Untruths and videos

A note on untruths in Coalition video

Subj: fun with being lied to

Date: 2/23/02 [posted here 2-25-02]

From: Jonathan Justice

This Friday evening, I attended the Wabash Valley Presbytery's Amendment 01-A event at my home church, the evening before the Presbytery's vote. There was much that was of interest, but one item was so powerful in my own process of discernment that I present it here more or less by itself.

I was presented with the truly amazing opportunity to watch Princeton's own Thomas Gillespie lie on video tape. It refreshes my amazement at God's willingness to let the mighty stumble for my sake. Some of you may already have had the opportunity to be smarmed for the 27 minutes it takes to watch the video the Presbyterian Coalition and Renewal put together to oppose Amendment 01-A, but I had thought I had other things to do. Fortunately the 'No on 01-A' folks in my Presbytery elected to show it as the main substance of their argument this evening.

While there is a lot of fun to be had talking about the patriarchal, top down aspect of doing that, and it was gently noted, my present concern is with the content of the video itself. Early on, when Dr. Gillespie opened up his historical sketch of events at the 1978 General Assembly, he laid down a hefty piece of the sort of false witness God is so widely reported to find distasteful. It appears that he would have us believe that the Task Force created by the 1976 General Assembly recommended against ordaining avowed homosexuals. As a person who attended both the 1976 and 1978 General Assemblies, and still has a copy of the Task Force's Report in my files, I recognized this as a whopper. Some charitable persons might wish to suppose that he misspoke himself in reporting on the work of the GA Committee that changed the direction of the Task Force's Report, and the work of his own Subcommittee, where the Committee's revision was put together. Frankly, it did not look that way to me.

It looked to me like a full blown case of rewriting the story of that set of historic events to paper over the Task Force's Majority Report that they had met gay and lesbian people with real callings that the Presbyterian Church should start ordaining forthwith. Two purposes appeared to have been served in this retelling: The Task Force was drafted into the ranks of supporters of the tradition that would resist 01-A, and Dr. Gillespie was made to look a bit more important to the process of setting up the infamous "Definitive Guidance" than the rest of us might think.

While this foolishness is itself worth a belly laugh or two, in the context of a call to "Faithful Witness to the Gospel" ostensibly voiced by a brace of folks who are decidedly better at it than thou, it becomes a real hoot, demolishing the speakers' credibility before they can even get their assertions laid out. If Dr. Gillespie is willing to misrepresent events [that are still] in the living memory of many who hear his words, how can his assertions about the church's historic response to homosexual persons be trusted?

Whether the offending remarks would be thought by a court of law to constitute an outright lie might be open to some discussion, but Dr. Gillespie is addressing the whole church where a decidedly broader "false witness" standard applies (being in the Bible and all). It is also not appropriate to excuse this prevarication as inadvertent; the remarks occur in a heavily produced video decorated with some of the masterworks of Counter-Reformation painting, and swatches of Beethoven (not an ordainable person under the restrictions 01-A proposes to remove, and the author of two wonderful musical settings of the Latin Mass, besides). Had anyone in charge thought the remarks ill considered, editing and reshooting would have been seriously appropriate and hardly detectable.

It appears to me that we are expected to take the video's argument seriously exactly because of the clout of the people who are making it. I have to suggest that this is a decidedly sinful expectation-trusting in one's own might, rather than God's, after all.

Whether the inclusion of such an obvious lie about the Task Force is conscious or unconscious is another interesting question. It is kinder to suppose that our loving God let this particular version of 'The Emperors' New Clothes' proceed out of a friendly desire to show us just how loony the defense of the patriarchy is lately. Alternatively, we might have to suppose that including it is meant as an underhanded signal to intimidate those who might to know better into a Spenglerian submission. Then we would have to consider just how contrary to the Gospel that would be.

I hope that this piece will not be censored as lacking in civility. Jesus and the prophets were usually pretty direct about confronting hypocrites. I would understand that as a matter of loving them too much to let them get away with it, and that is certainly my intention. Meanwhile we have polity to help us to go forward and do the work Jesus calls us to without killing each other. Notice that polity is exactly what is under attack in the battle against 01-A, because good polity makes it very difficult to use clout to stampede folks into anything.

Jonathan Justice