Gay Restorationist

Testimony.

2011-06-21T14:09:00.000-05:00

(I was recently asked to give a testimony to the LGBT faith group hosted by Urban Village Church here in Chicago. Here is the result.)

Waking up.

I came out of the blackout to discover that I was behind the wheel of my Buick, driving down a large, tree-lined boulevard I didn’t recognize. How had I gotten here? In what direction was I driving? Who was the person in the car with me? How had I gotten so drunk?

I pulled over and told the stranger to get out of the car. When he didn’t seem to understand, I yelled at him and threatened to drag him out onto the shoulder of the road. Wisely, he got out.

I continued up the road and, finding a landmark, discovered that I was in a town 30 miles north of Dallas, which put me more than 50 miles from home. Upon arriving at my house an hour later, I checked the car, but discovered I had no glasses, no credit card, and no phone. I also discovered it was nearing dawn on the 25th of November. The last drink I remembered was on my birthday, November 22nd. Perhaps mercifully, the days in between are just...gone.

On the way.

A few years earlier, my life looked completely different. In 2003 I graduated from Harding University, a Church of Christ school in Arkansas with a B.S. in Chemistry, and moved to Chicago to study at the University of Chicago Law School. I came to Chicago afraid I would be out of my intellectual depth, but I quickly discovered I thrived in the work hard/play hard environment. Which is to say, I knew how to work hard, and I desperately needed to play hard after 18 years in Texas and 4 years in Arkansas.

I did well enough in school to be asked to be a research assistant by a quirky but brilliant Contracts professor known for helping graduates secure tenure-track teaching jobs. And In my second year of law school, I was offered an internship with Skadden Arps, one of the largest and most profitable law firms in the world. Skadden, the best of the best, made its name by perfecting the art of the hostile takeover, so it isn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy place -- its main office in New York is affectionately referred to as the “Death Star.” I split my time as an intern between the New York and London offices, and was offered a permanent job in London with a starting salary that was well on the other side of obscene. All I needed to do was graduate, and I was on my way. I didn’t ask the obvious question: on my way where?

Free from the constraints of Texas and Arkansas, I was definitely working, but I was also playing...hard. My drinking, which started in secret at my Christian college, accelerated during my first few years of law school, and particularly during my schmoozy, boozy summer internships with Skadden. But I deserved to have a little fun, right?

Screw you, God.

But In 2005, while I was working (and playing) in New York, I got a call from one of the Elders at Lakeview Church of Christ in Chicago, the church I attended since graduating from Harding University. Lakeview is a small church, and since Churches of Christ don’t ordain priests or pastors, all are expected to participate in the life and leadership of the church. At Lakeview I led worship, presided at the Lord’s Supper, taught classes, was involved in outreach, and occasionally preached. I was also part of a group trying to include women in the leadership and public worship of the church for the first time. I’d put myself, as always, at the very heart of the church.

That day Jeff, one of the Elders of the congregation, told me I’d been outed by someone at the church who didn’t like my theology and who didn’t care for the way I was agitating for women’s equality in the church. The complaining member of the church argued that gay inclusion was the next step after inclusion of women in public worship. The Church had to put its foot down before things got out of hand, and the Church certainly couldn’t have a homosexual leading worship.

The Elders agreed: the Church was to stop talking about women’s inclusion, and I was to be disciplined. I was told I had two options for continued membership in Lakeview Church of Christ: I could disavow my homosexuality (either completely or by promising celibacy), or I could step down from all leadership positions in the church, and attend church without serving publicly. Otherwise, I would be “disfellowshipped,” (removed from the fellowship of the saints), which is Church-of-Christ-speak for excommunication. I had been silenced.

I’d had enough. I told the Elders thanks, but no thanks. Then I calmly said “fuck you” to God, and began walking away from it all: God, the church, school, my research, my job, my family, my friends, and my boyfriend.

The Church of Christ.

The Church of Christ, in which I was raised, developed out of the Restoration Movement, the frontier movement that also spawned the Christian Church and the Disciples of Christ. The leaders of the movement sought to restore the purity and unity of first-century Christianity by going “back to the Bible” and abandoning practices not found within the pages of the New Testament. Though it sounds crazy to this postmodern Christian, the founders of the Restoration Movement genuinely believed that if all Christians would just read the Bible literally, the pure, unadulterated, unified Church of Christ could be restored. Everyone will read the same words, so everyone will agree on what God wants, right?

Though Restoration leaders would never say the words Sola Scriptura (they sound too...well...Lutheran), they became obsessed with the Bible. The historic creeds of the Church were abandoned because they aren’t found in Scripture, Christian tradition was viewed as apostate, and even the celebration of Christmas was viewed as suspect. I remember being taught that there was no such thing as theology, there was just the Bible. And in an attempt to out-protest the Protestants, we were taught that denominations were “unbiblical.” We, the Church of Christ alone, we were The Church restored to the earth at long last.

In hardcore Church of Christ families like mine, this meant that a person could grow up and never set foot in a church belonging to another denomination, particularly not a church as liberal as, say, the Southern Baptists, who had a piano. Marriage outside the church is taboo, and even friendships with those outside the Church are suspect, since it essentially means fraternization with the damned. The Church operates more like a sect than a denomination.

Other features of Churches of Christ: strict congregationalism with absolutely no governing structures, weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper, belief in baptism by immersion as necessary to salvation, exclusively a cappella singing in worship (and there’s always A LOT of singing), and though Elders and Deacons are chosen from the men of the congregation, there is a complete lack of ordained clergy. And did I mention an obsession with knowledge of Scripture? (I honestly believe I did well in law school because reading and interpreting texts was almost second nature.)

Young men in this Church were trained to know the Bible, and because of the church’s anti-clericalism, we were expected to learn to pray in public, preside at communion, preach, evangelize, and baptize. We were the priesthood of all believers. Baptism in the church was itself evidence of a call to ministry. No pressure.

This all brought with it strong denominational identity. I didn’t go to a Church of Christ: I am Church of Christ. This fundamentalist Church was in my marrow, and it was the lens through which I saw God and the world. All of my family are Church of Christ, as were almost all of the friends I made before I was 25.

God versus Gay.

As you can imagine, the call from the elders was not the first time my faith and my sexuality had been in conflict.

I was a shy, timid, kid. To my father’s unending consternation, I preferred spending time alone with a book (or playing with the girls) to spending time playing sports with the other boys in the family. So, as a child, I was (cue euphemism) “toughened up” by my father. My father didn’t want me to grow up “soft”, and told me that he’d rather I be dead than a faggot. So, he took me hunting, enrolled me in sports, made me play with other boys, and beat the shit out of me when I showed weakness (crying was sure to trigger a beating). It would be easy to think that this was just Southern life gone wrong, or a cycle of abuse continuing, the victim becoming the aggressor. But it was more than that.

The abuse and the obsession with masculinity were an attempt to teach me how to be a man. My dad thought that if he could just force me to “act like a man,” I’d end up married with children, like him. All of this was based on twisted notions of “Biblical manhood” and “traditional family.”After all, God commanded us to be fruitful and multiply, and created us male and female. Sodom was destroyed. Romans 1 tells us what happens when men turn away from God.

And didn’t the Apostle Paul, the highest authority in the Church of Christ, teach us that husbands are the head of the household as Christ is the head of the Church? Disobedience to Dad, then is the same as disobedience to Christ. Men and women have different places in the world, in the family, and in the church, and blurring of the lines between them by being, for example, a man who cries, is unnatural and unbiblical. Salvation comes through obedience, obedience of children to parents, wife to husband, husband to Christ. Disobedience, nonconformity to God’s plan, deserves fatherly punishment, because punishment here on earth is better than punishment after death. Or something like that. Suffice it to say: it was fucked up, and it had scriptural footnotes.

As was expected of a bright Church of Christ young man like me, I attended Harding University, a Church of Christ school in Arkansas. This was also part of a poorly-planned attempt to straighten out. I went so far as to be re-baptized my freshman year, thinking that perhaps the first one hadn’t worked since I still wanted to sleep with men. Harding was a traumatizing experience, where I was isolated, threatened with expulsion, and made to listen to really bright people do really awful things to Scripture. There was even a required course called “Christian Home.” You can imagine, I am sure: it’s an experience shared by LGBT students at Christian universities across the country.

It was while at a Harding-sponsored study abroad program, sitting on a hill overlooking Florence, Italy, that I decided I would come out of the closet. Study abroad gave me just enough distance to finally start the process. When I returned from Florence to school in Arkansas, I headed to the bookstore and purchased The Church and the Homosexual, by John J. McNeill and Gay Theology without Apology, by Gary David Comstock. Those two books (followed by many more) taught me a new way of doing scriptural interpretation, and new ways of looking at Genesis 19, Romans 1, and the other texts I had so long feared. Able to read scripture with a critical eye for the first time, I quickly cobbled together my own version of a “Get Out of Hell Free” card.

In all this, though, my approach to pro-gay theology was purely theoretical. I became able to argue that God loved gay people as much as straight people, that one could be both gay and Christian, and that our traditional ways of dealing with sex and sexual orientation in Churches of Christ were deeply flawed. But I kept all of my gay theology books hidden in a box in the top of my closet, and I tore the book covers off in case someone should walk in while I was reading them. And, though I was finally fairly certain that I probably wouldn’t burn in hell for being gay, I kept the secret to myself for almost another full year. I was sure God didn’t hate me, but I wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with me. I was theoretically sure God wasn’t going to send me to hell for being gay, but I was still full to the brim with shame and self-loathing.

But, I came out anyway. I told friends, a couple of Harding professors, and in 2003, my parents. My folks responded by outing me to my brother, sister, and extended family, and by promptly cutting off all communication with me. This silence lasted for several years, and was briefly lifted only to be reinstated when I walked away from the church. From 2003 until I got sober in 2008, my family and I basically only spoke at holidays and when my father was being treated for prostate cancer.

Walking away from life.

So, no, the phone call with the Elders of Lakeview Church of Christ wasn’t the first time I’d experienced conflict between faith and sexuality, not by a long shot. But that day, something clicked. It was as though all the religious abuse I’d survived came back in ONE GIANT EMOTION. And I couldn’t handle it.

I was angry at God and the Church. I was deeply hurt, though I wouldn’t admit it, and felt abandoned by a Church that had been my family. And so I gave them both the middle finger. My anger and pain came out sideways and I began dismantling my life. It made sense at the time.

I left work and went to the bar. I’d been a problem drinker for some time, my refrain always: “you’d drink too if you’d grown up like me.” But for the first time that summer, the summer of 2005, my drinking moved to the next level: it became both necessary and self-destructive. I began drinking to feel numb. I stopped going to church, stopped going to class, stopped returning my professors’ emails, and got a job at a restaurant in Chicago. I was in full-fledged flight from reality.

Drinking, at that point, probably saved my life. I was completely incapable of dealing with the pain I felt upon leaving the Church of Christ. And I couldn’t ask for help, because I was unable to show weakness, for fear of appearing unmanly or unworthy. Drinking was my self-prescribed medication. It was the only way I could sleep, the only way I could pretend to have a normal life for just one day. I kept planning to kill myself, but always just got drunk instead.

So, from 2005 to 2008, my life continued its slide down. I was able to make it to work at the restaurant, but that was about it. I drank myself into a blackout almost nightly, and began waking up on the streets, in bathhouses, in alleys, in the apartments of strangers. I started drinking before work, otherwise my hands shook so much I couldn’t hold a pen. And though I was making a thousand dollars a week in tips, I could barely make rent. All my money, all my energy, and all my time, belonged to the bar.

The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.

During this time of downward trajectory, I made one great effort to save myself. One day, my lesbian-latina-Yale-educated-atheist-feminist roommate told me to snap out of it. “I can’t believe I’m saying this” she continued “but...you have to go to church. Now.”

I agreed. Something had to change, and though I still didn’t want anything to do with God, I began visiting churches. UCC, UU, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran...they just didn’t quite fit. And then, remembering Gene Robinson’s consecration as Bishop in 2003, I went to Church of the Ascension, an Episcopal Church on La Salle Street, where I witnessed liturgy unlike anything I’d ever seen. And I was hooked.

To someone raised in a church without sacraments, images, stained glass, holidays, clergy, choirs, organs, or incense, the Episcopal Church was a radical shift. The emphasis on liturgy, mystery, and sacrament seemed the polar opposite of Church of Christ emphasis on correct doctrine and knowledge of Scripture.

But I began to understand that the Episcopal Church had something deep and true to offer me, and I began regularly attending Church of the Atonement in Edgewater. In 2006, I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, my final separation with the Church of Christ. Confirmation almost didn’t happen, since the Episcopal Church requires proof of baptism before Confirmation, and I had no proof. Churches of Christ don’t exactly issue a baptismal certificate after they dunk you in a fountain on your college campus in Arkansas.

So I became an Anglican. I was astonished and by Church of the Atonement’s emphasis on the Eucharist (Holy Communion). Churches of Christ celebrate communion weekly, but it is nothing like Mass at Atonement. And I was struck by just how much Bible there was in a denomination I knew to be so liberal. Three scriptures and a Psalm are read every Sunday! From a giant silver Bible! Plus, the Book of Common Prayer, the prayer book of the Episcopal Church, cites scripture more effectively and beautifully than any Church of Christ preacher.

So, hesitantly at first, I returned to the church. But I left God on the shelf where I’d put him years before, and made it clear that though I would worship him from afar, I didn’t want him anywhere near my day-to-day life. And, though I’d found a new church where I was welcomed and loved, and where I could receive communion and participate in the life and worship of the church, I was still damaged. I was still drowning in fear, and shame, and addiction. The blackouts, the drinking, the slow but steady self-destruction continued.

On my 28th birthday, miserable, lost, and alone, I started a binge that would last three days and finally lead me to freedom. A few days of death, and then my Lazarus moment.

Back to life.

On November 25th, 2008, after the 3-day blackout, I finally understood what people had been telling me for some time: I was going to die if I didn’t get help. I drove drunk often, and had already developed many of the physical symptoms seen only in older alcoholics. I’d tried to stop drinking many, many times in the past, including a stint in rehab, but it never seemed to take. I was full of fear and shame, and I felt completely and totally lost. But, knowing that I could not stop drinking alone, I went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

When I arrived at the meeting, I looked awful, smelled worse, and didn’t want to talk to anyone. I sat in the back row and didn’t raise my hand when the moderator looked directly at me and asked if any new people were in the room. I tried to run out of the room as quickly as I could after the meeting, but was stopped by short, angry-looking bald man. I thought I was going to be scolded for not raising my hand or for some other breach of etiquette. Instead, he looked me in the eye and said, “You never have to feel this way again.” That moment was, and continues to be, the deepest moment of grace in my life.

I politely listened to Geoffry, struck by the fact that a man who looked so angry could be so kind. I wanted to ask for his help, but I didn’t think I deserved it, and I was sure I’d disappoint him in the end. So I thanked Geoffry for his time, exchanged phone numbers with him, and left.

On the way home, I was sure I’d never go back. It was strange that Geoffry and the others in AA were so nice to me. Didn’t I deserve to be punished, or at least scolded, for what I’d done? I believed I was beyond help. Then, the phone rang. It was Angry Geoffry.

“I decided to call you, since I know you’re afraid to ask for help. You don’t think you can get sober, and you don’t think you deserve to be happy. God loves you, and so do I.” He told me that he’d decided to be my sponsor, though I hadn’t asked him, and that I now had to do whatever he told me. “Don’t drink tonight, and meet me at Starbucks tomorrow. Go home, thank God for keeping you sober today, and get in bed.” I went to bed sober that night, and haven’t had a drink since.

The work of sobriety was not what I expected. Geoffry listened to my story, and paid close attention when I talked about church. And then he told me that he was taking charge of my prayer life. I was only to pray one prayer in the morning, “God, please keep me sober today” and one prayer in the evening “God, thank you for keeping me sober today.”

And we quickly began working a program of recovery. The first three steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous involve admitting powerlessness over alcohol, coming to the belief that some higher power can help you recover, and turning your life over to that power.

It was clear from the start where I would have trouble. I had little trouble admitting that I was powerless over alcohol -- Maker’s Mark had been running my life for a few years. And I had little trouble admitting that there was a power, God, that could help me recover. But I did not believe I could or should turn my life over to that God. He’d had my life before, and he’d royally fucked up. I told Geoffry my life was my own, not God’s.

Geoffry gently reminded me that perhaps for once I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. After all, I was the one who couldn’t stop drinking. So, perhaps, I should just shut up and try it his way.

Geoffry reminded me that Christian theology teaches that God iss a refuge, not just an avenger. He reminded me that he, Geoffry was created in the image of God. That god-imaged part of him led him to reach out to me. It was, he said, God acting through one person to restore the dignity of another person. It was a start.

Geoffry then told me to go home, pray, and sit quietly for a while. Then, I was to write out my own idea of God, a God I could give my life to. I went home somewhat agitated, but did what he said. Then, as I began to describe God, I conveniently forgot the judgment of the Church, the past wrongs of my family, my mistrust of God. Instead, I began to remember verses of Scripture I’d memorized as a child and teenager. I remembered hymns that had been sources of comfort. I remembered words from the Book of Common Prayer:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father, there is no shadow of turning with thee; Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not; As Thou hast been thou forever wilt be.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him...

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee; I trace the rainbow through the rain, and feel the promise is not vain, that morn shall tearless be...

The words continued on, and on, and on. They were a litany of scripture, prayer, hymn, all jumbled together, but all reminding me what I knew, but had forgotten: God is love, end of story. God is peace, and joy, and rest. God is faithful to me. I can give my life to a God like that.

And so, slowly, I continued with the work of sobriety (it took me three months to get to the third step). I didn’t understand it at first, but Geoffry was teaching me that I don’t keep myself sober; my higher power keeps me sober and I get to enjoy the journey. And this wasn’t some evangelical, bright light from the heavens, faith healing, Paul on the road to Damascus moment. I didn’t suddenly embrace God and stop craving alcohol. Quite the contrary.

The work of sobriety involved daily, slow, steady improvement of my spiritual connection to God. Those daily prayers, “Keep me sober” and “Thank you for keeping me sober” continued, and new prayers were added. Slow, steady, slow, steady, slow, steady, day by day by day by day. Prayer, after prayer, after prayer.

Eventually, I found myself in a new place, I finally understood that God gives a shit. I finally came to believe, not just in theory but in practice, that God is my refuge and my strength. God matters, today, and God’s work happens here on earth, when one alcoholic helps another. Who knew?

I continued in the program and eventually had a month, six months, a year of sobriety. I got rid of old resentments, made amends, all that jazz. I worked the 12 steps, then worked them again. I tried to finish law school, but wasn’t able to because of some of my drunken antics. Oh well, worse things have happened.

I began sponsoring people, and was able to look them in the eye and say “you never have to feel this way again.” I began to rebuild the relationships with my family, and mended friendships I’d broken. I apologized to a boyfriend I’d loved deeply but had walked out on. I rediscovered joy in the small victories. I discovered the joy of Ben & Jerry’s and Golden Girls reruns. I stopped taking myself so seriously, and starting trying to find small ways to be of service. I developed a sense of peace that depended less on my daily emotions and more on my trust in God’s fidelity. A calm assurance that everything is going to be OK, in the end. A new baseline of joy and freedom, not fear and isolation.

Testify.

So that is my story. I grew up fundamentalist, came out, lost my church, got drunk about it, hit bottom, found God again, and got sober. That’s my story, and this is my testimony:

God matters. God matters today, here, and now. God is not a distant, removed creator. God’s love is radical, crossing all boundaries. God’s love isn’t confined to the Bible, or the past, or the person of Jesus. God’s love is here. In this room. And it will be here tomorrow, whether I’m doing dishes in a restaurant or kneeling in a church. God is with us, whether we are safe in our beds or passed out on the street.

I know this not because I read it in a book. I know this because when I was lost, God found me. I don’t mean that I was lost in that I was unsaved, or not numbered among the Elect. I mean that I was lost. I was dying spiritually, and I was slowly killing myself, physically. I was was waking up in my own filth, or on the street, or full of shame. I could not save myself, so God reached out to me through one of his creatures and restored my dignity. God rolled away the stone and called me out of death.

God’s love reaches out in loud ways, sure, in revivals and prayer meetings and the Incarnation and Gay Pride parades and the beauty of nature. But God’s love is also steady, quiet, and calm. God’s love is the man who looks to you and says, because he knows it is true: “you never have to feel this way again.”

I tell you what I experienced: I was pushed out of the church, but God told the church to go fuck itself and came and got me through an angry, bald, gay alcoholic named Geoffry. Now I get it: God is a shepherd, walking out into the night for a lost sheep. How queer.

This tells me that my work as a Christian isn’t what I thought. My work as a Christian isn’t to find the right church, or to be ordained and put on a collar, or to create perfect liturgy. My work as a Christian is simply (radically) to tell people God loves them. To help people remember that they are made in the image of God. Or to tell them for the first time, if no one has told them before.

I’ll start now. Church gays: God’s love is here. Now. Whether you’ve been excluded from ordination, or silenced in your church, or excluded by your family or faith group, or marginalized by the gay community because you aren’t shiny and wealthy and white. God desires you; you are made in the image of God. God’s love is as real in the dark moments of your life as it is on Easter Sunday. You never have to feel that way again. God is love, and love abides.

Today, I am reminded of God’s resurrecting power, God’s radical welcome, and God’s desire to be with us most clearly in the sacrament of Holy Communion. In Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, we come to God’s table and are fed. No expectation, no fee, no conditions. Holy Communion is the icon of God’s welcome to all.

At the communion table, God puts God’s self in the hands of women and men to be distributed to other women and men freely and joyfully. In Churches of Christ, lay people come forward, break bread, and take it out into the congregation. In the Episcopal Church, liturgy leads up to the moment when the host is consecrated and then distributed by the priest. Regardless, God’s people are fed from God’s table, because God’s love abounds.

True to form, the Book of Common Prayer is succinctly eloquent on this point. Before communion is distributed to the people, the priest is directed to stand at the altar, raise the host and chalice, and say: “The gifts of God for the people of God.” God is the Bread of Heaven; we take God into ourselves and are filled with God’s love. Sunday, after Sunday, after Sunday, the Sacrament reminds us that God’s kingdom is today, and today we are fed today from the very body of Christ.

I testify: resurrection doesn’t just happen at Easter, or at the Eschaton. I experienced God’s resurrection in my own life. I am a queer, bourbon-soaked Lazarus, and I tell you that I have been raised from the dead. I was dead, but I am alive. And I feast at God’s table, because God is love. Thanks be to God.

Issues are people, too.

2011-04-09T22:54:00.000-05:00

My mom can sing. She doesn't have the best voice in the world, she hasn't been trained, and she won't win any Grammys, but she can sing. Years spent in Churches of Christ in the South combined with more than her fair share of hardships have given her a soulful, clear soprano voice that you just...believe. There are few things that say "home" more than to hear my mother sing as she peels potatoes or washes dishes.

I thought of my mom as I sang in church on my second Sunday back at Lakeview Church of Christ, the church that asked me to leave because I am gay. Somehow, standing among the congregation singing "Lily of the Valley" (acappella, of course) just felt right. It felt like home.

The sermon that Sunday was on community. The preacher talked about Lakeview, about what a loving, welcoming place it is, about the ways it reaches out and pulls people into its center. He was right about all of those things. Lakeview Church of Christ is a community of faith in the truest sense: people come together to be the church. They take care of each other, share limited resources, and reach out to the marginalized in the neighborhood around them.

The preacher went on to remind the congregation that we fail as a church when we begin to place doctrine above people. If we fail to honor the dignity of those around us, and think of them as labels and not individuals, we are not loving our neighbors as ourselves.

It was, to put it mildly, surreal to hear this sermon preached in a church that asked me to leave because of what basically amounts to a doctrinal dispute. The sermon seemed to come from a good place: as Lakeview prepares to include women fully in its public worship, congregants on both sides of the "issue" need to be reminded that issues are one thing and people quite another. But I had to wonder: what about the gay folks in the congregation? Are they people too, or just another doctrinal issue?

