In the weekly missive from The Alban Institue, Wesley J. Wildman and Stephen Chapin Garner write:
There are plenty of Christians who feel theologically and spiritually displaced. They feel lost in the middle between the noisy extremes of religion and politics and long to feel at home right where they are. They sense that it is possible to ignore the oversimplifications of left and right and, instead, move deeper into their faith. But they are not quite sure how to do that. They know the path they seek has something to do with love because they understand the power of love to unite people of different kinds, to overcome alienation, and to bring about transforming forgiveness. If only they could understand their situation clearly, perhaps they could plot the path ahead.
Numerous conversations and interviews lead us to conclude that there are at least four distinct reasons why discerning moderate Christians make the decision to transcend the liberal versus evangelical conflict and commit themselves to church unity in the face of theological and political diversity. Each is a tangle of negative and positive motivations.
Is it possible that the authors simply don’t want to acknowledge that a choice has to be made about whether to include LGBT Christians fully in the life of the Church, and that it is very difficult to argue anything other than Yes, or No? One can choose not to participate in this debate, but it is difficult to understand how one would “transcend” it, as the authors advocate. But this criticism comes from one who is suspicious of those who deride left and right, and who believes that the argument for the superiority of the middle often reflects its own sort of moral vanity. In addition, there is a certain reflexiveness about this sort of argument, as though the soundest thing one can do in a debate about whether the value of two squared is 4 or 5,000 is to insist that we should all agree on 2,502.