FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In recent years, thousands of rural communities in Senegal have held extraordinary public rallies they call “declarations,” and they’ve declared an end to a deeply rooted practice, one rarely discussed in public, one commonly known as female circumcision.

MOLLY MELCHING: Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would be sitting here years later, saying that 4,792 communities in Senegal had abandoned. In the beginning it was just unthought of, unbelievable, because it was so taboo.

DE SAM LAZARO: Molly Melching founded a group called Tostan—“breakthrough” in the local Wolof language—in the early ’90s. She had modest goals: to educate people about health and human rights, especially in rural areas and in local languages. The Illinois native is fluent in the ways of Senegal but she keeps a low profile in the work of Tostan.

Tostan’s work often begins with an ice-breaker, like an old movie. Many in the audience have never watched a film. To overcome the language barrier, the selection is a Buster Keaton silent movie classic from 1923, and it’s a hit. A more serious film followed, on vegetable gardening. It’s all part of seminars on nutrition, health, basic human rights, and other issues—in groups, songs, dances, and drama.

Skit: She needs to be cut. All girls need that.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s proven to be one of the most promising attempts in history to wipe out what Melching calls female genital cutting [FGC], a practice that dates back 2000 years. Each year, the World Health Organization says up to 3 million girls in Africa are subjected to genital mutilation, and up to 140 million women live with its consequences.

Skit: You can’t have a recognized marriage if she is not cut.

DE SAM LAZARO: That cut is a painful rite of passage for girls across a wide swath of predominantly Islamic African and Middle Eastern countries. However, the practice goes back hundreds of years before Islam or Christianity and is also practiced in both faiths and religions native to this region. It’s thought to have originated in the harems of ancient rulers as a means of controlling women’s fidelity, or as a sign of chastity among those who aspired to be consorts.

MELCHING: Those who were in the rest of society could move up, and you could marry someone who was more prestigious or had more money, more status, if you underwent this practice, because it was a sign of good reputation, and as the years went on, I mean 2,200 years, it became very much a part of what was considered criteria for good marriage.

DE SAM LAZARO: Melching came to this West African nation as a student in the 1970s and later as a Peace Corps volunteer. She stayed on to work on improving health education, which she found sorely lacking.

MELCHING: When you see a friend that you’ve known for several months and you’ve gone to her house for lunch, and then she tells you her child has some problem, that it’s someone who has cast an evil spell on the child, the baby, and that she’s going to take them to a religious leader to get the spell taken off, and you don’t know what to say, and it turns out the baby was dehydrated.

DE SAM LAZARO: But from the health education, women began to understand infection, and Melching says they began to connect the dots.

MELCHING: So suddenly as they started learning germ transmission and the consequences of FGC and how these infections occur and why they had more problems in childbirth than other women who had not been cut, they started saying wait a minute.

Seminar: People used to be afraid to talk about this before. Not anymore.

DE SAM LAZARO: But how did women in conservative, patriarchal societies become able to speak out, especially on a sensitive sexual topic? Melching says it’s because Tostan involves men and religious leaders who’ve confirmed that cutting is not required.

MELCHING: We share our modules with the religious leaders so that they see that everything that we do is for the well-being of the community, the health, and all these things are things that Islam espouses, and so they’re very happy in general, but first of all they’re happy because we start with them. We respect them.

DE SAM LAZARO: And that respect also carries over in the group’s message on genital cutting.

MELCHING: Tostan found that using approaches that shame or blame people really was just the opposite of what would work in changing social norms. When you say to someone, we know you love your daughter and you’re doing things because you love your daughter, but let’s look at this and let’s try to understand together exactly what are the consequences of this practice. But you are the ones who will have to make the decision. Then suddenly people are willing to listen. They don’t get defensive.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s far more effective than the approach of many aid groups—religious, government, and private, says Princeton University professor Gerry Mackie.

PROFESSOR GERRY MACKIE: Not hectoring and preaching but having pro and con discussions. When we think of an ideal way of making a change, we’d say it’s democratic. We all get together and talk it over and decide what the best thing is to do. Whereas some development approaches would, say, force them to do it, pay them to do it, trick them into doing it.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s volunteers and staff who conduct its seminars all hail from the local communities. Often they are leaders and elders speaking from personal experience or anecdotes. Diarre Ba used to make a living as a female circumciser.

DIARRE BA: I was part of this process. I felt bad. This is not right. But I didn’t know anything at the time. I had no learning.

DE SAM LAZARO: Others have painful, vivid memories. Ibrahim Sankare was very close to an older sister growing up. He walked into her room one evening.

IBRAHIM SANKARE: I saw her lying in a pool of blood. I thought someone had really hurt her. I screamed. My father explained to me. Since then, even now I get goosebumps thinking about it.

MARIAM BAMBA: It was very painful. I will never—you ask me if I can forget it? I will never forget the pain. So painful.

DE SAM LAZARO: Marieme Bamba is a long-time campaigner against genital cutting, and she’s spared her ten-year-old daughter the trauma. Yet before she became involved with Tostan and early in her marriage, she was determined to keep up the tradition. Even her own husband was opposed to genital cutting.

SULEYMAN TRAORE: She insisted that she had to do it. There were so many problems if you didn’t do it. If you cooked meals, no one would eat your food. It’s because we didn’t know. People told us that it was our religion. If you don’t do it, you’ll be going against your religion. All this is false. But I alone can’t do this in the village.

