Sojourners Again: Questions about Coherence and Integrity in the Struggle for Justice

I'm continuing to find the story of Sojourners and its prejudice-driven refusal to take sides in the struggle for justice for LGBT persons in society and faith communities instructive.  The narrative line that catches attention here: it's a parable about how people of faith who profess to be committed to justice nullify this when they refuse to practice justice in some area in which, right before their eyes, the struggle for justice is being played out in a conspicuous way.



I recently received an email from Sojourners asking me to donate to them.  I immediately replied, of course, with an email telling Sojourners that there’s no way in hell I intend to give any money to a "progressive" and "justice-oriented" faith group that refuses to run an ad by Believe Out Loud asking Christian churches to start treating LGBT people like human beings.  Real human beings with the same human rights other human beings have.

This week, Sojourners emailed me back.  I have no way of knowing whether their email was crafted to reply to my concerns uniquely, or whether the organization has gotten other emails like mine, and this email was therefore sent to all those who refused to donate for the same reason I did.  I tend to think the latter is probably the case.

I appreciate the reply, whether it’s a personal reply to me alone or to a group of people disenchanted with Sojourners’ recent statement that it cannot take sides in the struggle of LGBT people for justice in society and faith communities.  At the same time, I’m hardly reassured by Sojourners’ response to my concern.  It’s long on "listening and reflection," on "dialogue and civility."

And it’s short on action.  It’s short on precisely the same kind of action Sojourners espouses in the case of other groups of people subjected to injustice and oppression—the economically struggling, working people, people of color, women, and so forth.  Its message—and this is consistent with what Sojourners has long said to LGBT people, and intends to keep saying—is that those who are gay and lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, are a case apart from all other people who experience injustice and oppression.  They're a case apart from all other people, period.

And they need to recognize this, and stop complaining.  Stop the uncivil calls to communities of faith to practice the same justice in the case of LGBT people they claim to practice in the case of poor people, working people, people of color, women, etc.  Start listening and reflecting—on the gospel message Sojourners and like-minded people of faith proclaim to their gay brothers and sisters.  A message that places those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered in a special category of people whose humanity is not equal to that of everyone else, and who therefore do not have the same rights that everyone else has.

Or the same claim on the conscience of people of faith engaged in the struggle for justice, so that the denial of the full humanity and full range of human rights that those people of faith offer to LGBT people does not, we’re asked to believe, undercut people of faith’s proclamation of justice for other marginalized groups.

Sojourners’ email to me directs me to an FAQ composed, the email tells me, to answer the many critical questions directed to the organization after it refused to run Believe Out Loud’s ad.  And here's what I find when I visit that page:

1. Sojourners is claiming that it decided not to run Believe Out Loud's ad because the group's campaign for justice for LGBT people "includes advocacy for gay marriage in the church."  And this is a matter about which "Sojourners has intentionally not taken a position" because Sojourners "encourages civil dialogue within the church."

2. Sojourners describes itself as "a welcoming organization," and claims that "we have welcomed openly gay and lesbian people on our staff and will continue to do so."

3. Sojourners denies that it doesn’t take sides on LGBT issues, and says that it "supports full civil rights for LGBT people and equal protection under the law," and has repeatedly done so in various circumstances.

4. Sojourners has been asked whether its refusal to "take a stand on this" [on what, precisely: gay marriage? the Believe Out Loud ad?] is because of its "work to build coalitions on poverty."  And the organization replies that this is, indeed the case, since it works with faith-based groups seeking justice for poor people who do not support the struggle of LGBT people for justice.  And so, "Not only is taking a stance on gay marriage in the church outside of the purview of our mission focus, we feel it would hinder our ability to build these coalitions."

Take a close look at Sojourners' rationale for not taking sides in the LGBT struggle for full inclusion in the human community and faith communities, and quite a bit does not hang together.  With regard to claim #1--that Sojourners did not run the Believe Out Loud ad because Believe Out Loud advocates for gay marriage in the church--as Jamie Manson recently pointed out in National Catholic Reporter, the ad Sojourners turned down makes no mention of gay marriage.  It's an ad in which various people of faith ask the churches to begin treating LGBT people as full human beings.

With regard to claims #2 and 3--that Sojourners is a "welcoming organization" which has unambiguously sided with LGBT people in their struggle for justice--as I've noted in previous postings on this blog (the first link in this posting points to one of those), I happen to know someone who has long been interested in working for Sojourners, and who has strongly supported Sojourners' ministries.  He also happens to be gay, partnered, and in a long-standing committed relationship.