So I was left again with the tension. All the way down to my marrow, worshiping at Lakeview felt like a return home. It was like lying on the couch listening while my mom sings quietly to herself. But Lakeview (and the Church of Christ) can no longer be home because I am still an issue, not an individual.

Mary's Song

2011-04-04T12:54:00.000-05:00

Over the next few weeks, Lakeview Church of Christ will be deciding whether or not to include women fully in the life, worship, and leadership of the church. I attended Lakeview yesterday (I couldn't stay away) for the first day of voting.

Two questions were being decided yesterday:

At Lakeview, do you think that women should be allowed to silently participate in
the worship service by passing the communion and offering trays (no prayer)?
At Lakeview do you think that women should be allowed to serve in speaking
(non-teaching) roles like announcements, scripture reading, and prayer?

Before I can say anything else, I have to talk about the way these questions are phrased. Should women be allowed? Seriously? Not: "are women equal to men?", and not: "do you support full inclusion of women in the worship of the church?"

Come on.

On second thought, though, the questions are brutally honest. Lakeview Church of Christ is not deciding on the worth or value or inherent ability of the women who are members. The Church is deciding what it will allow women to do in public, much like Harding does when it imposes a "no shorts before 2 PM" rule. The phrasing of the questions makes plain: women (like gays) are an issue to be debated.

As the debate around the questions continued, only men spoke. About women. For women. For the interest of the church, and for "our children" (gag). Finally, a young woman spoke up, during the part of the discussion about whether women should be allowed to pray in public.

This woman mentioned Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, and Mary. And she asked the question: "If the prayers of these women can become Scripture, with authority over us today, why can't I pray in the assembly?"

Mary's words are appropriate for the conversation, I think.

My soul glorifies the Lord, *

my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.

He looks on his servant in her lowliness; *

henceforth all ages will call me blessed.

The Almighty works marvels for me. *

Holy his name!

His mercy is from age to age, *

on those who fear him.

He puts forth his arm in strength *

and scatters the proud-hearted.

He casts the mighty from their thrones *

and raises the lowly.

He fills the starving with good things, *

sends the rich away empty.

He protects Israel, his servant, *

remembering his mercy,

the mercy promised to our fathers, *

to Abraham and his sons for ever.

(Luke 1:46-55, Douay-Rheims Version)

Am I still C of C?

2011-04-04T12:14:00.003-05:00

As some of you may know, I was asked to leave Lakeview Church of Christ in Chicago a few years ago. Though I often say I was kicked out, I guess that's not technically true: I was told that I could not serve in any public capacity and could not consider myself a member of Lakeview. I was still allowed to attend services, but any public contribution to the life of the church would be unwelcome.

This was unacceptable, so I started the process that eventually led me out of Churches of Christ and into The Episcopal Church (long story). Most of the time, I have no regrets: I found that I was unwelcome in the denomination of my birth, so I left and made a home elsewhere.

Lately, though, I've been experiencing doubts about the choices I made a few years ago. Was leaving the right thing to do? Should I have stayed and worked for change from within? Did I actually leave, or did I just step away for a while? Was TEC the right place to land? Have I given up too much of my heritage by stepping into a Catholic tradition? I dunno. Some of this may be navel gazing at its worst, and there is no obvious (or correct) answer to any of my questions.

A few months ago, I started to feel a longing for a more evangelical (for lack of a better word) expression of the faith. It started, I think when I was staring down the barrel of TEC's lengthy ordination process. As I considered whether I had a call to ordained ministry in The Episcopal Church, I found myself looking back to my roots. I have preached, I have taught classes, I have presided at the Lord's Table, and I have baptized. Do I really, then, belong in a church which limits my activities because I am not ordained? Do I need a $100,000 education to be able to serve in the way that I feel called?

This fed into broader concerns that I have about TEC. It is a wonderful place, and my current church took me in when I badly needed it. But I am not always sure that it is for me. Yes, I love the history, liturgy, music, deep theology, and welcoming approach to the LGBT community. And I don't know how I prayed before I discovered the Book of Common Prayer. But TEC is, in its way, rigid. Particularly in a church like mine (with a strong Anglo-Catholic bent), liturgy is the sacred cow. It is beautiful every week, but it is the same every week (with modifications for the season of the liturgical year).

So I took a step back, and began to consider where I belong. Again. Sigh. Am I still an evangelical? Am I still Church of Christ?

HU Queer Press

2011-03-28T01:07:00.000-05:00

"The religious have an unhealthy but completely understandable obsession with the more exciting sex lives of homosexuals." -HU Queer Press

This post is definitely late in coming, but a couple of folks have asked for my thoughts on the HU Queer Press. So here's a couple of observations.

First, it should be no surprise that Harding's administration blocked the website as soon as they heard about it. Harding's administration wants many things, but the free exchange of ideas is certainly not one of them. I've said before - and I'm not alone - that Harding more closely resembles a church camp than a university, and this is the perfect example. That the administration is so afraid of conversation that it needs to block websites demonstrates how far Harding has drifted from its basic purpose. A university should be a place of academic study that welcomes free exchange of ideas. A Christian university should be a place of academic study within some sort of Christian framework. Harding's primary purpose isn't to save souls. It is to educate.

Second, if you haven't watched Dr. Burks's chapel address, you should. I give Dr. Burks credit for noting that bullying is unacceptable, regardless of your opinion of a person. That is something, I'd wager, that has never been said in chapel at Harding before, and it deserves respect. But I think the video is important for another reason: Dr. Burks basically lays out the way Churches of Christ and Harding view queer people:

Dr. Burks can't bring himself to say the name of the website, because apparently the word 'queer' is offensive to him. This represents a complete lack of understanding of what 'queer' means, which is understandable if you've only ever heard a word as a slur. If, on the other hand, you are familiar with Queer Nation, queer theory, queer studies, queer theology, or the last 20 years of LGBT history (or if you occasionally read a newspaper), you'd know that the word 'queer' has been reclaimed. It is a blanket term for those who don't fit in a traditional heterosexual framework. This includes gay folks, of course, but it also can include straight folks who don't adhere to established gender norms. And 'queer,' frankly, is just easier than LGBTQIA.
But even if he knew all this, Dr. Burks wouldn't talk about queer folks, because of his belief that queer isn't something that you are, it's something you do. Dr. Burks and Harding don't recognize gays as a type of person oriented differently than straight people. We are, instead, just regular old folks who engage in sinful behavior. This is a more subtle argument than is often given credit: by saying that gays are just sinners like everyone else, one can sound sympathetic and egalitarian while simultaneously condemning a whole class of people. One can say, for example, that gays aren't specifically targeted, because all sexual relations outside of marriage are condemned. Never mind that gays can't actually get married. Dr. Burks only discusses 'homosexual behavior' because that's all that exists in his world. There is only sexual behavior, not sexual orientation.
Dr. Burks also makes clear that it is what you believe that is important. This is an important CofC fallacy: you must believe the right thing or you are condemned. In the Church of Christ, for example, we believe in the Bible (what does that even mean?). Churches of Christ consistently conflate belief and faith, and consistently limit 'belief' to its narrowest possible definition. Mature faith is something deeper than the correct understanding of and belief in a set of doctrines. Mature faith is the steadfast assent of God as Lord, and a willingness to follow where God leads. Belief in the Bible is less important than faithfulness to God.
Dr. Burks makes clear that what is acceptable to God is determined by the Bible, not by societal norms. Morality isn't up for democratic debate, it seems. Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 make it clear that homosexual behavior is sinful, so no matter what society says, the Church must remain steadfast. I would argue, on the other hand, that it is the duty of the Church to read the Bible acknowledging that the men who wrote it were in fact...well...men. And nothing more. We have a duty to read the Bible in light of the full depth of human experience and history. Yes, scripture is God-breathed. But so are we.

Anyway, Dr. Burks's chapel announcement is interesting for what it reveals about Harding and about the traditional Church of Christ approach to queer folks, but I don't want to spend too much time talking about him (after all, Star Trek is about to come on).

I am astounded by the courage of the folks who published the HU Queer press, and I wish I'd had the balls to do something like this when I was in school. I've written before about my time at Harding: it wasn't terribly pleasant, and it was hella isolating. I was unsure of myself and my theology, and I was terrified of getting caught and outed.

But these kids are so...positive. They are sure of themselves. They are funny, honest, and endearing. They aren't bitter or spiteful. And, because they know that they are loved by God, they are loving and gracious. It's really impressive, and it's theologically sound. Furthermore, they give an accurate picture of the state of the gay at Harding: it is not a safe place.

HU Queer Press: you rock. Harding: get it together, for the (queer) love of God.

It gets better.

2010-10-21T22:44:00.002-05:00

I can't stop thinking about the suicides that have been in the news recently. Getting things out sometimes makes me feel better, so:

Like many gay folks, I spent some time in my youth thinking about killing myself. I was never bullied, in the traditional sense: I was never beaten up or stuffed in a trash can, though I was called 'faggot' and 'gay' more than necessary in high school. But things got really bad when I went to college.

At Harding University, when I was 18, 19, and 20, coming out seemed impossible. I'd been taught all my life that people like me were going to hell, and Harding's professors, administration, and students helped keep that belief alive (I'll never forget the day my favorite college professor compared gays to dogs). It was par for the course that being gay was not just a sin, but it was a form of mental illness.

I spent my freshman year trying to figure out how to be a better Christian, in hopes that all the 'homosexual' thoughts in my head would somehow go away. In my sophomore year, though, I realized that my soul was losing the battle against my mind and body. I thought I was doomed, and I thought there was no way out. I correctly predicted that I would lose my church, and I correctly predicted that I would lose my family. I wasn't sure if I would keep my friends.

It was an awful year. I felt completely trapped and alone. A part of myself was completely cut off from both God and the world. It was then that I began to fantasize about killing myself. I thought about pulling into oncoming traffic, I thought about jumping off a building, and I thought many, many times about breaking my dorm room mirror and cutting my throat or wrists. The last fantasy was most prevalent, since I couldn't stand the sight of myself.

Anticipation of things to come got me through that year: I was slated to study abroad after my sophomore year, and the excitement and anticipation of seeing a larger world excited me and kept me sane. I'm glad it did, because my time in Florence was the first time in my life I achieved some form of inner peace. When one sits on a hill overlooking one of the most beautiful cities in the world, one gains a little perspective. My problems didn't seem so big, mainly because my world got so much bigger.

And then things started to get better. After returning from Europe, I began to go out and meet other gay people. I came out to my friend Robyn, who let me cry and then told me she loved me. I slowly (and ungracefully) began the process of coming out, and there was no going back.

The coming out process is a search for personal integrity. I would not achieve that sense of wholeness until much later in life (when I got sober), and I occasionally feel like it can slip away if I don't pay attention and guard my spiritual life.

Some bad things happened after I came out, and life didn't always seem like it had improved. But it slowly and surely did get better.

My point is this: bullying comes in many forms. It's the big jock beating up the skinny kid, sure. But it's also in the use of the word 'gay' as a slur, it's also in the assumption that men should behave a certain way and women another, and it's in the university that teaches students to condemn behavior first and ask questions later.

Oh, and bullying happens one more place. It is codified in Christian doctrine. Teaching that gay people are sick, teaching that our relationships are invalid, and teaching that we cannot fully participate in the life of the Church is bullying, plan and simple. An attempt to silence the weak, and to push us into conforming with straight folks' expectations is not Christianity, and it is no different than stuffing a skinny kid into a locker.

Gay kids: God is love, and God loves you. Any person who acts unlovingly toward you is acting on their own. They do not speak for the Church.

Straight kids: Play nice. And repent. And tell your churches to repent. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, where there is neither male nor female.

It really does get better.

Love, not Fear.

2010-08-30T00:56:00.001-05:00

I ran into a college acquaintance at a wedding a couple of weeks ago. We now live in the same city, so he and I had coffee and caught up. Since we are both gay graduates of Harding University, and were both born and raised in the Church of Christ, part of our conversation turned naturally to our shared experiences. And though we didn't know each other that well in college, we both ask a lot of questions (and both speak somewhat frankly), so the conversation got a little heavy for a little while.

Rehashing college life and the coming out process always leaves me feeling raw, and I can't seem to shake it this time. For the first time in months (years?), I find my thoughts constantly turning back to Harding and the Church of Christ. Honestly, it's a bit unsettling.

My friend's story is different from mine, but parallel. He came out to his family less than a year ago, and his parents no longer speak to him. His siblings have been hard on him. All in all, it's been a very unpleasant experience, and it seems as though some truly awful things have been said to him. He hasn't been to a Church of Christ in a very long time, and currently does not attend church at all (and who can blame him?).

This friend also caught me up on the story of another gay Harding graduate, who has been dating yet another gay Harding graduate for years. It seems we are everywhere. Both men in this relationship were raised in the Church of Christ--one by a somewhat famous preacher--and both were outed against their wishes and have been disowned or shunned.

It just keeps happening. Families are torn apart by unyielding doctrine and arrogant Biblical literalism. Parents think they can save their children by shunning them. Ministers and elders doubt their ability to lead congregations because they have raised gay sons. Fear of hell drives the conversation, not love of neighbor.

And so I say again: A church that casts its sons and daughters out of fellowship in order to preserve purity is a church that has abandoned the gospel of Christ. A church that teaches its members to act out of fear and not out of love is a church that does not grasp the generosity and radical hospitality of God.

This rejection sticks with us. As I heard my friend describe the events of the last year, I felt pain for him, but I also remembered my own rejections. I remembered the letters I received from family members, I remembered being excluded from fellowship, and I remembered that awful realization that I no longer had a church home. And though I have dealt with the resentment in my life, the pain can still sneak up on me.

But what is the response of the gay person to be? How are we to deal with fear-driven rejection? Should we roll over? Should we strike back? Should we turn our back on the church?

To do so would mean listening to the gospel of fear, not the gospel of love. God is love, and those who hear and understand the gospel respond to rejection with hospitality, and respond to division with peacemaking. A positive, loving, confident understanding of true Christian religion has nothing to fear from fundamentalism, and can therefore look beyond divisive doctrine to make peace. The realization that we are beloved children of God gives us the power to be forgiving and gracious.

We must still be firm: exclusion of gays and lesbians from the public ministry of the church is sin. Excluding a gay Christian from the fellowship is schism. Excluding one's child from one's family is bigotry. But I, as a Christian, do not have the luxury of acting out of fear, hate, or resentment. The love of God compels me to love my neighbor.

I hurt for my friend, I hurt for the gay folks currently at Harding, and I hurt for my own family and myself. But I am also confident that the love of God is sufficient and unfailing, so I have nothing to fear.

Compline at Christ Church (The Lord's Prayer)

2010-08-18T23:39:00.000-05:00

One of the reasons I love The Episcopal Church: Compline. The service, said or sung in the evening, is the perfect ending to a day.

Some settings are choral; some, like this one, are more simple. It is a beautiful way to pray in community.

Sarcastic Lutheran

2010-08-18T17:08:00.000-05:00

I keep hearing about more and more people raised in the Church of Christ now attending a liturgical church. Quite a few Episcopalians, some other traditions, and one Lutheran. Sarcastic Lutheran is a former Church of Christ-er, and now a Lutheran Pastor. The following clip is of a sermon she preached at the reinstatement of some LGBT Lutheran Pastors after the ELCA restored them to ministry (they had been excluded from the ministry based on their sexual orientation):

No Longer Gay Nor Straight.

God is Love

2010-06-27T00:25:00.000-05:00

"Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love." I John 4:7-8 (KJV)

I was reminded tonight: God is love, and I am God's. God is love, and I have nothing to fear. God is love, and so I should love. Too often I forget how far I have come in my journey of faith, how lost and how hopeless I once felt. At one time I thought the love of God did not extend to people like me. I am reminded today that the love of God knows no bounds, because God is love.

As one who experiences the love of God, I am called to be loving. If I do not love others, I do not know God. If you do not love, you do not know God.

LGBT folks: happy Pride weekend. Stonewall happened 41 years ago. If you haven't heard it recently, hear it now: God's love is unfailing and you, as a child of God, deserve a life of dignity, love, and respect. Love others as God has loved you.

2006-2009 in a Nutshell

2009-09-07T18:42:00.001-05:00

So, it's been a while since I've posted on this blog. More than three years, actually. So what's happened? In the fall of 2006, I was confirmed in The Episcopal Church, and began to take off the armor I wore to worship every Sunday. Since that time I have been more and more actively involved, and now attend Church of the Incarnation, an Episcopal parish in Dallas.

In addition to my struggles in and with the Church of Christ, I developed a nice little case of alcoholism. Not "eh, I probably drink too much" alcoholism. More like "why am I waking up in an alley?" alcoholism. From 2004 to 2008 my drinks grew deeper and longer, until life was one big bender. I dropped out of graduate school, isolated myself, and pretty much fell off the face of the earth. In the summer of 2008 I began to wake up again (in my bed this time), and since November 25, 2008, with the help of God and a recovery group which chooses to remain anonymous, I've been sober.

Becoming an Episcopalian helped restore my Christian faith. Admitting I was powerless over alcohol helped restore my contact with God.

What now? Who knows. But as they say in The Program: one day at a time.

Hmm...

2009-09-04T12:38:00.000-05:00

Thinking of a return to the blog world. Not sure yet.

Final Thoughts

2006-05-21T13:07:00.000-05:00

As my 3 devoted readers have probably determined by now, I think I've decided to give up the blogging game (as if that weren't readily apparent from the 3 month gap in posts). Right now, I feel like I can do absolutely no good, so I've decided to take care of myself for a while. Perhaps I shall return at some future date in a blaze of blogging glory. A couple of final thoughts, though (I, like Jerry Springer, feel the need to wrap things up).

I am convinced that our churches are wrong to treat gay men and lesbians they way they do. Period. We deserve love, full inclusion and affirmation, not pity, dismissal, and revulsion. This is not just another 'issue' the church must deal with. The Church of Christ destroys lives and families when it throws stones. Our church must grow up, move past the pettiness of absurd doctrinal disputes, and move on to the real work of Christ.

Further, while most elders, preachers, and Christian college presidents and professors insist that their opinions are based on the Bible, I am convinced that their condemnation stems more from pure disgust. The refusal of so many to reconsider their doctrine (or to even give a modicum of respect to those whose opinions differ from their own) speaks volumes. Disgust, misogyny, and homophobia, however unconscious, drive the (male) decisionmakers at our universities and in our churches:

Consider, finally, the central locus of disgust in today's United States: male loathing of the male homosexual. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized, anxiety, but they are less often objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may feel negative emotions toward the male homosexual -- fear, moral indignation, anxiety -- but again, they rarely feel emotions of disgust. What inspires disgust is typically the male thought of the male homosexual, imagined as anally penetrable. The idea of semen and feces mixing together inside the body of a male is one of the most disgusting ideas imaginable to males, for whom the idea of nonpenetrability is a sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that one might oneself lose one's clean safeness, become the receptacle for those animal products. Thus disgust is ultimately disgust at one's own imagined penetrability and ooziness, and this is why the male homosexual is both regarded with disgust and viewed with fear as predator who might make everyone else disgusting. (Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, p. 113)

The male decisionmakers in our churches are afraid of penetration, of vulnerability, of the so-called "female" traits they, in their (perhaps innocent) ignorance, believe to characterize the homosexual. We must convince our elders, our leaders, to let go of notions of masculinity and femininity, of what makes one a Man, so we can convince them to reconsider their readings of the Biblical texts.

Disgust, that most unchristian of virtues, controls the discussion now. Love must overcome it.

Cowboys (Or: Learning To Be A Man, part 1)

2006-02-24T09:55:00.000-06:00

"Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they become its advocates."
- Charles Dickens

I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy.

At church some months ago, during a discussion about gender, a middle-aged man gruffly said, “I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy.” I don’t want to read too much into what he meant by this statement, but I haven’t been able to get the sentiment out of my mind. It represents a thought that can and should be echoed by so many boys and men; by those who were supposed to be cowboys, but turned out not to be, or by those who became cowboys only to discover they no longer wanted to be, by those who have discovered the emptiness of the masculine baggage we’ve been handed. I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy. I want to write those words in ash and tears on the altars of our churches, on the hearths of our homes, and on the gates of our schoolyards.

I grew up in the South, in the land of football and cheerleaders, of debutantes and good old boys, of macho men and dainty women. Women have a place (the dirty secret: so do men). I remember Texas in the 1980s, a time of blue eye shadow and platinum hair for my mother, a thick mustache and a police uniform for my father. I was dressed in cowboy boots from time immemorial (though I always managed to pull them off so I could run around barefoot in the warm Texas dirt).

Dad, you see, was (and is) a lover of John Wayne and all things War and Western. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. They Died with their Boots On. Gunga Din. Ft. Apache. McClintock. Bridge on the River Kwai. He refused to watch Rock Hudson movies, though I could never understand why. (I finally understood when I learned that Rock Hudson had died of AIDS; or was the problem not so much the AIDS as the penetration that preceded infection?). Though he also enjoyed the occasional Cary Grant romantic comedy, or even one of Jimmy Stewart’s weepy performances, Dad typically stuck with guns and horses, tanks and valor, cowboys and Indians and women waiting for their soldiers to come home.

I started playing football when I was six, baseball when I was five (I would eventually play football until I was sixteen and baseball until 17. Not a short run.). I wasn’t bad at either sport, and I could have been considered an above average first baseman. My father, like many fathers, seemed noticeably more proud when I scored the winning run than he was when I received perfect scores on my report card. And I think he was proudest when I shot and killed my first deer at the age of 7. Violence and victory and tackles and touchdowns were ways to prove my worth as a boy, it seemed.

Being a boy in my family, and in most other families I encountered, meant certain things. Don’t cry. Play rough. Win. Fight dirty if necessary, but never run away. Don’t hug too much, especially not another man. Above all: don’t cry. Oh, yes, and: don’t cry. I learned these lessons over and over. Sometimes I was taught subtly: I was rewarded for good grades with a fishing pole or a new bat; I received more than one gun as a gift. Other times, the training was more, shall we say, overt.

I have focused on my father, but he was only one of my trainers. I remember a day my mother took me to the dentist. One of the perks of visiting Dr. Connor was that, after the cleaning, I could pick out any toothbrush I wanted (not a small deal to a young child). At the end of this particular visit, I picked out a pink toothbrush, which prompted the following discussion with my mother:

“Boys don’t use pink.”
“Why?”
“They just don’t. Pink is for girls. Do you want blue?”
“No, I don’t like blue.” (I did, in fact, like blue, but I couldn’t pick the same color as my little brother.)
“Take green then. Your father will be upset if you bring home a pink toothbrush.”

So, pink was out. And so (I would later learn) were flowers, dolls, all things that sparkle, long hair, boy bands, doing the dishes, and cooking. And let’s not forget crying.

Gender, it seemed, made a lot of difference. Though he loved us all, I had a different kind of value to my father than did my sister and younger brother, or so he told me. I couldn’t understand what difference it made that I was his firstborn son; I was, after all, the middle child – he had a daughter before me and another son (whose age was so close to my own that we were practically raised as twins during our younger years).

I was also learning that gender made a lot of difference in church. Only men preach. Only men make decisions. Only men pray (They told us that women pray too, they just do it silently. I couldn't be sure at first.). I, as a male, would one day be expected to protect, to teach, to pray, to preach, to lead. My sister, for her part, would learn to follow, to submit. We would both learn that the husband was the head of the wife. We each had our burden. I would learn to pray and be strong; she would learn to cook and to mother.

Typical of my Texas fundamentalist upbringing, the Bible played an important role as I learned “what it means to be a man.” The first chapters of Genesis taught me that Adam was formed first, and then Eve formed from him. Paul reminded me that this order of creation meant that the husband was the head of the wife, just as Christ was the head of the Church. Women were to be silent. You know the rest, especially if you were raised in a Church of Christ.