DE SAM LAZARO: They say Tostan was able to insure they were not alone—that communities in which they intermarried were also thinking alike, that their daughters would still be marriageable. The large declaration ceremonies have been critical.

MACKIE: One part of bringing about a change like this is to get everyone to change at once, what we call “coordinated abandonment.” Everyone has to see that everyone else sees that everyone is changing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Genital cutting is not the only tradition they want to change. Many communities have vowed to end the frequent practice of allowing older men to marry adolescent girls, acknowledging both the health risks and the girls’ human rights. Molly Melching says there’s plenty of historical precedent for abrupt changes in social norms and attitudes. She sees a very current example every time she comes home. That’s in American views about smoking.

MELCHING: People were smoking, and nobody said anything about it much through the ‘50s, the ‘60s, and even the ‘70s. As people became more and more aware of the harm that it causes, more and more people—there was a critical mass of people who started really protesting. It was amazing for me, coming from Senegal to the United States, to see how quickly things turned around.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tostan’s efforts have now expanded to 14 other African nations.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Kaolack, Senegal.

After the vote, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton asked Los Angeles Episcopal Bishop Jon Bruno how he would explain the vote to Anglicans around the world who oppose gay bishops, and what message he hoped it would send to gays and lesbians.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Another gay rights issue that has divided people of faith is hate crime legislation. President Obama signed an expansion of the hate crime law that makes it a federal offense to attack people because of their sexual orientation. Some faith leaders welcomed the hate crime expansion, calling it a human rights victory. But others fear it would inhibit religious speech, even though the law explicitly says no one will be prosecuted for their beliefs or speech.

Here to examine the issue is David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times who has covered religious liberty questions. David, welcome. Why do what appear to be a fair number of religious conservatives think this new law or this extension of the law is wrong?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK (New York Times Staff Writer): Well, if you believe yourself to be engaged in a culture war, a part of which is about the nature of sexuality and homosexuality, then you want to convey to your children, you want to teach your children that homosexuality is a sin. It’s something to be avoided. It’s not a natural kind of behavior. And now comes along a statute that is going to say homosexuals are a kind of person worthy of not only special respect but special protection. You’re going to see that as a defeat.

ABERNETHY: But what about seeing it as a threat to free speech, even to what a pastor might say in the pulpit? Some people have said pastors could be prosecuted for preaching the biblical view of homosexuality and other things like that. What about that?

KIRKPATRICK: That’s overblown. Okay, I mean, clearly this does not suspend the First Amendment, and there’s nobody, I think, on either side of the US Senate or House of Representatives that intends to see preachers locked in jail. But we get overblown rhetoric on the left and the right, and the reason why this particular overblown rhetoric finds some purchase in the minds of people out there is because there is an element of thought involved. You know, what a hate crime does is it adds to the penalty to an aggressive or criminal act if the person who perpetrated it was motivated by a special disdain for the person they’re hitting. You know, if someone is standing outside of a bar saying “I hate gay people” and then slugs a gay person, that’s a hate crime, and it does have something to do with their reasoning and their thinking, so it’s not ludicrous to think that a kind of thought is being penalized here.

ABERNETHY: And even that it might apply to a sermon?

KIRKPATRICK: Well, that goes a little bit far, but, you know, suppose a pastor gave a sermon about how terrible sodomy is, and then later that day he happened to get into a fight with a gay man. Well, he could be in trouble.

ABERNETHY: But what about just a parishioner who heard a sermon and then went out and did something? Would that, then—would the pastor then be held responsible for that?

KIRKPATRICK: I’m not a lawyer, but that seems pretty far-fetched to me. However, on the other hand, you know, if you’re an active participant in a congregation that spends a lot of time talking about what a sin sodomy is, and then you happen to get in an altercation with a gay man, I think that that could plausibly raise questions, and if you want to, you know, if we’re going to try to be as sympathetic as we can to the people who are concerned about this, let’s look at college campuses. You know, that’s a place where, within the context of the campus, people do regulate free speech, and they do regulate hate speech, and I think that there are some people who think, well, goodness, I don’t want my son or daughter to end up at a secular college where by reading certain passages of the Bible they’re going to trigger, you know, speech codes. So they’re not—it’s not completely irrational to feel like there’s something at stake here.

ABERNETHY: David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times. Many thanks.

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: Mainline denominations continue to be sharply divided over issues surrounding homosexuality, and this week (August 17-23) it was the Lutherans’ turn. Leaders of the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination voted to lift their church’s ban against noncelibate gays and lesbians in the clergy. The issues dominated debate at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s biennial assembly held in Minneapolis this week. Kim Lawton has our report.

PRESIDING BISHOP MARK HANSON (Addressing 2009 Churchwide Assembly): Have no fear, we will pray!

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: They prayed for unity, but disagreements over homosexuality were clear as delegates of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—the ELCA—gathered in Minneapolis this week (August 17-23).

UNIDENTIFIED DELEGATE: We cannot change what is right and what is wrong.

UNIDENTIFIED DELEGATE: How about Jesus saying judge not, that you be not judged?

VOICE OF ASSEMBLY MODERATOR (Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson): If you’re in favor of the amendment, vote one. If you’re opposed, vote two. Please vote now.

LAWTON: After vigorous debate, clergy and lay delegates approved a measure that allows local congregations to hire homosexual pastors who are in “lifelong, monogamous” relationships. Previously, only celibate gays and lesbians could be recognized as ELCA pastors.

