Tying together multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches of grief, my research considers the real-time institutional shifts within the largest US mainline and largest global Methodist denomination, The United Methodist Church (UMC). UMC members express grief and pain at the pending split over disagreements on the ordination and marriage rights of LGBTQ+ persons. While lingering over decades, the last six years have changed the terrain of the UMC, with one quarter of US UMC churches disaffiliating. My larger dissertation research weaves together theory that considers grief as a dynamically individual and collective meaning-making process. I also consider the ways emotion is objectified outside the human experience (“The UMC mourns…”) to understand how institutions and official bodies impact the grief experience. Research includes interviews and focus groups across several UMC conferences, content analysis of UMC-related documents, and over 900 in-depth qualitative surveys of current or previous UMC members.
Within my findings is a significant strand that ties language of harmed and freed to emotion. On the one hand, language of being harmed falls, paradoxically, on all sides. LGBTQ+ persons in Methodism express their experience as that of ‘the other’ – the minority, stigmatized, periphery, decentered. While perspectives have changed over the last 50 years in the US, and US Christian religion, these challenges remain real and persistent for the LGBTQ+ community. They experience harm by being excluded from ordination and marriage; harm when their worth and sacredness is questioned in sermons, Bible studies; harm when they are loved as a sinner but hated for their identity; harm in unsuspecting places and the daily experience of living on edge of potential harm lurking around the corner – sometimes even life-threatening harm.
“We are the outcast, the downtrodden, the hated sin, the thing that can exist so long as we don’t live out our existence.”
Yet the traditional viewpoint – which sought (and continues to seek) to maintain that homosexuality is sin – also claims harm. The majority of those who remain traditional in the UMC or who have disaffiliated from the UMC do not, at surface appearance, fit the mold of the outcast, minority, or other. Rather, they are centered in the status quo. They are overwhelmingly white, middle and upper class, and cisgendered, heterosexuals. They have historically held the positions of power both in the denomination and the larger US context. The Book of Discipline – until May of 2024 – aligns with their theological and social perspective.
“We didn’t have any choice. We were forced to take a stand and that’s why we left. We were forced out by all the times… when people broke the [Book of Discipline]. We can’t even trust the Bishops to do their job. They ain’t Christian like we’re supposed to be. And so we had to leave, but not because we wanted to. They just won’t accept us.”
The harm experienced, the narrative of grief that comes from those who are the majority of leadership, who hold the status quo, has been molded into a narrative of the outcast, the excluded, the least of these.
This presentation will further evaluate how both experiences – that of the LGBTQ+ and traditional community – experience what they term “harm,” as well as the ways in which they are now “free” from the burden of the UMC, either by the choice to disaffiliate or the change in polity that now allows ordination and marriage within the queer community.
Tying together multi-disciplinary theoretical approaches of grief, my research considers the real-time institutional shifts within the largest US mainline and largest global Methodist denomination, The United Methodist Church (UMC). UMC members express grief and pain at the pending split over disagreements on the ordination and marriage rights of LGBTQ+ persons. Within my findings is a significant strand that ties language of harmed and freed to emotion and structural change. Research includes interviews and focus groups across several UMC conferences, content analysis of UMC-related documents, and over 900 in-depth qualitative surveys of current or previous UMC members.