans denounced “vile passions” and “the men leaving their natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another.” For the Judicial Council even to debate the question of homosexuality offended this person: “How is it possible for mature men and women elected or appointed to responsible, authoritative positions to justify so much time, effort and money attempting to ‘rule’ on a truth that was decided for you (and all mankind) several thousand years ago?”Footnote ⁹⁰

According to this view, for too long United Methodist leaders had put tolerance ahead of judgment. Some of these critics repudiated the Mollenkott doctrine explicitly: there can be no doubt that the followers of Jesus Christ are called to love their neighbor, but the Holy Bible does not require we condone sin. One Virginia Methodist charged that “zealously determined, militant and well-financed homosexual extremists…profane our faith.”Footnote ⁹¹ These conservatives, as they termed themselves, had anxiously waited for some definitive statement from their leadership. It finally came in 1996 when the General Conference decided UMC ministers should not celebrate unions between “self avowed practicing homosexuals.” “Many, many Methodists breathed a sigh of relief,” one Oklahoma church reported. Finally, unequivocal language: “a clear statement that Methodists had strong beliefs and a Code of Conduct supported by the Bible.”Footnote ⁹²

Then: betrayal. Rank-and-file Methodists, so pleased that their church had finally decided to follow the Bible, did not realize that the General Council had put its sanction against homosexual unions in the Social Principles. This meant it was not binding law; revealing that church leaders never seriously intended the prohibition in the first place. They were simply trying to fool good honest Bible-reading Christians. Although this group despised Creech's actions, they fully accepted his argument that the Social Principles were not law.Footnote ⁹³

That was a minority view. More often the petitioners thought their church sincerely battled homosexuality, saw Creech as a renegade, his counsel as tricksters, and wrote to support the church hierarchy. The problem required tighter discipline and these writers demanded that the church centralize authority, exercising greater control over individual ministers and annual conferences. The South Georgia Annual Conference wrote that annual conferences “may not disregard specific mandatory provisions of the Discipline.” Nor can local groups alter official rites and rituals of the church, changing the standard marriage ritual to suit same-sex couples, for example. “It necessarily follows, then, that no individual pastor would have a right that has been denied to Annual Conferences and not established, and in fact negated by the General Conference.” To strengthen their appeal to law, the South Georgians concluded their brief with a Certificate of Service, attesting that they had mailed it to the proper address.Footnote ⁹⁴

The entire Book of Discipline is law, these writers insisted. They almost always based their argument on the 1953 decision handed down by the Judicial Council, Decision 96.Footnote ⁹⁵ This decision came from a New Hampshire property dispute, in which the church had staked its claim to an abandoned church to a provision in the Methodist Book of Discipline. The church lost its case, and the property, because the secular judge ruled that the church's Book of Discipline did not call itself “church law.” Indeed a sentence in the “Episcopal Greetings” had said that “the Discipline became not a book of definite rules nor yet a formal code, but rather a record of the successive stages of spiritual insight attained by Methodists under the Grace of Christ.” To correct this, and presumably prevent further loss of church property in similar cases, the Judicial Council ruled that, in fact, the Book of Discipline was law. On the page preceding the Book of Discipline's title page, the editors began urging readers to “See Judicial Decision 96, which declares the Discipline to be a book of law.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Long-time Minnesota minister Peter F. Milloy spoke for many when he forthrightly stated that the entire Social Principles were law, pointing out that in Decision 96 the Judicial Council did not say the Book of Discipline was partly law, even though “some portions of it are not written in such a way as to require, permit, or prohibit anything.” Like Creech's supporters, Milloy noted that the Social Principles begin with a call for “studied dialogue.” However, he continued, their general character does not mean that no part of the Social Principles can have juridical intent. Milloy had carefully researched the prohibition's legislative history and found that the Administrative Council of Grace UMC in Newport, Kentucky, had originally proposed the sentence forbidding same-sex unions. For some unknown reason, this church proposed putting the prohibition in the Social Principles. The legislative committee reviewing the proposal endorsed it without suggesting it might be better placed in some other part of the Book of Discipline. Milloy pointed out that Philip Wogaman had objected to placing such a juridical rule in the Social Principles, meaning that he did understand that it was a rule. He warned that it would distort the Social Principles by making one part of them enforceable in church courts. Wogaman spoke against the rule, but Milloy triumphantly cited his speech as proof that the General Conference knew what it was doing; Wogaman had told them. Moreover, when delegates consulted the Judicial Council, it refused to intervene, saying that where the rule went was the business of the delegates.Footnote ⁹⁷