REV. BRADLEY SCHMELING (St. John’s Lutheran Church, Atlanta): Well, it’s certainly painful when people say that your relationship or your call are not valid.

LAWTON: After acknowledging his relationship with another man, Atlanta pastor Bradley Schmeling faced a church trial in 2007. He’s no longer officially recognized as an ELCA pastor, but his congregation kept him on. Schmeling says he hopes the denomination is entering a new era.

SCHMELING: Well, my dream for the ELCA would be that we could be a community that really celebrates gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender leaders in the church—not just tolerate our presence, but genuinely celebrate the gifts that people bring to the church.

LAWTON: Traditionalists argued that the measure violated biblical teachings.

REV. CORI JOHNSON (Northern Great Lakes Synod delegate): We have a clear witness in Scripture about homosexuality. Every time homosexuality is mentioned in Scripture, it’s mentioned in a negative light. We don’t have any positive references to homosexuality in Scripture.

LAWTON: Many said the same standards should apply to all pastors.

REV. MARK CHAVEZ (Lutheran Coalition for Reform): And the proposals are just a flat-out rejection of what the Christian church for 2000 years, and most Christian churches today, and most believers today, still hear and believe: Don’t have sex outside of marriage. Period.

LAWTON: But supporters argued for a different interpretation of Scripture.

REV. GLADYS MOORE (New England Synod delegate): I think there are some who want to see the Word as a static book that we are to read literally, and others of us see it as a living, breathing, dynamic Word that continues to be revealed to us.

LAWTON: With nearly five million members, the ELCA is one of the largest denominations in the US. Delegates are hoping the debates won’t tear their church apart. They passed a social statement affirming that there is room in the ELCA to accommodate differing views on homosexuality—an issue, the statement said, which is “not central to our faith.”

VOICE OF ASSEMBLY MODERATOR (Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson): The social statement as amended is approved.

REV. MOORE: I don’t think this is a church-dividing issue. There are some who will say that, but I’m not one who believes that.

REV. JOHNSON: I think that there will be some deep hurt, and there will be some pain, and how we move forward and deal with that as a denomination will speak volumes as to our fidelity to the word of God and to the strength of our unity.

LAWTON: Both sides acknowledged more debates about homosexuality are still ahead. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

DEBORAH POTTER: The Lutheran delegates also passed an agreement to have “full communion” with the United Methodist Church. That means the nation’s two largest mainline Protestant denominations will share ministers, missions, and other church resources. The United Methodists approved the agreement at their general conference last year.

JUDY VALENTE: A basement bar near the campus of a major Eastern university Thursday night around 10 p.m. Some of these young people, after having a few drinks — or more than a few — may later become physically intimate in some way, possibly with someone they barely know. It’s called “hooking up,” and it’s not uncommon behavior these days.

Prof. Christian Smith

Dr. CHRISTIAN SMITH (William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame): A lot of universities at 5:00, 5:30—almost every adult has left the campus. I mean literally it’s a small village that’s taken over by 18- to 22-year-olds, and so what they want to do there, they do.

Dr. LORI S. WHITE (Vice President for Student Affairs, Southern Methodist University): I think it exists on every college campus. I think this is how students develop relationships with one another on college campuses nationwide.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE STUDENT #1: Hardly any of our friends are in a serious relationship. Most people have, you know, steady hookups, but they would never consider them their boyfriend or their girlfriend.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Most guys love to go out and look for the hookup. I think it’s a lot better than having a relationship, personally.

VALENTE: Why?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Because there’s more excitement. I mean, you don’t really have the monotony of just going out to dinner with same girl or just hanging out with her every single night.

VALENTE: Hooking up can mean anything from kissing to sexual intercourse, or something in between. It comes with no emotional involvement and certainly no commitment. In other words — no strings attached.

Dr. SMITH: I would say the hookup culture is very pervasive. Most young people have to deal with it. It’s around them even if they never hookup. Even if they think it’s immoral, they have friends that are or they know people that are.

VALENTE: Christian Smith is a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame. He’s been studying the emotional and spiritual development of young people from their early teenage years to college age and beyond.

Dr. SMITH: The intimacies of physical involvement and sexual involvement among college-age students these days — they don’t know what it means. They don’t expect much from it. It doesn’t have much significance. It seems to be another form of entertainment that doesn’t have too much attached to it.

VALENTE: What ever happened to dating, to romance? Why is there what some have called “a crisis of courtship”?

SARAH (Student): My mom is always, like, Sarah, you know, I can’t believe you don’t have a boyfriend. You know, college is the time where you can meet your, like, potential husband. But in fact really like not a lot of like dating, traditional courting, goes on.

“It’s about just meeting random people and having fun.”

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE STUDENT #1: I went to all-girls school for 13 years. I thought coming here, you know, you’d meet a lot of guys and you, hopefully, you would leave with having a boyfriend. But now I think that, after being here for two years, I think that it’s more about just meeting random people and having fun.

Dr. SMITH: The media has just been more explicit about sex and casual relationships, “Sex in the City”— whatever it might be. Young people have just picked up this is just a normal part of life. It’s no big deal. You just, if someone is attractive to you anything’s fair game as long as both people are consenting.

VALENTE: Laura Sessions Stepp is a journalist who has written about how hooking up impacts the young women who are involved in it, and why they do it in the first place.

