PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION : The People Don’t Hear God’s Voice : Protestants are resisting a more open, inclusive view of sexuality because their collective conscience is not stirred.

There’s little question that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will, in its meeting today, overwhelmingly reject a study document on sexuality prepared by a task force of that 2.9-million-member body. It is equally certain that the voters represent the voice of the members in congregations “back home” more than do the experts who drafted the document.

The only question is why most church members are so reluctant to accept the gift of “open” sexual attitudes when a voice of their denomination offers it to them. And why will there be similar reluctance to change in at least three other Protestant bodies central to American Christianity, which have formally taken up the sexual issue: the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Methodist Church? A standard complaint against organized religion is that its leadership is too stodgy, too ready always to say no to change, too closed-minded to notice the struggles and sufferings of people, including its own members. In these reports there is the yes of the open-minded.

Yet the impression one gets from comment in public media is that church members and secular bystanders by and large disdain the products of these task forces. Why?

Cynics say that people like to have the church resist change so that they can make fun of it for being in a rut. Or that they like to know that someone, somewhere, stands for something--though they themselves enjoy departing from the standards set by authoritarian churches.

More credibly, some will charge that the General Assembly is stacked with reactionary, backlashing people, or that the believers they represent do not accept “prophetic” calls like those uttered by the task force. The first of these explanations will not hold up, because Assembly voters for years have taken risks on issues of social justice, even when the voice of the pew was not ready. The second charge also won’t stand. The term “prophetic” harks back to biblical prophets, whose power came from their ability to call people back to the terms of a common covenant with God and with each other. Thus Martin Luther King moved Presbyterians and members of these other bodies, by prophetically calling them to act upon the cries for justice and to follow the directions of Isaiah, John the Baptist, or, in the secular sphere, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He appealed to a collective, recognized conscience.

The Presbyterian task force fails to stir this conscience because the membership does not recognize itself, its thoughts, its language in the document. It ought to, one might fairly urge. In all congregations there are people whose cries for help are given voice in the report on sexuality. There is an adult single for every married couple in each of these large church bodies, and singles are taken into consideration here as never before. A significant number of gays and lesbians participate in the lives and ministries of most congregations, and are recognized here ungrudgingly, even enthusiastically. Abused women will find friendly support here. No one can accuse the task force authors of not being “with it” or even ahead of “it,” meaning the movement for new affirmations of sexual expressions.

Still, where the membership does not display anger or derision it is reluctant; there is no better word for the response. The Latin root of reluctance includes the idea of struggle. People are struggling to keep families together, to feel that their marriages are truly honored, to recognize that their children need standards, to find more causes for their shortcomings than “heterosexism” and “patriarchy,” (the all-purpose villains of this report). These people do not respond to the task force’s way of addressing them.

Presbyterians and their kind are used to having to wrestle with biblical commands, including some that say “don’t.” In these commands they have heard the voice of God.

They are ready to do plenty of rehearing and reinterpreting, but the study document tends to cut them off from biblical roots. It cites texts positively only if they agree with the task force’s blurring language, which connects “justice-love” with a hyphen. Such inventions are deaf to profound theology voiced through centuries, theology demanding to be heard before it gets reconstrued.

Church women and men are genuinely bewildered by the sexual revolution that has made divorce so common and brought homosexuality into new visibility. They do want to minister to and among and with AIDS victims and with sexually abused women and children. But on other grounds than the task force proposes.

Some may be so stunned by change that they simply want the church to be careful, to go slow while they think and adjust. Without landmarks they are lost, without moorings they are at sea. They will make some moves if they feel that somehow their church speaks with a voice of reasonable authority that quickens conscience and in which they can still hear at least a muffled “word of God.”