On August 7, Bishop Dan E. Solomon and Bishop Bruce P. Blake made oral presentations to the Judicial Council. The two bishops appeared only briefly, asking questions about 65C on behalf of their jurisdiction. Solomon said later that whereas some writers have compared the Judicial Council to the United States Supreme Court, he disliked the comparison and did not feel as if he were engaged in a legal argument with winners and losers as in secular court, although appearing before the Council was sobering. “I never got away from awareness that people's lives are involved in this experience.” The Council rendered its decision the next day. It summarized the question this way: “…whether ¶65.C is law and whether ¶65.C governs the conduct of the ministerial office.” The answer was yes. “The General Conference has the authority to speak on connectional matters, and, when this authority results in a legislative enactment stated in mandatory language, it is the law of the church, notwithstanding its placement in the Discipline.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The Council then moved to its second question: whether ministers could be charged and tried in church court for violating 65C. The General Conference makes binding law, the Council said. It is the legislative body of the church and has authority to define and fix the powers of UMC ministers. Because the Book of Discipline states that disobedience to the “Order and Discipline of The United Methodist Church” constitutes a chargeable offense, ministers could be tried and convicted for violating 65C, the Judicial Council ruled in a decision known as No. 833. This did not reverse Creech's acquittal, but it meant to put to rest qualms that some members of his trial court had harbored.Footnote ⁹⁹

To some United Methodist clergy it seemed as though conservatives had aggrandized power and “were looking for examples, looking for people to pick off and they were really going on the attack.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Progressive United Methodists generally reacted with a feeling that something had to happen, some kind of protest. This was especially true in the West. In Sacramento, California, a lay leader and lesbian named Ellie Charlton said later that when she learned that her church's highest court had ruled against homosexual marriage, her immediate reaction was that “somebody needs to do something…because that's not right.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ To her minister, Don Fado, the Judicial Council decision showed that his church had “lost its way.” No one served on the Judicial Council from west of the Mississippi River, he fumed, and had not for 20 years. This meant that the most progressive part of the church, geographically, had no voice on the United Methodists' highest court. In northern California, progressive United Methodist ministers organized against the new “law,” calling themselves the “65C group” after the paragraph in the Social Principles forbidding homosexual marriages. They held meetings and emailed each other, discussing how to organize a protest.Footnote ¹⁰²

One month after the Judicial Council ruled that United Methodist ministers could not perform same-sex ceremonies, the Reverend Greg Dell of Chicago's Broadway United Methodist Church conducted a holy union service between two men. Dell had been involved in social justice issues since his high school days, protesting the Vietnam War, advocating disarmament, and marching with Martin Luther King for fair housing in the face of brick-throwing hecklers. He grew his hair long and refused to cut it, even when asked to do so during a job interview for a rural church pastorate. In 1978, two active members of his congregation, both women, said they wanted to have a blessing on their relationship. “I didn't give it a second thought,” Dell claimed later. Dell had worked out in his own mind what the standards for marriage should be. The couple should have self-respect in their relationship, power should be shared, and they should want to be part of a broader community that included the church. None of Dell's standards for marriage included sexual orientation. After that first same-sex service, Dell went on to perform over forty holy union celebrations, mostly before the church had ruled against such services. But he continued after the Judicial Council ruled.Footnote ¹⁰³

