Couple of things to unpack. The first is the nature of morality. Morality can be both objective and situational. That’s the first thing that we have to acknowledge. If we define morality as making the ‘best’ decision however we choose to define it (As Methodists, we would probably define it as the action that most pleases God, but we don’t have to use that definition), then it becomes clear that situations certainly enter into it. Let me explain. I think that most of us would agree that grabbing someone without their permission and throwing them to the ground is an immoral act. We’re violating their bodily autonomy and hurting them in the process. If though, they are about to step on a land mine and that is the most effective way to save them, most of us would probably say that we performed a very moral act. Despite the fact that the action is identical, the situation changes the moral value of the action. This does not mean that those actions do not have true moral weight or are open to debate. In each case, there is a morally correct path, but the situation changes what that morally correct path is. Once we wrap our heads around that fairly simple concept, we can see why culture matters. Culture is a situation. Culture changes the morality of a given action. For instance, let’s pretend for a moment that God is real and that following other gods is immoral. If I were living in say 8th century Ireland and was celebrating Halloween, I would be doing so in the context of a culture that views that as worship of various harvest gods (possibly, let’s not argue about the roots of Halloween and just pretend that this is so.) This would violate our earlier premise of not following other gods. Even if I were Christian and just play acting, I’m encouraging others within that cultural context to worship harvest gods, so it would ostensibly be an immoral act. On the other hand, in 21st century America, celebrating Halloween is simply dressing up and getting candy. There is no implied worship of other gods and I might even go so far as to say that NOT celebrating it is hurting others who may be forced to feel guilt over nothing more than a sweet tradition among neighbors and friends. The action is the same, but the cultural context changes the situation and thus the morality of the action. This does not mean that there is not an objective morally correct thing to do in each case, merely that each case though superficially similar is actually quite different. It would completely be expected that for a given decision that takes place in 2nd millennium BC Israel and 2nd millennium AD America there are different actions that would correspond to the ‘best’ action. This is in our view extremely Biblical and what our forebears believed about God. The Circumcision Controversy is one of the earliest examples of this that recognized that different cultural contexts produce very different moral actions, but those actions are still judged against an objective standard for that time and place and set of circumstances.
Now that we’re over that hump, we can speak to the church as moral authority. The long and the short is that the United Methodist Church does not claim to have an absolute moral authority. It never did. The name ‘Methodists’ refers to the fact that we use a ‘Method’ that we hope brings us closer to God. It doesn’t claim to have all of the answers and we fully recognize that other churches have different methods and different answers that may be just as valid or even more so than our own. We are simply one expression of Christianity that attempts to discover God. We might be wrong and we recognize that-we’re just people and people make mistakes. We have social principles, but we can amend those if we feel they were in error. There is no penalty for members who violate them since we don’t all have to agree that they are correct. They are simply what the majority of United Methodists believe at a given time. Maybe we were wrong in the past or maybe we’re wrong now. It’s only our current best thinking. This doesn’t mean that we don’t think that there IS a correct answer, merely that we must approach things with the humility that we might be wrong about that answer. We completely recognize that a vote doesn’t actually change the mind of God and so it’s ludicrous to pretend that the United Methodist Church via vote can somehow change the morality of an action. In this particular case, Homosexual acts either are or are not part of God’s plan and a vote by 850 people in St. Louis doesn’t change that. It merely affirms what a majority of us believe (Actually there is more to it than that. If it were just a vote about our social principles, people probably wouldn’t care. It changes disciplinary actions. As a general rule, we’re not a very disciplinary church and making this particular issue a disciplinary issue is quite frankly revolting to most of us and why it might be unconstitutional-I’ll get to church governance next. I promise.) So this is only to say that we don’t pretend to be an absolute moral authority, we only say that we try our best and where we’re wrong we rely on the unmerited grace of God to forgive us for our errors. We generally try to base our social principles on loving God and loving others rather than on some sort of Ten Commandments-like list of do’s and don’t’s.
So church governance and unconstitutionality. What this proposal did was essentially say that pastors that are gay get booted out of the church and anyone that performs a gay marriage gets suspended for the first infraction and kicked out for the second. That’s really the sticking point. As I said way earlier, in the social principles(our moral guidebook as it were) homosexuality has been deemed incompatible with the church since the Sexual Revolution when all of the old people started clutching their pearls. As I’ve also said earlier in this post, we’re mostly free to ignore the social principles if we don’t like them, so we do. We have gay clergy and a gay bishop and have been marrying gay people off and on for awhile now. What this proposal is doing though is basically doubling down and kicking those people out. This is really, really unsettling because as a general rule, we DON’T kick people out. That’s not who we are. Clergy get kicked out for only extremely egregious actions like diddling little kids or blatantly stealing from the church and half the time embezzlement only gets them a warning to do better and a watchdog to keep an eye on them. Certainly we don’t get kicked out for kissing a girl and liking it. This gets us to the current proposal. It is singling out one particular violation of the social principles and punishing it. The United Methodists have a foundational document that we call our ‘Constitution’ (same as the US) That Constitution has a list of rules for governance just like in the US government. Proposals can not violate that Constitution without changing the Constitution (same as US). Since this proposal singles out a certain class of people, that violates what might be called the equivalent of our 14th amendment. We have a non-discrimination amendment in our Constitution and this rule seems to actively target certain people for discrimination. Unless they want to amend the Constitution which is basically impossible - no way that they’re going to be able to hold together an African bloc to vote to legalize discrimination (they have long been the primary beneficiaries of that clause since when there are US workplace laws that benefit Americans, they must also benefit Africans even though the laws may not apply in Africa, we can’t give paid leave to American pastors and not African ones as an example-not that we would not want to do so, but the non-discrimination clause requires it), that means that the Judicial Council can overturn the proposal and we’re back to square one.