LAURA SESSIONS STEPP (Journalist and Author, “Unhooked”): There are several factors. One is the empowerment of women — women feeling like they can do anything a man can do. We’ve seen that in business, and now we see it in their social lives. Their parents have told them relationships can wait. They’re hard. You get emotionally involved with someone—that distracts you from your studies. Put that aside. Go for your career.

VALENTE (to Dr. Smith): Why would a young woman engage in this behavior?

Dr. SMITH: Well, if you ask them they would say it’s fun. They would say it’s pleasurable for a time. I think beneath that there are deeper levels of wanting to be accepted.

VALENTE: Hookups often follow heavy drinking. Laura Sessions Stepp got this letter from a young man who had read her book.

Ms. STEPP (reading from letter): An often-occurring event, at least to me, is a drunk girl throwing herself all over me and frequently asking me to take her home, or similar. But I have found that girls are offended if I do not sleep with them, which is usually the first night I meet them.

VALENTE: The prevalence of the hookup culture may come as news to many people. But is it seriously harming those who participate in it, or is it just another generation sowing its wild oats?

Donna Freitas, now an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, has written about the spiritual and sexual lives of college students.

Professor DONNA FREITAS (Department of Religion, Boston University and Author, “Sex and the Soul,” lecturing students): To have a successful hookup you’re able to shut yourself down emotionally so you do not care when you physically engage with someone in some way —basically you don’t care about it the next day. So that’s a successful hookup.

“Most guys love to go out and look for the hookup.”

Ms. STEPP: The point is not that they’re having sex. Young people have always had sex. Certainly my generation did outside of marriage. That’s not the point. The point is the relationship. What is this teaching them about being in relationship to others?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #2: I think it’s a stage in our lives — just a college stage. But hopefully we’ll mature.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Yeah, we’re just looking to have fun. No regrets.

Dr. SMITH: Young people today draw a very strong line between their fun years and their settling-down years: What happened in my early to mid-20s will stay there, and then I will magically become happy, faithful, committed, monogamous person, and what happened three years ago won’t affect my life in the future. I personally think that that’s quite naïve.

Prof. FREITAS (speaking before audience): One hookup, one hookup, depending on the scenario, depending on where it happens, depending on who finds out, depending on who it’s with and what they say afterwards or who watches it happen, can make or break your college experience. I heard that over and over again, and think about that: one night could make or break your college experience.

VALENTE: But social psychologist Pepper Schwartz, who studied the sexual behavior of students at 11 U.S. campuses, says hooking up doesn’t necessarily cause emotional damage.

Dr. PEPPER SCHWARTZ (Professor of Sociology, University of Washington): I think that when we say people are hurt from hookups, compare that to a situation where every relationship has to be important. He’s the love of your life or vice versa. It breaks up. They get suicidal. They feel terrible about it. That’s a really terrible thing when you’re talking about adolescence and people just maturing. Is it a hookup by its nature? Has it proceeded to an extremely important emotional connection? When it’s over, you know, so be it.

VALENTE: But is it, really?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Well, you know, with the hookup someone’s always going to get attached and so that leads to a little bit of heartbreak for one side. For me, personally, I try not to get too attached at all.

Dr. SMITH: When people are physically intimate, that’s powerful. That affects their emotions in ways they may not be able to control. It impacts on their relationships.

Dr. SCHWARTZ: People go on usually in their early 20s to mid-20s and just say “enough of that,” and then go and look for something more important. It’s not like they’re damaged forever. They do, in fact, make relationships, and they get tired of this. It’s not like they’re now doomed to always have sterile, passing-by sexual relationships that mean nothing.

Laura Sessions Stepp

VALENTE: A woman in her 30s, describing herself as “scarred” by her sexual experiences, wrote this letter.

Ms. STEPP (reading from letter): I think our culture has no idea just what we women feel inside. We put this pressure on them and let them turn from girls to women without any help. It is too much, what we do to our daughters.

VALENTE: What about religion’s role? Do its teachings about individual dignity affect sexual behavior? Donna Freitas found that hooking up is just as common at Catholic universities as at secular schools, but much less so at evangelical schools. Christian Smith says a religious upbringing may deter hooking up, but not always.

Dr. SMITH: There are a lot of young people who just compartmentalize. They completely compartmentalize that, meaning my religious faith is something over there, and how I behave at parties and in my dorm room is just unrelated.

VALENTE: One reason hooking up is as prevalent as it is is that on many campuses administrators long ago gave up seeing themselves as substitute parents or moral police. Lori White is vice president for student affairs at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Dr. WHITE: At the end of the day each individual is responsible for the decisions that he or she makes, and we’re very clear with that when we have initial conversations with students during orientation. So I don’t see myself in any way as a parental figure. I see myself as an educator in helping students through this next phase of their life. I’m just not quite sure where it’s going to go from here. You know, it may well be that we have a counter-revolution, that we get so far out there that people begin to really feel uncomfortable with that and decide that we have really gone too far and that we need to really get back to some of the core values of our grandparents’ generation.

VALENTE: There are hints of reaction. Donna Freitas says students in her study would claim at first that they liked hooking up, only to admit later on that they wished things were different. And it wasn’t just the women.

Prof. FREITAS (speaking before audience): Probably one of most surprising things I got from the study was that men do not like cultures of casual sex. Men do not like hookup culture, and men really love romance but don’t know how to sort of get themselves in situations where it’s OK to be romantic.

