The Church and the Homosexual | One Utah

There?s an old joke ? in the Bible there are 300 verses about straight people and 6 about gay people; it?s not that God doesn?t love gay people, it?s that heterosexuals need more supervision.? I?m borrowing the title of John J. McNeill?s landmark book for this post.

FWIW, this post turned out much more challenging than I expected when I began.?

When I started writing, I had to basic ideas ? first to explore some of what lies behind the often unhinged resistance of so many Christians to glbt rights and issues and second what if anything is the relationship between glbt persons and the Christian church.? It?s impossible to write about the relationship between the church and gay people without acknowledging? that the Christian church, historically and in the present day, has been and is pointlessly, repeatedly and sadistically cruel toward glbt persons.? It has denied their full humanity and it has more often than not been the agent of their oppression, repression and destruction.? To deny this reality is to be willfully blind to the damage the church is fully capable of inflicting upon people in the name of orthodoxy and right morality.?

The church?s cruelty, though not consistent in all times, places, denominations, intensities?or behaviors, has been an ever present reality for gay people for centuries.? To be gay in the Christian world has been to be automatically suspect; at a minimum, sexual minority persons have suffered from a malign neglect.? Sexual minorities have adopted various strategies for survival, the most common of which is the creation of a relatively closed subculture; in the 60s, prior to Stonewall, elaborate cultural and social taboos against homosexuality led to the formation of a subculture dominated by fear, anonymity, furtive sexual contacts and the mob, which usually owned and ran the bars.? To be gay in pre-Stonewall America was to be a regular target of official harassment by law enforcement.? The church, rather than standing on the side of those abused by the power structure, gave that power structure their full and explicit support.? When the church spoke about gay people ? which it didn?t do very often ? it did so in toxic ways.

And yet, despite this reality, glbt persons have refused to leave the church ? almost any church choir worth its salt has got more than a few gay people singing, directing or playing music.? Medieval monasteries and abbeys were home to more than?a few devout queer people, many of whom no doubt had lifelong intimate relationships with one another (with or without active sexuality since the enforcement of the rules was far from uniform).? Today, despite conservative Christians organizing national campaigns against glbt rights, the gay community has refused to turn its back on the church.

GLBT issues divide the church precisely because they occur at the intersection of personal life, Biblical authority, and the social order.? How one reads the Bible is perhaps the central question in Christianity today.? Is the bible an inerrant authority or is it the product of a set of social and historical circumstances which must be understood contextually?? Do we read St. Paul as a final arbiter of church order or do we understand him as a product of his culture, limited by it, but still valuable?? Do we read the Revelation of St. John as a metaphorical and allegorical product of religious vision or is it a literal map to the ?end times??? For a great many American fundamentalists, the latter interpretation shapes their worldview; it?s impossible to hear fundamentalist preachers talk about Israel without realizing they perceive it not as a nation-state but as part of a divine plan for Armageddon and the Second Coming.? If the Bible is an inerrant source of authority, then its rules and regulations must be obeyed without question lest one risk one?s eternal soul going to damnation.? (And yes, I know that even supposed Biblical literalists do not actually take the Bible literally and treat large parts of it as if they no longer apply ? i.e. almost all of the Jewish purity laws are dismissed as not applying to Christians.)

The faithful who so readily ignore huge chunks of Mosaic law insist on applying the Levictical injunction against men laying with me as with women literally ? of course to gay men.? All those other rules don?t count.? It?s as if a great many fundagelical Christians have picked the one sin they are pretty sure they won?t ever commit and decided it is the big one.? It sometimes seems that if conservative Christians took half the energy they spend condemning glbt people and focused it on homelessness, poverty, and other forms charity, they could transform the world tomorrow.

But that ignores one of George Lakoff?s most profound insights from Moral Politics ? conservative objections to gay rights are grounded in the conservative conception of social order as a strict father family.? The strict father family structure envisions a social order in which the authority figure stands atop an obedient hierarchy of men over women, adults over children, and spirit over body.? It is a social order which values self control and which sees giving into temptation as conclusive evidence one lacks control; it sees homosexuality not as a state of being but as nothing more than a physical act.? Gay people have gay sex because they lack the self control to not have it.? A same sex couples also fails to recreate the preferred social order ? by definition a household of two men or two women lacks a primary male authority figure ? a strict father ? who hands out rules and punishment and who is accountable for the household?s obedience.? The film Far From Heaven accurately portrays the meltdown of a strict father household ? as the father fails in his role, the family flies apart (fwiw, Far From Heaven is one of the smarter films I?ve seen in terms of its social commentary and its ability to portray racism, sexism and heterosexism and it is one of the most visually stunning films I?ve seen in years).?

