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ix Preface My maternal grandmother, who tried to teach me manners, would surely be scandalized to know that I have written a book about religion, politics, and gender. Raised the daughter of Danish immigrants in Lincoln, Nebraska, my grandmother learned to put aside such controversial topics so that she could blend into the community, and she encouraged me to do the same. As this book not only seeks out the intersections between religion, politics, and gender, but also commits my arguments to print, my maternal grandmother would worry that I might hurt someone’s feelings or offend their sensibilities, and, honestly, I share those worries. But fortunately, I also had a paternal grandmother, a rural preacher’s wife with less concern for the social niceties. Known for her feisty disposition, she would sit up late into the night arguing with anyone who would listen. She showed me that sometimes we have to talk about precisely the things that divide us. Through much of my life, religion, politics, and gender have been the things that divide us. Religion and gender are central battlefields of these “culture wars” that supposedly have polarized American politics at least since the early 1990s. Too often, issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, and evolution become the litmus tests that we use to distinguish our allies from our adversaries. Disputes over these high-profile issues reveal that ours is a culture ruptured along the axes of class, geography, and generation. Not only do the fault lines split Left from Right, but also professional from working class, North from South, and grandkids from grandparents. Navigating this terrain is perilous. As religion, gender, and politics have loomed large culturally, they have also reigned supreme in my personal life. My firsthand experiences with x g The Faithful Citizen debates over these issues have admittedly influenced both my scholarly interests and my biases. I came of age as a preacher’s kid in the United Methodist Church (UMC) in an era when church leaders could not stop talking about sex. An early flashpoint in my adolescence was the Re-Imagining Conference, when thousands of clergywomen, my mom among them, gathered at an event sponsored by the UMC, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and other mainline denominations. My mom and her friends returned from the conference inspired and energized, but not shocked or offended, and no one anticipated that months later a controversy would arise and prompt internal investigations of the denominational agencies sponsoring the conference. It seems that participants had affirmed radical and unorthodox theologies: they had used the Greek word sophia to refer to God, and they had celebrated communion with milk and honey. The controversy over Re-Imagining revealed, but did not quell, abiding anxiety over the propriety of women in church leadership. It showed me, as a teenager, my church’s impulse to curtail ideologies of gender it deemed deviant, an impulse that has not abated in the years since. Even after the Re-Imagining controversy had run its course, several of the mainline denominations persisted in heated arguments over human sexuality . In my teenage years, as the UMC argued over whether to ordain gay and lesbian clergy and whether to conduct same-sex union ceremonies, my local church declared itself a Reconciling Congregation, signaling its openness to persons of all sexual orientations. Since then, in the UMC, there have been church trials of gay clergy, of clergy who performed same-sex union ceremonies, and of one clergyman who refused church membership to a gay individual. Every four years, when the denomination’s General Conference meets and delegates debate these issues, activists stage public demonstrations , which have sometimes included civil disobedience and police arrests. Many of my friends, people I have known my entire life, have provided courageous public witness on both sides of these issues. The denomination seems far from arriving at a happy resolution, and in the meantime, churches are broken, careers are destroyed, and individuals are hurt. More than just contesting gender, sex, and sexuality, these debates implicate a wide range of theological issues, such as the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, the possibility of God’s continuing revelation, the legitimacy of church policy-making processes, the role of the church in dictating individual morality, and the propriety of the church influencing public social positions. One of the most tragic results of the Re-Imagining scandal , in my view, has been an abiding distrust of the Women’s Division, the [3.21.248.47...

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