Ms. STEPP: We don’t talk enough about love in this society. We are — it’s somehow become a word that people are afraid to use. But in essence that’s what every one of those young women that I talked to and have written me want — and the young men as well. They want to be loved and to love. And the question they have to ask themselves is, is hooking up the way to get there?

VALENTE: College administrators say parents should not assume it’s too late to talk with their children about sex and relationships, even when they’re in college, and more colleges are engaging in dialogue with students about hooking up. But ultimately it will have to be the students themselves who decide whether there might be a better way.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Judy Valente in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now a special report on teaching about sex and gender issues in theological seminaries—or really not teaching about them: sexual problems in marriage; gay, lesbian and transgender questions; kids having sex at ever younger ages. Some religious leaders are concerned that many seminarians are not being taught what they need to know to become good counselors to their future parishioners. Judy Valente reports.

Professor LAUREL SCHNEIDER (Chicago Theological Seminary, teaching class): Sex and sexuality is of course a very significant part of our experience.  And I put the question up here, “Is sex divine?”

JUDY VALENTE: Professor Laurel Schneider of Chicago Theological Seminary teaches an evening course in systematic theology. Most of the time, it’s hardly sexy stuff. But this evening the topic is sex. This seminary is one of the few where human sexuality, in all its facets, is openly discussed.

UNIDENTIFIED TRANGENDERED STUDENT:  My oldest son right now won’t even talk to me, won’t have anything to do with me. His comment to me was, “God created you as a man and God does not make mistakes.”

UNIDENTIED FEMALE STUDENT: The male who has become a female, that part of you inside that wants — that feels female — that wants to be female, that’s still a part of you. That’s still — God made that too.

VALENTE: Sexual mores have been changing. But how well are seminaries preparing future pastors and rabbis to address these changes? The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality is a nonprofit group that helps promote sexual health in faith communities. The Institute recently studied 36 seminaries across denominational lines. The study found an “overwhelming need” to better educate and prepare future religious leaders in the area of human sexuality.

Dr. KATE OTT (Associate Director, Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing): We see these issues every day and the harm that can be done around sexuality issues — either a kid who’s questioning their orientation, a couple whose marriage is failing. I think when those folks are coming to us in faith communities for real information and for real help, we need to make sure we have the training to be able to address that.

Dr. Alice Hunt

VALENTE: Many pastors say issues such as teen sexual activity and marital infidelity are among the most common topics about which congregation members seek guidance. Yet few seminaries offer courses in sexuality, and fewer still require these courses.

Dr. ALICE HUNT (President, Chicago Theological Seminary): It’s a challenge. It’s controversial. It makes people feel uncomfortable. It makes people feel insecure. So it’s just taking time for schools to come on board with addressing these issues.

Dr. OTT: When seminaries don’t offer the courses, they’re still talking about the issue. They’re just talking about it from silence and from a negative perspective, and seminary students understand that. They hear both messages loud and clear, and we would just prefer that they get a positive, open message rather than a silenced or dismissive message.

VALENTE: Some clergy have criticized the Religious Institute’s report saying seminaries can’t teach everything, that students aren’t there primarily to obtain “how to” skills, but to study biblical texts, to reflect and pray. Dr. Hunt says it’s a legitimate point.

Dr. HUNT: You have to, then, change your whole curriculum. If you want to incorporate issues of human sexuality and race and gender, you have to examine everything you’re teaching in your educational context, and that’s a lot of hard work.

VALENTE: As a result, graduating seminarians are often expected to “learn on the job.” Reverend Lillian Daniel is the senior pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She recalls one of the few classes at her divinity school where sex was discussed.

Reverend LILLIAN DANIEL (Senior Pastor, First Congregational United Church of Christ, Glen Ellyn, IL): The teacher goes “Never, ever, ever — with anyone in your congregation.” We all thought, “Did we miss the verb? What is it? Go skiing? Go dancing?”  I mean, he couldn’t even bring himself to say the word, and that was the extent of the conversation.

Reverend Lillian Daniel

VALENTE: And the word would have been?

Rev. DANIEL: Don’t sleep with.

VALENTE: Daniel says seminaries often discuss gender rights, sexual harassment, and how pastors should maintain proper boundaries with their congregation members. But, she says, they rarely train students to deal with the complex, intimate questions congregation members are likely to bring to them.

JENNY GRESKO (Therapist, Central DuPage Pastoral Counseling Center, speaking to group): “We don’t have as much sex as he wants and we have more sex than I want and we’ll never fix this.” That’s a very, very common issue between couples.

VALENTE: As part of a Sunday afternoon series on sexuality, Daniel’s congregation has been examining a variety of issues connected with marriage.

JOE FORTUNATO (Congregant): Sexuality isn’t bad. It’s something that’s a good thing. It’s a gift from God, which is the cliché, but it is a gift from God, and to deal with it honestly and openly is very, very important, I think, to a lot of people here.

Rev. DANIEL: I’m all in favor referring people on to folks with more expertise if they’ve got sort of issues that are ongoing. But a lot of times people come in to see a pastor because they want to tell something one time. Or they just want a reality check. Or they just want some kind of comfort or someone to listen to them. Sometimes it’s almost in the area of a confession. So in those cases, we may be their only stop.

VALENTE: Chicago Theological, a United Church of Christ seminary, received a high rating in the Religious Institute study. But even this school doesn’t require students to study human sexuality. It does, however, offer several sexuality courses. Alice Hunt says the seminary wants its graduates to be able to minister to the “whole person.”