For some conservative clergy, it mattered a great deal whether the progressives were trying to use church rituals to influence public opinion. Dell later faced accusations that he turned his holy union services into political acts of protest, criticism that must have influenced the way he remembered his thinking before performing the holy union service. “I'm going to get involved politically,” he explained later, meaning that he would “increase my participating in the ministry of the church, trying to change the church's position, but I wasn't going to use a worship service that way.” Dell acknowledged that a worship service might have a political impact, “but it shouldn't be designed—you don't design a worship service for political gain.” Dell made no effort to publicize the service, but a reporter for Windy City Times attended. “I didn't know that, but I don't screen wedding guests.” The story appeared on the front page of the newspaper, and a conservative member of Dell's conference called. According to Dell, this minister asked, “I need to know from you whether you did it for political or pastoral reasons.” Dell answered, “I did it for pastoral reasons, it was part of no political strategy, but I knew doing it that if word got out it could have political implications.” After contacting Dell, this minister (identified by Dell only as “Scott”) called the bishop to complain. Bishop Joseph Sprague had himself once performed holy unions; before 1996. Now he contacted Dell, “I could be the complainant or Scott could be the complainant. I'm kind of inclined to be the complainant myself.” Dell answered, “I think that makes sense, Joe, I think you would be fairer in what you write.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Sprague's letter charged Dell with failing to uphold the Order and the Book of Discipline of the UMC, but described the ceremony as an “act of conscience and pastoral ministry” and praised him as “a person of integrity, who possesses an enviable record of pastoral faithfulness and effectiveness…an effective pastor.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Dell emailed his children on the day he got the letter saying that he had wept, but that the bishop, he said, “was pretty complimentary” and, therefore, “things do look pretty good.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sprague, however, did not have the last word. Counsel for the Church of the Northern Illinois Annual Conference rewrote the bishop's complaint, accusing Dell not only with performing the holy union ceremony, but with doing so as a political protest against the Judicial Council's decision. “Rev. Dell attracted public attention to and press coverage of the planned homosexual union ceremony.” Counsel spelled out his evidence: Dell had written a letter to his congregation saying that he had assisted the media in preparing a story about the proposed ceremony. After September 19, 1998, “Rev. Dell purposely sought to publicize the fact that the ceremony had occurred and invited public media coverage of the ceremony.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Conference's Committee on Investigation charged Dell with “disobedience to the Order and Discipline of the United Methodist Church” (the same charge leveled against Creech) and supported its charge with five specifications. The specifications alleged that Dell had celebrated the holy union of Karl Reinhardt and Keith Eccarius on September 19, 1998 and did so knowingly in violation of Judicial Decision No. 833.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Dell's trial began March 25, 1999 in Downers Grove, with a stalwart supporter of the church's position against gay rights, Bishop Jack Tuell of Seattle, sitting as judge. Tuell had briefly practiced law before changing careers to become a minister and, partly for that reason and partly because he had a reputation as a rigorous student of Methodist organization and law, bishops regularly called on Tuell to preside over church trials. As in Creech's trial, no one disputed the basic facts alleged: Greg Dell testified for the prosecution that he had performed the same-sex ceremony alleged against him. Karl Reinhardt and Keith Eccarius testified and admitted their sexual orientation. Once again the real issue was the legitimacy of the church's law against same-sex unions. Prosecutor Stephen Williams called Bishop George Bashore, president of the Council of Bishops, to validate the legitimacy of the ban on same-sex unions. Under UMC rules, members of the trial court can question witnesses, and one member asked Bashore if he had ever performed holy unions. He admitted he had but added that he had done so only before 1996 and with the approval of his bishop. Another member noticed that Bashore had said that as a minister he had acted “with an air of elasticity.” When Bashore agreed, the member asked if that meant that “for us as pastors we have this broad spectrum in carrying out our responsibilities as leaders with the Church that may sometimes bring us into tension with the law of the Church?” When Bashore seemed to agree with that, Tuell asked his own question: when carrying our civil or ecclesiastical disobedience “did you do so in the knowledge of acceptance of consequences of what that might mean?” Bashore answered that he had never even contemplated ecclesiastical disobedience but agreed that he was ready to accept the consequences for civil disobedience.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Dell's counsel, Larry Pickens, asked the trial court not to follow the letter of the law. He did this by saying the trial was not about the law, “but how we respond to human beings in need.” Ministers should not mindlessly follow the law, Pickens said, “I only ask you the question, then are we ever allowed to question?” He urged the trial court members to think not of law but of “the people. The faces. The personalities.” The trial involved not a single act, but a ministry “that has been effective for over 30 years.” This ministry had an impact on numerous people, Pickens said, “giving dignity and worth to gay and lesbian persons.” Addressing the trial court, Pickens said, “This is a story about a pastor who has served the Church well.” Dell has done everything a pastor should do, Pickens told the Trial Court. “He has taught his people about love. He has taught his people about a relationship with Jesus Christ. He has taught his people about what it means to be in committed relationships.” John Wesley, Pickens reminded the trial court, had also confronted a conflict between pastoral need and church law. After the Revolutionary War, most Church of England clergy returned to England. To ordain ministers to serve the new nation, Wesley defied the law of his church and ordained ministers outside the regular process, beginning the Methodist Church.Footnote ¹¹⁰

