When a cathedral promotes discrimination...

Earlier this week I discovered that Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock, Arkansas was giving a platform to Erik Metaxas. I found this discouraging on many levels and not simply because Metaxas is a theologian with whom I generally disagree but that in the midst of this he is also a Conservative Christian Media personality with a long history of anti-women and anti-LGBTQ+ bias. Now I realize that we need to host individuals who disagree with us to come to our communities and tell us their thoughts and stories... this is a good thing. When we do this, however, we must do so in a way that names what we are doing. Otherwise what quickly comes into question is the character of our community and how it relates to the speaker. Trinity Episcopal Cathedral has failed to make any such distinction.

Without providing this clarity what Trinity Cathedral is promoting is the idea that the rest of the Episcopal Church is enabling Nazism and Genocide. This is, some how, the very logic of Metaxas who feels that progressive christians who promote birth control, allow for abortions, and accept LGBTQ+ individuals (all of which the Episcopal Church does) puts us in the same category as those who feel no need to respond to humanitarian need in the middle east and are equivalent to those who allowed Nazism to rise and the Holocaust to occur. Any church that supports non-discrimination laws for the LGBTQ+ community, a position the Episcopal Church has held for decades, is opposed, in Metaxas mind, to Religious Freedom. The logic being that true Christians need not respect the basic dignity of LGBTQ+ individuals when it comes to issues of housing, employment, and public accommodations.

A lot of this comes from wanting to make the current narrative promoted by certain christians that they are a persecuted minority in America today linked intrinsically to the plight of Bonhoeffer. Promoting this persecution narrative, that Christians are the new Jews and soon will be outwardly attacked, is a major part of his text on Bonhoeffer. What makes Metaxas appealing is that he does everything as a soft sell. By and large he is the dealer of gate way theologies into the darker sides of christian exceptionalism in America. He specifically remains palatable to give problematic narratives credence.

What Metaxas is currently doing around Bonhoeffer he has already done with William Wilberforce. While his book on Bonhoeffer seeks to assimilate the Nazi Persecution narrative with the current narrative of persecution held by conservative christianity in America, his book on William Wilberforce seeks to paint Conservative Christians, in their fight against LGBTQ+ inclusion, women's health, and sexual health, as the modern day abolitionists. His book took an existing trend and solidified it within the conservative christian narrative. Now if one listens to Focus on the Family talks one will find the story of William Wilberforce presented as a narrative of wild sexual play boy who found Jesus and became an abolitionist. The questions they bring up is one of how can Conservative Christian Pastors reclaim their politically active roots as abolitionist and speak politically against the LGBTQ+ community, against women's health, and against contraception... aka against wild sexual play boy antics.

All of this, I hope, sounds absurd and presents why if an Episcopal Cathedral is going to host such a media personality that they do so with some level of conditions and awareness. As it stands it is unclear to what, if any, extent Trinity Episcopal Cathedral agrees with Metaxas around discrimination against women and the LGBTQ+ community, how much they buy into his narratives of Christian persecution in America and of anti-LGBTQ+ advocates as equivalent to modern day abolitionists. This is a lack of distinction which simply cannot be allowed to stand in light of the overall Episcopal Church's decade long stances on sexual health, women's health, and LGBTQ civil protections.