Dr. HUNT: Understanding what your tradition says about human sexuality, being sexually healthy yourself, understanding what religious texts say, being aware of counseling issues, knowing how human development happens with sexuality, being aware of societal constraints and the fear that people face for not being able to fully express who they are — all of those are crucial in becoming a mature minister.

Mark Winters

Rev. DANIEL: The problem is it really falls upon the pastor to seek out that knowledge, and if you were somebody who wanted to shut yourself away from this, you really could, and your church could become a place where none of this is able to be talked about.

VALENTE: But there does seem to be a shift in generational attitudes. Today’s young seminarians, who grew up in a more sexually liberal culture, seem eager to address these matters openly.

MARK WINTERS (Student, Chicago Theological Seminary): I think that, generally speaking, younger folks tend to see, for instance, homosexuality as basically a non-issue, whereas older folks come from a different time and a different place where you weren’t as open about sex and sexuality, and I think I would include heterosexuality in that as well as homosexuality, as you alluded to in the question, in terms of cohabitation for heterosexual couples. I think, generally speaking, we are in a more nonjudgmental time, and I consider that a very good thing.

VALENTE: Many pastors would disagree. Nonetheless, questions of gay marriage and whether to ordain gay clergy have moved sexuality issues to the forefront in many churches. Alice Hunt says there is a far more fundamental reason for making sex a topic of discussion.

Dr. HUNT: I hope another imperative is the imperative of God’s love, a kind of radical inclusivity of everything that promotes human flourishing. I hope we’ll take it — a good look at what we need to do to get to the space where we can fully minister to our congregation.

Dr. OTT: Our sexuality is part of our spirituality. We’re embodied beings, and most of our faith traditions believe that God gave us the gift of sexuality, so it has deep theological meaning for us.  So I don’t think we can say sexuality isn’t a religious issue. It deeply is a religious issue.

VALENTE: The Religious Institute recently received a grant to help seminaries introduce sexuality courses and provide continuing education classes for those already in ministry. One young seminarian described this as a “coming out time” for sexuality discussions in faith communities. “If sex is a common topic in the Bible,” he asked, “then why shouldn’t it be talked about in churches and seminaries?”

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Judy Valente in Chicago.

Q: How would you describe the statement of the bishops who met in New Orleans?

A: I think it’s a miracle when you look at what a broad piece of common ground we are standing on with this document. Then you look at the bishops who are in the room, all but one of whom, a very liberal bishop, voted for it. And it was the full range of liberal to conservative, all kinds of different faith and practice. That we could craft such a broad piece of ground to stand on, I think it’s a really wonderful thing. I think the prediction was that this would be like Katrina II. You know, some horrible storm that would tear the Episcopal Church apart. And what actually happened was that the vast majority of the bishops of all persuasions came together for this common statement. It’s really, really a miracle.

Q: Where does it leave gay and lesbian members of the church?

A: I think it leaves us pretty much where we were. That is to say we’re somewhere between being totally excluded, this was the case in the past, and we’re not quite towards full inclusion yet. The Episcopal Church has made enormous progress here, and yet we are a part of a broader Anglican Communion. And although we would like it all to have happened yesterday, that’s not the way the church works. I would say it’s not the way any group works. We are undergoing vast change at a pretty good pace. Would I have liked to have gone further faster? Absolutely, but there are also people who would have liked it to go much slower, and that’s what being a church is about. It’s about finding that middle ground, something that we can all live with for this moment. Then we see where the future takes us.

Q: Where does it leave the diocese of Chicago if Tracey Lind, an openly lesbian priest, is elected bishop?

A: We have a resolution of the General Convention that says we should exercise restraint, and we don’t really know where that will take us, and we won’t know until there is another bishop-elect who is gay or lesbian, and then we’ll see how that happens. I think we’re all exercising restraint in a sense that we know this is an important issue. We know it’s a controversial issue, and only time will tell how that will go either with bishops or with standing committees. And remember in our church it’s not just bishops who decide, but clergy and laity as well as the bishop.

Q: What did you learn at this meeting about the feelings of the rest of the world?

A: I think the international visitors underscored for me what we’ve known, but hearing it coming from their lips is even more powerful. Their contexts are so different from ours. It should not surprise us, but perhaps we’re naive when we forget that in many countries of the world if you’re known to be gay you can be imprisoned. There’s just rampant discrimination. In a context like that, to ever have a chance to sit in the room with a faithful, committed Christian person who also happens to be gay or lesbian — it’s just not something that happens. So to hear from their lips how their contexts are different from ours, I think it always helps to have that personal contact. It was just as important for them to experience how very different our context is. So I think there was learning on both sides. That’s really why we treasure the Anglican Communion so much is that if we hold together there is so much to be learned from one another.

Q: We understand there were some pretty frank exchanges. What did you say to the Archbishop of Canterbury?

A: I was frank with the Archbishop of Canterbury, at his invitation. I began my remarks to him by saying, “Your grace, you know that I respect you and your office. I always have. I always will. But some of what you had to say to us was disturbing.” And I understood him to be saying that we had to choose between fidelity to our gay and lesbian members and fidelity to the process of what he called “common discernment.” I said that as a gay man choosing a process over human beings felt dehumanizing to me. Perhaps there were people who were shocked that I said that, but after all I am the only openly gay voice in that room. I did feel that way. I know that other gay and lesbian people, had they been in the room, felt that way. I owed it to him out of my respect for him and his office to say to him what he came to hear, which was our responses to him. So he invited us to respond. I was not the only one who responded, nor was I the only one who responded in a frank manner.