With his expert witnesses, Pickens attacked the use of church law against Dell. Thomas Frank was director of Methodist studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, a premier United Methodist theological center. Frank had written a book analyzing the UMC Book of Discipline and advised the Council of Bishops. Frank testified that the Book of Discipline never defined “order and discipline.” “I think what the phrase means is…open to interpretation.” Pickens asked if that meant “the Trial Court has the ability to determine what Order and Discipline means.” Frank agreed. Pickens asked if the Judicial Council had ever determined the meaning of “order and discipline”, and it was stated that they had not.Footnote ¹¹¹

Pickens also questioned Frank about the ban on holy unions. “I think it's very unusual,” Frank answered, and described it also as ill defined: “it prohibits something and it prohibits something that has never existed in a United Methodist ritual. And there is no definition of what it is.” UMC ministers regularly perform baptisms and serve communion without strictly following the published rituals. Weddings almost never follow the published ritual. “I went to a wedding…a few weeks ago in which the ritual for the celebration of marriage was used almost word for word out of the hymnal, and my jaw dropped to the floor. I have not been in a wedding where the ritual was used word for word for so long it was a great pleasure, actually, to me to hear it.”Footnote ¹¹²

Pickens also wanted the trial court to see Dell as a pastor effectively responding to his community, putting the members of his congregation over church law. John McDermott, member of a community group in the neighborhood of Dells' church, testified that the community included many gay and lesbian members. McDermott praised Dell for his involvement in the community, winning the respect of people of many faiths, encouraging his congregation to support construction of low-income housing. A 16-year-old member of Dell's congregation testified to his ministry: “He's strengthened my belief in God.”Footnote ¹¹³

“We thought we had a pretty good defense,” Dell said later. “I mean, it said that is what you are ordained to do, you were doing it, and the church passed this law which was ambiguous as they passed it, but you specifically violated it.” The vote to convict Dell came in at eleven to two. “So,” Dell said later, “there were only two votes that agreed with our defense.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Ultimately a third person agreed with Dell's defense. Bishop Jack Tuell had helped write “one kind of anti-gay thing that went into the Discipline.” In 1983, while meeting with women clergy in New Mexico, Tuell had arranged an airport meeting with another bishop to prepare language for the 1984 General Conference intended to exclude gay men and lesbians from the United Methodist clergy. “I believe,” Tuell said later, that “it is accurate to say that I came up with the notion of a sentence that would say ‘faithfulness in marriage and celibacy in singleness.’ A generic phrase. But there was no question who it was intended for.” As the trial progressed, Tuell remembered later, he did not think much about his position or reconsider his views. He did remember thinking the prosecution's argument that Dell violated his connection with the church was weak, but he was too busy to think about the bigger issue. “I was consumed with managing the trial.” Not long after he returned home, he did reconsider. “Shortly after the trial it really hit me.” Prosecuting a capable minister ministering to his congregation was unjust and unfair, Tuell concluded. “We send this minister to this place—a community made up of gay people. And we kick him out.” Tuell's faith in the United Methodist system of democracy led him on a quixotic quest to overturn the anti-gay portions of the Book of Discipline. In 2000, he sent all delegates to the General Conference a letter asking them to vote to lift the ban on holy unions.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In the penalty phase, the trial court heard further evidence before sentencing Dell to be suspending from his ministry until such time as he promised never again to perform holy unions. For Dell this meant his career as a minister was over. He would never agree to stop ministering to gay men and lesbians. He appealed his sentence to the Committee on Appeals. The Committee rejected the sentence as indeterminate, a suspension by definition has to have a termination date, it ruled. The committee suspended Dell for 1 year or until he promised to stop performing holy unions. Dell left the ministry for 1 year, returned to Broadway Church, and resumed performing holy unions.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The most dramatic revival of 1960s-style protest against 65C and the trials of Creech and Dell came in northern California, outside San Francisco. In Sacramento, the Reverend Don Fado found the Dell verdict troubling. On October 4, 1998, he called for direct action to protest the Judicial Council's ruling and the verdict against Dell. In a sermon, Fado threw down the gauntlet. “I cannot remain silent in the face of such an injustice,” he declared. He then told his congregation that he felt he had only two choices: leave the United Methodist ministry or protest.” “I choose the latter,” he said and then explained that, “the way I will protest is that I will do such a service, as an act of civil disobedience—well, that's the wrong word because this is not “civil”, this is not against any of our state laws—I will conduct a service of holy union, as an act of ecclesiastical disobedience. I will not do it in secret. I will do it in the spirit in which Martin Luther King, Jr. did his disobedience. I will do it openly in order to challenge the law.” He then told his congregation that most ministers in the California–Nevada conference believed the rule against homosexual unions to be unjust. Finding ministers to stand with him would be no problem, Fado thought, but he doubted that it would be easy to find a couple willing to put themselves forward for the protest he envisioned. “It will have to be a unique couple that will want such a ceremony and be willing to put up with all the publicity that will accompany it.” Nonetheless, he said, “We must demonstrate to the General Conference the folly of the exclusion.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Ellie Charlton and Jeanne Barnett were not in church on October 4. Barnett had suffered a stroke in 1995 and her health was failing. But Fado's sermon had sent such a shockwave of excitement coursing through the congregation that within hours after they got home from church, members started telephoning Charlton and Barnett. On Wednesday, Charlton was on the phone with Fado. “Don, we'd like to do that,”Footnote ¹¹⁸ she said and then asked Fado if he was “serious” about his offer. Taken aback to have his challenge answered so quickly, Fado nonetheless did not hesitate. As he remembered later: “I said, ‘sure!’”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Fado and his fellow clergy saw the two women, well known, well liked, and active in United Methodist governance, as ideal candidates for a public challenge to the Book of Discipline. “This was your grandmas that you've known forever,” Elane O'Rourke remembered.Footnote ¹²⁰