GLBT persons and rights strike at the core of what it means to live in a moral, conservative household.? By arguing and understanding homosexuality as a matter of choice, conservative Christians in essence sidestep the moral, legal and social issues.? If something is a choice, than you can unchoose it and the problem goes away.? By envisioning being gay as an addiction, as nothing more than a behavior, fundamentalists offer a solution to the moral problem ? just stop being addicted and you will start obeying the rules.? When conservative Christians describe being gay as a choice, they are doing so because their moral system has no other means of dealing with it; in a paradoxical way, that position is a kind, even compassionate one.? By almost any standard, there is no way for someone embracing fundamentalist moral theology to make homosexuality morally acceptable; by arguing it is changeable, the fundamentalist Christian offers gay people a means of becoming moral and going to Heaven.

To my mind, the primary failure of this position lies in not questioning or examining the validity of the rule itself.? What is it that makes being gay immoral?? It?s forbidden by the Bible; but for what reason is it forbidden?? Is it actually forbidden?? Did the Biblical authors actually understand sexual orientation as we do today?? All of these questions strike at the core of Biblical authority, raising the very real question that the Bible is fallible and flawed.? If Biblical authority crumbles then entire moral system itself crumbles.?

Both the Catholic and Mormon churches take the official position that being gay isn?t a sin, but acting on your gay feelings is.?

Author John J. McNeill rightly points out that any god who creates gay people and then tells them they must spend their lives ? willingly or not ? celibate is a cruel and sadistic god.? If being gay is not a sin then how is it a sin to fall in love, to have intimate relationships, to have sex??

Perhaps recognizing that they have no good answer to that question, conservative Christians have developed a second line of reasoning ? that sexuality serves the purpose of procreation and nonprocreative sex is immoral and damaging and must therefore be regulated.? John J. McNeill addresses this argument by pointing out that this view of sexuality reduces both our partners and the act of sex to nothing more than object, nothing more than a means to an end.? Arguing that sexuality is primarily for reproduction is starkly reductionist.? But, it also places same sex couples forever outside the moral circle since their sexuality cannot make babies.? Contrary to this view (advocated by many liberal Christians) is the view of sexuality as a means unto itself, a source of joy, union, communion and knowing of persons.? McNeill defines sexuality as a form of play ? something that occurs when one feels safe and free to express one?s self fully, something which serves no end beyond itself.

Conservative Christians have recently expanded their arguments against glbt rights to include claims that expanding civil rights protections and enacting marriage equality constitute an infringement on religious freedom.? These arguments place opposition to glbt rights at the center point of Christian doctrine; IOW, you can?t be Christian unless you are anti-gay.? Suffice to say that?s hardly a traditional or orthodox position of Christianity.

All of which would suggest that glbt folk would be better off walking away from the Christian church.? Even the more liberal and tolerant denominations have generally failed to effectively advocate for the rights of glbt persons.? Justin Lee, director of the Gay Christian Network, observed:

As I turned to my church and the Christians I respected most to get their support, things only got worse. Christian groups kicked me out or turned their backs on me when they learned that I was gay, even though I told them that I didn?t want to be and that I hadn?t even acted on my feelings! I learned that that one magic word, ?gay,? had the power to make Christians turn unkind and uncompassionate without even realizing they were doing it.

?By almost any measure, the Christian church is a hostile environment for glbt persons.? Which brings me to a difficult question: What place exists within Christianity for openly gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons?? Lee reported the same interview that some members of the GCN have chosen to remain celibate in view of scripture.? Such a position baffles me ? I tend to hold the view that celibacy can be valuable at times in almost any life but it is not good to force it on people who are not truly called to it.? I don?t believe for even a moment that anything in the Bible requires us to give up intimate relationships on the basis of a thousands of years old injunction given by a?dubious and probably mythical deity.

Should glbt persons even want a place within the Christian church?? Can the church be redeemed of its centuries of malignant hatred??

I hope someone knows, cause I got nothing.

Source: http://oneutah.org/this-blog/the-church-and-the-homosexual/

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