Q: What about your attendance next year at the Lambeth Conference?

A: Actually, the thing I most hoped for happened during this week related to my participation in Lambeth, which is that it would be taken out of being a solitary decision between the Archbishop of Canterbury and me of New Hampshire. It would actually be owned by the House of Bishops. Part of the response that we made was to say that this whole house hopes for the full participation of the bishop of New Hampshire. I’m very pleased by that. There was hardly any debate over that at all, that the people of the House see my inclusion in Lambeth. That’s a really important thing for the American church.

Q: Several of the most conservative bishops weren’t here for that part of the meeting.

A: It’s important to remember that the bishops who left right after the archbishop left have not attended our meetings in years, have not lodged with us, eaten with us, or worshiped with us. So this was nothing new. The only thing new was that they actually showed up. They had announced very early on that they were not staying. That grieves me, but I cannot make someone stay at the table. I think the important thing here is that the vast majority, liberal to conservative, all stayed. We hung in there with each other. We spoke our minds. We disagreed about things. Then we found a place that we could stand together. That’s amazing.

Q: What message do you hope this sends to the wider world?

A: What I hope it says to the American church and the Anglican Communion is that we dearly love each other and we dearly love this church. Although there are many things we disagree about we intend to hang together. We treasure our partners in the Anglican Communion. We hope they treasure us. If we just keep holding on to one another while we fight some of these things out, it’s going to be okay. So the result I’m hoping for is a kind of lowering of the anxiety and discomfort, just to say it’s in Christ that we find out unity, not in our agreement. If we just hang in there with one another long enough, the spirit of God will hold us together.

I think the message for gay and lesbian Episcopalians is that the Episcopal Church is not going back; that our movement towards greater and greater inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the life and leadership of our church is continuing forward. It may not be going as fast as we would like, but its there. It is heartfelt. Even, it’s interesting, even some of the conservatives today in our closed session said we know where this is going. We know how this is going to turn out. Even they see it. I think they are just arguing pastorally that it needs to be at a pace that their people can absorb. So I don’t think there’s been any change in where we’re going. We’re only talking about how long it takes us to get there.

Q: And finally your thoughts on the involvement of foreign bishops in some U.S. dioceses?

One of the great surprises, to me, of this meeting was to hear of the sheer number of dioceses that have had incursions by bishops from foreign jurisdictions — archbishops, bishops, clergy coming from other international churches really with the purpose of undermining the Episcopal Church. I knew it was happening. I read about it like everyone else does. I am blessed not to have that happening in my diocese. But I was stunned at the number of dioceses in which this is happening. I don’t think the members of the Anglican Communion realize what an assault on our church this is. No one seems to be remembering that the Windsor Report, which everyone thinks called only us to task, actually called for that kind of incursion to end. There are no efforts that I know of in the Anglican Communion to stop those incursions from happening. That, too, is a part of the Windsor Report. The Americans would be happy to see some support from the Anglican Communion for stopping those incursions.

Q: How important a moment is this for the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion?

A: Well, from the perspective of the Episcopal Church it’s a very important time in our life to be very clear about who we are, you know, where we’ve been, and where we’re going to be going as a collective church. For the larger Communion, I think it’s a time to really reclaim what I think is the great activity and work of the church globally, and that is to say we have far more important things to do than to fight over these issues of human sexuality that we cannot resolve at this time and be engaged in the mission of the church, given the situation that is very much a part of the definition of the Global South.

Q: The bishops are going to be asked again to respond to the communiqué that was issued in Tanzania. What is your sense about where the bishops are heading on that?

A: We received that communiqué with a great deal of respect, but the House of Bishops has already spoken, and the other thing that primates need to understand, and I think other people even in our own church need to understand, is that the bishops, really, we can create “mind of the house” resolutions. We cannot change the direction or, in fact, speak to that kind of question as a defining moment in the life of our journey as Episcopalians. That’s up to the Executive Council, and so both the House of Bishops and the Executive Council have made it very clear that the scheme offered by the primates in Dar es Salaam was a scheme that we could not incorporate or accept.

Q: Remind people how the Anglican Communion works. The rest of the world cannot tell the U.S. church what to do, can it? The U.S. church is autonomous.

A: I don’t think autonomy is the right word. We’re a collection of very, very different provinces that in a sense are self-governed but in fact are connected to each other by the office and position of the Archbishop of Canterbury. We’re in communion with one another through our communion with the archbishop. And so even the discussions that have ranged for years about people not being in communion with the Episcopal Church — it’s really inaccurate. You are in communion with us unless the Archbishop of Canterbury says you are not. So I think the issue here in terms of where we are right now is that our church is very much a post-colonial church. It’s a bicameral legislative church, and a lot of folks don’t understand that in terms of the balance of powers, the check and balances systems that are retained within it.

Q: Because of that is there a growing frustration in the U.S. with strong international pressure?

A: Well, I think we have to get to the root of what the issues are here. For me, as one bishop, the issue is who’s going to control the Communion. Who’s in charge? Who has the power, which is an unusual place to be in, given the loose confederation of churches and provinces that make up the Anglican Communion. I look at it less as a serious threat to the American church and more as an extremely serious threat to the concept and the life of the Anglican Communion. That, to me, is far more serious, and that’s an issue that we don’t really talk too much about, other than the fact that there could be dissention and maybe a dissolution of some provinces away from the Communion after [the 2008] Lambeth [Conference] or maybe even before Lambeth.