The UMC bishop for northern California was Melvin Talbert, once a member of the commission formed in 1968 to rewrite the Social Principles. To Talbert, Charlton and Barnett's protest promised to continue the civil rights movement. As an up-and-coming Methodist clergyman, Talbert had once gone to jail with Martin Luther King for protesting segregation in Atlanta. Talbert had committed himself to civil rights, joining the Selma to Montgomery march before participating in protests from his church in Los Angeles, California.Footnote ¹²¹ It was close to this time, members of his cabinet remember, that Talbert began saying, “You're talking to the man who understands discrimination.” He invited Charlton and Barnett to dinner with his entire cabinet, the leadership of the UMC in two states. At dinner, these leaders unanimously gave their support for the protest, but explained that they could not themselves participate in the ceremony, because they knew charges would be brought, likely leading to a trial. As they would be charged with organizing the trial, they could not themselves officiate at the holy union. But they assured the two women that privately they entirely supported their plans.Footnote ¹²²

Fado began recruiting other ministers to join the protest. He first sent out a letter to some ninety retired clergy, thinking them less vulnerable to church censure, and asked them to co-officiate. Although the retired clergy could not be fired, that did not mean that they faced no consequences if they joined the ceremony; Fado carefully researched the facts and warned the retirees that if the Annual Conference took them to trial and won a conviction, the ministers might lose their health insurance benefits and would definitely lose their housing deduction. Ministers do not have to declare their housing as income under United States income tax laws. Within 2 weeks, Fado had forty-four retired clergy willing participate. That might have been enough, but eager volunteers continued to step forward, some from other denominations and from outside California. The number of volunteers quickly reached seventy-five, including active clergy. That was when “it finally dawned on us we were getting so many…that if we have a trial, the only people left [for] the jury—because it has to be your peers—it'll be the clergy on the other side.” Fado began urging his fellow ministers not to volunteer, so they would be available for jury duty.Footnote ¹²³

From across California and beyond California, the United Methodist ministers asking to participate did so for a variety of reasons. Several had homosexual family members.Footnote ¹²⁴ Many saw an opportunity to continue the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, to walk to the steps of Martin Luther King. Fado himself saw gay rights as a continuation of the civil rights struggle: “I don't think there's any difference.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Claire Beals-Nesmith, a minister since 1944, recalled her work in Mississippi registering African Americans to vote. This was like that, she said: in both cases she sought “to make God's love visible to the whole community.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Bruce Hilton likened the holy union to going to Mississippi where he broke discriminatory laws—at the urging of his bishop.Footnote ¹²⁷ Other ministers, such as Douglas Monroe, invoked both Gandhi and Martin Luther King.Footnote ¹²⁸ Douglas Hayward had become aware of homosexuality as a rights issue when he served as a pastor at a Berkeley Methodist church in the 1960s. Once he became convinced that sexual identity “was not something you took upon yourself,” but rather “something you were born with,” he became a full supporter of the movement for homosexual rights, including marriage. For him too, natural law trumped politics.Footnote ¹²⁹