Twice in the past several years, he has seen openings at Sojourners and has contacted the organization to find out whether Sojourners offers benefits to partners of gay employees.  Both times he's been told that the organization would discuss his request.  And each time, the reply has been, No.  No, we don't offer partner benefits.

Something may have changed since the last time my friend asked Sojourners about this issue.  I'd like to think that's the case.

But if not, what can the claim that Sojourners is "a welcoming organization," and "we have welcomed openly gay and lesbian people on our staff and will continue to do so" possibly mean, when a heterosexual couple working for this faith-based organization is able to receive partner benefits, but a same-sex couple is not?  This is a shell game that people of faith and their organizations have been playing for far too long with the humanity and the lives of LGBT people: we welcome you.

But please don't expect to be treated equally.  As if your humanity counts in precisely the same way that the humanity of everyone else counts.

As if your demand for justice matters in the same way that the demand for justice by poor people, working people, people of color, or women matters.  Because it doesn't.  You belong to a special category of people whose humanity is not precisely the same.

And so we can claim to be welcoming and justice-oriented while not really welcoming you.  And while actively discriminating against you.  And it is uncivil of you to point out that our behavior contradicts the wide-ranging claims we make about justice and human rights in every other area imaginable.

Though its FAQ implies otherwise, Sojourners did say, by the way, that it cannot "take sides" in the LGBT struggle for justice when it refused to run the Believe Out Loud ad.  And its feet need to be held to the fire about this refusal by anyone who cares about the integrity of faith-based communities' witness to justice in the world today.  This is, in fact, precisely why many people of faith are holding Sojourners' feet to the fire now.

With regard to claim #4--that Sojourners can't really take sides with LGBT people because its mission to work for justice in other areas, and its coalitions to serve that mission, prohibit such taking of sides--Jamie Manson has eloquent rejoinders in the NCR article to which I link above.  As she notes, Sojourners head Jim Wallis has persistently answered questions about the status of LGBT people and their claim on the conscience of Christian communities this way:

[D]ebates over LGBT issues "have not been at the core of our calling, which is much more focused on matters of poverty, racial justice, stewardship of the creation, and the defense of life and peace. . . . Essential to our mission is the calling together of broad groups of Christians, who might disagree on issues of sexuality, to still work together on how to reduce poverty, end wars, and mobilize around other issues of social justice."

But as Manson notes, Elie Wiesel writes, "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."  And in the case of LGBT people,  Manson reminds us, "there are soul-shattering repercussions" to the refusal of people of faith to stand unambiguously for justice.  There's the active unwelcome that many LGBT people of faith experience within communities of faith.

And there are further troubling facts that Manson can document from her hard-earned experience living in a committed same-sex relationship: there's the fact that she and her partner, both with academic backgrounds in church-related schools (Manson has an M. Div. from Yale Divinity School) not only sometimes find themselves made unwelcome in some church communities.  But, in fact, when some church groups find out that Manson is in a partnered gay relationship, they rescind invitations to her to speak about various issues.

There are, in short, significant real-life consequences to the refusal of Sojourners and other "progressive" communities of faith to take a stand for justice for LGBT people.  Those consequences are written across the lives and relationships of the people these communities continue to place in a special category of human beings--a sub-class of human beings whose human rights and struggle for justice matter less than do the human rights and struggle for justice of other groups of human beings.

But the consequences of the refusal of communities of faith to support LGBT people in their struggle to justice are also increasingly grim for those faith communities themselves.  As the culture at large reaches a tipping point at which increasing numbers of people recognize the full humanity of LGBT persons, churches and other religious bodies radically undermine their claims to be committed to justice, when they continue to treat LGBT people as a case apart, as human in a different (and inferior) way.  

What begins to happen as a cultural tipping point occurs in this area is that churches' call for justice increasingly appears to be incoherent, when these communities ask LGBT people to live on a special, sub-human reservation within the churches, while they urge us to recognize the humanity of other marginalized human beings.  And the integrity of those crafting this two-tiered system of humanity--one tier for heterosexuals, another for those who are gay--is also called into question.

Jamie Manson raises an important question, for instance, when she asks whether Sojourners' refusal to take sides in the LGBT struggle for justice is driven by economic considerations.  "Progressive" people of faith often refuse to stand in solidarity with LGBT people in their struggle for justice because they fear the loss of donations and financial support from their anti-gay coalition partners if they take sides with LGBT people.

