My Grade 9 English teacher once described the United Church of Canada I attend as more a country club than a religious faith.
Luckily for me, this is as close to religious persecution as I have ever been forced to endure.
The same cannot be said for the Jewish people, which makes the news that the agenda of the UCC General Synod includes considering a boycott of Israel deeply troubling.
I've had an uneasy relationship with Christian dogma, but when pressed would admit to faith. I attend the Beach United Church a dozen times a year, had my daughter christened there and will likely have some relationship with the United Church for the rest of my life.
I enjoy the services, which typically provoke and question, rather than prescribe or hector. Each one leaves me wondering at humanity and the divine, stoking my vestigial faith. Sometimes I'm inspired and occassionally changed and stengthened.
If there is a criticism I level at the United Church, it is a wooly-headedness that sometimes ranges into the farcical.
For example, a past head of the United Church once got himself embroiled in controversy by stating his belief that Jesus was not divine and did not rise from the dead. Since Christianity more or less rests on these two articles of faith, its hard for someone like me who wrestles with their beliefs to buy in when the head of the religion more or less says not to bother.
Despite this occassional fraillty, the UCC's involvement in social justice and poverty is long-standing, admirable and fundamental to my continued membership. I want to belong to a living faith that practices the charity, hope and love it preaches.
While it is this engagement in the world that makes the United Church relevant, it also is an occassional source of controversy and embarassment, as these anti-Israel resolutions show.
In the UCC's defense, the current set of resolutions are one of dozens. They were placed on the agenda as a bottom-up exercise through the actions of a handful of members in local churches or associations. The decision of the UCC General Synod to unanimously reject some of the worst excesses of language is a good first step.
But the Synod must go much further, refuse the call for a boycott of Israel, reaffirm their 2003 declaration on the right of Israel to exist and instead focus on positive actions to foster peace, like the current policy of investing in Israeli companies that support the peace process.
Make no mistake. These anti-Israeli resolutions turn their back on the values that underline social justice and, indeed, Christianity as espoused by the United Church.
Instead, it buys into a false logic that the Middle East is an easy situation of white and black hats, that the state of Israel is inherently bad, and that a one-sided boycott will produce peace. At the heart of this "boycott Israel" movement is the severing of dialogue between Israel and Palestine, a hardening of positions into camps of stubborn isolation that is the opposite of peace.
This rejects the embracing of dialogue and freedoms of speech, worship and assembly that are fundamental to the intellectual underpinings of the United Church of Canada.
Passing them would sever all ties to the Jewish community in Canada, destroying inter-faith discussion in favour of moral righteousness grounded in a troubling world view.
The resolutions veer into ahistorical falacy and one-sided demogogery with claims of ethnic cleansing by Israel, ignoring the avowed aims and continued attempts of neighbour regimes to destroy Israel and its inhabitants.
They employ the language of apartied and comparisons to South Africa, aiming these barbs at the only stable liberal democracy in its region, a pluralistic nation where electoral franchise and legal rights extend more broadly.
Most troubling, they accuse Canadian MPs of dual Canadian-Israeli citizenship of questionable loyalty. They make dramtic charges against the Jewish community of bribery. While there is nothing inherently bigoted in calling for Israel to withdraw from Gaza or questioning its human rights record, this unfounded attack on Canada's Jewish community is anti-Semetism without question. It is ignorant, hateful and wrong.
These bigoted statements have been unanimously denounced by the Synod, although without sufficient vigour or clarity. The background materials accusing Jews of bribery and Jewish MPs of questionable loyalty have been removed from the discussion.
But the fundamental policy remains available for adoption: a boycott of Israel.
Such a policy is one-sided and ridiculous in a world filled with tyrants. To boycott Israel and not Iran is farce. To boycott either is to turn our backs on engagement with the world.
The United Church has only called for a boycott once before, in the case of South Africa. Destructive regimes in Myanmar and Sudan have been the subject of criticism, but not of boycott. Iran appears to have avoided even modest censure.
Most everyone agrees that Israel should continue along a path of peace for land and that a two-state solution is required. But boycott fails to help this. A weakened and isolated Israel will not choose that path. Only a nation that feels strong and engaged in the world can take a route frought with peril in hope of finding resolution at the end.
There is a balanced resolution on the table that calls for both Israel and Palestinians to end violence, acknowledges the right of the State of Israel to exist and removal by Israel to the pre-1967 borders. Personally, I don't agree with the resolution because it presupposes the outcome of what should be a negotiated process of withdrawl, but it is a valid point for debate and a resolution that would not repulse me were it adopted.
The same cannot be said for the remaining three resolutions.
Elie Weisel said that peace is our gift to each other. That requires a relationship, engagement, trust. These things don't come from isolation but from dialogue.
The United Church should be seeking to advance dialogue, not curtail it. Those resolutions that would boycott Israel should be rejected as strongly as possible.