********

Much of what I have described above is often seen (perhaps rightly) through the lens of the ‘subjugation of women’ in the culture of the American South and in Churches of Christ. But that is not what I want to focus on. Though the treatment of our daughters is shameful, I want, instead, to focus on the way our boys are trained to be men. I was taught that I had more value than my sister, both at home and at Church (I after all, could pray in front of the congregation and at the dinner table; she could not). This elevated place in the church and the home, though, relied in large part on my ability to swing a stick in a baseball game, tackle a foe in a football game, injure someone in a fistfight, to hide my emotions, to be hard and unyielding. I had value only as long as I eliminated everything Soft about me. If I didn’t fit the mold (if I wasn’t a Man) then, since I wasn’t a woman, I had no place in either the home or the church. My place in the world and in the church depended on my decision to buy into the violent and kyriarchal training of my youth.

Maybe my focus is off; maybe I should focus on the way my sister was treated. But I will leave that to the feminists among us, and I will wish them luck. I want now only to make this point: someone should have told me, just once, that I didn’t have to be a cowboy. Someone should have told me that I didn’t have to be ashamed that I didn’t fit the mold. Someone should have told me that it was acceptable to just be, well, me. No one ever did, especially not at church.

We need to train our boys what it really means to be a man. We need to teach them that violence is bad, not good, and that domination is to be avoided, not lauded. We need to teach them that there is neither male nor female in Christ. We need to teach them to learn from the women in their lives. We need to tell them it is not shameful to cry, that it is not shameful to express love and affection for those around them, that intimacy (whether sexual or not) is a gift from Above. We are failing our sons by trying to make them something they don’t have to be. We do it everyday at home and at school. And, saddest of all, we do it every Sunday at Church.

Family Values.

2006-02-13T15:06:00.000-06:00

An excerpt from Know My Name: A Gay Liberation Theology, by Richard Cleaver

-----------------------------

It is worth asking ourselves what kind of movement Jesus tried to build. Where did he begin? Matthew 4:18-22 tells one version:

As [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea--for they were fishermen. And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Notice that they drop everything. We know (because Jesus heals Peter's mother-in-law) that Peter is married. There is no mention here of Peter arranging to take care of his family. We are told explicitly that James and John just walk out on their father, to whom presumably they have both business and family obligations. Elsewhere we hear similar advice for other followers of Jesus. In Matt. 8:18-22, we read:

Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Another of his disciples said to him, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead."

This is not a movement for family values. It is not built on a husband, a wife, and 2.3 children in the suburbs; ... Jesus' movement cut through even the most important relations in society, such as the duty to bury one's father. In Matt. 12:46-50, Jesus himself sets the example:

While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, "Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you." But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?"

Remember, Matthew is the evangelist who devotes his whole first chapter to "begats," all the way back to Adam, so that we can know precisely who Jesus' mother and brothers were. But here he tells us that Jesus, "pointing to his disciples,...said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.'"

The Jesus movement is not a workplace from which we go home to our families for emotional support. It constructs a new family not defined by blood or by marriage. It is the family of hearers and doers of the Word.

For lesbians and gay men, this is good news indeed. Many of us have been thrown out of our families. All of hear those with power in the church and in the state preach that such bourgeois families are the basic unit of society and the church. This is why they say we must be cast out: we are a threat to the family. But their kind of family, if we believe Matthew, does not seem to be the basic unit of the community that Jesus built. Indeed, it could not be, because such forms of family did not exist in the society where Jesus worked. If we put the bourgeois family at the heart of Jesus' message instead fo the assembly of hearers and doers, we worship an idol.

Some will object that we must be prepared to accept the reality of social change in history. They are right. But we must also be able to accept the social changes that have forged new forms of family amoung lesbians and gay men. Underlying the debate over family values is an assumption that "families" and "lesbians and gay men" are two separate groups, without overlap. In fact, we are all part of the families we grew up in. We may not always get along well with them, but a lot of straight people do not either. Many of us get along fine. Often we are heads of families ourselves--lesbians especially, if they have been allowed to keep their children. The bourgeois family is not necessarily any more foreign to lesbians and gay men than to others. We, too, may be guilty of worshiping that idol.

Framing the debate on the family in terms of an all-or-nothing choice between some well-defined unity unchanged throughout history, on the one hand, and the liberation of lesbians and gay men, on the other, is a kind of shell game. It diverts our attention from the uncertain place of families in a changing society, for good and for ill, and from how a changing society in turn molds families, also for good or for ill. These are issues for theologians along with everyone else, and lesbians and gay men, being, so to speak, both inside and outside the institution, have valuable insights. In this, as in so many aspects of U.S. culture that are so familiar as to be opaque to their beneficiaries, Ethan Mordden, the chronicler of New York gay life in the 1970s and 1980s, aptly observes: "We have to know more than the straights know: have to understand what we are as well as what they are--have to find our unique place in their culture."

Idols are false gods that we worship because they are easier to manage than the real thing. We have made the bourgeois family into an idol because it, unlike the living God, gives us permission to confine our concern only to our own kin and kind. It tells us it is OK to worry above all about keeping our families safe from the resto fo society.

That is precisely the kind of family Jesus tells us to reject.

Re-examining our core homophobia.

2006-02-09T10:32:00.000-06:00

The family must be nurtured and defended. In my childhood, I never imagined how much change I would live to see in American home life. Today, even the definition of the word family is up for grabs. No-fault divorce, cloning and gay marriage - things unimaginable 50 years ago - have joined the host of forces intent on tearing down the foundation of society, the home. Properly understood, the home provides care for the elderly, protection and training for children, respect for both men and women, sanctity for sex, and love for all. It is such a remarkable institution that when the Apostle Paul wanted to describe the marvelous relationship between Christ and the church, he turned to the home (Ephesians 5:22-33). If you look in our current catalogue on Page 5, you will find that our mission statement includes "stressing a lifelong commitment to marriage and the Christian family."

- David B. Burks in the most recent Harding Magazine

Several other bloggers have commented on Dr. Burks's recent Harding Magazine article, "Re-examining our core beliefs." My participation in the discussion on other blogs has been limited to short sarcastic statements. I want to discuss the article (or at least one part of it) further here.

For obvious reasons, I choose to focus only on the above excerpted paragraph. The paragraph begins with an assertion with which, facially, most people can agree: "The family must be nurtured and defended." Sure. I want to protect my parents and siblings. I want to nurture my grandparents and care for them as they age. I want to guard my mother and sister from harm whenever possible.

But that's not what Dr. Burks means. Dr. Burks assures us that Harding is here to defend the family from Change and especially from no-fault divorce, cloning, and gay marriage. Eschewing history and the Bible, he nostalgically and naively looks back in time and sees an (imagined?) Epoch characterized by familial strength and purity, an epoch that will quickly be brought to a close if we don't act. The good old days are being challenged. And not by progress. Not by accident. Not in the interest of those trampled on and marginalized by Dr. Burks's 1950's-style Ward and June Cleaver white middle class suburban America (itself largely a fiction of Dr. Burks's imagination). No. Instead, a 'host of forces' has joined together, 'intent on tearing down the foundation of society.' And, though Dr. Burks does not say it, we all know how you respond to a host of forces hell-bent on destruction: you go to war.

Dr. Burks has painted a near-apocalyptic picture for us in the first three sentences of the paragraph. His portrait is of a lovely home full of happy, smiling Christians who are intentionally torn apart by the invidious forces of chaos, by those who would purposely shake the ground on which society stands. By faggots who want to marry. A dark picture, indeed. Something must be done. The foe must be defeated.

Thank God Dr. Burks has such high respect for the institution of marriage. Or does he?

Dr. Burks goes on to describe what a home should provide. Among the things provided by a home: "love for all." This is interesting because of the phrase's close position in the paragraph to the call for war against those who would dispute Dr. Burks's normative view of family. Maybe instead of 'love for all,' Dr. Burks means 'love for those on our side'? Love for those like us? Love for those in our families? Love for those who deserve it?

I may sound a bit harsh here, but I think it's important to point out what Dr. Burks is missing. He is forgetting that I (one of those intent on 'tearing down the foundation of society') am already a part of someone's family, that I am worthy of love and respect. He assumes that I, and others like me, have no respect for the family because I want to marry a man instead of a woman. He ignores the fact that, far from wanting to destroy the institution, I want to join it (albeit in a slightly different way).

He also seems to forget something else: since when is the family the basic unit of society? Since when is the 'one man, one woman, 2.5 kids in the suburbs' model the norm? Since when is marriage primarily and institution that teaches respect for both men and women? Since Adam, whose son Cain killed Abel? Since Abraham, who took a wife and then conceived a child by another woman? Since Jacob, who had children by 4 different women? Since the days of levirate marriage? Since Jesus, who (so far as we know) never married and who, at one point, seemed to turn his back on his own family? Since Paul, who declared that celibacy was preferable to marriage? Since the days when women were passed like chattel, sold to the husband who could best bring title and fortune to the girl's father? Since the days women were refused medicine during childbirth because it was God's curse that they feel pain during birthing? Since the days, not so long ago, when women were trained to be obedient and subservient to their husbands, not matter what? Since the days when, taking the words of Jesus literally, divorced was refused to any who could not prove marital unfaithfulness, even to the woman who had been beaten to a pulp? Which 'good old days' should we look back to, Dr. Burks?

Instead, I would argue that, for the Christian, the family is not the foundation of society. God is the foundation. For the Christian, care of the elderly, the training of children, the love of others is the job of the whole community and the individual disciple. For the Christian, there is no reason to fear gays and lesbians who would attempt to be covered by the civil law of marriage; there is only reason to love.

I don't want this post to be too long, so I'll close with this. I stumbled across another paragraph about marriage today while reading for a class:

Marriage [] bestows enormous private and social advantages on those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. 'It is an association that promotes a way of life, not cause; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects'...Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life's momentous acts of self-definition.

This was taken from the majority opinion in Goodridge v. Dept of Pub. Health, 440 Mass. 309 (2003), the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court requiring equal recognition of gay and lesbian marriages. Sounds like they know what marriage is, doesn't it? Are you listening, Dr. Burks?

Another Letter

2006-02-03T16:55:00.000-06:00

To follow up the last letter, I thought I would write another. This may seem a bit lame, but I have written a letter to myself. It is a note I wish I would have received when I was an 18 year-old freshman at Harding

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Dear Self,

You are 18 and lost. You don’t know why everything seems to be falling apart. You thought everything would start to make sense once you got out of the house and went away to college, but it hasn’t. Things won’t even begin to make sense for a very long time. You feel confused, alone, frightened. You are trying to find your place in this world and in the church and inside yourself, but you are beginning to feel as though it is hopeless. You think you will never be whole, and you think you will always hurt.

I remember. Trust me, I will never forget, though I am the older You. I remember what it was like that first year at Harding, when you thought you could finally make everything right if you just found the right crowd, studied the right books, and prayed the right prayers. You even asked to be re-baptized, thinking that the first one must not have counted if you were feeling these emotions and thinking these thoughts. You aren’t totally unhappy, having made some friends in the first few months away from home. But you don’t think you can tell those friends what is going on inside. You don’t think you can tell Mom and Dad. You are afraid of what will happen if the Secret gets out.

I am writing to tell you this: you will survive, you have strength, you are loved.

It is okay that you are scared. It’s only natural. You are growing up into someone you don’t yet know. You are afraid of who he will be, what he will believe, and how he will live. You are afraid you don’t have the strength to do what you think you have to do. You are afraid that you will end up alone.

But you have the strength. You will have the strength to turn your eyes inward and face the demons. You will have the strength to sort through the fears of Hell and of rejection. You will read what others have written and realize that others have done what you think you have to do. And they have survived, too.

You will read still more (since you will wrongly think you can’t talk to anyone) and discover that there are many out there who challenge the traditional interpretations of the texts by which you feel so terrorized. You will learn that there are many others out there who are working to teach others that, perhaps, the Old Readings of the Bible may not be the True Readings (if such readings exist). You will learn that there is more to Faith and to Worship than you have been taught. You will learn that, sometimes, it is okay to be unsure of the answer.

This will not be an easy journey. I, even as I write this to you, still struggle. I struggle with faith (though my faith has deepened immeasurably), I struggle with family (though I am able to love them so much more, now that I can love myself), I struggle with the Church (though I and others like me are part of the Church we struggle with).

The journey will be made bearable though, because of the people you encounter along the way. At Harding and beyond, you will meet people who will love you when you don’t think you deserve it, who will bear your burden when you no longer can, and who will stand beside when you need it (or in front of you to shield a blow). You will not make it without these people; let them into your life. These people will be your friends at Harding, friends you make after Harding, and even a couple of Church of Christ ministers (though you can hardly imagine that now). They will love you and will show that love in countless ways.

So stand firm. Cry when you need to, and shout your rage to Heaven when you need to. Just be patient. God loves you. I love you. Your friends and yes, even your family, love you.

Do not be ashamed, and do not be afraid. Be strong. The secrets you so fear will not destroy you, and it is only when you face what lurks in the dark corners of your heart that you will begin to heal and begin to grow. Just remember that you are “convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate [you] from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

With love and even with certainty,

Yourself, age 25

Quote o' the Day

2006-02-01T13:17:00.000-06:00

Many thanks to Irie at Gal328.org for bringing this quote to my attention:

"On the whole, however, the ideal of unity and equality has never been recognized in reality until the inferior group, whether women or slaves or a racial group, has asserted that equality and compelled the church to translate its principles into practice."

H.Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism

Deus Caritas Est

2006-01-25T15:17:00.000-06:00

Pope Benedict's first papal encyclical is available online here. I haven't read it yet, but I hope to read it later tonight.

A Letter

2006-01-25T11:07:00.000-06:00

One of the purposes of this blog is to personalize the so-called ‘gay issue.’ That means letting you into my life a little (while still trying to maintain some modicum of privacy). I share with you this letter I wrote to my father. I haven’t yet sent it, and I’m not sure if I will, but I want you to read it because I want you to understand the pain that families have endured, and will continue to endure, because of our Church’s current ‘position’ on the ‘gay issue.’ I don't yet know at this point what will happen between me and my family. Hopefully we can come to terms with each other. I fear that we cannot.

------------------------------

Dad,

I’ve given much thought in recent months about our relationship. I’ve wanted to call you, tell you everything that’s going on in my life and in my head. I’ve wanted to open myself up to you in hopes that you could understand what, exactly, I am doing and thinking (and correspondingly, why I am doing and thinking those things).

But I haven’t called to talk. I haven’t written, and I decided not to talk to you when I was visiting home. I can think of a few possible reasons why (but, frankly, I’m not sure which is the real reason):

I think I haven’t talked to you because I’m afraid of losing you and Mom again. The last few years have been hard on me (harder, I think, than you appreciate), but no time in my life has been as difficult as the months when you refused to speak to me and refused to have me in your home. I don’t want to endure again the pain of separation, the loneliness, the anger, and the emptiness of being a virtual orphan. I am afraid you’ll turn your back on me again.

I think I haven’t talked to you because I’m afraid of sounding unsure when I talk to you about my life and my faith. It’s odd: I can ramble and talk incessantly to perfect strangers about my faith, my theological ruminations, my concerns for the future, and the hurts of my past. But when I sit down to talk to you, I freeze. Instead of a moderately intelligent, somewhat self-assured 25 year-old, I become a stumbling, bumbling, confused pre-teen who’s in trouble with his parents again. I can’t explain myself to you because there is too much to say; I can’t defend myself because I can no longer speak on your terms and with your religious vocabulary (and when I use my own vocabulary you just tell me I should read less). So I end up stuttering and, flustered, I become defensive and combative. I haven’t talked to you because I’m not sure I’m able to talk to you.

I’m also afraid of not having all the answers. You, it seems, have it all figured out. If you have any Doubts, you’ve never revealed them to me. And since you have church, God, faith, and sexuality seamlessly woven together into a bullet-pointed, proof-texted devotional lesson, you allow me no room to wonder, to question, or to doubt. This makes me feel as though I can’t talk to you until I can combat each point, each assumption, each conclusion, each text. Until I can match scripture for scripture. I am not prepared to do that, so our conversations are between one who knows every answer and one who is struggling to figure out a few of the many possible answers to our common questions. You must give my mind room to breathe and process when we talk before you list yet another six verses and end the conversation. I would like it to be okay with you that I’m struggling. You could tell me that everyone struggles, but you don’t. Instead, you tell me the answer (your answer), and get upset when I don’t unquestioningly accept it.

I am, in short, afraid of you. My father. And, I’m afraid of me. Afraid of what I’ll say, and, frankly, afraid of where I’m going, since I go there largely alone (you will not accompany me, I trust). I would like to be able to lean on you, but I don’t think I can anymore.

Earlier, I said I have too much to say to get it all out. What is it I want to tell you, though? That you’re wrong? That the things you’ve taught me are wrong? That your visions of Church, of God, of Scripture, are crooked or backward or upside-down? Sometimes, yes, that’s what I want to say. But it’s more than that.

It’s not so much that I think you’re wrong. I just think there is more to be said. There has to be, or I have to leave behind the faith you’ve given me. I can no longer (and have for some time been unable) to accept all the things you’ve taught me, at least without some qualification. I can no longer look at the Bible in the way you taught me. I can no longer look at my mother in the way you taught me. I can no longer look at myself in the way you taught me. As I try to make your faith my own, I find I have to make adjustments.

I can’t look at the Bible like you want me to. Your way just seems too shallow and unfulfilling. I would love to just cite a chapter and verse for each theological proposition I proffer, but I can’t do that in good conscience. The way you taught me to look at scripture ignores too much: it ignores the humanity of the authors, compilers, and redactors. It ignores the bias of those who have given us our traditional glosses of texts. It reads selectively to fit a predefined comfort zone. It diminishes the Gospels in favor of the Epistles and pretends that apocryphal and non-canonical books don’t exist. It ignores the social, cultural, historical, and ideological contexts of the Scripture.

I can’t separate scholarship and faith like you want. You are afraid of what will happen to me if I keep reading. I think you’re afraid that the books I read will lead me away from God. I, on the other hand, am afraid of what will happen to me if I stop studying and learning. I’m afraid my faith will shrivel. For me, studying, learning, and reading are acts of worship. I can’t imagine faith without them. I must admit, though, that your fears are, to some degree, founded. The things I read change me. I can’t read a book on feminist theology and then look at Paul’s writings the same way I did before. But that doesn’t mean I can or should stop reading and thinking. It just means I have to be careful while I do so.

I can’t separate my faith from my Experience. Take the experiences I’ve had with my friends as an example. In the same way the things I read change me, my friends and colleagues change me. You are afraid of this, too. I know that. But it cannot be helped. When you and Mom told me I could not come home, when the stress of graduate school, loss of family, and near loss of faith landed me in the hospital, my friends were there for me. I was cared for, loved, and affirmed by those you believe are leading me astray. Perhaps they are; I don’t yet know. But I know that when I was at my lowest, they held me, stood by me, and gave me what you (and my Church) would not: affirmation. They saved my life and, perhaps, my faith. So what am I to do with them? Am I to leave them behind because they don’t share our (your) faith? Am I to shut them out when they tell me I should find a different church for my own health and sanity?

I have to make adjustments because of the things I know in my heart. I know that women are equal to men in value, intellect, heart, faith, and clerical ability. I know that it is immoral to assign them a lesser place. I know that it is wrong that I’ve never heard either of my Grandmothers pray (not because they have no faith, mind you, but because they are women). It is wrong that I haven’t heard my mother pray since I was baptized. I know that any use of scripture to diminish the place of women in our society, our families, or (and especially) our churches has to be a false and errant use of scripture. I know and believe this and, though I can accept the fact that you think I’m incorrect, I cannot accept the ease with which you seem to dismiss me and those like me who want our sisters’ voices to be heard.

Another thing I know in my heart: I am gay. You will not accept this, nor will you accept the way this shapes my view of faith. You still believe I can be cured. You still believe that I’ve made a misguided lifestyle choice. You believe it impossible to be gay and a Christian. You insist on believing that my eternal salvation hinges on whether I am “practicing” or “celibate.” I can live with the fact that you believe these things. I cannot, though, abide your absolute refusal to consider the possibility that I might have actually thought this all through, that I might actually deserve your respect, that I might actually be more than a petulant, misguided child. I cannot abide the fact that you never ask me how I’m doing, that you’ve never expressed concern that I might be hurting, and especially that you’ve never acknowledged that you and your church might have caused me pain. You’ve never apologized for the comments you’ve made about gays and AIDS, you’ve never apologized for the things you said to me after I first said the words “I’m gay,” you’ve never acknowledged that you may have overreacted throughout that first year.

So, for all these reasons, I can’t talk to you about my faith. I can’t tell you that I was asked to leave a church I had been attending for two years. I can’t tell you that I’m afraid I’ll never find a church I can call home. I can’t tell you that, while I’ve figured some things out, I don’t have all the answers (I am, after all, only 25. I’m young and could sometimes use advice.).

I don’t know where we go now. I don’t know how we come to terms with our differences. I don’t know how we rebuild our relationship after the last several years of pain. I hope we can. Maybe it will just take time. But until the time comes when we can be truly reconciled, what do we do?

All my love,
Your Son

Losing the Farm

2006-01-19T20:28:00.000-06:00

This is why gay couples need legal protection. Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

A Project

2006-01-18T09:28:00.000-06:00

Some questions for any readers out there:

1) If you were going to interview a gay Christian or, more specifically, a gay Christian in a Church of Christ, what questions would you ask her or him?

2) If you were going to interview the Christian parent of a gay child, what would you ask her or him?

3) If you were going to interview an 'ex-gay', what questions would you ask her or him?

I would love some input here...

I Simply Am, Part IV

2005-12-29T23:19:00.000-06:00

Below is the last part of Andrew Sullivan's 1994 essay addressing some of the problems he faced as he attempted to reconcile his Catholic faith with his emerging self-awareness as a gay man. I have commented on other parts of this essay, but I think this last part needs no commentary, except that I'd like to briefly highlight two of Sullivan's observations:

First, a theology of sex must be evaluated in light of its effects. We cannot simply pontificate on the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality; instead, we must see how our theology plays out in the lives of our fellow Christians. Our experience may tell us that our theology should be reevaluated.

Second, we must realize that the gays and lesbians in our churches ARE our churches. Our lives are the life of the church. We are not an "issue", we are not a "conflict", we are a part of the life of the church.

Enjoy. Comments are appreciated.

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IV.

For many homosexual Catholics, life within the Church is a difficult endeavor. In my 20s, as I attempted to unite the possibilities of sexual longing and emotional commitment, I discovered what many heterosexuals and homosexuals had discovered before me: that it is a troubling and troublesome mission. There's a disingenuous tendency, when discussing both homosexual and heterosexual emotional life, to glamorize and idealize the entire venture. To posit the possibility of a loving union, after all, is not to guarantee its achievement. There is also a lamentable inclination to believe that all conflicts can finally be resolved; that the homosexual Catholic's struggle can be removed by a simple theological coup de main; that the conflict is somehow deeper than many other struggles in the Church - of women, say, or of the divorced. The truth is that pain, as Christ taught, is not a reason to question truth; it may indeed be a reason to embrace it.

But it must also be true that to dismiss the possibility of a loving union for homosexuals at all is to banish from the minds and hearts of countless gay men and women the idea that they, too, can find solace and love in one another - is to create the conditions for a human etiolation that no Christian community can contemplate without remorse. What finally convinced me of the wrongness of the Church's teachings was not that they were intellectually so confused, but that in the circumstances of my own life - and of the lives I discovered around me - they seemed so destructive of the possibilities of human love and self-realization. By crippling the potential for connection and growth, the Church's teachings created a dynamic that in practice led not to virtue but to pathology; by requiring the first lie in a human life, which would lead to an entire battery of others, they contorted human beings into caricatures of solitary eccentricity, frustrated bitterness, incapacitating anxiety - and helped perpetuate all the human wickedness and cruelty and insensitivity that such lives inevitably carry in their wake. These doctrines could not in practice do what they wanted to do: they could not both affirm human dignity and deny human love.