The homophobia of faith-based "progressives" comes with an increasingly high price tag.  It increasingly undercuts the claims of faith-based groups like Sojourners to be about justice at all.  It exposes the justice-oriented message of these groups as incoherent, since that message cannot recognize the claims to justice (and humanity) of a significantly oppressed group right in the midst of these people of faith.  And it raises critical questions about the integrity of those behaving in this way.

So that now, when the Jim Wallises of the world write about the dangers of male-entitled misogyny, no one listens carefully.  Because misogyny and homophobia spring from the same male-entitled heterosexist roots.  And one cannot challenge one without challenging the other.  Not if one expects to be credible.  And one cannot speak credibly without acting, without acting to do justice for all of those excluded from networks of power and privilege--of humanity itself--by men who imagine that being male and heterosexual grants one an ontological status denied to those different from oneself.

John Aravosis on Sojourners' "Progressive" Stand on Gay Issues

John Aravosis at AmericablogGay weighs in on Sojourners' refusal to support the "Believe Out Loud" campaign, about which I blogged yesterday:

I also get a kick out of how Sojourners sees itself as "progressive," but then adds that they don't take sides.  That's like calling yourself a Democrat, but then adding that you don't vote.  And in any case, how is it taking sides publishing an ad that simply welcomes everyone to church?

Smells an awful lot like religious homophobia.

I think Sojourners is going to be surprised at the push-back it's going to get for this nasty bit of fence-sitting.  Things are changing rapidly in American culture, when it comes to awareness of the humanity and human rights of LGBT persons.

It's time for people of faith to grow up and recognize these changes, just as they have had to do in the case of other movements for human rights, including the Civil Rights movement and the feminist movement.  It's time to stop the fence-sitting, which is really a way of siding with those we imagine have power, while we pretend to be objective.

(At the end of my first post about this topic, to which  there's a link above, see Judy Brown's comment, with helpful information about an online petition campaign to ask Sojourners to reconsider this discriminatory nonsense, and an email campaign to ask Utne to reconsider an award it has proposed to give Sojourners.)

Sojourners Refuses Once Again to "Take Sides" in Struggle for Gay Rights

 

 

I've noted in a number of previous postings that I no longer offer support to Sojourners, though I'd like to do so.  We sorely need organizations in the U.S. that draw together coalitions of faith-based communities working for progressive change.  But Sojourners' (and Jim Wallis') ongoing refusal to  support gay rights (and gay and lesbian human beings) has become more than a blind spot in that organization's work for justice, as far as I am concerned.

The homophobia (and that's what it is, when battle lines are clear, and the refusal to take sides represents a failure to stand on the side of justice in a historic battle to see justice done) increasingly undermines for me any position Sojourners takes about anything.  And so I also increasingly turn a deaf ear to anything I read by Jim Wallis.

And Robert Chase's report yesterday at Religion Dispatches about Sojourners' recent refusal to support the "Believe Out Loud" campaign, since Sojo doesn't "take sides," hardly causes me to revise my opinions about the organization.  It's time for good people of faith to stop playing these shameful games.

Controversy about Gay Student Website Erupts at Arkansas Church of Christ University

My previous posting had an Arkansas angle with its comments about Rev. Mike Huckabee and my knowledge of that gentleman's political career, since I grew up in and live in Arkansas.  In fact, Rev. Huckabee graduated from a Southern Baptist university in Arkansas, Ouachita University, of which my father's brother was the academic vice-president for some years, and in which my uncle's wife taught English.

And here's another Arkansas story, which pertains to another faith-based university in my state--in this case, Harding University, the alma mater of Kenneth Starr, the Republican independent counsel who hounded President Clinton during Clinton's presidency, pushing for Clinton's impeachment following the Monica Lewinsky revelations.  Harding is a Church of Christ-affiliated university.

Yesterday, the statewide weekly Arkansas Times reported on its blog* that gay and lesbian students and alumni of Harding have launched a website to offer support to those at the university dealing with its disapproving stance towards LGBT students.  The university immediately blocked the website for those using the campus internet system.

This morning, Harding issued a statement about its actions, on which the Arkansas Times reports.  The statement notes Harding's stand on the issue of homosexuality, based in its religious tradition.  By implication, Harding is also claiming its right to discriminate overtly in the case of LGBT students, faculty, and staff, since faith-based institutions in the U.S. are frequently not bound by legal codes that prohibit discrimination in other non-faith based institutions and workplaces.

