"Membership"
5 June, 2008
One day my grandmother was telling me a story
about someone at her church who I didn't remember. She got out the
church directory book to show me their picture. I still didn't remember
the person. While Grandma continued to tell her story, I thumbed
through the directory, looking at page after page of pictures of
smiling families and the occasional single person. Between a pair of
such pictures I found an entry for me.
There was no phone number, address, or picture, but I was still listed
as a member. I had left the town two decades previously, and hadn't
considered myself a Christian at all, let alone a member of that
particular church, for roughly the same number of years, but they still
considered me a member. When I commented on my listing, Grandma rather
stiffly pointed out that I must have never asked my new church to
request my letter (which in our denomination is code for "transfer
membership"). Rather than re-open that can of worms, I agreed that I
had made no such request, and then changed the subject.
This story was met with incredulity one of the times I told it: "Surely
an organization like a church would purge their membership lists on a
regular basis." Except church membership, at least in the denomination
I was raised in, was considered on par with family membership. The
black sheep of the family may disappear for years on end, never
writing, never calling, always forgetting birthdays and anniversaries,
but they're still part of the family. Even if we disown him and he
disowns us, we are still related to one another.
So I wasn't surprised to read recently that one of the largest
association of evangelical churches has admitted that its membership
numbers have been seriously inflated. Their churches don't have a
combination of 30 million members, as previously reported, but barely
half that number. To be fair, the association had never claimed to have
records and names of all those members. They had a complete list of the
member churches, and relied upon each church to accurately report its
own membership numbers.
For whatever reason, they had decided to try to verify those numbers.
They discovered that a lot of the member churches are carrying on the
membership rolls the names of people who haven't attended in years. A
certain fraction of those members are people such as myself, who have
abandoned or changed their faith. Another fraction are people who have
simply started attending a different church in the same or similar
denomination and never bothered to transfer their membership, so they
are listed as a member in more than one church.
While it didn't surprise me, it made me feel a little odd. An
organization that has actively fought to deny me and people like me
basic legal and human rights, had until recently been bolstering its
influence over some politicians by counting me among its
followers--because I never contacted my grandmother's church and asked
them to remove me from the membership list. Sure, I was just one person
out of that inflated 30 million, but I was part of the inflation,
nonetheless.
One reason I never formally resigned after learning I was still
considered a member is because I didn't want to hurt Grandma's
feelings. If I had officially resigned, word would have gotten to her
one way or another.
I have to admit that there was a more daunting reason than her
feelings. Once word had gotten to her, she would have eventually wanted
to talk about it. I just didn't see how that conversation wouldn't turn
into an argument. Nor did I see how that argument would change her
mind. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.
We had stopped talking about religion after a few heated discussions
shortly after I came out of the closet. She knew I had stopped
attending church, but remained eternally optimistic that I would return
to the fold eventually. Conversations often drifted into topics
bordering religion, but I only commented on generalities or made
noncommital statements. I could sympathize with her finding something
upsetting without actually agreeing with why she was upset, for
instance. Besides, often I did agree with her, just not for the same
reasons. And when I disagreed with her on a subject I thought mattered,
I could present an alternate view. She was quite open to discussions
about different ways to look at or interpret a particular moral
principle.
It could be argued that this was just another form of the closet. By
not confronting her about some things, I implied that I agreed with
her. Except she knew there were many things we disagreed about.
The crucial difference between my religious beliefs and my sexual
orientation was this: she'd never expressed support for laws
restricting people's rights to worship or not as they wished. She had,
previously, supported laws restricting gay rights, criminalizing gay
relationships, et cetera. She had come to decide that she had been
wrong to do so. She had seen that her gay grandson still had a strong
sense of what was right and what was wrong and was sincerely making an
effort to live his life on the correct side of that divide. She had
come to accept that gay people could be productive members of society.
She had reached those conclusions, in part, because we had kept a
communication going. I had picked my battles. I'm quite sure she did
that same. We never agreed on everything, but we came to a
meeting of minds on the important things.
We did it because neither of us was willing to give up on the
other. Neither of us was willing to let the other stop being a
loved one. And that's the only membership that matters.
--Benjamin Franklin
.