This truth is not an argument; it is merely an observation. But observations are at the heart not simply of the Church's traditional Thomist philosophy, but also of the phenomenological vision of the current pope. To observe these things, to affirm their truth, is not to oppose the Church, but to hope in it, to believe in it as a human institution that is yet the eternal vessel of God's love. It is to say that such lives as those of countless gay men and lesbians must ultimately affect the Church not because our lives are perfect, or without contradiction, or without sin, but because our lives are in some sense also the life of the Church.

I remember, in my own life, the sense of lung-filling exhilaration I felt as my sexuality began to be incorporated into my life, a sense that was not synonymous with recklessness or self-indulgence - although I was not immune from those things either - but a sense of being suffused at last with the possibility of being fully myself before those I loved and before God. I remember the hopefulness of parents regained and friendships restored in a life that, for all its vanities, was at least no longer premised on a lie covered over by a career. I remember the sense a few months ago in a pew in a cathedral, as I reiterated the same pre-Communion litany of prayers that I had spoken some twenty years earlier, that, for the first time, the love the Church had always taught that God held for me was tangible and redemptive. I had never felt it fully before; and, of course, like so many spiritual glimpses, I have rarely felt it since. But I do know that it was conditioned not on the possibility of purity, but on the possibility of honesty. That honesty is not something that can be bought or won in a moment. It is a process peculiarly prone to self-delusion and self-doubt. But it is one that, if it is to remain true to itself, the Church cannot resist forever.

I simply am, part III

2005-11-18T10:19:00.000-06:00

I have been commenting on a 1994 essay by Andrew Sullivan on his struggle to reconcile the teachings of his Church with the experience of his life. This is difficult for all people, but for the gay Christian, the dissonance can be unbearable. The third part of the essay, posted below, illuminates the difficulty in hating the sin and loving the sinner, especially when the sinner is the Self and the “sin” reaches to the very core of the person. A few thoughts:

(1) Perhaps most importantly, this part of the essay addresses a few of the commonly (over)used analogies for homosexual behavior. Analogies are good when they serve a heuristic or didactic purpose—often through iterations of analogies something can be learned (dismissing one analogy for another helps define the boundaries of the question at hand). If, however, the analogy doesn’t fit (e.g., alcoholics = homosexuals), violence can be done to Truth. What analogue exists for the ‘gay issue’? Are gays like alcoholics? Sex addicts? Are they like cannibals? Or are they more like sterile people? What do we learn from these analogies, especially at the points where they don’t align? When the argument is made that gays, like alcoholics, should simply avoid the thing that tempts them, what are we asking?

(2) Sullivan, below, asserts that the main problem with analogizing homosexuality to alcoholism is that homosexuality, unlike alcoholism, reaches into the deepest part of the person, reaches to the part of us that exists for loving others. An alcoholic must give up alcohol and, in so doing, must face those demons which drove her to drink. If successful, though, she gains her freedom. The gay Christian is asked to give up so much more. Sex, yes, but more: love, intimacy, a life lived with another and for another. The difference from the alcoholic grows: the homosexual is asked, at a very young age, to promise to never enjoy the love associated with committed sexual union, though she is asked to support all her friends as they begin their lives with husbands and wives. We are not told to refrain from having a whiskey; we are told to refrain from love if we hope to save ourselves from hell.

There is another difference between the homosexual and the alcoholic. Alcoholism is invariably pathological; homosexuality is not. The evidence for this continues to mount. Lesbians and gay men are well-adjusted, productive, happy people.

(3) If homosexuality is either a natural or a blameless condition—that is, if only homosexual action and not homosexual orientation is sinful—is it coherent to require gay and lesbian Christians to abandon all hope of romantic love, to tell them to love themselves but no one else? Many of the older generation (my parents included) don’t have to face this question; they deny the existence of homosexuality altogether (i.e., it is a choice made by misguided individuals).

But if you agree that homosexual orientation is (for some, at least) fixed and immutable, and if you further believe that this orientation is not, in and of itself, sinful, then why deny gays and lesbians expression of their love? The common to this question is “the Bible says.” But do you think Paul believed homosexual orientation to be immutable, natural, and sinless? If not, does that change the way you read Paul’s injunctions against certain homosexual behaviors?

(4) The situation of the gay member of the Church of Christ at first seems different from the situation of the gay Catholic. Catholic theology relies heavily on tradition and natural law, while our theology (at least nominally) primarily relies on the Biblical text. It is important to remember, though, that we read our text through the inherited lenses of 2,000 years of tradition and history. We have inherited our concepts of what is natural from Catholic tradition, and the text itself is often burdened with the weight of thousands of years of readings and misreadings.

(5) The last part of this section of Sullivan’s essay addresses a point that is often missed. Assuming, arguendo that the heterosexual sexual union is the acme of human sexual expression. Why must it be the only expression of human sexuality?

And so, part III of this essay by Sullivan (The italics below are mine):

----------------------------------

III.

[The demand to love the sinner but hate the sin] is also a demand that raises the central question of the two documents (see parts I and II below) and, indeed, of any Catholic homosexual life: How intelligible is the Church's theological and moral position on the blamelessness of homosexuality and the moral depravity of homosexual acts? This question is the one I wrestled with in my early 20s, as the increasing aridity of my emotional life began to conflict with the possibility of my living a moral life. The distinction made some kind of sense in theory; but in practice, the command to love oneself as a person of human dignity yet hate the core longings that could make one emotionally whole demanded a sense of detachment or a sense of cynicism that seemed inimical to the Christian life. To deny lust was one thing; to deny love was another. And to deny love in the context of Christian doctrine seemed particularly perverse. Which begged a prior question: Could the paradoxes of the Church's position reflect a deeper incoherence at their core?

One way of tackling the question is to look for useful analogies to the moral paradox of the homosexual. Greed, for example, might be said to be an innate characteristic of human beings, which, in practice, is always bad. But the analogy falls apart immediately. Greed is itself evil; it is prideful, a part of Original Sin. It is not, like homosexuality, a blameless natural condition that inevitably leads to what are understood as immoral acts. Moreover, there is no subgroup of innately greedy people, nor a majority of people in which greed never occurs. Nor are the greedy to be treated with respect. There is no paradox here, and no particular moral conundrum.

Aquinas suggests a way around this problem. He posits that some things that occur in nature may be in accordance with an individual's nature, but somehow against human nature in general: "for it sometimes happens that one of the principles which is natural to the species as a whole has broken down in one of its individual members; the result can be that something which runs counter to the nature of the species as a whole, happens to be in harmony with nature for a particular individual: as it becomes natural for a vessel of water which has been heated to give out heat." Forget, for a moment, the odd view that somehow it is more "natural" for a vessel to exist at one temperature than another. The fundamental point here is that there are natural urges in a particular person that may run counter to the nature of the species as a whole. The context of this argument is a discussion of pleasure: How is it, if we are to trust nature (as Aquinas and the Church say we must), that some natural pleasures in some people are still counter to human nature as a whole? Aquinas's only response is to call such events functions of sickness, what the modern Church calls "objective disorder." But here, too, the analogies he provides are revealing: they are bestiality and cannibalism. Aquinas understands each of these activities as an emanation of a predilection that seems to occur more naturally in some than in others. But this only reveals some of the special problems of lumping homosexuality in with other "disorders." Even Aquinas's modern disciples (and, as we've seen, the Church) concede that involuntary orientation to the same gender does not spring from the same impulses as cannibalism or bestiality. Or indeed that cannibalism is ever a "natural" pleasure in the first place, in the way that, for some bizarre reason, homosexuality is.

What, though, of Aquinas's better argument - that a predisposition to homosexual acts is a mental or physical illness that is itself morally neutral, but always predisposes people to inherently culpable acts? Here, again, it is hard to think of a precise analogy. Down syndrome, for example, occurs in a minority and is itself morally neutral; but when it leads to an immoral act, such as, say, a temper tantrum directed at a loving parent, the Church is loath to judge that person as guilty of choosing to break a commandment. The condition excuses the action. Or, take epilepsy: if an epileptic person has a seizure that injures another human being, she is not regarded as morally responsible for her actions, insofar as they were caused by epilepsy. There is no paradox here either, but for a different reason: with greed, the condition itself is blameworthy; with epilepsy, the injurious act is blameless.

Another analogy can be drawn. What of something like alcoholism? This is a blameless condition, as science and psychology have shown. Some people have a predisposition to it; others do not. Moreover, this predisposition is linked, as homosexuality is, to a particular act. For those with a predisposition to alcoholism, having a drink might be morally disordered, destructive to the human body and spirit. So, alcoholics, like homosexuals, should be welcomed into the Church, but only if they renounce the activity their condition implies.

Unfortunately, even this analogy will not hold. For one thing, drinking is immoral only for alcoholics. Moderate drinking is perfectly acceptable, according to the Church, for non-alcoholics. On the issue of homosexuality, to follow the analogy, the Church would have to say that sex between people of the same gender would be - in moderation - fine for heterosexuals but not for homosexuals. In fact, of course, the Church teaches the opposite, arguing that the culpability of homosexuals engaged in sexual acts should be judged with prudence - and less harshly - than the culpability of heterosexuals who engage in "perversion."

But the analogy to alcoholism points to a deeper problem. Alcoholism does not ultimately work as an analogy because it does not reach to the core of the human condition in the way that homosexuality, following the logic of the Church's arguments, does. If alcoholism is overcome by a renunciation of alcoholic acts, then recovery allows the human being to realize his or her full potential, a part of which, according to the Church, is the supreme act of self-giving in a life of matrimonial love. But if homosexuality is overcome by a renunciation of homosexual emotional and sexual union, the opposite is achieved: The human being is liberated into sacrifice and pain, barred from the matrimonial love that the Church holds to be intrinsic, for most people, to the state of human flourishing. Homosexuality is a structural condition that restricts the human being, even if homosexual acts are renounced, to a less than fully realized life. In other words, the gay or lesbian person is deemed disordered at a far deeper level than the alcoholic: at the level of the human capacity to love and be loved by another human being, in a union based on fidelity and self-giving. Their renunciation of such love also is not guided toward some ulterior or greater goal - as the celibacy of the religious orders is designed to intensify their devotion to God. Rather, the loveless homosexual destiny is precisely toward nothing, a negation of human fulfillment, which is why the Church understands that such persons, even in the act of obedient self-renunciation, are called "to enact the will of God in their life by joining whatever sufferings and difficulties they experience in virtue of their condition to the sacrifice of the Lord's cross."

This suggests another analogy: the sterile person. Here, too, the person is structurally barred by an innate or incurable condition from the full realization of procreative union with another person. One might expect that such people would be regarded in exactly the same light as homosexuals. They would be asked to commit themselves to a life of complete celibacy and to offer up their pain toward a realization of Christ's sufferings on the cross. But that, of course, is not the Church's position. Marriage is available to sterile couples or to those past child-bearing age; these couples are not prohibited from having sexual relations.

One is forced to ask: What rational distinction can be made, on the Church's own terms, between the position of sterile people and that of homosexual people with regard to sexual relations and sacred union? If there is nothing morally wrong, per se, with the homosexual condition or with homosexual love and self-giving, then homosexuals are indeed analogous to those who, by blameless fate, cannot reproduce. With the sterile couple, it could be argued, miracles might happen. But miracles, by definition, can happen to anyone. What the analogy to sterility suggests, of course, is that the injunction against homosexual union does not rest, at heart, on the arguments about openness to procreation, but on the Church's failure to fully absorb its own teachings about the dignity and worth of homosexual persons. It cannot yet see them as it sees sterile heterosexuals: people who, with respect to procreation, suffer from a clear, limiting condition, but who nevertheless have a potential for real emotional and spiritual self-realization, in the heart of the Church, through the transfiguring power of the matrimonial sacrament. It cannot yet see them as truly made in the image of God.

But this, maybe, is to be blind in the face of the obvious. Even with sterile people, there is a symbolism in the union of male and female that speaks to the core nature of sexual congress and its ideal instantiation. There is no such symbolism in the union of male with male or female with female. For some Catholics, this "symbology" goes so far as to bar even heterosexual intercourse from positions apart from the missionary - face to face, male to female, in a symbolic act of love devoid of all non-procreative temptation. For others, the symbology is simply about the notion of "complementarity," the way in which each sex is invited in the act of sexual congress - even when they are sterile - to perceive the mystery of the other; when the two sexes are the same, in contrast, the act becomes one of mere narcissism and self-indulgence, a higher form of masturbation. For others still, the symbolism is simply about Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, and the essentially dual, male-female center of the natural world. Denying this is to offend the complementary dualism of the universe.

But all these arguments are arguments for the centrality of heterosexual sexual acts in nature, not their exclusiveness. It is surely possible to concur with these sentiments, even to laud their beauty and truth, while also conceding that it is nevertheless also true that nature seems to have provided a spontaneous and mysterious contrast that could conceivably be understood to complement - even dramatize - the central male-female order. In many species and almost all human cultures, there are some who seem to find their destiny in a similar but different sexual and emotional union. They do this not by subverting their own nature, or indeed human nature, but by fulfilling it in a way that doesn't deny heterosexual primacy, but rather honors it by its rare and distinct otherness. As albinos remind us of the brilliance of color; as redheads offer a startling contrast to the blandness of their peers; as genius teaches us, by contrast, the virtue of moderation; as the disabled person reveals to us in negative form the beauty of the fully functioning human body; so the homosexual person might be seen as a natural foil to the heterosexual norm, a variation that does not eclipse the theme, but resonates with it. Extinguishing - or prohibiting - homosexuality is, from this point of view, not a virtuous necessity, but the real crime against nature, a refusal to accept the pied beauty of God's creation, a denial of the way in which the other need not threaten, but may actually give depth and contrast to the self.

This is the alternative argument embedded in the Church's recent grappling with natural law, that is just as consonant with the spirit of natural law as the Church's current position. It is more consonant with what actually occurs in nature; seeks an end to every form of natural life; and upholds the dignity of each human person. It is so obvious an alternative to the Church's current stance that it is hard to imagine the forces of avoidance that have kept it so firmly at bay for so long.

No Nonsense in November, V (the final one, I promise)

2005-11-08T22:07:00.000-06:00

So, it's no surprise the amendment passed. I do have to say I was a bit surprised by the margin of victory (perhaps I've been in a blue state for too long?).

Part of my surprise must stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of why someone would vote FOR this amendment. Though some cast their votes out of pure animus for gays and lesbians, I can't imagine that 75% of Texans hate gays. So why? Could someone please explain? And if you could try to do a better job than Maggie Gallagher (see below post) that would be great.

A few questions:

You believe it is wrong to be gay. Why must that translate into a legal ban? And would you vote to ban, say, adultery, fornication, or sodomy?

You believe that marriage is between one man and one woman because "that's the way it has always been." Why must it stay that way? And why does that argument fail when it comes to other ancient aspects of marriage that we have thrown by the wayside?

You believe that marriage is primarily about procreation. Even if procreation is the primary goal, must it be the exclusive goal? Why does the procreation argument necessarily exclude lesbians and gays from the institution of marriage, since we can adopt, or since many gays and lesbians have their own biological children?

If you oppose gay marriage, mustn't you also (logically speaking) oppose nondiscrimination policies banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation? Mustn't you also oppose every civil right for gays and lesbians, since the ability to choose whom to love and with whom create a family is among the most fundamental of human rights?

Someone please help me understand.

No Nonsense in November, IV

2005-11-08T15:36:00.000-06:00

(NB: This picture is meant partially in jest. Many of you may know that the Klan recently held a rally in support of proposition 2)

The noise you are about to hear is the sound of GR beating a dead horse:

A few more thoughts on Proposition 2, including an embarrassing confession of cowardice. First, though, I want to include a statement by someone I respect and admire (I pulled this statement out of a conversation happening at another blog):
Instead of legislating morality, I like to think of an ideal law as morally legislating. Instead of giving the impression that the law gives some ultimate idea of what's right and what's wrong, moral legislation would be a law-making that is informed by moral principles while still acknowledging the broad scope of what different persons would consider 'moral.' Moral legislation would not define what is moral but rather reflect and embody moral principles in its words, essence, and execution.

This would cut short a simple ends-means ratio of legislation. Moral legislation for an anti-abortionist seems like it would focus more on how to provide effective care, insurance, education, and general supportive social structure for children instead of on simply overturning a court ruling. Moral legislation for an anti-war person seems like it would focus more on diplomacy, self-aware consumption of goods, and an effort to engage rather than marginalize the ideology of 'opposition' instead of on simply trying to pull troops out of wherever we may be.

It simply is not possible to legislate morality (though, as J. Burton points out, it may be possible to morally legislate). Passing this amendment will not make me straight. Passing this amendment will not end my hopes of finding someone with whom I can spend the rest of my life. Those behind the amendment and those who will vote for it know this. So why push the amendment? Why fight so hard to amend the Texas Constitution?

As I mentioned below, I have spent some time calling potential voters to urge them to vote against Proposition 2. One caller summed up what I believe is at the root of this amendment. When I asked him why he was going to vote to ban gay marriage, even though it is already illegal in Texas, he replied: "They simply don't belong in Texas."

I want so badly for this all to really be about strengthening the institution of marriage. I want so badly for this all to be based on a carefully considered (though refutable) political philosophy. I want so badly for this all to be about "doing the right thing," or even about that ever-present bugaboo: judicial activism. But for most Texans, it simply isn't about policy; it is a gut reaction to a perceived evil. At root, this Constitutional Amendment is about the majority's discomfort with what a few men do in the bedroom. At root, many Texans just don't want gay people around. At root, we make many of you uncomfortable.

The backers of this amendment support it because, when it comes down to brass tacks, they believe Sodom got what it deserved when it was reduced to a smoldering pile of ash and sulfur and mangled bodies. Though they are wrong, they believe that a holocaust of fire was just punishment for a disgusting sex act performed by the men of a town (they ignore the fact that rape, and not love, was the goal of the Sodomites). They believe gay men and lesbians to be the moral descendants of these perverts (that's why they call us 'Sodomites' and wish they could still ban 'Sodomy').

Now, most of the backers of the amendment won't say the above out loud. Most wouldn't put it in such absolute and graphic terms. Most don't hate LGBT persons. They may instead say that lesbians and gays are 'broken' and need 'healing.' They may say that they are only banning gay marriage in hopes that fewer people will accept the so-called gay lifestyle, or because they don't want society to endorse the choice of a few misguided individuals. But the euphemisms are inadequate to mask the heart of the argument: gay sex sends you to hell, so coercive power of the state must be used to stop people from doing it.

I do not think most Texans hate gays. I don't think a majority of Texans want to see all legal protections for gay couples eliminated. I do think, though that a majority of Texans have been convinced that, if you believe it is wrong to be gay, you must vote to ban gay marriage (that is, they have been convinced that moral disapproval is a sufficient condition for banning gay marriage). Most are missing the fact that the logic doesn't add up. Moral disapproval of an action (or a group) is neither a necessary condition nor a sufficient condition for banning an action.

Sure, let's have a policy debate about the parameters of state-sanctioned marriage. Let's even talk about whether the government should be involved in marriage at all. We could talk about how marriage rights for gays and lesbians could have a stabilizing effect on the gay community. We can talk about how gays and lesbians should be considered equal under the law. We can talk about how a ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional sex discrimination. We can even make conservative and traditionalist cases for gay marriage.

But instead, when the polls close at 7 p.m., I suspect we will discover that it was not policy considerations that carried the day. We will likely discover that, when it comes down to it, the LGBT community just doesn't belong in Texas. We aren't wanted because, in a state dominated by evangelical, fundamentalist, and conservative Christians, we are still nothing more than Sodomites.

And now my confession of cowardice: yes, I donated money to defeat the amendment; yes, I called potential voters to get out the vote; yes, I voted against the amendment. But I was scared of one group of people: my family. I didn't call my parents, my siblings, or any of my extended family. Perhaps this was Southern sensibility: you just don't talk politics with the family. Perhaps this was my pragmatic side coming out: I'm pretty sure I know how they will vote, so what's the point? In reality, though, there was more: I'm afraid my family will stop speaking to me again. I'm afraid that asking for their votes will be the tipping point. I lost my family once, and I don't want to lose them again.

I cannot speak to my family about my desire to start my own family because, if I do, I risk losing the family I already have. I think they call this a Catch-22, but I'm not sure.

No Nonsense in November, III

2005-11-08T10:22:00.000-06:00

So, today's the big day. Today proposition 2, the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (and anything resembling gay marriage), is up for a vote. If you are a Texan, get to the polls (you have until 7 tonight) and vote 'no'.

Sorry I have been absent lately. I've been spending most of my spare time calling potential voters; the results have not been encouraging.

I don't have much to say about this amendment that hasn't been said before: it is unnecessary, it is revolting attack on lesbian and gay citizens, and it does nothing to protect the institution of marriage.

Vote no.

No Nonsense in November, II

2005-10-25T13:10:00.000-05:00

There has been much discussion on the web about Texas's proposed constitutional amendment 2, which would ban gay marriage (and any legal status similar to marriage).

I don't want to make constitutional or legal arguments, because I don't think that's what this is really about. At its core, marriage is not about legal rights and responsibilities, it is not about licenses and laws, it is not about tax breaks and visitation rights (though all of these are and should be part of the broader discussion). Marriage is about creating family. Marriage is about joining yourself with another forever. Marriage is about love and a life together.

Some people do not believe that LGBT people can create families. Some people do not believe that LGBT people are capable of monogamy, that we are capable of being parents, that we are capable of building families and lives together. They do not believe that the relationships we have should be legally recognized because, for moral reasons, they do not believe they are valid. So they seek to ban our marriages and to tell us that our families aren't really families after all.

But look around. Lesbians and gays have been creating families for a long time. There are thousands of committed gay and lesbian couples in Texas. Many of these families are raising children (some estimate that there are over 1 million children being raised by gay parents in the U.S.). LGBT people are capable of giving and recieving love. We already give love as your children, your brothers, your sisters, and your friends. We, though, must now grovel and beg for the right to love romantically and to have that love recognized by society.

We will probably lose this fight. But we aren't going anywhere, and we don't plan to stop falling in love anytime soon.

Marriage, that millenia-old institution, has survived because it has evolved. Its survival depends on its relevance, and it will continue to survive only if it keeps pace with humanity. It is time for the next step. Recognize us as your fellow citizens. Recognize us as deserving of respect. Recognize us as humans capable of love and commitment. Vote No on November 8.

Quote o' the Day

2005-10-24T19:12:00.000-05:00

From Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov:

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

Poem o' the Day

2005-10-24T19:02:00.000-05:00

From William Blake's Songs of Innocence:

The Divine Image

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
and Love the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too

Maggie Gallagher at Volokh

2005-10-18T13:59:00.000-05:00

Maggie Gallagher is guest-blogging this week on same-sex marriage over at the Volokh Conspiracy (her posts are mixed in with the normal posts). Ms. Gallagher is one of the leading opponents of same-sex marriage (and typically writes graciously and intelligently), so I will be reading her posts all week and then will attempt a response.

Yes, I support same-sex marriage. But I also think it's important to hear from the other side.

I simply am, part II

2005-10-16T10:37:00.000-05:00

Below is part 2 of an article by Andrew Sullivan on the interplay between his personal life and his Catholic faith. My comments follow

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II.

In a remarkable document titled "Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics," issued by the Vatican in 1975, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made the following statement regarding the vexed issue of homosexuality: "A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable."

The Church was responding, it seems, to the growing sociological and psychological evidence that, for a small minority of people, homosexuality is unchosen and unalterable. In the context of a broad declaration on a whole range of sexual ethics, this statement was something of a minor digression (twice as much space was devoted to the "grave moral disorder" of masturbation); and it certainly didn't mean a liberalization of doctrine about the morality of homosexual acts, which were "intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of."