I'm fascinated to read the discussion that has developed following both of the preceding postings--fascinated above all by the insistence of many of my fellow citizens that religious groups have the "right" to discriminate against those who are gay or lesbian, and an obligation to discriminate, due to their religious convictions.  This is precisely the argument that the Catholic magisterium also promoted in response to the rising tide of gay rights around the world.

What does it say about many Christian institutions and what they are now becoming, I wonder, when one of the characteristics for which these institutions are now most known is their loud assertion of their "right" to discriminate against a vulnerable minority group?  Is this where Jesus would have wanted the churches founded to preserve and transmit his memory to end up?

Peter Gomes, whom Candace Chellew-Hodge eulogized yesterday at Religion Dispatches, certainly didn't think so.  For some of my preceding reflections on Gomes and his thinking about where some churches have ended up vis-a-vis LGBT people, see here and here.

*The Arkansas Times website has been having difficulty today, and is going up and down.  If the links to the postings at its blog don't work for you right away, you may want to try back later.  I apologize for the inconvenience if they're not working when you click on them.

Anglican Priest* Disrupts Funeral of Murdered Gay Ugandan Leader, Shouts Homophobic Slurs

As a solemn, horrifying postcript to the recent murder of Ugandan gay leader David Kato, there's this story: if you ever doubted that hateful words (and silence in the face of hate) from religious groups can do a world of harm in the lives of gay and lesbian people the world over, I recommend that you pay attention to this report of what took place at Kato's funeral.

People can do a tremendous amount of good in the name of God.  They can also do a huge amount of damage.

And then there's this filth.  From someone who also claims to speak on behalf of God, as he pours out lie upon lie.

*Addendum, 31 Jan.: I'm grateful to a good reader of this blog, Fr. Joseph O'Leary, for pointing out a possible mistake in the title of the blog.  Fr. O'Leary notes that some media sources are reporting that Thomas Musoke, the Anglican pastor who disrupted David Kato's funeral, is a lay reader and not an ordained priest.  I continue to see numerous media sources identifying Musoke as a priest, but also want to make note of Fr. O'Leary's information, and to correct the title if my information is not correct.  This RTE clip, to which Fr. O'Leary has kindly directed me, does refer to Musoke as a pastor and not a priest.

Note, too, the statement of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in this clip : "You can’t go around sharing information about the identity of supposed lesbian and gay persons and urging people to ostracize them or worse hang them in the headline of one of the Ugandan newspapers.  You can’t do that without taking responsibility for the consequences."  Milder, perhaps, than it might be, given the violence developing in Uganda against LGBT persons and the complicity of members of Williams' own church in justifying that violence.

But at least--unlike Pope Benedict--he's speaking out.  As one would expect a pastor following Jesus to do.  Condemning violence and words that lead to violence . . . .

Addendum, 2 Feb.: Fr. O'Leary has kindly provided another link, this time to an essay by Albert Ogle at the Episcopal News Service site, which clearly states that Thomas Musoke is an Anglican lay reader and not an ordained Anglican priest.

Christmas in London: Reflections on Recent Media Trends in Britain

Well, though I do find Jeff Danziger's Christmas-in-London cartoon funny, I have to say, our experience here hasn't been anything like this.  We did fly into Gatwick on the 20th, a day after Heathrow had been closed by a snowstorm, and the problems at Heathrow apparently continued for days after that.  Our flight was full of people who had been bumped from other flights.  And we considered ourselves very lucky that it landed on time (even ahead of schedule) without a hitch, while so many other flights were being canceled.

It was definitely unusually cold when we landed at 7 A.M. on the 20th--16 degrees F.  With snow all over the ground, though that melted in a day or so.  And the wonderful, kind, Cockney-to-the-core gentleman who picked us up at the airport to shuttle us to our hotel was delayed, because of the snow, which caused all sorts of traffic snarls on the freeway.

All in all, we've had a wonderful time without any interruptions due to weather.  There was a tube strike yesterday, and it may be going on again today, but what impressed us about it was not how much disruption it caused, but how helpful the tube workers were about redirecting us to the buses we needed to take in order to reach our destination yesterday, the Strand walk from Trafalgar Square to St. Paul's and back.  That cheerful British can-do spirit really does exist, and there's an underlying layer of good manners that makes it work even more smoothly, and which puts our American way of doing business to shame.

