CONTROVERSY IN THE PEWS
Congregations in North Carolina struggle with the issue of homosexuality

Congregations in Conflict:
The Battle over Homosexuality
Keith Hartman '88
Rutgers University Press, $24.95

Many journalists have a difficult time writing about religion. Cynical after years of covering politicians or business executives, their first instinct when someone professes to be motivated by altruism or morality is to assume such sentiments are bunk and to dig deeper for that person's presumably more venal motives. But more often than not, people who regularly go to church really do believe in some way in what is preached there, whether or not they live up to the sermons in their own lives. Anyone who is to write about the subject must understand what that religion's values and message mean to the people in the pews, and then try to explain their sayings and actions in that context.
Keith Hartman '88 does an admirable job of that in his book on the most divisive issue to hit the pews in decades, homosexuality. Congregations in Conflict: The Battle Over Homosexuality is a fascinating though incomplete study of how churches in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area were forced to come to grips with the issue over the last decade. Most media coverage of this has focused on the battles within major Christian denominations at the national level, such as this spring's heresy trial of an Episcopal bishop who had ordained a gay man in New Jersey. Hartman brings the issue home by concentrating on what happens in individual churches when two gay or lesbian congregants wish to be married, when an aspiring minister seeks ordination, and when a pastor wants to be a member of an ecumenical gay-rights group.
Though the churches differed greatly in theology and traditions, most handled the gay question in a strikingly similar way: After it was raised, the congregation spent months educating itself on all sides of the issue. In Sunday school classes, business meetings, and anywhere else that church members gathered, they studied and pondered. And, so educated, a majority generally ended up supporting the gay or lesbian parishioner or minister.
So it went in both a Southern Baptist Church and a Quaker meeting where members sought permission for a same-sex wedding. The Baptists' debate centered on whether homosexuality is chosen or innate. The discussions led a number of gay people to come out for the first time in church; their testimony that it is innate eventually helped to sway their fellow congregants to vote for the marriage. The Quakers, coming from a more liberal tradition, had less trouble with the basic concept but ended up divided on whether to call the ceremony a "marriage," risking repeal of a North Carolina law that allows Quakers to perform marriages without clergy, or to call it a "holy union." The women whose ceremony it was agreed to compromise on a "holy union," only to find themselves berated by a fellow Quaker for not taking a stronger stand.
These heartfelt exchanges between worshippers are the most gripping part of the book. Hartman was present at some of the meetings and reconstructs others through interviews with and from the writings of the participants. At their best, the debates were earnest, reasoned, even scholarly, and much more nuanced than the sloganeering and sound bites typically offered by fundamentalist and gay-rights national leaders. When both sides clearly speak from the heart, the result is illuminating, and when outsiders get involved in some of these church battles, the change in tone is striking.
If the antigay side occasionally seems underrepresented here, it is because some antigay congregants and activists simply refused to join the debates or to talk to Hartman. The Southern Baptist Church, for example, found itself besieged by pickets from a fundamentalist group who declined repeated invitations to come inside and present their views. Hartman theorizes they either assumed he was gay (he is, he writes in a footnote) or were uncomfortable with the subject. What he encountered may actually have been the distrust many religious conservatives feel for the outside world and especially for journalists, a distrust that, to their own detriment, often causes their views to be inadequately represented in the news media.
Another gap is that the book only covers five mainstream Christian denominations-Methodist, Episcopalian, Southern Baptist, Quaker, and Roman Catholic-plus the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Church and the nonsectarian Duke Divinity School. In a preface, Hartman explains that he limited his focus to the Raleigh area to show the interplay between churches that occurred as each confronted the issue in turn, and he couldn't find other congregations there that had grappled with it. Yet the reader is left to wonder why, as in the Sherlock Holmes story, some dogs did not bark: why, say, Raleigh's gay Jews or Presbyterians or African Methodist Episcopalians chose not to force the issue in their congregations; in a city of that size, surely some must have wanted to.
Congregations in Conflict could also have benefited from a slightly wider view on the outside world. Except for events in which ministers or congregants were directly involved, the reader learns little about the secular struggle for gay rights in Raleigh during this period. And few of the participants in religious debates are described by their positions in the secular world, even though their ages, professions, and where they grew up might have helped shape their attitudes.
Even with its omissions, however, Hartman's book is a readable, engaging study of how people from widely divergent spiritual backgrounds confronted a painful issue and generally became better and wiser as a result, no matter which side they ultimately ended up on. It will be especially useful for anyone whose own congregation might end up facing the issue-and surely, in the next few years, many more of them will.
-Alan Flippen '84
Alan Flippen is an editor on the metropolitan desk of The New York Times.