On January 16, 1999, more than 1000 United Methodists and their friends converged on the Sacramento, California, convention center to bless the holy union of Jeanne Barnett and Ellie Charlton. One hundred and fifty clergy and lay people marched down the center aisle in full regalia to both bless the happy couple and protest church law prohibiting their celebrating such unions. “This is our lunch counter, this is our freedom ride,” one Fresno Methodist told a reporter. A Chicago Sun-Times reporter present at the event agreed that the ceremony resembled a “civil rights demonstration,” the San Jose Mercury News termed it “a massive symbolic disobedience,” and CNN labeled the proceedings “mass defiance.” A church spokesman told the New York Times that never before had so many ministers faced the possibility of a church trial for disobedience.Footnote ¹³⁰

Conservatives quickly announced their plans to file charges against the officiating ministers to enforce the law of the church on behalf of the national majority of United Methodists who disapproved. Church members filed 184 formal complaints against ninety-two United Methodist ministers whom they identified as participating in the ceremony. Many of the complaints came from the conservative Orangevale United Methodist Church.Footnote ¹³¹ As the cabinet held meetings and anguished over how to handle so many complaints, Fado and his friends met to debate their response to the charges that everyone had known had to come.Footnote ¹³²

The United Methodist hierarchy in northern California absorbed and defused the 184 complaints. Instead of passing on the conservatives' complaints, two members of the cabinet converted them into single complaint in their own name. District superintendents Ardith Allread and Dave Bennett supported the holy union, Bennett had been openly supportive, Allread, committed to the UMC and its laws, more quietly so. “I don't think our positions are materially different,” Allread maintained later. Allread acted as dean of the cabinet; Bennett as superintendent of the district where the holy union took place. Allread now says the two acted to save a fellow member of the cabinet from associating himself with the complaint. He had a gay family member and could not sign a complaint, he told his fellows. By putting their names on the complaint, Allread and Bennett made themselves targets of resentment and anger from United Methodist clergy across the California–Nevada conference. Both lost friends.Footnote ¹³³ The cabinet took over the complaint process because under the United Methodist Book of Discipline, the first stage, after a charge has been formally filed, calls for “supervision.” Intended to prevent minor infractions from going to trial, this part of the process has as its goal a negotiation resolution, arbitration. In this case, the cabinet followed the technical requirements of church law, but never seriously expected resolution with the conservative complainants. By the time of the Barnett–Charlton holy union, Talbert had already tried to reconcile with the conservatives in his conference, without success. The conservatives had church law and a majority of Methodists behind them, felt they stood for the Bible against sin, and saw no reason to compromise. “We felt,” Bennett said later, “that it would be better if we were the ones who moved the complaint forward so that we could perhaps come to some resolution with the pastors and the bishop and cabinet” and avoid a trial. Rather than forward the complaints from Orangevale and other conservatives, the cabinet wrote its own complaint. “We got started on our complaint,” Bennett remembered later, “so that we could be in control of the process.” Resolution with the conservatives was impossible; resolution with the cabinet was a certainty. On March 23, 1999, Allread and Bennett forwarded a letter of complaint to Bishop Talbert, accusing sixty-nine ministers with violating the Book of Discipline.Footnote ¹³⁴

On September 1, 1999, Fado and his fellow respondents met with the Committee on Investigation at the United Methodist Conference Center in West Sacramento. The committee secretary made only skeletal notes. Thirty-nine of the sixty-eight charged parties (one of the sixty-nine originally charged had died) came to the meeting in addition to counsel for the church and seven others acting as counsel for the accused. After a Bible reading and prayers, the discussion began. The first sentence in the secretary's notes indicated that the committee confirmed that the two District Superintendents were the only charging parties, even though everyone understood that the real complainants were the conservative United Methodists and that the official complainants privately supported the holy union ceremony. This confused some of the respondents. “How can resolution be achieved without the parties who feel aggrieved being present?” someone asked. Someone on the Committee answered that “It is a complaint of disobedience to the order of the church, the church is the injured party.” The notes then say only, “there was a lengthy discussion about the difficulty of the official complainants not being the aggrieved parties.”Footnote ¹³⁵