Q: How do you balance the U.S. church’s moving ahead with what it feels called to do, based on its canons and its reading of scripture on one hand, and the concerns of the rest of the Communion on the other?

A: We are part of the Communion. We will be a part of the Communion until the Archbishop of Canterbury says we are not a part of the Communion. We’re absolutely committed to being in the Communion. We believe that the Anglican Communion is probably one of the greatest hopes, at least for what I would call the broad Protestant denominations in the world today in terms of addressing global issues, and also our own domestic issues. Without the Communion, we become extremely weak. We become independent dioceses, independent provinces. We don’t have resources, and we don’t have the skill sets that are needed to address what’s going on domestically and globally.

Q: Some in the gay and lesbian community are concerned that, in an attempt to appease or to meet the concerns coming from other parts of the Communion, the Episcopal Church will back away from their issues. How important is staying in the Communion versus dealing with these divisive issues?

A: From my point of view, the Episcopal Church has been very clear about its support and its care for members of the gay and lesbian communities that have been a part of our life for forever. Legislation crafted at General Convention makes that very clear. The statement that was issued by the House of Bishops to the primates who had sent us the scheme from Dar es Salaam was very clear, you know. We are not going back to Egypt, and I think the gay and lesbian community, if they don’t understand that, they need to understand that. I think our African partners, for the most part, the reasonable partners who clearly may disagree with us but look at a much bigger picture of what it means to be in Communion, understand that as well. They also understand that they’re beginning to address those very complex human sexuality issues in their own countries and in their own provinces. And so what we do may not necessarily be a lead in or a support for them, but it does say it is a very problematic piece. In terms of what’s going to happen in New Orleans, I really don’t know. I do know that the House of Bishops is very much united in terms of what it will and will not do, what it can and cannot do by constitution and canon. I also believe that we will have to exhibit some sensitivity to what we would call, what others have called “the Windsor bishops.” I mean, they have some very real concerns, and the people that they serve — these bishops have some very real concerns in terms of serving people in the dioceses that they’ve been elected to care for. We’ve got to find a way in which to provide them with appropriate care and support, and respect those positions as much as we hope they would respect ours. But we are not going back to Egypt.

Q: People have been searching for a way to accommodate both those positions for a long time. Is it still possible to find that accommodation?

A: I think it’s very possible. I think it’s unfair to label me as anything other than a bishop in the Episcopal Church, but I’ve been labeled a lot of things. … But I would say this, that some of my closest friends in the House of Bishops are bishops who are on the other side of the aisle, who are very conservative, and some who are “Windsor bishops,” and we look at the church in some ways from a very different perspective, and yet we understand that the strength of our common mission is the greater gift, rather than the evil of being divided. And so if there are some of us who can be in that position within the American church, and we can carry that through New Orleans, there’s no reason why that cannot be the reality in the rest of the Communion. But what it takes is you’ve got to — you can’t write letters, you can’t send e-mails, you can’t send press releases out. What you have to do is you have to sit down at a table, you have to look each other in the eye, and you have to let it go, and you’ve got to be consistent and hardworking at dialogue and also in listening, and dialogue and listening are issues and pieces of life in the Episcopal Church [that] have been, in the past, pretty much lost entities, and I think we are reclaiming that, given the challenges that are before us both domestically and globally.

Q: There has been a trend of disaffected U.S. priests being made bishops here for other parts of the Anglican Communion, for Africa. What is your reaction to that?

A: It’s very painful, you know, and one of the things that I expressed [at a church meeting] this summer in Spain was they need to understand how painful that is in the life of my province, my church, the Episcopal Church, and how much it undermines the very concept of what it means to be an Anglican or to be a part of the Anglican Communion. What’s it going to do? I think very little. I think there’s so much division right now within what used to be considered the right wing of the Episcopal Church, in terms of who’s in control and who has the power, who’s going to make the decisions, that all of these consecrations and all of this divisiveness in 10 or 15 years will be something that you and I are going to look back upon, God willing, and we’re going to see it as one of those significant painful blips in the growth and life, I think, of a great Communion.

Q: What do you hope to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury? What message do you hope he brings?

A: Well, first of all, I hope he listens and hears how much we respect the office. I hope he hears how faithful we are and committed we are to the Communion. I hope he also learns something about the life of this church, which I think he has not heard clearly, and that is that what he might perceive as a division in this church — I mean, I’ve heard figures of 40 percent or more people who are disaffected with the way in which the Episcopal Church is moving, you know. That’s fallacious. It’s absolutely not true. What is he going to come away with from this meeting? I hope that what he comes away with, along with having an opportunity to hear us and be a part of our community’s life, I hope he comes away understanding that, you know, we are not as divided as some would say we are, and at the same time we are willing to live into those pieces of legislation that we passed at the General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, recognizing that maybe the language in those resolutions might not be as clear as he would like. Nonetheless, the bishops in the House and I know others in this church respect that legislation and will live into it well. You know, I think we’re in great shape. I’ve had, in the last probably 8 or 9 months, I think I’ve been more hopeful about the future of this church and it’s growth than at any time since I’ve been ordained, and that means growth in the Communion. It means growth in the Episcopal Church.