Talking About Exile: Valuable Testimony from Tom Doyle and Ruth Krall

UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

Yesterday, I looked at the movement now developing among conservative Christians in the U.S. to herd the church into exile. The reasoning that lies behind this rhetoric appears to be that since contemporary American culture has resisted the attempt of the churches to control culture [words are crossed through] to offer the good news of Christ to it via culture wars, the churches are left now with only one plausible response: to turn their backs on contemporary culture and go into exile.

In what I posted yesterday, I sketched my own reasons for being underwhelmed by what strikes me as a petulant and immature response to the failure of right-wing Christians to capture the imagination of many Americans in the latter part of the 20th century and early part of the 21st century, as those Christians have obsessively focused on opposing women’s and gay rights and have equated this focus with the gospel itself. Today, I’d like to point to some contemporary voices that speak credibly about exile, as far as I’m concerned.

These are people with roots in the Christian churches who have actually experienced exile — as opposed to those who want to manufacture a reactive exile in which to nurse their bruised egos after they failed to seize control of American culture through their culture wars. These are people whom the churches themselves have shoved into exile, because they asked too many questions, wanted too much honesty, demanded too much justice for those on the margins.

These are some credible voices to which I’ve been listening lately as I think about themes of exile in contemporary Christianity: here’s Father Thomas Doyle speaking at the recent SNAP conference (thanks to Jerry Slevin for putting the text of Tom Doyle’s SNAP address online):

My own confidence and trust in the institutional church has been shattered. I have spent years trying to process what has been happening to the spiritual dimension of my life. The vast enormity of a deeply engrained clerical culture that allowed the sexual violation of the innocent and most vulnerable has overshadowed the theological, historical and cultural supports upon which the institutional Church has based its claim to divinely favored status. All of the theological and canonical truths I had depended upon have been dissipated to meaninglessness.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.