As the Committee of Investigation considered what to do about Fado and his fellows, its members received a reminder that in other parts of the country the UMC legal process worked to smite such open challenges to church law. Learning that Jimmy Creech still performed holy unions, the Nebraska Methodists moved with unusual speed to oust him from his pulpit. This time Creech decided not to rely on legal maneuvering to avoid admitting what he had done. On November 17, Bishop William Boyd Grove of West Virginia presided over a dawn-to-dusk trial. Creech again testified for the prosecution, but then refused to put on a defense and asked the trial court to refuse to return any verdict. “The law that is the basis of the charge this day is … unjust and immoral,” Creech told the court. He urged the trial court not to “blindly” support a law “that can cause injury and harm.” The trial court turned aside his plea and returned a unanimous guilty verdict and then voted to defrock Creech. Press accounts said the sentence stunned Creech's friends and supporters.Footnote ¹³⁶

It may have stunned the Californians as well, but they moved ahead with their plans to avoid trying Don Fado and his fellow clergy. Two months after the Creech conviction, in January, 2000, a year after the holy union, the Committee on Investigation had decided to hold an unusual public hearing, announcing that “in the spirit of the United Methodist tradition,” it would call on experts to discuss “scripture, tradition, reason, and experience” as they relate to the case.Footnote ¹³⁷ The hearing took place at Community United Methodist Church in Fairfield, chosen as neutral ground, a church that had never taken a stand on homosexuality. Expecting a big crowd, the Reverend Dave Bunje, pastor of Community, formed a hearing hospitality team and counted his seats; he calculated that he had space for 180 spectators and printed visitors' passes to be distributed first-come, first-serve.

Fado felt that his responsibilities as a pastor trumped any obligation he had to follow public opinion, even public opinion translated into church law. In his more private communications, Fado explained that he saw himself primarily as a pastor. He did not want conflict or divisions, but felt he had to perform his ministry. He told one friend, “I have never turned a church member down for religious services in my ministry and I don't intend to start now.” He added, “I can't sell out to please the crowd.” He confessed privately to feeling “irked” by conservative claims that he broke his covenant as a pastor by violating 65C. It offended Fado that the conservatives would use his violation of one rule to try to drive him out of the ministry. Fado felt that the Book of Discipline required church support for members acting out of conscience. Some of the conservatives attacking the holy union had themselves violated some of the 2351 “shalls” and “shall nots” he counted in the Book of Discipline. “I do not like using rules to clobber each other over the head,” he emailed one conservative friend who had contacted him. Fado then asked, “What do you feel the proper punishment ought to be for our obeying what we felt to be the call of Christ rather than this social principle?”Footnote ¹³⁸

For its argument that ministers had a duty to follow rules set by the General Conference, the prosecution relied on Steve Harper, vice president and dean of the Florida Campus of Asbury Theological Seminary, Orlando. Harper announced that he would not confront sexual identity, the ethic of love, or the nature of pastoral ministry to all people. He would leave those topics to other witnesses. Instead, he wanted to talk about connectionalism. To Harper connectionalism meant “keeping faith with ordination vows and living in covenant community with the ordained fellowship.” Performing an act of holy union for homosexuals, Harper continued, “is quite a bit more than an 'act of conscience.'” Nobody's conscience should be the focus of investigation, Harper urged, but violating the Book of Discipline disconnected the offending ministers from their church. As Harper testified, Fado scribbled notes. “Once conf answered questions,” he wrote, “no debate, do it.”Footnote ¹³⁹