Still, the concession complicated things. Before 1975 the modern Church, when it didn't ignore the matter, had held a coherent view of the morality of homosexual acts. It maintained that homosexuals, as the modern world had come to define them, didn't really exist; rather, everyone was essentially a heterosexual and homosexual acts were acts chosen by heterosexuals, out of depravity, curiosity, impulse, predisposition or bad moral guidance. Such acts were an abuse of the essential heterosexual orientation of all humanity; they were condemned because they failed to link sexual activity with a binding commitment between a man and a woman in a marriage, a marriage that was permanently open to the possibility of begetting children. Homosexual sex was condemned in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons as premarital heterosexual sex, adultery or contracepted sex: it failed to provide the essential conjugal and procreative context for sexual relations. The reasoning behind this argument rested on natural law. Natural law teaching, drawing on Aristotelian and Thomist tradition, argued that the sexual nature of man was naturally linked to both emotional fidelity and procreation so that, outside of this context, sex was essentially destructive of the potential for human flourishing: "the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love," as the encyclical Gaudium et Spes put it. But suddenly, a new twist had been made to this argument. There was, it seems, in nature, a group of people who were "definitively" predisposed to violation of this natural law; their condition was "innate" and "incurable." Insofar as it was innate - literally innatus or "inborn" - this condition was morally neutral, since anything involuntary could not be moral or immoral; it simply was. But always and everywhere, the activity to which this condition led was "intrinsically disordered and [could] in no case be approved of." In other words, something fundamentally in nature always and everywhere violated a vital part of the nature of human beings; something essentially blameless was always and everywhere blameworthy if acted upon.

The paradox of this doctrine was evident even within its first, brief articulation. Immediately before stating the intrinsic disorder of homosexuality, the text averred that in "the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties. ... Their culpability will be judged with prudence." This compassion for the peculiar plight of the homosexual was then elaborated: "This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it. ..." Throughout, there are alternating moments of alarm and quiescence; tolerance and panic; categorical statement and prudential doubt.

It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that, within a decade, the Church felt it necessary to take up the matter again. The problem could have been resolved by a simple reversion to the old position, the position maintained by fundamentalist Protestant churches: that homosexuality was a hideous, yet curable, affliction of heterosexuals. But the Church doggedly refused to budge from its assertion of the natural occurrence of constitutive homosexuals - or from its compassion for and sensitivity to their plight. In Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's 1986 letter, "On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," this theme is actually deepened, beginning with the title.

To non-Catholics, the use of the term "homosexual person" might seem a banality. But the term "person" constitutes in Catholic moral teaching a profound statement about the individual's humanity, dignity and worth; it invokes a whole range of rights and needs; it reflects the recognition by the Church that a homosexual person deserves exactly the same concern and compassion as a heterosexual person, having all the rights of a human being, and all the value, in the eyes of God. This idea was implicit in the 1975 declaration, but was never advocated. Then there it was, eleven years later, embedded in Ratzinger's very title. Throughout his text, homosexuality, far from being something unmentionable or disgusting, is discussed with candor and subtlety. It is worthy of close attention: "[T]he phenomenon of homosexuality, complex as it is and with its many consequences for society and ecclesial life, is a proper focus for the Church's pastoral care. It thus requires of her ministers attentive study, active concern and honest, theologically well-balanced counsel." And here is Ratzinger on the moral dimensions of the unchosen nature of homosexuality: "[T]he particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin." Moreover, homosexual persons, he asserts, are "often generous and giving of themselves." Then, in a stunning passage of concession, he marshals the Church's usual arguments in defense of human dignity in order to defend homosexual dignity:
It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

Elsewhere, Ratzinger refers to the homosexual's "God-given dignity and worth"; condemns the view that homosexuals are totally compulsive as a "demeaning assumption"; and argues that "the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation."

Why are these statements stunning? Because they reveal how far the Church had, by the mid-1980s, absorbed the common sense of the earlier document's teaching on the involuntariness of homosexuality, and had had the courage to reach its logical conclusion. In Ratzinger's letter, the Church stood foursquare against bigotry, against demeaning homosexuals either by anti-gay slander or violence or by pro-gay attempts to reduce human beings to one aspect of their personhood. By denying that homosexual activity was totally compulsive, the Church could open the door to an entire world of moral discussion about ethical and unethical homosexual behavior, rather than simply dismissing it all as pathological. What in 1975 had been "a pathological constitution judged to be incurable" was, eleven years later, a "homosexual person," "made in the image and likeness of God."

But this defense of the homosexual person was only half the story. The other half was that, at the same time, the Church strengthened its condemnation of any and all homosexual activity. By 1986 the teachings condemning homosexual acts were far more categorical than they had been before. Ratzinger had guided the Church into two simultaneous and opposite directions: a deeper respect for homosexuals, and a sterner rejection of almost anything they might do.

At the beginning of the 1986 document, Ratzinger bravely confronted the central paradox: "In the discussion which followed the publication of the [1975] declaration ... an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Elsewhere, he reiterated the biblical and natural law arguments against homosexual relations. Avoiding the problematic nature of the Old Testament's disavowal of homosexual acts (since these are treated in the context of such "abominations" as eating pork and having intercourse during menstruation, which the Church today regards with equanimity), Ratzinger focused on St. Paul's admonitions against homosexuality: "Instead of the original harmony between Creator and creatures, the acute distortion of idolatry has led to all kinds of moral excess. Paul is at a loss to find a clearer example of this disharmony than homosexual relations." There was also the simple natural-law argument: "It is only in the marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally." The point about procreation was strengthened by an argument about the natural, "complementary union able to transmit life," which is heterosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual sex cannot be a part of this union means that it "thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living." Thus "homosexual activity" is inherently "self-indulgent." "Homosexual activity," Ratzinger's document claimed in a veiled and ugly reference to HIV, is a "form of life which constantly threatens to destroy" homosexual persons.

This is some armory of argument. The barrage of statements directed against "homosexual activity," which Ratzinger associates in this document exclusively with genital sex, is all the more remarkable because it occurs in a document that has otherwise gone further than might have been thought imaginable in accepting homosexuals into the heart of the Church and of humanity. Ratzinger's letter was asking us, it seems, to love the sinner more deeply than ever before, but to hate the sin even more passionately. This is a demand with which most Catholic homosexuals have at some time or other engaged in anguished combat.

------------------------------

A few brief comments:

1. Our church must determine how it will respond to the “growing sociological and psychological evidence” of which Sullivan speaks. Many acknowledge and accept this evidence. Many, though, still hold to the belief that homosexuality is some sort self-destructive choice made by a few confused individuals, and that those individuals can be “cured” if they just work hard enough and pray long enough. Which position do you take? And how does that decision affect the “issue”? Is it the “condition” of homosexual orientation that is immoral, or just the behaviors flowing therefrom? And is it all behaviors, or only certain behaviors? For example, is it immoral for two straight men to hold hands and, if not, is it immoral for two gay men to hold hands? Why?

2. I think the distinction drawn between “homosexual” and “homosexual person” is important, and I wish Churches of Christ more often emphasized the distinction. Christians often forget that those gay folks are, in fact, folks just like them. We are persons worthy of respect. We are persons who deserve to be treated fairly. We are persons who often give of ourselves only to be spat upon. We are your daughters and sons, your sisters and brothers. Very often we are the persons who, because of our own struggles, can best understand the struggles of others. Very often we are the persons who have something real to say about justice, because we often have experienced injustice. We are persons who deserve better than to be talked about abstractly as those who are out to “destroy the institution of marriage.” We are more than an issue to be debated, and I ask that you treat us as such.

Also, an aside to those of you pat us on the head, tilt your head to the side with (what is supposed to look like) an expression of empathy, and then tearily tell us that we are “broken,” and need “healing.” I hesitate to criticize you; you are doing so much better than your forebears. But to patronize us is to treat us as children, not as persons who are your intellectual and spiritual equals. To say that we are “broken” (whatever that means), but that you are not because you have sex with those of an opposite gender is to miss the point entirely. Thank you for loving us and for not spitting on us. But please, take one more step.

3. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is an immensely problematic statement; a statement that attempts to cover a whole host of evils. It is acceptable to send your minor child to an institution to be healed, because you are doing it out of love. It is acceptable to tell your gay son he may no longer enter your home or speak to his brother or sister, because you are doing it out of love. It is acceptable to wrest a foster child (whose foster parents happen to be lesbians) from the only home she has ever known, because you are doing it out of love. It is acceptable to oppose laws that would ban discrimination against LGBT persons, because you are doing it out of love. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is a statement that has the word “hate” in it. How is that acceptable to a Christian?

Gay Marriage, Continued

2005-10-15T01:18:00.000-05:00

Following up on the last post, I thought I'd post an article by Jonathon Rauch. What is gay marriage all about? Is it an attempt to undermine an important social institution, or an attempt to honor that institution (albeit by entering it in a slightly different way)?

As Christians, how should we react to this wedding? With disgust, with pity, or with joy? Should we join the United Church of Christ in affirming that this marriage is blessed by Christ's church? As voters, should we seek to ban this marriage, entered into out of deep and true love? As voters, should our religious belief in the normativity of heterosexual marriage trump the religious beliefs of those (like the UCC, the MCC, the UUs, and others) whose religious beliefs impel them to sanction and affirm such marriages?

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At A Same-Sex Wedding, The New Is Made Old Again

By Jonathan Rauch, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Oct. 14, 2005

A cloudy afternoon on a recent Saturday in western Massachusetts. Rain sprinkles the Berkshire hills. Strolling in twos and threes along paths between broad lawns, 80 or so wedding guests make their way to a performance barn on the grounds of Jacob's Pillow. Rustling, cheerful, curious, they take their seats. Gray light filters through high windows and casts soft shadows among the rafters. The barn is not a sanctuary, but it feels like one today.

A violinist, one of the relatives, begins a Corelli prelude, and the wedding party enters. Both grooms wear tuxedos and boutonnieres. The minister, a young seminarian in the United Church of Christ, tall in his robes, begins. Under order of the state Supreme Court, same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and today the minister will marry Jamie Beckland and Michael Pope.

"Every relationship of love is holy, sacred, and worthy of public affirmation and celebration," he says, with a touch of emphasis, slight but sufficient, on the word every. "We pray that this couple will fulfill God's purpose for the whole of their lives." Emphasis again, this time on the word whole. Not everyone in the hall picks up the inflection, but the grooms do.

Jamie is 27, originally from Wisconsin, now a development officer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael, also 27, works at a private research company. They plan to move to Massachusetts, the place where Jamie lived when they met and the only state where their marriage has legal force. Jamie is taller, blond, bespectacled, thin, with the bearing of the former dancer that he is. Michael is dark, heavyset, as reserved as Jamie can be bubbly, a product not of the liberal Upper Midwest but of conservative southwestern Virginia, a state notorious for its gratuitously anti-gay legislation.

For all the differences, Jamie and Michael and their families have this in common: divorce. The newlyweds' immediate families count eight divorces between them, four on each side. Michael's parents divorced when he was 6, Jamie's when he was 10. "I think there's a whole generation of kids from broken homes who only want to be married once," Michael says. This marriage of two men, so radical by some lights, aspires to reconsecrate the deepest of marital traditions.

A few weeks before the wedding, over coffee at Starbucks, I asked Jamie why he wanted to marry. For my generation of gay men (I am 45), legal marriage was unthinkable, and emerging into the gay world often meant entering a cultural ghetto and a sexual underworld. Jamie, who could just about be my son, replies with an answer that turns the world of the 1970s and 1980s upside down. Once he realized he was gay, he says, he simply expected to marry.

"Why does anybody get married?" he asks. "I wanted the stability, I wanted the companionship, I wanted to have a sex life that was accepted, I wanted to have kids. For me, it's not a choice. A marriage evens you out."

The couple met on May 18, 2002. The next day, they exchanged telephone numbers at church (both are Christian). Within weeks, they knew it was serious. In February of this year they took a trip to Massachusetts and went snowshoeing on the grounds of Jacob's Pillow, a dance center where Jamie had worked when they met. There, on an outdoor stage, Jamie got down on one knee. "Which was hard, because we were in snowshoes."

He gave Michael a compass inscribed, "May we always find our way together," and launched into his carefully planned proposal, doing fine for about a minute before starting to cry. Michael began laughing, Jamie pulled himself together long enough to propose, and the two kissed, their faces stung by freezing tears.

Most weddings occasion unambiguous joy, but at this one, reactions run the gamut from delight to incredulity. Jamie's mother, Laura, freely confesses to having been a "monster mom" when Jamie first told her he was gay, seven years ago. He recalls her blaming a demon that might have possessed him one day while he was using a Ouija board. Today, however, she is fighting a losing battle with her false eyelashes as the tears flow, and the tears are happy ones. "It's amazingly wonderful and appropriate," she says of the marriage, "and it breaks my heart" -- not that Jamie is gay or is marrying a man, but that he is making this final transition out of childhood.

Laura's parents, Lee and Ludene, both in their early 70s, have shown up at their grandson's wedding on the advice of their priest, who counseled support for their family even if they could not condone a same-sex marriage. They say they are open-minded Catholics, but today's event has pushed them to their limit. "I feel that it's wrong," Lee volunteers. "I don't think it's real. I kind of wish it hadn't happened." He loves his grandson, no doubt about it. But "this is hard for me, to see it happen." Ludene, who believes that marriage is for procreation, struggles to find a more conciliatory note. "We're living in a different age," she says.

Jamie's two younger brothers are enthusiastic about the marriage. It never occurs to them to regard a same-sex marriage as anything but real. His father, Kim, has been supportive all along. But his paternal grandparents, Jim and Carol, are guarded as they sit on a bench awaiting the ceremony's start. "We love Jamie, and I'm not going to drive a wedge in the family," Jim says. Carol mentions that both are Christians who are close to the Bible. "This will be interesting," she says. "I'm not the judge."

Opponents of gay marriage have argued that same-sex couples, especially men, will undermine marriage by regarding it merely as a path to legal benefits, rather than as a moral and spiritual commitment. Gay couples may get married, goes the criticism, but will not act married. To judge by Jamie and Michael, there is little cause for worry on that score.

For their part, gay couples have had reason to worry that their marriages, however valid in the law's eyes, might be regarded as less than authentic in the eyes of family, friends, religious institutions, employers. After all, a marriage is a marriage not just because the law certifies it but because the community accepts and underwrites it.

Jamie's and Michael's relatives will face a question that never comes up after a straight wedding: whether to inform their friends, neighbors, and colleagues that their son or grandson or brother or nephew is married to a man. Among the parents' and grandparents' generations, most people said they would share this information selectively, or they would play it by ear, or they just didn't know what they would do. The marriage is no secret, but neither does it bask in the social sunlight that straight spouses take for granted.

Yet marriage has its own dynamic, one that deepens bonds between spouses and forges links to kin and community. From time immemorial, parents have expressed ambivalence, even dismay, over their children's choice of spouse, yet have been won over, if not to the choice, then to the marriage and the stability it provides. Michael's mother, Kathy, is from the town of Buena Vista, Va. She was raised in a strict Brethren Church but now considers herself "spiritual." She has been married and divorced twice. "This is truly not what I expected to see in his marriage," she says of Michael, her only son. But she adds: "I hope this is going to be a stabilizing factor in his life, because he's been at loose ends for a long time."

Marriage creates kin, a process in evidence today. Laura, Jamie's onetime "monster mom," toasts the couple with the words, "I'm so happy to have a fourth son." Jamie's father says, "I've seen these two together enough to know that this is the kind of relationship that marriage is about." Times may change, and marriage may change, but parents are ever parents.

It is almost 5 p.m. The minister has given his blessing, invoking Solomon's song that many waters cannot quench love. "Remember this," he says, "remember this, remember this. Amen."

Then: "Before God and all present, do you, Michael, enter into this marriage with an open mind and heart and promise to love Jamie as long as you both shall live?" Michael firmly answers yes, and then Jamie, less steadily, gives the same answer, wiping away tears as he says, "Most importantly, I will work every day at loving you better." The minister calls for the rings, and laughter relieves sniffles as Jamie, flustered, offers his right hand.

That mistake corrected, the minister makes a pronouncement that I never thought I would live to hear. "By the authority vested in me by the state of Massachusetts, I declare that you, Jamie and Michael, are joined in the covenant of marriage, with the blessing of Christ's church. You may kiss."

They do. It is done.

No Nonsense in November

2005-10-07T14:46:00.000-05:00

I have been monitoring my site traffic and have noticed that a huge segment of my readers live in Texas. Though I am not currently in Texas, I was born and raised there and am still registered to vote in that state. So, on November 8, I will be voting against Proposed Constitutional Amendment #2, which seeks to ban gay marriage. I ask those of you who are Texans to consider doing the same.

No Nonsense in November

I am not (at this moment) asking you to change your religious beliefs about homosexuality. I am not asking you to condone same-sex marriage. I am asking you to consider the possibility that your gay and lesbian friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintences should be treated the same as you; that they are your equals in the eyes of the law.

It is one thing to morally disapprove of someone's actions or "lifestyle." It is quite another to say that you are willing to use the law to prevent them from engaging in that behavior. I defend your ability to disapprove of me. But defend my right to marry.

Register to vote. Call your friends and tell them to do the same. Support me and those who, like me, want to be your equals.

I simply am.

2005-09-29T17:47:00.000-05:00

[Below is an excerpt from a 1994 essay by Andrew Sullivan (the essay can be found in its entirety here). The essay is in several parts, and I plan to post it in sections and comment on each part. Mr. Sullivan (someone for whom I have deep respect) is an excellent writer who here shares some insight into the dynamics involved in his faith, his sexuality, and his church. My comments follow the excerpt. I post this because I think this essay says more than I can say about what it means to be gay and Christian. I would appreciate your comments.]

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Alone Again, Naturally
The Catholic Church and the homosexual

In everyone here sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have been had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
- Philip Larkin, "Faith Healing"

I.

I can remember the first time what, for the sake of argument, I will call my sexuality came into conflict with what, for the sake of argument, I will call my faith. It was time for Communion in my local parish church, Our Lady and St. Peter's, a small but dignified building crammed between an Indian restaurant and a stationery shop, opposite a public restroom, on the main street of a smallish town south of London called East Grinstead. I must have been around 15 or so. Every time I received Communion, I attempted, following my mother's instructions, to offer up the sacrament for some current problem or need: my mother's health, an upcoming exam, the starving in Bangladesh or whatever. Most of these requests had to do with either something abstract and distant, like a cure for cancer, or something extremely tangible, like a better part in the school play. Like much else in my faith-life, they were routine and yet not completely drained of sincerity. But rarely did they address something that could unsettle the comfort of my precocious adolescence. This time, however, as I filed up to the Communion rail to face mild-mannered Father Simmons for the umpteenth time, something else intervened. Please, I remember asking almost offhandedly of God, after a quick recital of my other failings, help me with that.

I didn't have a name for it, since it was, to all intents and purposes, nameless. I don't think I'd ever heard it mentioned at home, except once when my mother referred to someone who had behaved inappropriately on my father's town rugby team. (He had been dealt with, she reported darkly.) At high school, the subject was everywhere and nowhere: at the root of countless jokes but never actualized as something that could affect anyone we knew. But this ubiquity and abstraction brought home the most important point: uniquely among failings, homosexuality was so abominable it could not even be mentioned. The occasions when it was actually discussed were so rare that they stand out even now in my mind: our Latin teacher's stating that homosexuality was obviously wrong since it meant "sticking your dick in the wrong hole"; the graffiti in the public restroom in Reigate High Street: "My mother made me a homosexual," followed closely by, "If I gave her the wool, would she make me one too?" Although my friends and family never stinted in pointing out other faults on my part, this, I knew, would never be confronted. So when it emerged as an irresistible fact of my existence, and when it first seeped into my life of dutiful prayer and worship, it could be referred to only in the inarticulate void of that Sunday evening before Communion.

From the beginning, however - and this is something many outside the Church can find hard to understand - my sexuality was part of my faith-life, not a revolt against it. Looking back, I realize that that moment at the Communion rail was the first time I had actually addressed the subject of homosexuality explicitly in front of anyone; and I had brought it to God in the moments before the most intimate act of sacramental Communion. Because it was something I was deeply ashamed of, I felt obliged to confront it; but because it was also something inextricable - even then - from the core of my existence, it felt natural to enlist God's help rather than his judgment in grappling with it. There was, of course, considerable tension in this balance of alliance and rejection; but there was also something quite natural about it, an accurate reflection of anyone's compromised relationship with what he or she hazards to be the divine.

To the outsider, faith often seems a kind of cataclysmic intervention, a Damascene moment of revelation and transformation, and no doubt, for a graced few, this is indeed the experience. But this view of faith is often, it seems to me, a way to salve the unease of a faithless life by constructing the alternative as something so alien to actual experience that it is safely beyond reach. Faith for me has never been like that. The moments of genuine intervention and spiritual clarity have been minuscule in number and, when they have occurred, hard to discern and harder still to understand. In the midst of this uncertainty, the sacraments, especially that of Communion, have always been for me the only truly reliable elements of direction, concrete instantiations of another order. Which is why, perhaps, it was at Communion that the subject reared its confusing, shaming presence.

The two experiences came together in other ways, too. Like faith, one's sexuality is not simply a choice; it informs a whole way of being. But like faith, it involves choices - the choice to affirm or deny a central part of one's being, the choice to live a life that does not deny but confronts reality. It is, like faith, mysterious, emerging clearly one day, only to disappear the next, taking different forms - of passion, of lust, of intimacy, of fear. And like faith, it points toward something other and more powerful than the self. The physical communion with the other in sexual life hints at the same kind of transcendence as the physical Communion with the Other that lies at the heart of the sacramental Catholic vision.

So when I came to be asked, later in life, how I could be gay and Catholic, I could answer only that I simply was. What to others appeared a simple contradiction was, in reality, the existence of these two connected, yet sometimes parallel, experiences of the world. It was not that my sexuality was involuntary and my faith chosen and that therefore my sexuality posed a problem for my faith; nor was it that my faith was involuntary and my sexuality chosen so that my faith posed a problem for my sexuality. It was that both were chosen and unchosen continuously throughout my life, as parts of the same search for something larger. As I grew older, they became part of me, inseparable from my understanding of myself. My faith existed at the foundation of how I saw the world; my sexuality grew to be inseparable from how I felt the world.

I am aware that this formulation of the problem is theologically flawed. Faith, after all, is not a sensibility; in the Catholic sense, it is a statement about reality that cannot be negated by experience. And there is little doubt about what the authority of the Church teaches about the sexual expression of a homosexual orientation. But this was not how the problem first presented itself. The immediate difficulty was not how to make what I did conform with what the Church taught me (until my early 20s, I did very little that could be deemed objectively sinful with regard to sex), but how to make who I was conform with what the Church taught me. This was a much more difficult proposition. It did not conform to a simple contradiction between self and God, as that afternoon in the Communion line attested. It entailed trying to understand how my adolescent crushes and passions, my longings for human contact, my stumbling attempts to relate love to life, could be so inimical to the Gospel of Christ and His Church, how they could be so unmentionable among people I loved and trusted.

So I resorted to what many young homosexuals and lesbians resort to. I found a way to expunge love from life, to construct a trajectory that could somehow explain this absence, and to hope that what seemed so natural and overwhelming could somehow be dealt with. I studied hard to explain away my refusal to socialize; I developed intense intellectual friendships that bordered on the emotional, but I kept them restrained in a carapace of artificiality to prevent passion from breaking out. I adhered to a hopelessly pessimistic view of the world, which could explain my refusal to take part in life's pleasures, and to rationalize the dark and deep depressions that periodically overwhelmed me.

