What does it mean when a church declares itself to be “open and affirming?” How does this relate to churches that claim that “no matter where you are on your spiritual journey, you’re welcome here”? In this episode, Dan decodes these phrases to highlight their very different meanings, and suggests that they represent a significant resource for charting the terrain of American Christianity.
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Hello and welcome to Straightwide American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and you are listening to the series, It's in the Code, where I essentially map some of the terrain of American religion, especially American Christianity, learning how to decode some of the slogans, the phrases, the symbols, the images that appear there.
As always, Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, so we thank them.
Thank all of you for your support, whether that's financial through Patreon and other platforms, whether it's just through the emails and thoughts that you share with us.
We appreciate you.
Couldn't do this without you.
I just want to note that I continue to try to build this series kind of from the ground up, drawing on the insights that so many of you are willing to share.
As always, I try to respond to emails I get.
I'm not always able to.
I get way more cool ideas for this series than I can obviously do on a week-to-week basis, but I'm keeping track of those and compiling those, and so keep those coming.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj, that's danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
I'd love to hear those.
I also do want to note that I am also a trauma resolution practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, working with folks to help work through religious trauma.
The reason I highlight this is just that I know that some of the topics that I talk about on this series are topics that I hear with clients and In group sessions with others, I've heard from many of you who find this both helpful, but also find that thinking about some of these things can open up some really hard questions or some issues that maybe you want to explore further.
So I just want to offer the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery as a resource of which you can be aware.
And I'm happy to talk with people about that as well.
I just want people to know that that's a resource.
So let's dive in here, right?
Last episode I spent some time decoding the affirmation or the slogan or whatever you want to call it.
That it goes something like this, that no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you're welcome here.
And noted that this be the kind of thing that you might see on a church website or in a church flyer or on a banner or something like that.
And I suggested that once we get into the decoding of this slogan or this affirmation, that the kind of inclusion and welcome that is apparent in it, it might be less thoroughgoing than it would seem to the uninitiated.
Now, I've had many, many, many, many, many conversations with American Evangelicals, and again, this is very much typically American Evangelical language.
I talked about that last episode as well.
Who would deny this?
who would say that this is welcoming, that this is affirming, that this is a sort of inclusive vision of the church and so forth, and would say and have said, and I still hear from them occasionally, that I'm being far too critical, far too negative, that I'm just sort of projecting all my own baggage onto them and that I'm just sort of projecting all my own baggage onto them
So I also suggested in the last episode that this episode I'd be picking up a topic that would help sort of support these points, help bring this out, help bring into clearer relief what I see as the code behind the wherever you are in your spiritual journey language.
So I want to start by looking at thinking about decoding a different slogan or affirmation and this is going to be interesting because if you're uninitiated if you are listening to this and you're just like Curious about American religion, or maybe you're just trying to map it, or maybe somebody assigned it at this point, and you're stuck listening to me talk about this stuff.
There's another slogan that you will also see on church banners, that you might see on church signs, that you'll see on websites, that you'll see in church brochures, and this is the affirmation that a church declares itself to be, quote, open and affirming.
And you might see that and say, well, open and affirming sounds an awful lot like you're saying, wherever you are in your spiritual journey, you're welcome here.
And yet, what I want to suggest is that number one, there's a gulf that exists between these two slogans or these two affirmations.
There's a gulf that exists between a congregation that declares itself to be open and affirming and a congregation that says, no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you are welcome here.
Are there exceptions to this?
Of course there are.
I feel like I always need to say this because somebody will email me and say, well, what about this church here that did this and this and this?
There are exceptions, but I'm going to stand behind this being the rule.
There's a gulf between these.
And that you can map out a lot of the landscape of American Christianity in the gap between these two slogans.
So what we're going to look at to start here is this language of open and affirming, and this really does pair with what we said about the language of wherever you are in your spiritual journey last time.
So again, to the uninitiated, these two phrases could sound a lot alike, right?
No matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you're welcome here, says one church, and maybe down the street there's another church with a banner that says that they are open and affirming.
So what does it mean when a church claims to be open and affirming?
Well, the most basic and explicit meaning, and this is the, if there's such a thing as an explicit code, this is it, okay?
The most basic and explicit meaning is that the congregation in question welcomes and affirms LGBTQ plus identified people and allies.
This is a congregation that is pro-LGBTQ+.
This is a congregation that may well have a queer pastor, will have lots of queer members, and so forth.
And the language was explicitly formulated as a code to communicate exactly this.
In the debates that have taken place within American denominations and Christian groups for decades now, About the legitimacy of LGBTQ plus identity, what it means to affirm that or to condemn that or what position a church or congregation should hold and so forth.
Those churches that affirm LGBTQ plus identities, what does that mean?
For them it means that it is not sinful or depraved or fallen to be queer identified.
In more theological language, they may well say that we're all created in the image of God, and if you're a queer person, it means that God made you a queer person, and that God affirms you and values you as you are.
Very different perspective from more traditionalist kinds of circles, and we'll come back to that.
And this language was explicitly formulated to communicate this.
And so while there are some denominations in which virtually every congregation would declare itself to be open and affirming, I live in a part of the world in New England where there are lots of United Church of Christ, UCC congregations, and the UCC is very much an LGBTQ plus affirming denomination as a whole, right?
Exceptions for particular churches, of course, but as a whole that marks the denomination or the Unitarian Universalists or some group like that.
Okay?
But this language, it'll also show up on, say, the brochures or the websites of individual churches that might declare themselves to be open and affirming, that might identify with denominations that are not open and affirming as a whole.
In which case, it's a way of communicating to those of us who want to know more about that church, where they stand on this issue.
And it's also a way of differentiating themselves from other churches, maybe in their own tradition or their own denomination.
So this part of the code is pretty obvious, right?
Maybe it's not known to everyone, but you don't have to dig very deeply to understand that the language of open and affirming means LGBTQ plus affirming.
Affirmative of queer identity, allyship, and so forth.
Okay?
But there's more to the code than just that obvious part.
And the first thing to be aware of, is, and I've already hinted at this, the churches that feature this slogan, they're almost universally more liberal or progressive in their theology.
Again, could there be exceptions?
I suppose so, though I can't think of any.
But there could be, but they're typically more liberal or progressive.
And this contrasts with the no matter where you are in your spiritual journey crowd.
I talked about that last episode.
The churches that tend to say no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you are welcome here, tend to be more theologically conservative or traditionalist in what they affirm.
Congregations that declare themselves as open and affirming, just to give a little bit of a sense of this, they are not likely to claim that they take the Bible literally, right?
They're Christian churches, they'll talk about the Bible, but they won't claim that it's literal or inerrant in the way that a more traditionalist church might.
They typically won't use the language of saying that one is eternally condemned unless they affirm Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, etc.
So, these are churches that in many ways will have Diverged from that more traditionalist stance and traditionalist language.
And this brings up another important point in mapping the territory of American Christianity and religion more generally, right?
This language of open and affirming is pretty typical of a certain kind of American Christianity.
The significance of it maps on to other denominations or other traditions as well.
Particularly, I think, American Judaism.
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