Roy Howard Beck

This book, published 1988, which I only first read in the last couple years, should be seriously out of date, but it has become one of my favorites, which I have read several times, because the general issues that it raises remain current. The particular stories, related in great detail, are also historically interesting.

Roy Howard Beck was a journalist working for the Cinncinnati Inquirer. At their United Methodist church, he and his wife, Shirley, were running a popular class called Main Streams for adults pondering the relationship between their faith and current events. Then he received a call at 11:30 p.m. offering him a job at the United Methodist Reporter (UMR), a privately owned, but very influentional paper that would, with its sister publications, become only more important in American religious reporting. Beck's correspondents couldn't decide if he was a wild-eyed liberal or a mean-minded conservative; such a diversity of opinion is often taken as a (frequently back-handed) compliment to a reporter's fairness. Beck would win every major award for journalism given by church organizations, but eventually his vigorous reporting put him On Thin Ice, as he calls his book, first with the much of the hierarchy of the United Methodist Church (UMC), and then with his boss, who decided to put out a more positive publication, and he left to work as a bureau chief for the Booth Newspapers.

During his time at UMR, Beck would report on the Eddie Carthan case, a cause célèbre in Mississippi about race relations in the little town of Tchula that the UMC became involved in. Beck found the truth to be more complicated than he had been lead to believe, which raises the still very relevant question: how do we know what is true? Whom do we trust? Also along that line: 60 Minutes and Reader's Digest made explosive accusations about the National Council of Churches (NCC) and liberal Christianity supporting violent and questionable causes without the knowledge of the people in the pews. Beck and his colleague Garlinda Burton went to New York to investigate and found that while the reporting had been sloppy, there were disturbing issues. Beck found the UMC to be rather careless about how it expended its prestige and money, the bureaucracy high-handed in its dealings with its local churches. (I remind the reader that the book is more than 25 years old, and things may have changed.) He also covered the Nestlés boycott, which he participated in, and the UMC's part in resolving that, as well as the arguments about who owns a cause, and when does one declare victory and move on?

Then there was the issue of sexual chastity, especially for the clergy. It started when the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), which catered largely, but not exclusively, to gays and lesbians, wanted to join the NCC. They were rejected not so much on hetero/homosexual per se, but on the issue of life-long monogamy which UFMCC members often rejected. When Beck asked Morris Floyd, a UMC gay activist how the churches could require chastity for heterosexuals but not homosexuals, Floyd retorted that it wouldn't be any different from how the church heterosexuals, including the clergy, actually functioned. The UMR did not publish that interview. This led Beck to some interesting reflections on personal piety versus social activism, and on just how flexible Jesus was and meant his followers to be: “True, the New Testament was full of examples of Jesus consorting with and embracing sinners rejected by society. But his forgiveness included the admonition to go and sin no more.”

In fairness, let me state the caveat that I am ex-UMC, and now an atheist. I parted on rather hostile terms with the UMC, and so I take a certain malicious glee in learning from Beck that many things that I suspected were in fact true. It has been 25 years, and things may have changed, but I have serious doubts. But even given my admitted prejudices, this is a thought-provoking book, and a good historical source for the issues that it covers. With the UMC trying to reinvent itself (Focus), and the arguments about gay rights and the potential schism, things will be interesting.… (mais)