No doubt some of this behavior was part of any teenager's panic at the prospect of adulthood. But looking back, it seems unlikely that this pattern had nothing whatsoever to do with my being gay. It had another twist: it sparked an intense religiosity that could provide me with the spiritual resources I needed to fortify my barren emotional life. So my sexuality and my faith entered into a dialectic: my faith propelled me away from my emotional and sexual longing, and the deprivation that this created required me to resort even more dogmatically to my faith. And as my faith had to find increasing power to restrain the hormonal and emotional turbulence of adolescence, it had to take on a caricatured shape, aloof and dogmatic, ritualistic and awesome. As time passed, a theological austerity became the essential complement to an emotional emptiness. And as the emptiness deepened, the austerity sharpened.

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A few comments on part 1 (Please note that, as a writer, I am nowhere near the same league as Andrew Sullivan. My apologies.). I simply want to note a few of the reasons I identified with this essay:

I, like many before me, often asked for divine help with that before I could even really identify what it was. I don't think I am unique in this. I remember asking for help when I was 12 (shortly before I was baptized); I remember asking for help when I was 16; I remember asking for help when I was 18 (shortly before I was baptized again); and I remember asking for help the moment the thing had a name (I was 20).

And from the beginning, my sexuality (such as it exists as an independent personal characteristic) has been a part of my faith; there has been dynamic interaction between the two, not diametric opposition. At times, I knew the sexual part of myself in a way that I didn't know the Christian part of myself, and at times the opposite was true. The "differentness" I felt as a result of my sexual feelings and impulses led me to question foundational assumptions about the world, the Bible, and the Church. The knowledge I gained by seeking to identify the sexual aspects of my being directly influenced the way I read the Bible, much as the things I learned as a student of Science directly influenced the way I read Genesis 1. These two totalizing aspects of my person worked together to re-create me time and again.

I can also identify with Mr. Sullivan's desire to immerse himself in the sacraments. Certain aspects of worship have remained sacred to me because of their steadfastness. As I worked my way through, around, in, and out of faith, the constant act of weekly Communion instructed me. As I thought and rethought who I was, the Old Songs gave me comfort (I still can never sing "Come Thou Fount" without losing my composure - the words quiet me and anchor me). The repeated symbols of worship, through their constant calming simplicity, were signposts, tools to maintain a course.

And finally, I identify with Mr. Sullivan's answer when asked how he can be gay and Catholic: I simply am both gay and a Christian.

A break from the silence

2005-09-25T21:28:00.000-05:00

A sincere apology for the length of time between posts. A few thoughts:

Going home again (see below post) made me introspective and gave me time to sit still. The stillness and the introspection are terrifying to the point of being nearly debilitating (often, there can be nothing so frightening as knowledge of oneself). But they serve a didactic function.

I move so much: grad school, work, friends, church, news, politics, all piled on top of some ceaseless desire to read more and more and more, and to create words about God and faith and the Church, words that no one has yet thought to say. But when I went home, I had nothing to do but think. I couldn’t bring the books with me that I wanted (they upset my parents, who think that too much reading is partly to blame for my “condition”), I had no work to do, I had no classes. I stopped, so I decided to look inside.

Stillness and introspection can be dangerous. For me, they allow the voices of my inner demons to finally be heard. These demons have names: Fear, Self-Doubt, Anger, Pride. Introspective stillness allows Fear to speak of Hell, which I spent so many years fearing, and failure, which lurks always in the back of my mind. It allows Self-Doubt to tell me that I am not worthy of the church I so long to serve, and that even if I were worthy, I have not the talent or resources to accomplish those goals toward which I work. It allows Anger, that demon of War and Hate, to contradict the words of Self-Doubt by saying that the mistreatment I have received by my Church in the past make it a source of Evil, not Good. And finally, the demon of Pride (perhaps the demon that helps me to write these things?), which tells me that I know better than those who have come before me.

But other voices speak in the stillness: the voices of the Angels (those messengers of God). They are the voices of my friends, who have loved me and stood by me, and who, for some mysterious reason, believe that I have something to add to the Conversation of the Saints, which has continued on its steady way all these thousands of years. They are the voices of two Preachers I so admire who say more every Sunday than I can hope to say in a lifetime and who encourage me to live a life of service. They are the voices of the downtrodden, who tell me of the privileged place I occupy, and who command me to serve and to pursue justice (the suffering of others brings a great deal of perspective; I learn from them that my indulgent self-pity is a weight I should cast off). They are Providence and they are Grace, messengers of a merciful and loving God.

It can be a difficult thing to continue trying, to continue working, and to continue on the long march to the goal. But we must. The voices of the Angels drown out the voices of the Demons in the end. And so we work toward the goals of worshipful peace, justice, equality, and liberation. We work by thinking, praying, serving. We work with humility strengthened by passion for the truth. And we work with the help of the Lord, whose abundant grace and strong arm are with us.

May we all serve as we should, and may God’s will be done through us.

Home, Sweet Home

2005-09-08T02:00:00.000-05:00

As some of you have noticed (though I guess I shouldn't overestimate the size of my audience), I have been absent for a little while. My apologies. Since my last post, I have started several new essays, but have been unable to finish any of them. The reason: I'm visiting my parents.

For the past 12 days, I have been at my parents' house, and I will be here for several days more. Originally, I planned this as a time of great productivity. My parents both work, and I am home alone most days, so I thought I would get a lot of reading accomplished, write a bit, and have some time to watch Springer and General Hospital.

But it hasn't been working out quite that way. Now, I love and miss my parents, so I'm glad to spend some time with them. But, as many of you can understand, it can be difficult to be home again.

When I am home again, I remember the good times with my family. I remember laughing, playing, having fun, and growing up. However, I also remember the fights, the anger, the avoidance, and the loneliness. When I am home again, I have to seal up a large chunk of myself in a ziploc bag and leave it in my suitcase, making sure to hide it very carefully to avoid conflict and further pain.

It has been a little more than 2 years since my parents found out that I am gay. Since that time, each of us has been struggling to keep the fmaily together, but it often feels as though we are failing. Of the past two years, one full year passed with basically no contact between me, my parents, my siblings, and my extended family. Now that we are speaking again, each of us is constantly walking on eggshells to avoid saying that wrong thing that will make the situation come tumbling down like the fragile house of cards it is. Usually, we have to pretend the "problem" doesn't exist, just so we can stand to be in the same room together.

My parents do not approve of my "chosen lifestyle," and never will. Originally, they were hopeful that I would one day snap out of it, find the right girl, and produce a few heirs. I think they have revised their goals for me: celibacy and avoidance of hell. I don't approve of my parents theology, and can only hope that it changes. I come by my stubbornness honestly, though, so I don't think change is in the cards for any of us.

I can't even imagine how hard this must be for them. They honestly believe that one of their children is doomed to the fires of hell, and nothing I say can convince them otherwise. They believe they have failed me, and they now feel helpless to fix everything and make it right.

So where do we go from here? Do I just move on, pretend that I've forgotten the day that my mother called me and told me I was no longer to come home or speak to any member of my family? Do I forget the day that my father called and, without explanation, told me I was allowed to come home for Christmas?

My thinking becomes very unfocused when I'm home (hence my inability to finish a post). I can't seem to sift through all the baggage, history, and pain to get to the point. I can't seem to think about theology; I only have regret. This trip has been particularly difficult, and I have to wonder whether I will have the strength to come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I don't know where my parents and I will be a year from now. I fear I may someday get another phone call letting me know I've been disowned (again).

That's all for now. I'll write something more when I leave home and can think clearly again.

I'm speechless...

2005-08-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

Except to say something I never thought I'd say...Thanks Jerry Falwell (and I'm not even being sarcastic!):

On Aug. 5, during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Situation with Tucker Carlson," Falwell raised eyebrowns when he said he was not troubled by reports that nominee John Roberts had done volunteer legal work for gay rights activists on the case Romer vs. Evans.

In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the state of Colorado could not create laws with the sole intention of discriminating against gay men and lesbians. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — the judges that
President Bush has said best represent his preferred judicial philosophy — along with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, dissented from the majority opinion.

Falwell, who in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, blamed the terrorist attacks on "the pagans, the abortionists, and the feminists and the gays and lesbians," and who describes himself as "very conservative," told Carlson that if he were a lawyer, he too would argue for civil rights for gays.

"I may not agree with the lifestyle," Falwell said. "But that has nothing to do with the civil rights of that … part of our constituency.

"Judge Roberts would probably have been not a good very good lawyer if he had not been willing, when asked by his partners in the law firm to assist in guaranteeing the civil rights of employment and housing to any and all Americans."

When Carlson countered that conservatives, "are always arguing against 'special rights' for gays," Falwell said that equal access to housing and employment are basic rights, not special rights.

"Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or conservative value," Falwell went on to say. "It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on."

Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said his group welcomed the apparent softening of Falwell's position on at least some gay rights.

"Like most Americans, it seems Rev. Falwell has reached the conclusion that everyone deserves basic rights," said Solmonese. "I hope he also supports legislation that would deliver on these values."

Hopefully, Falwell will be the first of many to realize that it is possible to maintain moral disapproval of homosexual behavior while at the same time helping secure equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens. We shall see.

My Dream Team

2005-08-23T19:30:00.000-05:00

Inspired by Dr. Elrod's nomination of Noam Chomsky to speak at Harding, and in an attempt to bring a bit of levity to the Ann Coulter discussions, I'd like to nominate a few speakers. This list is (partly) tongue-in-cheek, but I'd love to see any of these speakers on the Benson stage:

Richard Epstein
Dale Martin
Andrew Sullivan
Harold Bloom
Margaret M. Mitchell
Barack Obama

Anyone else want to make some nominations?

Give if you can.

2005-08-22T15:31:00.000-05:00

I don't know Ira, Joe, or Katie, but I have heard enough to know they could use a bit of help. If you can, click the link below and give some money to help with medical bills. Skip a haircut or carpool for a couple of days to free up some cash if necessary:

Ira Hays Fund

Give them some crumbs, please

2005-08-22T11:03:00.000-05:00

And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And a Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, "Have mercy on me, Sovereign, Heir of David, my daughter is severely possessed by a demon." But Jesus did not answer her a word. And the disciples came and begged Jesus saying, "Send her away, for she is crying after us." Jesus answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Bust she came and knelt before Jesus, saying, "Sovereign, help me." And Jesus answered, "It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Sovereign, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their owners' table." Then Jesus answered her, "O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire." And her daughter was healed instantly. (Matthew 15:21-28)

This is one of my new favorite stories in the Bible. It was only recently that it finally made sense to me, and I want to make a few observations about it. I don't claim that I'm saying anything new or mind-blowing, and much of what I'm saying is adapted from the writings of others, but here are a few thoughts:

The Canaanite woman was an advocate: This is important to remember. This woman was begging, not for herself, but for her daughter. She knows that Jesus can save her daughter, so she goes to him.

In the same way, we should advocate for others. Too often, I argue for inclusion of lesbians and gays in the church for the wrong reasons. I want my rights, and I want them now. That is not the road we should travel. I should become an advocate for gays and lesbians because they are spit on, cast out, and called names. I should be working for the sake of the little girl whose parents send her to shock therapy, and for the little boy who is beaten to a pulp at church camp because he has a lisp.

Likewise, I challenge you, Christian, to be our advocate. So often, I feel as though I am struggling alone. I need preachers, teachers, elders, fathers, mothers, and single straight people on my side. You don't have to believe that the so-called "gay lifestyle" is acceptable to God. As a Christian, though, you should believe that it is wrong to demonize, to judge, to trample, and to condemn. You should speak up when you hear the word "dyke." You should step in when you hear someone called a "sissy" or a "pansy." You should shout and scream and yell when rumors circulate about someone's "tendencies." We need you, and you have a responsibility to us as your sisters and brothers in Christ. It is our job, mine and yours, to advocate for the eradication of homophobia and bigotry in our fellowship.

The Canaanite woman was persistent: She didn't give up. She followed behind Jesus and his disciples crying and begging for help. The reason: she knew the stakes (her daughter's life), and she knew that help could be found (she had faith in the power of Christ).

In the same way, we advocates for change should be encouraged to keep working and to never give up. Keep crying out, because (1) the stakes are high and (2) change is possible. The stakes are high because people's lives are in the balance. And I believe that change is possible because I have faith that, with time, with effort, and with the help of the hand of God, we can convince people in Churches of Christ that gay men are more than AIDS storage facilities and that lesbians are more than butch women who just need some makeup and the right man.

We (all of us, even you) must argue for tolerance, acceptance, and eventual affirmation, and we must not give up.

Jesus is transformed as a result of this woman's advocacy: I think it is difficult to underestimate the implications of this point. Some state that Jesus was just trying to make a point. They argue that he always planned to help the Canaanite woman and that he was just trying to teach the disciples a lesson.

I see no reason to think that was the case. If it were, why go to the lengths of referring to the Canaanite woman as a dog? I, like many others, believe that this WOMAN, through the power of her weakness and the strength of her faith, changed Jesus' mind.

Advocacy can change people. It can make people think what they never thought they would, and it can encourage them to act in ways we never thought imaginable. But, to accomplish change, we have to advocate in the right way. When Jesus referred to the woman as a dog, she did not respond by calling him a pig, a fascist, or a bigot. That would be the easy response, as those who have ever been called a "faggot" can probably attest. When someone calls you a name, you want to strike back, whether with your fists or your tongue.

But when you are an advocate, you must remember the goal at hand: save your daughter's life (or, show the lesbians and gays in your fellowship that they are loved by God). Striking back at Jesus could have meant her daughter's death, so the quick, bright woman responds, "even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their owners' table." Though it nearly kills us to swallow our pride, we might have to say "even a faggot deserves better than to be abandoned by his family," or "even a sissy deserves to be protected from abuse." Serving the person for whom we advocate is more important than protecting our feelings.

Her self-effacing, humble, faithful response astounds Jesus. He praises her faith and instantly heals her daughter. She may not have won the game, she may have been forced to swallow her pride, but her daughter survived. May we be so faithful and so successful.

We should be advocates, not just in front our fellow man, but in front of God himself: Jesus was a man, but he was also God. We should be advocates in front of God for change, for acceptance, and for progress.

And, for those of you who believe that gays and lesbians cannot enter the kingdom, I ask you to be an advocate in this respect: ask God to change his mind. There's nothing in the rules against that, is there? Ask God to welcome all into his kingdom, regardless of sex, sexuality, sin, etc. Beg. Plead. Like Abraham plead for Sodom. It may not work, but, then again, it may. If you really believe that I am wrong, ask God to change his mind.

And finally, we should remember that even the crumbs are enough: The woman was able to say what she said ("even the dogs eat the crumbs") because she knew at least one bit of truth: the crumbs from God's table are a feast for the hungry. Her daughter didn't need a whole loaf of bread, she didn't need a glass of wine, and she didn't need a place of honor at the table. A crumb from God is enough.

In the same way, we advocates must trust that every step of progress that we make is a crumb of God. We already have his love, we have the love of his son, and we have the prophetic power of the spirit working among us. We're doing pretty well. As we argue for change, as we slowly gain acceptance, first in this church and then in that one, as individuals' minds are changed, we have to see these crumbs for what they are: more than we can ever need.

And so I ask you to advocate with me, using this clever, strong, faithful woman as our guide. Even if you don't agree with all my conclusions, surely we can agree that the way LGBT people are so often treated in our churches is wrong. Educate with me. Talk with those who idolize the masculine. Talk with those who think the white suburban family with 2.5 kids and a minivan is the familial model found in Scripture. Ask your Elders to have another look at the Scriptures with an open heart and mind. Do the same yourself. Point out evidence indicating that homosexuality may not be a chosen trait. Vote against those who demonize us for political gain. If a student is outed at your Christian school, stand by her, even if you are a professor and it may cost you your job and even if you are a student and it may cost you your scholarship.

Men, you have a special duty to us because you are so often the only ones who can be heard from the pulpit or in the classroom. You are the group that has the most privilege and power in our denomination. You are also the demographic group that most strongly opposes and demeans us, the group that is disgusted by gay men and turned on by gay women. A white, straight, male voice for change could accomplish much. Your lesbian sisters and gay brothers need advocates, and you have a duty to us as members of Christ's body.

Read these.

2005-08-22T08:50:00.000-05:00

I will be posting on this same topic soon (hopefully today), but I'd like to recommend these two posts:

Matthew 15:21-28

"...he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man..."

I don't think I'll be invited

2005-08-20T18:32:00.000-05:00

There has been much discussion on Mike Cope's and Greg Kendall-Ball's blogs about Harding's recent decision to host Ann Coulter as a part of the ASI lecture series. I, like Mike and Greg, am angry about this decision (I've already called Drs. Carr and Reely and plan to send a letter to Dr. Burks), especially in light of Harding's refusal to allow certain C of C "liberals" to speak on the Benson stage (mind you, I'm using "liberal" in a relative sense). I find something odd about the fact that a woman cannot pray on the Benson stage, but Ann Coulter can stand up and demand that we invade countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.

Now, since Mike Cope, Max Lucado, and Jeff Walling aren't allowed to speak at Harding, I think it's a safe bet that I won't be invited anytime soon. But were I to have the opportunity, I might say something like this:

We see in the person of Jesus the way we should live. We learn from the Christ, God incarnate and among us, the way we should spend our lives. Accepting your place as a disciple of Jesus requires a commitment to God and to humanity: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Loving our neighbor, our fellow man, is the simple yet radical challenge presented by Christ's presence on earth. We learn from Christ that the one we hate is the one we should learn to love. The one who is cast out, spat upon, and ignored is the one we should serve. The marginal becomes the valuable when you seek to follow Jesus. If you are not serving your fellow man, you are not living as a Christian should. Love and service go hand in hand, and they are core values of true Christian religion.

History teaches us that Christians are not often servants. Christians often wage war, kill, maim, seek power, seek money, enslave, dominate and raise their voices in anger and judgment against people of color, Native peoples, women, gays and lesbians, and against each other. Being right and being in charge have moved to the heart of Christian religion; we have forgotten to love and serve.

Duties of love and service are not discharged when we drop our money in the collection plate, even if it is a lot of money. We should be willing to give everything we have, even our very lives, to ease suffering, to make peace, and to fight hate with love, all in the name of the God who loves the unlovable. In addition to our money, we should be willing to give our time, and we should seek to transform ourselves into the type of people that think of others first and ourselves second. If our lives as Christians are focused only on getting to heaven, we are selfish and we miss the point. The Kingdom of God is not something we hope to enter when we die, if only we avoid sin. Instead, the Kingdom of God is a goal, we should attempt to make it manifest here and now, in Searcy, Abilene, Malibu, the war zones we call inner cities, Africa, India, everywhere.

Loving God includes loving him with your mind. The act of learning about God can be an act of love and devotion. Theology, ideas, words and thoughts about God should be welcomed, not feared. Ideas drive humanity and bolster faith, and we should seek to know more so that we can be more than we currently are. Ideas are not always comfortable. They may challenge us to rethink our doctrine; the old ways may have to go because of our new understandings and because of our duty to love and serve.

We may, for example, learn that there really is neither male nor female in Christ, in spite of what our parents taught us. We may, by thinking, learn that our ideas about faith and heaven need to be updated. Loving our neighbor teaches us not to hate the lesbian and gay people among us; using our minds may tell us that not only should we love gays and lesbians, we should affirm them as full members of the body of Christ.

Harding, as a Christian institution, should be a place of love and of service. It should not be a place where the word 'faggot' is heard, where students who slip up are brushed under the rug or thrown out the door, where young people are told that who they are on the inside is dirty, wrong, and abominable. It should be a place where all feel welcome, and where all are taught the path of service and the beauty of love.

Harding, as a University, should encourage the life of the mind. New ideas should be given voice; those ideas that challenge the status quo should be valued as much as those ideas that affirm the old ways. Liberal thought, conservative thought, radical thought and traditional thought should all be heard. We should actively seek those ideas that can help us better ourselves and that challenge us to love, welcome, and serve.

Harding students, you have an obligation to love, to serve, and to think. This is not the entirety of being a Christian, but love, service, and thought are essential elements of the apostolic project. Harding faculty, you have an obligation to challenge your students to new levels of service and of thought. You should teach, in part, by example: serve the needy, give to the poor, challenge the status quo. Harding administration, you have an obligation to create an environment where all are welcome, where service is encouraged, and where new ideas are aired.

I end with Paul Tillich: "Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt."

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and get them sit ups right and

2005-08-19T16:23:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Krister for sending me this link:

Kanye West Calls for End to Gay Bashing

Rappers haven't had a good track record in the way they've historically talked about women and gays. Perhaps a step forward has just been taken?

The Idolatry of the Masculine

2005-08-19T13:21:00.000-05:00

Most of the discussion on this blog centers around men, probably because (1) I am a man (my experience is limited), (2) the discussion surrounding homosexuality in our Churches is largely driven by white men, and (3) the idea of a man being penetrated by another man (because that's all homosexuality is) is, for some reason, more threatening to the group controlling the discussion than is the idea of two women in a relationship with each other. Men together are perceived as disgusting or threatening; women together are often just dismissed (talk about the truly marginalized). I want to direct your attention to this interesting post over at Gay Spirituality & Culture. The pointed questions at the end are of particular interest. Read the whole thing, but I have copied and pasted the parts I found most interesting:

This:

...I went to the Exodus International website and found another testimonial, by Melissa Fryrear, who now works for Focus on the Family. She wrote about how she was attracted to girls at age seven, found a Bible verse against homosexuality at age thirteen (interpreting it to mean "Melissa is detestable"), and began to question why she hated "being a girl." Eventually, she came to a program called Crossover, where she "began to learn about this thing called womanhood." She writes "Goodness! Who knew there was so much to learn: plucking eyebrows, hair bleaches, hair waxings, facial mud masks, eye lash curlers, manicures, pedicures, push-up bras, tummy tuckers, rear-end boosters, last year’s colors, and next year’s fashions?"

And this:

There are few articles on the Exodus website devoted specifically to lesbianism, but one is particularly interesting as it relates to their view of spirituality. It's entitled "Control: The Last Stronghold of Lesbianism." After claiming that the roots of a lesbian orientation lie in sexual abuse or mistreatment, Alan Medinger (the author) goes on to describe how this abuse is rooted in God's curse ( "...your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you" Gen. 3:16). This is an interesting interpretation of a curse directed at the the husband-wife relationship, especially for women whose "desire" is not for any husband. He goes on to characterize the lesbian relationship as characterized by "manipulation, jealousy, co-dependency", a generalization which he does not back up through citing any studies. Is it possible that the women who most struggle with their self-image as a lesbian resort to such unhealthy activity in order to retain their significant other at all costs? Is it possible that these are the sorts of women most likely to seek out a program like Exodus? These questions aren't addressed--they are ignored in favor of a sweeping generalization which appears to be supported by Medinger's reading of scripture.

The solution for this wounded, scared woman? To start seeing Jesus as her potential lover:
"But Jesus is seen as a man. Although a Christian woman knows that He is a man free of sin and could never hurt or abuse her, in the depth of her wounded heart she may be a long time coming to accept this truth. Emotionally and psychologically there is great difficulty in trusting even Jesus. But He can overcome this. He has a wonderful patience that will just keep wooing her until she can begin to trust Him."

We are now closer to the thrust of Medinger's argument--lesbian women are those who don't trust Jesus enough. If they were to follow more closely the old hymn, "Trust and Obey", they might find themselves (under the curse of God) desiring their husband and wishing that he rule over them.

The rest of the article describes, in broad descriptions, Jesus "[wooing the lesbian] until she can trust Him" and the now former lesbian "mov[ing] out from a lifetime of control and self-protection." There is no discussion of how these actions are linked to loving other women, to precisely what about a same-sex relationship requires "manipulation", or how the lesbian is to go about undergoing these changes.

These are the questions which I would like to put to Medinger and others, and see discussed more openly in the media, which is preoccupied with the nuances of gay men's lives in comparison to the occasional lesbian kiss-a-thon aired for ratings during sweeps.