SHORT TAKES
Between God and Gangsta Rap:
Bearing Witness to Black Culture
Michael Eric Dyson *91
Oxford University Press, $23

Michael Eric Dyson *91 began life as a young welfare father in Detroit, later graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, and is now an ordained Baptist minister and a professor of communications studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He believes his diverse experiences enable him to "speak in tongues"-to talk the languages of scholar, preacher, radical democrat, and inner-city dweller. Between God and Gangsta Rap showcases the range of topics he is comfortable addressing, from O. J. Simpson and Marion Barry to Mariah Carey and Public Enemy. While the critical essays of current events and political figures shed light on race in America, the reviews of specific albums, plays, and artists, many of which originally appeared in Rolling Stone and Vibe Magazine, often are too fan-oriented and lack general interest. Where Dyson shines is in his essays exploring language. He discusses, for example, how the politics of language-defining acceptable dialect-is at the center of the multiculturalism debate. Most interesting among Dyson's commentaries are the book's "invocation" and "benediction." He begins with a complex and public letter to his brother, who is serving a life sentence for murder. He concludes with a poignant open letter to his wife, lamenting "the limits of language in saying what is really in my heart."

Women on the Margins: Three
Seventeenth-Century Lives
Natalie Zemon Davis, history professor
Harvard University Press, $24.95

Professor of history Natalie Zemon Davis takes us into three women's lives and another world in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Davis, known for her previous book The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983), shows how three non-noblewomen, released from marriage by death or divorce, found expression through teaching, writing, or painting. Glikl bas Judah Leib, a Jew, raised 12 children and upon her first husband's death, embraced the family business and profited. Later on, she wrote her autobiography, weaving in moral tales to pass on to her children. Marie de l'Incarnation, widowed at 19, refused all further offers of marriage so she would no longer have anyone "but God in my heart." She took the unconventional step of leaving her 11-year-old son to join a convent, eventually becoming mother superior of a nunnery in Quebec. A prolific writer, she composed her memoirs for her son. Maria Sibylla Merian left her husband to join a radical religious colony, but she eventually rejected that life to paint and work in Amsterdam. Initially guided by wonder for God's work, she published her paintings of European, and later, South American insects. These women's lives serve to remind 20th-century readers how marriage once trapped women in a role, leaving little chance for creative expression. Yet despite the limits of life on the margins, they broke free to create their own centers within the confines of their era.
-Jennifer Gennari Shepherd
Jennifer Gennari Shepherd, a freelance writer living in Natick, Massachusetts, covers women's issues.

BOOKS RECEIVED
Just Family
Tonya Bolden '81
Cobblehill Books/Penguin USA, $14.99

Cinema and the Invention
of Modern Life
Leo Charney and
Vanessa R. Schwartz '86, eds.
University of California Press,
$19.95 paper

White by Law: The Legal
Construction of Race
Ian F. Haney Lopez *90
New York University Press, $24.95

Beethoven Hero
Scott Burnham (music professor)
Princeton University Press, $29.95

Flesh (architectural monograph)
Elizabeth Diller (architecture professor) and Ricardo Scofidio
Princeton Architectural Press, $34.95

International Monetary
Cooperation Since Bretton Woods
Harold James (history professor)
Oxford University Press, $45

The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France
Philip Nord (history professor)
Harvard University Press, $49.95

Politics as Leadership,
Revised Edition
Robert C. Tucker
(politics professor, emeritus)
University of Missouri Press,
$15.95 paper