On February 8, the Committee on Investigation informed Fado and his fellows that it had decided not to certify the complaint for trial. The letter acknowledged that the United Methodist ministers in the California–Nevada Annual Conference were not of one mind regarding ministry to homosexuals. The committee also affirmed that the conference valued inclusiveness. The letter said little else, however, and failed to fully explain the committee's decision to dismiss the charge. Nonetheless, the threat of a church trial disappeared.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Whereas the committee itself revealed little of its reasoning, one member prepared a memorandum summarizing his conclusions. Emphasizing that he spoke only for himself, John E. Corson made several points, which probably reflected the thinking of the Committee. First, he wrote, the Book of Discipline is internally contradictory, urging discrimination against homosexuals but also favoring inclusiveness. Next, he noted that Fado and his colleagues believed that the church was in error when it tried to limit the ministry of its ordained ministers. For Harper and the conservative United Methodists, connectionalism meant that in fact clergy were limited in what they could do. Corson agreed with Fado and rejected Harper's argument. Connectionalism can conflict with individual conscience, he wrote. Corson even discounted the United Methodist equivalent of the Supreme Court, the Judicial Council. Rejecting the Judicial Council's decision that the General Conference intended to make law when it wrote 65C, Corson found there was a lack of clarity about what the General Conference meant to do; the language sounded law-like but the General Conference put it in the wrong place if it meant to make law. The biblical scholars' testimony supported Fado and his fellows, Corson decided, writing that the latest scholarship showed that the Book of Discipline's hostility to homosexuality actually conflicted with the Bible. Discrimination against homosexuals offends the Christian conscience, Corson continued. He concluded by saying that he thought a church trial seemed an over-reaction to what was actually an act of conscience, something the church normally supported.Footnote ¹⁴¹

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, elements in the UMC turned to their church's legal system curb the independence of progressive clergy committed to gay and lesbian rights. In part, these trials marked a march back from 1960s activism. The church converted a part of its Book of Discipline from a tool to protect or advocate for civil liberties to an instrument to staunch a potential expansion of rights. It did this democratically, by lopsided majority votes in its legislative body. At the outset of the controversy, the hierarchy of the church did not promote the prejudice, lay members of the church and rank-and-file ministers did. Historical explanations for prejudice against gay men and lesbians must take into account the force of mainstream public opinion.

Resistance to that opinion can be attributed, in part, to survivors of the counterculture, as Charles Keysor observed. Greg Dell and Don Fado had participated in the spectrum of 1960s protest, including antiwar demonstrations and civil rights marches. Jimmy Creech learned to distrust majority opinion in the civil rights era. These dissidents such as Dell, Fado, and Creech did not advocate lawlessness. To the fundamentalist Virginia Mollenkott, never a member of the counterculture, the problem was not the Bible or law, but rather the “voice of socialization.” She specifically warned against the “‘do your own thing’ crowd.” People on the Far Left might be in the crowd, but its ranks included homophobic conservatives as well, according to Mollenkott. Perhaps the sexual revolution encouraged the movement for gay and lesbian rights, but ministers marrying gay men and lesbians worked to counsel couples against promiscuous, random sex. One important difference between those sympathetic to gay and lesbian rights and those not, was that the sympathetic side thought homosexuals could obey Christian rules and the other side thought them inherently incapable of ethical behavior.

The ministers charged in church court questioned the legitimacy of the legal process used against them. To Dell, Fado, and Creech, their investigations and trials abused law. Conservatives wanted to use the force of church law to centralize power in the denomination, shifting authority from local congregations and individual ministers to the national leadership, increasingly guided by the majority of the denomination hostile to rights for homosexual persons. Nonetheless, the church's legal system was not a phalanx of certainty, to say the least. There was no centralization of procedure and the system tolerated what was essentially jury nullification. The regional units in the church organizing the trials and staffing trial courts allowed defense counsel to challenge the legitimacy of the law. Juries and trial courts debated and decided not only the facts but the law as well. Even after the church's highest court ruled that the rule against blessing same-sex couples should not be challenged, trials continued to serve as forums for debate among ministers over the legitimacy of the law.

The sensational trials of UMC ministers charged with being too sympathetic to gay and lesbian rights illustrate a transitional moment in American history, a resurgence of popularly supported conservative values against the remaining remnants of 1960s-era progressivism. The use of law as a tool to effect majority will has proven, so far, somewhat effective. Jimmy Creech lost his job, and although other ministers continue to quietly serve gay and lesbian members of their congregations, they do so under threat of prosecution. When charged, they very often resort to legal stratagems to avoid trial. There is no doubt that the majority successfully limited the number of same-sex couples officially blessed in church. Many ministers no longer perform such ceremonies, even in states where they are legal. The will of the majority could not be easily thwarted by legal dialectics or counterculture-style protest.