1. Where is your evidence that all lesbian relationships are foundationally made up of manipulation and emotional enmeshment? How would your description of two relationships differ, given the same attitude and actions within each, if the couples were straight or lesbian?

2. Why do you consider "spiritual healing" for women to require steps like learning about mascara and tummy tuckers? If the goal is not obtaining a spouse, why the emphasis on beautification which is determined by the (secular) culture, for the sake of watching men?

3. (To the Christians) How do you explain the varied portraits of men and women interacting in the Bible, and the dearth of explicit verses describing the courting process, the way men and women "should" interact, and what "masculinity" and "feminity" really are?

4. Why is homosexuality, whether male or female, defined in your publications primarily around the concept of "masculinity"? For men, it is being "drawn to the masculine", and for women, it is desiring to "be masculine." Is it possible that your emphasis on a specific cultural manifestation of "masculinity" is itself a kind of idolatry, a lack of ability to really see the variety of ways that God allows humans to relate to one another?

These are just starting points for the dialogue. If America is going to move forward in understanding what the questions are in this discussion, it needs to move beyond stereotypes revolving around a static concept of "masculinity" (whether defined as a lack thereof, or an attempt to falsely attain it). If America is going to move forward, it needs to recognize that lesbian relationships are not merely sad copies of male-female marriages, cobbled together by needy and wounded women.

Unfortunately, the current discussion is lop-sided and focused on, dare I put it this way, the fears of straight men with regard to penetration by another man (yet another fear of the "feminine", defined as penetration). Let's move beyond this, begin to look at the full spectrum of relationships in our country, and do so with our blinders off, asking the hard questions.

An Invitation.

2005-08-18T09:28:00.000-05:00

I don't always have a ton of time to write new essays for the blog. In addition, it is only a matter of time before my knowledge (such as it is) runs out. Therefore, I would like to extend an invitation to anyone who may wish to accept it:

I would welcome brief essays I can post on the blog. I don't care what perspective you are coming from, or whether you agree with my positions or not. I'd love to have comments from some women (any queer ladies out there?), some who may have recently changed their perspective on the whole 'gay issue,' comments on specific scriptures, themes, personal stories, etc. I would also love a well-written comment by someone who can briefly state a good argument why I'm wrong about, well, anything. I don't need a magnum opus or a dissertation.

If I get any responses (which I doubt), I'll read them and get in touch with you about comments, etc. I'll then decide if I want to put it on the blog (I almost certainly will). You can send things anonymously if you need to, or you can ask me to keep your identity confidential (I'm, um, pretty good at that). I can be reached at gay_restorationist@hotmail.com

Any takers?

What makes people gay?

2005-08-16T15:39:00.000-05:00

Shortly after I put up the post below, one of my friends sent me a link to this story:

What makes people gay?

Registration is required, and the article is a bit long, but it shows how little we really know.

Prayer o' the Day

2005-08-16T14:39:00.000-05:00

Prayer of Soren Kierkegaard

Lord, give us weak eyes for things, which are of no account, and clear eyes for all your truth.

A lesson from an unlikely source.

2005-08-16T10:22:00.000-05:00

I recently encountered some advice for parents, first through emails from friends (who, incidentally, are gay but do not consider themselves Christians...they send me stuff like this to mess with me), and second through my regular perusing of blogs and the internet. The first is a bit of advice James Dobson included in one of his newsletters (he quotes approvingly a Dr. Nicolosi), and the second is a list of how to know if your child is becoming gay (also from Dr. Nicolosi):

First:

Meanwhile, the boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

And Second:

Is My Child Becoming Homosexual?

Before puberty, children aren’t normally heterosexual or homosexual. They’re definitely gender conscious. But young children are not sexual beings yet — unless something sexual in nature has interrupted their developmental phases.

Still, it’s not uncommon for children to experience gender confusion during the elementary school years. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi reports, “In one study of 60 effeminate boys ages 4 to 11, 98 percent of them engaged in cross-dressing, and 83 percent said they wished they had been born a girl.”

Evidences of gender confusion or doubt in boys ages 5 to 11 may include:

1. A strong feeling that they are “different” from other boys.
2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.
3. A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.
4. A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in their games and other pastimes.
5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag” and “gay.”
6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately.
7. A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.

If your child is experiencing several signs of gender confusion, professional help is available. It’s best to seek that help before your child reaches puberty.

“By the time the adolescent hormones kick in during early adolescence, a full-blown gender identity crisis threatens to overwhelm the teenager,” warns psychologist Dr. James Dobson. To compound the problem, many of these teens experience “great waves of guilt accompanied by secret fears of divine retribution.”

If your child has already reached puberty, change is difficult, but it’s not too late.

[Disclaimer: As my friends and loved ones know, I tend to have a bit of a temper, and statements like these make me boil inside (I can feel my pulse beating in my temple and and have difficulty seeing). So, knowing myself and my temper, I decided to wait overnight before writing about these two statements. I tell you about my anger only in the interest of full disclosure.]

We should learn from the above statements the danger of reductionist thinking. It is easy to reduce gay men to products of a bad home. It is very simple to state that a distant father and an overbearing mother cause boys to become gay and that hatred of men causes women to choose to be lesbians. It sounds good and is easy to package and mass produce. But simplicity does not make it right.

To speak biographically for a moment, there are ways in which I line up with the above descriptions and ways in which I don't. For, example, I started playing baseball and football when I was 5, and I wasn't too bad at it. I played catch with my father and brother, and my dad coached my football and baseball teams. My dad taught me how to tackle, and I wrestled and 'played rough' with him and my brother on a regular basis. I fought with my brother physically, and played with male friends and male cousins all the time. My mother was never overbearing, protective, or overly emotional and, though my father was somewhat emotionally withdrawn, he was at every game, spelling bee, event, graduation, concert, etc. I was never bullied, though my brother did occassionally call me a 'fag' when we were younger, before he knew that I'm gay (um, but when he did call me that, I beat the crap out of him and scoled him).

To give Nicolosi some credit: I probably cried more than most boys, and I did always feel different. And, I will add that most of my close friends are women and that I find it more difficult to make friends with men (though I should note that this is a post-adolescent development that is probably due more to personal idiosyncrasies, insecurities, and shyness than to my homosexuality).

But: I have a siblings. My sister, who was raised in the same family as I was, is shy, has a lot of male friends, and is a very talented and accomplished athlete. Mysteriously, she's straight. I also have a brother, who had the same father and mother as I had. Straight as an arrow. Oh, and I have NEVER wanted to be a girl. No offense ladies, I just like being a guy.

My point is simply this: to think that you can reduce homosexuality to a mental disorder with known causal factors is to fallaciously reduce it to something it is not. Nicolosi and Dobson are patently incorrect. Further, their reductionist explanations unnecessarily blame parents of gay children (who very often are already hurting and may blame themselves), and unnecessarily cause 'gay panic' in parents of young children (perhaps we could consider the case of a Florida man who slapped his son around so much -- in an attempt to toughen him up -- that the child slipped into a coma and died). And I'm trying to hold my tongue here, but to blame a bullied child for the taunts and jeers of bullies, especially when the ammunition for the bullies so often comes from their religious parents, is unconscionable.

Sexuality cannot be reduced to a bunch of environmental factors. Neither can it be reduced to a gene. In this arena, as in most arenas involving human beings, Occam's razor is, frankly, hogwash. When it comes to humans, the simplest explanation is almost never the correct explanation.

Dobson and Nicolosi want to reduce gay men and lesbians to a sum of factors, the product of a particular environment. They dehumanize by reducing. Very often, I do the same thing. But we should learn from Dobson, et al., not to reduce those who disagree with us to something less than human. People are not just Fundamentalists or Liberals or Conservatives or Fascists or Idiots or Bigots or Academics. Those who want to see lesbians and gays attain full inclusion should not reduce and demean the 'opposition' by calling them names or dismissing them as backwards. We shouldn't pretend to know what makes them who they are, and we shouldn't pretend to know their motivations. Our conclusions will invariably be incorrect. Reducing humans to factors or opinions or background or viewing them as nothing more than the sum of their constitutive parts is the wrong way to have a conversation. Not only do you usually end up with the wrong answer, but you forget that you are supposed to love and care for those with whom you disagree.

We can do better, and we should do better.

A Summary

2005-08-15T11:29:00.000-05:00

[Preface: In the discussion I've referred to several times over at Greg Kendall-Ball's blog, one of the participants asked others to sum up their view of scripture. I have copied my response and modified it slightly. I hope this serves as a broad overview of my thoughts about scripture in the specific context of the so-called 'gay debate.' Specific arguments (i.e. arguments from nature, arguments about the nature of sin, arguments about meanings of greek words) are important, but I think it's important that we understand where these arguments fit into the big picture. I appreciate suggestions, comments, or questions. Feel free to question anonymously if you don't feel safe throwing your name out there.]

I believe Scripture to the be the word of God, and I believe it should be the primary, though not the exclusive, source of our ethics and norms. However, it seems to me (and many others) that Scripture comes to us through imperfect beings who lived in a certain time and place and who recorded the word of the Lord as they understood it in their specific context. Since we exist in a different context than that of the writers, we must look critically at the text, using our minds, hearts, and the prophetic spirit that flows through our community to try and figure out exactly what the scripture tells us. Scriptural inerrancy and infallibility are falsehoods we need to throw away, and the sooner the better for our denominational health. This does not mean that all scripture is a lie (as some assert); it simply may mean we are asking too much of scripture and that we need to rethink what exactly scripture is intended to be and how exactly it should function in our lives and in the life of the church.

Often, context and critical reading changes nothing about our reading of the text (e.g., ‘love your neighbor as yourself’). Sometimes, though, critical reading tells us that maybe we should rethink the way we view a text(e.g., ‘Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him,’).

Critical reading must be employed with prudence, as it is easy to import our own morality into the text. Context changes our reading on some occasions, but we shouldn’t remake the text in our own image. Another danger arises with the wildly divergent readings that can come out of a critical hermeneutic. When we reach varying conclusions, we have to commit to sticking together (“e pluribus unum”, to quote the back of my penny). Our diversity can actually be our strength: I grow when someone challenges my assumptions and conclusions just as I grow when someone challenges my unjust or unloving behaviors.

And I think it is important to state our goals. To what end do we read scripture? So often, we are reading so that we can figure out how to avoid hell. Poor form, in my opinion. Constantly trying to dodge some sort of divine bullet doesn’t seem like a very pleasant way to live, nor does it align very well with scripture. Instead, we should be reading the text so that we can become better people whose hearts are ever more closely aligned with the will of God. The question becomes “which behaviors are just, loving, and Godly?,” instead of “which actions must I avoid if I want to stay out of jail?” Remember that whole grace thing?

So, what do I do about the Biblical proscriptions against same-sex sexual activity? I read the text critically, using all of the intellectual and community sources of knowledge I possibly can (reason, tradition, consensus, history, etc, etc):

First, I try to put the verses in context. The statements come to us from a vastly different world from our own. In Leviticus, continuation of the tribe is paramount, as is setting up a barrier between "us" the chosen and "them" the unchosen. In this world, the people must bear children if they are to survive. In this world, males penetrate and females are penetrated. In this world, it is acceptable to own a slave. In this world, tattoos are abominable. In this world, mixing together two different kinds of cloth is contrary to the will of God.

Likewise, to Paul, a Hellenistic Jew, certain behaviors seem to be completely unnatural (para physin). Sex between men is unnatural. Why? Perhaps because, again, men penetrate and women are penetrated. Perhaps because all, or almost all of the male-male sexual relationships Paul ever heard of involved domination and exploitation (men with young boys, men with prostitutes, men with their slaves). Perhaps Paul just thought it was gross (I think it is difficult to overestimate the weight of this factor in Paul's and our own time). And as a reminder of how different Paul’s ideas about sex and marriage are from our own, just take a look at 1 Corinthians 7 (Wait, what? Paul would rather we stay single than get married, and he thinks of marriage as merely a prophylactic against porneia? I never heard that at my CoC university/marriage factory!).

We do not live in either of the worlds I just described. We don’t own humans (though often we outsource work to those who do). We think women and men are equally capable, equally intelligent, and equally valuable (well, we’re getting there). We don’t think that if a man dies without producing a male heir, we should pass his wife off to his brother as though she is nothing but child-producing chattel. We have gradually learned over the past millennia that sexuality is a little more flexible than we thought. We have learned there are men who want to love, honor, cherish, and commit themselves to another man, and who want to express that love in a sexual way. So maybe in our world, we should rethink the way we read Pauline and Levitical prohibitions on same-sex-sexual activity. Maybe it’s not always shameful and unnatural.

At the same, we must continue to affirm that domination, subordination, and injustice have no place in the life of a Christian. Sleeping with everyone you come in contact with is bad, not just because God once said it is bad, but because it is unhealthy for you and because you begin to view other human beings as items which you can use up and throw away. We should shout the message from the rooftops that people aren’t toys to be played with and tossed out. We should shout the message from the rooftops that pornography is bad because it always involves some form of coercion and domination. We should shout the message from the rooftops that women are not objects and that it is unjust to coerce them into taking their clothes off for the pleasure of someone who can afford to pay for it. Just scolding the American public for violating some random scripture doesn’t cut it.

It’s important that we avoid word games with arsenokoites and malakos if the only reason we are doing it is so we can get around a rule and avoid hell. If we are trying to attain greater contextual understanding, that’s swell and we should keep it up. Greater understanding never hurt anyone. But we must remember that we aren’t lawyers trying to convince a judge that our client isn’t guilty. And we must remember that concepts like faith, hope, love, and justice trump context any day of the week.

I think it is okay to be gay because I have, to the best of my ability, put certain verses in the Bible into context and come to the conclusion that Paul wasn’t really talking about my situation when he talked about same-sex sexual activity. Beyond this, I see no reason (from logic, nature, community, tradition, etc, etc), why LGBT persons must be excluded from the Kingdom.
I think that Paul would rather I focus on pursuing a just sexual ethic wherein I don’t treat people like a fast food meal to be consumed (and the wrapper discarded). I think that sex shouldn’t involve rape, power, domination, and exploitation, and I hope that I can be an example to others in the gay community of what commitment and love are. I think that by living like I hope to live, I can not only dodge the fires of hell (whew!), but I can better myself and align my life more closely with the will of God.

But whatever happens, I think the unity of the church is paramount. We can’t help those outside if we are fighting those inside. Vitriol and name-calling will get us nowhere, and I hope we can all (myself included) learn to be eager to listen, slow to speak, and never to judge.

I think I’ve gone on long enough. You get the point.

-GR

TRADITION.

2005-08-13T12:50:00.000-05:00

From G.K. Chesterton:

Tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of the common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record...Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father (Orthodoxy, 42).

I struggle with tradition. One one hand, I believe it has an important place in the life of the Church and of the individual Christian. It reminds us of our proper place in time and history: we are young women and men in a young denomination in a young country. Tradition tells us that we should think carefully before we neglect the accrued communal knowledge of millenia gone by. Tradition says that our physical and ideological mothers and fathers can teach us much, and that, before we do anything, we are wise to listen to the voices of the dead. It teaches us humility and reminds us that, just as the church came into existence without us, it will go on without us.

But that's not the end of the story. Tradition can be the muck that clouds our theological eyeglasses. Tradition can teach us to hold onto the status quo, regardless of who or what gets in the way. Chesterton's democracy of the dead can easily become a sort of fascist state, with those who held power in the past continuing to maintain their stranglehold on us. And we should never forget that, while our forbears teach us much good, they also occasionally teach us to hate, to enslave, to dominate, to destroy, and ironically, to never look back.

So how do we deal with tradition? There are many Christian traditions that concern me, but two are relevant to the focus of this blog (Aside: I should note here that watching CNN this morning reminds me that the focus of this blog may be a little off. I am a wealthy white male in a rich nation who ate a very large breakfast. Not a lot of people can say that. But back to the topic at hand.).

What do we do with our traditional posture toward women and toward the LGBT community? How do we discuss these traditions, and when, if ever, do we dismiss them?

After my comments above, it should be clear that I would never argue that we should dismiss tradition lightly. Our mothers and fathers are to be respected and we should always have our ears open to their voices. But sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they have read the Bible wrong, and sometimes years of human advancement teach us that we should move on and leave them behind. And occasionally, we discover that we should just step out of one tradition and into another better tradition(While there are long traditions of misogyny and homophobia in the Christian world, there are competing traditions of communalism, progress, liberation, and tolerance), or we discover that we should find a sort of via media.

Many theologians are abandoning the old interpretations of Scripture for new ones. While I don't think we should automatically dismiss all traditional doctrine and hermeneutics, I believe some new ways of reading scripture are necessary to wipe the muck off our lenses. That muck may have come from medievalism, Enlightenment rationalism, romanticism, fundamentalism, tribalism, and yes, even Western capitalism and individualism. We have to think about what the 2,000 years has done to us. We should hold onto the old way if we can. But love, prayer, community, etc, may lead us to believe that we and our forebears were wrong and that the tradition must change.

Beyond our Biblical interpretation, there is a tradition of discrimination and marginalization of gays and lesbians that we have to rid ourselves of. Our parents believed lesbians and gays to be perverts (or inverts). To them, gay men are lispy, limped-wristed caricatures focused only on sex and the conversion of as many young boys as possible. We all have AIDS, and we hope to give it to as many people as possible. But slowly, humanity (or at least significant chunks of it) is learning otherwise. As people get to know more of us, they discover that homosexuality is not invariably pathological. They discover that we are their sisters and brothers, that we love and want to be loved back, that we aren't always looking for the next covert sexual encounter. All lesbians don't secretly long to be men, nor do they "just need to meet the right guy." We are boring, just like everyone else. We are dentists and accountants and lawyers and waitresses and students. We aren't all defined by our sexuality, and we don't all live in the gay ghettoes of major cities.

Humanity, and the part of humanity that is in the Church, is learning that our ancestors may have been wrong. Traditional ways of looking at Scripture may have been wrong, as are traditional ways of relating to your gay neighbor. The tradition of marginalization faces a competitor: the tradition of acceptance. It has roots, and it isn't going anywhere.

We don't know everything, and we shouldn't dismiss Tradition lightly. But in this specific case, we have to look back, shake our heads, and say "never again." We have to join the competing tradition, or start our own, but we can no longer participate in the Old Way.

A parable

2005-08-12T05:42:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed this post over at A Few Voices:

What's That Blue Thing DOing Here?

I don't understand the so-called "argument from nature," which is basically an assertion it is unnatural to be gay because (1) not many people are, and (2) we weren't built that way.

As Jennifer illustrates with the above story, our ideas of what is and isn't natural come mostly from our upbringing and from those things to which we are (or aren't) exposed. "Natural" is largely a construct, much like "pretty" and "funny." Basically, the more lesbians you know, the less weird it is to see two women walking down the street holding hands. When someone you know and love tells you he is gay, it can cause you to rethink what is and isn't natural (alternatively, you can dig your heels in and refuse to budge). The more often you hear someone say "you guys" instead of "y'all," the more you get used to it (though you may continue to say "y'all" until the day you die).

The second part of the argument from nature is more complicated and goes beyond whether your skin crawls when you think of two men having sex. It is the "argument from design/creation/biology" (aka the "Adam and Steve" argument ). I don't want to go into this too much (the post would become a book). Instead, as food for thought, I want to quote J. Burton's post from Greg Kendall-Ball's blog:

That being said, I do have a comment about sex qua penetration and the argument of nature. I assume that when we speak of nature, we are speaking of the way God created us. And so the nature argument seems to boil down to the idea of Adam’s penis fitting inside Eve’s vagina to produce mutual sexual pleasure. This seems like a tidy argument, but I think it only seems that way because we want it to be. I should point out before anyone else does, that God did not, in fact, create Adam and Steve. But does that mean that we should assume that there is no room for homosexuality in our world? I don’t think so. It’s easy to forget, but the creation story in Genesis was written for a specific purpose (and one which other portions of the Hebrew Bible do not seem to mesh), and for a specific people. And it happens to be a people for whom, as GR has mentioned in his blog, homosexuality was not expedient. But if we believe Adam and Eve were created compatible, then we should also acknowledge the fact that mens’ prostates have been created to be readily stimulated from the rectum. And women have been created to be able to attain clitoral orgasm without (sorry guys) the presence of a penis. Sex qua penetration is the locus of a certain kind of pleasure that grows from relationsihp, and, it seems, is not confined to male-female participants.

It seems as though arguments from nature/design/biology/creation are very easily dismissed as either (1) stemming from a lack of exposure to the thing deemed "unnatural" or (2) bases on a misunderstanding of biology, and the history and function of the Genesis creation narrative. Am I missing something here?

NOOO! It wasn't us!!!

2005-08-11T06:34:00.000-05:00

Heh. I liked this short article in the Christian Chronicle:

Click Here.

No, it definitely was not the Church of Christ that recently endorsed gay marriage. It was the United Church of Christ.

Theological Worldview Quiz

2005-08-11T05:55:00.000-05:00

Interesting quiz. Decent timewaster:

You scored as Emergent/Postmodern. You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this.

Emergent/Postmodern

71%

Modern Liberal

68%

Neo orthodox

64%

Classical Liberal

64%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

57%

Roman Catholic

46%

Reformed Evangelical

21%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

11%

Fundamentalist

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

Things You Learn From Google

2005-08-11T03:59:00.000-05:00

I did a google search this moring to see what may be out there regarding gays and lesbians in Churches of Christ (I searched: gay "church of christ" -united).

Some results:

In October, Providence Road Church of Christ in Charlotte, NC, will be hosting a seminar sponsored by Exodus International, the organization which seeks to repair gays and lesbians of their sexual brokenness. This was a bit of a shock to me. In my experience, while Churches of Christ are staunchly anti-gay, we are not known for hosting seminars, especially seminars by non-C of C groups.

The Villa Rica C of C in Georgia has video of two lectures given by F. LaGard Smith on "God, Gays, and Government." There are 2 videos. In the first, Smith addresses nature/nuture and a few other topis. In the second, Smith is directly responding to the arguments of Daniel Helminiak, who has repeatedly written that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. I encourage you to watch and let me know what you think. F. LaGard Smith is highly respected in C of C circles, and I don't want to be too hard on him, but if this is the best the C of C can do, I'm hopeful about our chances for progress.

And then there's this, which I can only hope is a joke.

Prayer o' the Day

2005-08-10T09:29:00.000-05:00

Wesleyan Covenant Prayer

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

Church of Christ Universities

2005-08-10T05:47:00.000-05:00

Two inspirations for this post:

1. In my last post ("Truth Sets Free"), I suggested that everyone, especially college students, should consider looking up a gay-friendly church in their neighborhood, whether it be Abilene, Arkansas, Malibu, or Tennessee (there are C of C schools elsewhere, I know). A warning was required, though (don't get caught!).

2. In another post ("Should I Stay or Should I Go?"), I suggested that the C of C university I attended was nothing more than a church camp for 18 to 23 year-olds.

I spent a significant part of my time in college (a) trying to avoid getting kicked for being a sexual deviant and (b) wishing I had chosen a school that didn't require attendance of "Bible" classes on such topics as "how to have a good Christian family" (aside: the "Biblical" answer apparently involves something like: don't have sex until marriage, keep your sex life interesting, don't look at porn, have the wife stay at home with the kids, and ladies, don't wear tight clothing. I'm serious. The last one was said in class. It's YOUR fault if men lust after you. uh huh.).

Complaining about brotherhood universities is a bit too easy, though. The more difficult question to answer is: what should our universities look like? It's not enough to say that LGBT students should be made to feel welcome. It's not enough to say that serious academics should be praised instead of faux-intellectual fluff. It's not enough to say that Christian universities shouldn't further our denomination's deeply imbedded misogyny. We have to articulate a vision of what the C of C university should be.

Can Harding, ACU, Lipscomb, Rochester, and all the other C of C schools be both serious univeristies and Church of Christ universities, or must they choose one or the other? Must we emphasize either "Christian" or "university," or can we choose both?

I'm not looking for a middle ground. I don't want something that is a little bit Christian and sort of a university. Did I eat too many paint chips as a child? It seems to me that serious academic inquiry, which often challenges the status quo, has little or no place in a university which seeks to preserve the status quo.

I have thought long and hard about this, and no answers seem to come to mind. Should we be satisfied that our universities hire a token Democrat polisci professor and maybe the occasional non-traditional Bible professor? Should we be asking for more? What is the goal?

Thoughts, anyone? Bueller?

Prayer o' the Day

2005-08-09T12:12:00.000-05:00

Prayer of St. Benedict

O gracious and Holy Father, give us wisdom to perceive you, intellect to understand you, diligence to seek you, patience to wait for you, eyes to behold you, a heart to meditate upon you, and a life to proclaim you; through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

Truth Sets Free

2005-08-09T04:05:00.000-05:00

I ran across an interesting site (click the link below):

Truth Sets Free

I haven't looked through the entire site yet, and so must offer the disclaimer that there may be some things on it I don't endorse (duh).

The most fascinating thing on the site is the link that allows you to find a gay-friendly church. Click on the links for Texas (there are 6 in Abilene alone), Arkansas (Little Rock has quite a few as well), and Tennessee. If you are at a C of C university, I encourage you to carefully check one of these out some Sunday (don't get caught!). Obviously, I don't advocate leaving the C of C (see my post on that topic below), but I must say it is liberating to walk into a church and understand that your whole person is completely welcome and to know that you don't have to wall off a large chunk of yourself to join in the worship.

Poem o' the Day

2005-08-05T05:48:00.000-05:00

Batter My Heart
by John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

2005-08-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

(NB: I apologize. The following post could do with some editing, but I'm not going to have time for that for a while, so this is the best I can do.)

No, I'm not quoting lyrics from the Clash. Ok, maybe I am. I will also quote that venerable philosopher, Homer (Simpson): "I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?"

This post has been much more difficult for me to write than I had anticipated. I promised a post on why I remain in the Church of Christ because I thought it would be of interest to many – "many" meaning the four people that are reading this – and because I thought it would be easy to write. I mean, I’m still here, so I have to have a reason, right?

I must confess at the outset that I have done some ‘denomination shopping’ over the last several months. I have attended several Episcopal services and find comfort in the interesting mix of history, tradition, liberalism (in the classical sense), and social conscience. Plus, I like a good choir and snazzy vestments.

I always come back to the good old CoC, but I often wonder why. What draws me back? Why, though I am moved to tears by the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the beauty of a formal liturgy, do I return to the Church of Christ, with all its frustrating idiosyncrasies, fundamentalist tendencies, and pervasive gyne- and homo-phobia? I mean, there has to be a reason I return, doesn’t there?

Well, I decided to make a list of the reasons I stay. It was pretty good, I must say. I listed many of the distinctive characteristics of Churches of Christ, discussed them in light of the history of the Restoration Movement in the United States, and made the point that, if we take the best of our history and characteristics to heart, the Church of Christ is really no so bad after all, even if LGBT people aren’t yet welcome.

Bollocks. That’s not why I stay. I mean, sure, I do think the Restoration Movement is, at its core, an interesting and valuable faith tradition, one that can contribute much to the wider Christian world. And sure, I think that congregational autonomy is good, as is the ultimate goal of trying to become as much like the "pure," "unadulterated" "first-century church" as we can (even if the "first-century church" is a fiction, a creation of our denominational imagination). But the list seemed empty. The items on it are not why I stay.

I stay because the Church of Christ, simply put, is MY church, and I am her child. My church’s seal is fixed on my heart; it goes to the core of me and there is no way to distill out its presence.

I was raised in this church, I learned to speak of God, faith, and the Bible in this church, I learned to think and read and reason and argue in this church. I spent my Sundays in Bible class always understanding from where the words of the teacher came, even if I didn’t always agree with him. I spent Wednesday nights learning how to lead singing so that – if my voice ever changed – I could become a real song-leader. I passed hours at church camp memorizing Bible verses, leading devo songs, and practicing for Bible trivia. And though I rejected arguments that acapella music is the only scriptural way to sing, I secretly loved that we didn’t use instruments. The symbols and mythologies of this church make sense to me and comfort me.

I watched my Grandfather, an Elder, ascend to the podium to lead beautiful prayers. His prayers always seemed to follow that CoC rubric (you know the one), but the way he said them captured the attention of everyone in the room…his words told you that he was talking to God (thankfully, he let us sit in on the conversation). He taught me much. It was from him and my Grandmother that I learned that my church is a family. That means that you stock a little extra food, not just in the Church pantry, but in your own (you never know who might need it or when). It means that you visit people in the hospital and nursing home, even if you don’t know them that well, because they need to know that people care for them (you’d better take some food along with you, just in case). Being a family means Elders should always come to church with their pockets full of bubblegum to pass out to the kids. Oh, and being a family means and that no one should ever be made to feel unwelcome, not even that girl who is ‘in trouble’ or that guy who has fallen off the wagon, and not even that guy who can’t afford to come to church dressed as nicely as everyone else.

I gained a deep and lasting love of the Scripture from my church. I learned that truth matters, and that it is found in God and in a faithful reading of his word.

The Church of Christ is part of who I am. It always will be, even if I leave. It's not the totality of me, and it does not determine my future, but I love my church and I am thankful for its role in my life.

But that's not the end of the story. The church has also caused me (and many others) pain. Its anti-intellectualism and insular thinking make it a difficult place for those who would reassess our hermeneutics and promote change in our doctrine. Its fear of the Other makes it an unwelcoming place for the girl who speaks up too much or the boy who isn't very good at sports. Its pathologies run deep, and I don't know how to fix them.

It was from my Grandfather (the same one mentioned above) that I learned that you *must* be baptized if you want to get to heaven. There is no other path. It was my church that taught me to spread the word to "the denominations" that they needed to leave their heretical traditions behind and come to the true church (you know, Christ's church…the one he founded on Pentecost).

It is because of my church that my Grandmother (the one I mentioned above; the one who served tirelessly her entire life) has NEVER prayed in front of me. Not once. I haven't heard my mother pray since I was twelve, and I've never heard my sister pray. Their voices, it seems, are not as valuable as mine is (or was, until I came out…now I guess my voice is even less valuable than theirs…I don't get to pray at the dinner table any more).

It was in church that I first learned of AIDS. Apparently, it is a punishment from above. It was from church friends that I first heard the words "faggot," "queer," and "fudge packer." When I objected to my youth minster's homophobic comments, I was told that it was fine to talk to gay people. He continued: "just don't touch." Apparently, he wasn't clear on the fact that HIV isn't transmitted by mere touch.

It was in church that I first learned shame. That shame was reinforced at my CoC university, where my first research paper, which argued that perhaps the church should at least engage the gay community in a conversation, was met with disgust and a private conversation with the professor who (very kindly, I should add) asked me point blank if I was gay. It seems you can't care about the gay community unless you are one of "them." It was in a Church of Christ university that a professor indicated in class that "even her dog knows better" than to engage in same-sex intercourse, and it was this university that expelled wayward students in order to preserve the Christian environment.

At this university, the anti-intellectualism continued, in spite of the best efforts of some of the faculty and students (I won't praise them here; it wouldn't be very good for them, would it?). The university (which is better thought of as church camp for 18-23 year olds), or rather the administration of the university, don't really wanted to inspire thought. Instead, students should learn right doctrine and a few devo songs (that's what it means to be a Christian, right?).

So we've heard the good and bad. Why stay?

My family is sick, and it needs leaders. It needs help, and it needs healing. It needs a shift in focus so that we reach a point when the "Christian Affirmation" (if you haven't seen it, look it up) speaks of love, service, mercy, and justice and not communion, baptism, and instrumental music. My church needs intellectuals who can provide the foundation for preservation of its roots while helping it to shift away from its Enlightenment-influenced delusion that it maintains a firm grasp on the Truth of the Christian Faith. It needs people who will remind it of its place in a broader ecumenical conversation. It needs women who will teach their daughters and sons that gender doesn't matter anymore.

Our church will die if we don't save it. The world is leaving us behind. We weren't at the forefront of the abolition movement, the movement for universal suffrage, the civil rights movement, or the gay rights movement. We aren't speaking of things relevant to those outside our community. We aren't doing enough to alleviate suffering in the world at large and in our own backyards. We are at real danger of becoming irrelevant.

I just keep telling myself that we just have to stick it out. We just have to keep arguing that the church can be better than it is, that its hermeneutics can be broader, and that it should eradicate its fears of change and of those who are different. But this means we have to stick around, grab a shovel (to quote JTB on Chad Smith's site), and do the work.

For some it is impossible to stay. I recognize that, and I may someday join their ranks. For some, the pain is too deep, making it impossible to maintain faith if they stick around. I wish them well, but hope they will at least come back every now and again to chat and to remind us why they left (and to remind us that we should leave, too, if the church is smothering our faith).

The members of the Church of Christ are my people, and I have hope for us. I recently visited a CoC congregation that buoyed this hope. It was a place of healing, welcome, and open and genuine conversation. They aren't perfect, but they have a minister that is attempting to effect some real and lasting change. I pray he succeeds.

In sum: I stay because I can't not stay and because my church needs me. It's my family, it's a part of who I am, and it must have help. Or else.

Prayer o' the Day

2005-08-04T03:13:00.000-05:00

Prayer of Clement of Rome

Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, establish and confirm us in your truth by your Holy Spirit. Reveal to us what we do not know; perfect in us what is lacking; strengthen us in what we know; and keep us faultless in your service; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

Dale Martin

2005-08-02T06:05:00.000-05:00

Work is keeping me busy, so I haven't been able to finish the post I'm working on. Instead, I'll direct everyone to this link:

http://www.clgs.org/5/5_4_3.html

This is an article by Dale Martin, a professor at Yale and (I think) former Church-of-Christer. He can be a bit inflammatory (NB: that was an understatement), and I usually don't agree with all he says, but he always makes for a fun read.

Soak it in and let me know what you think (no really, I really want to know). Also, check out the discussion on gays at Greg Kendall-Ball's blog

Things to come

2005-07-30T04:22:00.000-05:00

So, I've received several questions on the blog and via email that will have to be addressed in fairly lengthy posts. I'm working on it, but I'm also abroad right now for work and have to do some tourist stuff. Posting here is fun; museums are more fun. Expect two posts soon:

1. Why I still attend a Church of Christ.
2. A (very, very, very, crude) linguistic analysis of arsenokoites and malakos.

I'm curious to see what I'll say for question #1, and I really don't want to write #2. Stay tuned, please, and in the meantime, read one of the books I suggested below. Several of them are short and can be consumed in a day or two.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere

2005-07-29T05:53:00.000-05:00

An interesting conversation about gays in the church is happening over at Greg Kendall-Ball's blog.

Check it out here.

Well, I think it's interesting. See for yourself.

Quote o' the Day

2005-07-29T05:51:00.000-05:00

From Uncle Paul (Tillich, that is...)

"The first duty of love is to listen."

Book Learnin'

2005-07-28T09:01:00.000-05:00

I want to offer a few book recommendations in case anyone wants to explore. Now, as I've previously mentioned (see first post), I'm no scholar, so take these recommendations with that in mind. Also, feel free to post any comments you may have about the books I mention or any other recommendations you may have (either pro- or anti-gay). This is a short, incomplete list. More will follow:

Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views by Robert A. J. Gagnon, Dan O. Via

Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches by Walter Wink (Editor)

What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality by Daniel A. Helminiak

New Testament and Homosexuality by Robin Scroggs

The Church and the Homosexual by John J. McNeill

Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible by Robert E. Goss (Editor), Mona West (Editor)

I don't endorse everything in these books, and some are intellectually lacking, but for those of you who have never given gay-inclusion much thought, these should kick off a conversation in your head.

Prayer o' the Day

2005-07-28T07:15:00.000-05:00

The Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

[NB: I plan to continue posting prayers on occasion. Churches of Christ do not typically recite prayers together and do not typically acknowledge prayers used in other traditions. I think this is a mistake. There is much to learn from those gone by and much eloquence to be found in books of prayer. Unfortunately, many of my counterparts in the CoC will be more familiar with this prayer because parts of it were made into a campfire song. Shame on us for neglecting 2000 years of tradition and history.]

Outing, Women, and Song-Leading (oh my!)

2005-07-28T05:31:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was outed. This was very inconvenient* (I'm working on the art of understatement...see note below). The story: a guy from church discovered that I am gay and decided it was in the best interest of everyone if he came and talked to me about it face-to-face. We talked things over, shook hands, and went our separate ways.

Actually, that's not what happened. The sleuth decided instead to go directly to an Elder and to skip any discussion with me. The Elder then decided it would be in the best interest of everyone if he came and talked to me about it face-to-face. We talked things over, shook hands, and went our separate ways.

Actually, that's not what happened either. The Elder decided instead to go directly to the Preacher and to skip any discussion with me. Thankfully, the preacher decided it would be in the best interest of everyone if he came and talked to me about it face-to-face (no, really, he did).

So, a guy, the preacher, and the Eldership know that I'm gay. What now? My discussion with my preacher started off exactly as I would have imagined. He told me what he thinks, I told him what I think, etc., etc. Basically, the point was that, while I can continue to attend services, I can no longer lead singing or serve communion (or serve in any other public way). In addition, I move from being a 'member of the church' to being an 'attendee of the church.' Basically, I have to decide if I can handle having a secondary role/status in the Church. If not (so the subtext of the conversation went), move on to the UCC or Episcopal Church down the street. All this was expected but, while painful, something I can probably deal with. Actually, the conversations behind my back hurt more than being told I'm not fit to serve as a songleader.

But then the guy threw me a curveball (more background necessary):

I am (to put it mildly) "loud" in class...basically, I'm the guy you hope you ever have to deal with as a Bible class teacher. I come to class prepared, say what I think and am not afraid of good and honest debate. Thankfully, the Church I attend is the sort of place I can say crazy things without being thrown out on my ear. One of the things that I and others in my congregation feel very strongly about is gender equality in Churches of Christ (insert shameless propaganda: visit www.gal328.org as soon as you finish reading this post). Finally, the 'issue' of the 'role' of women in the Church (ugh, how I hate CoC terminology) may be coming to the forefront of the congregation's collective consciousness (that is, we may soon have a class where we discuss the topic).

Great, right? Wrong. The preacher brought to my attention a very interesting point. My presence in said class may actually do harm to a cause about which I care very deeply. One of the questions that invariably comes up when Churches discuss gender is: where does it all end? If there really is 'neither...male nor female,' can a woman marry a woman? If we shake up our traditional hermeneutics and read texts on women differently, do we have to read Romans 1 differently? Churches often throw the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater due to fear of the proverbial slippery slope (ah, I love proverbs). Reworking your hermeneutical framework can be scary, especially if there is no end in sight.

Certain questions WILL arise in the conversation, and the Elders will be there when the questions come up. The 'gay issue' and the 'gender issue' WILL become linked in the minds of many people (for good reason, I must say). What will the Elders, whom I want to convince that men and women have equal place in the church, think if I (the crazy gay liberal who just won't shut up) am one of the loudest voices for change? They will, at best, write me off as a ridiculous person to be ignored and, at worst, they may (and likely will, according to the preacher) be afraid to talk too much about gender out of fear of where it may lead us.

I may have to leave because my very presence may become a distraction in a vital conversation. A lack of focus on social justice (of which gender justice is a small part) is the gaping hole in CoC theology. Our generation must redefine our denomination's core values so that Churches of Christ can turn our theological focus to matters more important than whether our Church has an organ. It is a matter of love and a matter of integrity, and it is the right thing to do. I could not forgive myself if I did damage to this cause by becoming a distraction in the conversation (on the other hand, maybe I've already done all the damage I can do...I mean, the secret's out, right?).

So, to sum up, the dilemmas facing me now are (1) whether to continue to to be involved with this particular conversation, accepting a diminished role (read: secondary status); and (2) if I stay, whether leave the congregation when it begins to discuss gender equality in order to avoid doing damage to the cause.

Fun times.

*Postscript: I sort of glossed over the way I felt upon being outed. This has happened before (actually, I was outed to my entire family). To sum up, it is an incredible violation. The part of you that you've hidden for so long (to avoid expulsion from your family, church, and Christian university) is ripped away from you and exposed for all to see. It hurts. A lot. Kinda like a surgeon has cut you open, jumbled you up on the inside, and left you to figure out how to sort things out and close the wound.

Prayer o' the Day

2005-07-27T04:16:00.000-05:00

Prayer of St. Ignatius

Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give without counting the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not to ask for reward, except to know that I am doing your will.

Amen

thank you

2005-07-26T15:54:00.000-05:00

GR,

Thank you for your comment on my blog (Theoblogia). I quickly scanned
a couple of your posts and just wanted to let you know that you have
a LGBT supporter within the Churches of Christ in me. I am familiar
with the struggle (not personally, but through some very close
friends), and I am taking a class this fall called Pastoral Care of
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered People. I will be in this
guided study course with two other people, both of whom are gay
males, one of whom used to go to a Church of Christ and a Church of
Christ-sponsored university. I'm still trying to work through it all
theologically, but I definitely want to be part of the conversation.
Thanks for visiting my blog. Hope to continue this discourse with
you. shalom!

Krister

Ex-Gay Watch

2005-07-26T14:25:00.000-05:00

For anyone out there who thinks "ex-gay" ministries (Like Exodus international) really work, I encourage you to check out a few sites. First Ex-Gay Watch. Next exgay.com. There is also a series on Salon.com here, here, and here. There is one more part to come in the Salon series. Check them out.

Question: What Makes a Christian?

2005-07-26T08:59:00.000-05:00

Can one be a gay Christian? A lot of people would say yes. Even more people would, I think, say no (especially in Churches of Christ). How do we determine if I am a Christian or not? Can we? What makes someone a Christian, and who gets to draw the line? This is a question the Church must face, because it cuts to the core of community. How does the community construct itself, and where does it draw its borders?

After much study and many long years of prayer, I have answered the question for myself. I know that God still loves me (as God loves all), but I also know he affirms me. There are many Christians who agree with me (see, e.g., the MCC, the UCC, the Episcopal Church). Are gay Christians really Christians?

Traditionally, the answer in Churches of Christ has been that Episcopalians are not really Christians anyway (so who cares what they say). They are not members of the "New Testament Church," so their souls are in jeopardy (at least, that's what I learned in Sunday School -- though it's important to remember how far that takes us from our Restorationist roots). Many members of Churches of Christ now reject the old way. We don't hold the line that we are the only Christians. So now where do you draw the line? Who is a Christian?

You can occasionally commit adultery and be a Christian. You can occasionally lie and be a Christian. You can occasionally sleep with other men and be a Christian, as long as you feel guilty about it. You can even (apparently) be an Episcoplian and be a Christian. But you cannot be gay and a Christian. Why?

The usual answer given to me is lack of repentance. The guy who occasionally slaps his wife around (but repents) is still in because he is not intentionally living a lifestyle contrary to God's Word (as it is currently interpreted). The homosexual, though, knows he is doing wrong but chooses to live a "lifestyle" of sin (so the argument goes).

But wait a minute. What if the homosexual doesn't believe he's doing wrong? What if he's studied his entire life, searched his heart, prayed constantly, and come to the conclusion that it is tradition, and not his lifestyle, that is wrong?

Assume arguendo that it is wrong to be gay (a point I in no way concede). Assume also, arguendo, that Episcopalian doctrine and praxis is wrong and Church of Christ doctrine and praxis is the right way to be a Christian (that is, you have to hear, believe, repent, confess, and be baptized). Why do we accept the Episcopalian Christian but reject the gay Christian? Both claim to be Christians. Both believe they are doing what is right in God's eyes. Both (according to the assumptions just laid out and according to CoC doctrine) are wrong. Why call one a Christian and not the other? Why take communion with one but tell the other he is going to hell?

Is it possible that all we are talking about is a disagreement over doctrine? We disagree with the Episcopalian over the proper interpretation of Acts 2:38 and we disagree with the gay Christian over the interpretation of Romans 1, but that's all it is...a disagreement among friends/brothers? Why then can churches of Christ accept as a brother the Episcopalian Christian (who, by the way, accepts gays) but not accept as a brother the gay who accepts Christ?

Getting the Word Out

2005-07-26T08:16:00.000-05:00

To any bloggers who happen across my humble new blog:

How did you get the word out that you had a blog? Seems difficult (especially if posting anonymously).

Suggestions are appreciated from my wiser counterparts.

Gay Teens Hanged

2005-07-26T07:29:00.000-05:00

Words can't even begin to express my disgust at this story.

This story gave me a bit of perspective. I often walk around feeling like a victim because I am often told there is no such thing as a "gay Christian." It's important to remember that there are those who have it much, much worse. My life is pretty easy compared to the woman forced to cover herself from head to toe, or compared to the young kid who can't come out of the closet because he will be killed.

And remember, this wasn't a lynch mob. This was a legal, court-ordered execution for a crime against the state.

First Post

2005-07-26T05:49:00.000-05:00

Readers (assuming that there are any):

The purpose of this blog is simple: (1) to let people know that there are LGBT members of Churches of Christ; (2) to let LGBT Church-of-Christers know that they are not alone in attempting (and hopefully succeeding) to be both queer and Christian; (3) to lay out arguments publicly, hoping for a dialectic that will help me improve my ability to communicate my central thesis, namely that homosexuality is not a barrier preventing access God and that it is possible to be a faithful gay Christian.

For now, this blog will be anonymous. Some of you may figure out who the man behind the curtain is (the Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Clark Kent, Diana Prince, Linda Danvers...you get the point), but I ask you to respect my privacy. I have been outed before; it is a very unpleasant experience (to put it mildly) and a deep, lasting, and painful violation (to put it honestly). Unfortunately, most Churches of Christ are at this point unwilling to accept openly gay people as full members of the body of Christ. Posting here puts me at risk of being disfellowshipped from the particular congregation I attend. It also puts me, and others who may post or comment here, at risk of being blacklisted in Churches of Christ writ large. I have friends who are ministers, graduate students, etc., who plan to work in Churches of Christ or in our universities. I hope they read what I write and post here, but future employment could become impossible for them, were they to become known as LIBERAL {read: "gay-accepting" (gasp!), or worse, "gay-affirming" (the horror!)}. I often consider the possibility of teaching at a CoC university or of working in a Church of Christ. Were my secret identity to be revealed, this future would immediately go up in a cloud of pastel-colored smoke. Please, please, please – respect our privacy.

I am not sure how this will all play out, but a few notes at the outset. I plan to swing back and forth between addressing Christians (generally) and Church-of-Christers (more specifically). I do want every gay or lesbian person to know that she or he is welcomed and loved by God, but I see a specific need for a rallying point for gay people who attend Churches of Christ. To my knowledge, there is currently no support structure in existence for us (if there is and I am ignorant of it, please do let me know). Part of this is due to the congregational autonomy that is part of our Restoration heritage. There being no synod, convention, or other governing body, individual Christians in Churches of Christ are often left to struggle on their own for change in a local congregation. This can be terribly lonely.

A final note: I am no scholar. I'm not stupid, but I'm not particularly well-read, nor have I received a higher education in religion, theology, or divinity. As such, I hereby issue a blanket caveat emptor (caveat lector may be more apropos): beware what you read on these pages. Think for yourself and feel free to criticize, analyze, suggest, etc, etc. I am a tough lad and enjoy pure academic and religious honesty, so feel free to tell me what you really think. I think better when on the defensive and am not afraid of a good argument. This blog and I are works in progress. I am young, foolish, and (in many ways) arrogant; I do not pretend that I will always argue well, that my thoughts will always be in order, or that I won't change my mind about some things. Posting may be sparse (I'm a busy fellow), and I may at times simply quote people who are smarter and more mature than I. Bear with me, please.

Let the fun begin.