Meanwhile, I'm fascinated by the various high-profile debates in the British media right now about religious issues.  From the Catholic side, there's much crowing, of course, about the fact that BBC broadcast a blurb from Benedict during the Christmas season--as if grabbing a radio spot deals a mighty blow to the other side, the nasty secularists and atheists and homosexuals, and vindicates our cause better than, say, living the values we preach in such an exemplary way that non-believers might sit up and pay attention to those values.

There was also a rather silly article in the Telegraph yesterday pointing out that the Archbishop of Canterbury applauded William and Kate in their intent to marry, and don't we just need more high-profile marriages like this to return our society to a sense of the importance of marriage.  The article turned  on that tired old argument that heterosexual marriage is falling into desuetude because people no longer respect the value of marriage, without asking why people no longer respect marriage, or in what precise way spending millions on a lavish public wedding will rehabilitate a failing social institution.  Or how a faltering economy might affect people's wish to marry and raise families.

And that, in general, is what I find most baffling about these proposals from the political and religious right: they put so much stock in public show to do what we ourselves have obviously failed to do as people of faith--to demonstrate the goodness and rightness of religious belief.  So that, the argument goes, the lavish spectacles will cause people to flock back to religion in droves.  This was the rationale for the fanfare over the papal visit to Britain; it's now the rationale for the obsessive focus on the upcoming royal marriage; it's the rationale for the increasingly belligerent tone of right-tending churches in Britain, as they confront secular society and demand front-page news coverage around the clock.

And they're getting the latter, more and more.  As the media response to the papal visit indicates, the British media are, on the whole, eager to give a high profile to religion and to permit right-wing Christians to posture as "the" Christians who have held onto the faith of our fathers, while more progressive groups within the churches have betrayed that faith.  And I suspect that, underneath all of this, there's the same need among media mavens here as there is in the U.S., to try to keep faith groups on the side of neo-conservative economic analysis of the economic woes of our society.

Religion is being used as obtrusively and as insincerely as a prop for the economic exploitation of the many by the few at this point in Western history as it was at the start of the industrial age.  As if we learned nothing from the many valuable critiques of the melding of religion and culture--of the melding of religion and the culture of economic elites--during the 19th century, and as if an alliance of the church with economic elites that ended very badly for the church in that period of history will do anything other than end badly all over again, at the start of the new millennium.

More from Peter J. Gomes on Religion-Based Homophobia: Irrational Fear of the Sexual Other

Another passage from Peter Gomes's The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus (NY: HarperOne, 2007), which I find in my journals from several years ago.  Where the two passages I posted yesterday focused on the churches' responsibility for fostering homophobia at this point in history, this one notes the way in which fear of gay and lesbian human beings operates at a political level, particularly in the U.S., a nation in which a considerable number of us over the course of our history seem to need someone to fear, hate, and target.

Gomes writes:

The contemporary fear gripping America seems to be a fear of the normalization of homosexuality.  What a strange pathology this is—fear that the sexual identity and practices of a minority will somehow taint the identity and practices of the majority.  Someone has said that the fear of homosexuals has replaced the fear of communism in American life, and as Americans always seem to need something to fear, homosexuality is an ideal candidate for that role.  Gay marriage is seen to threaten heterosexual marriage to such an extent that constitutional amendments must be designed to prevent it, although no one seems prepared to propose similar legislation to prohibit divorce, which is a far greater threat to marriage and the family, and on which Jesus himself had distinct views.  On homosexuality, he had nothing to say.  This irrational fear of the sexual other is all the more dangerous because it conceals itself within the sanctions of religion.  Homophobia is the most current example of how good people ending up doing and believing bad things (p. 106).

I'm struck by Gomes's precise naming of what many Americans including many people of faith in the U.S. fear today: the "normalization" of homosexuality.  Many citizens (including many people of faith) appear to believe that their identity as the normal depends on identifying another group of citizens as the not-normal--the abnormal, the subnormal.

And on keeping them in a position through various legal mechanisms that demonstrates their abnormality and subnormality to the rest of society--as a parable about what those who challenge the preconceptions of the normal may expect, if they continue their challenges to those preconceptions.

It is in this light that the ongoing need of many citizens, including many people of faith, to deny the right of even civil marriage to same-sex couples--even when there is abundant evidence that sexual orientation is not chosen, and people who are gay and lesbian, after all, want the same right to live in stable, productive, socially sanctioned relationships as anyone else--is best understood.  This crusade to "protect" what is called traditional marriage--to protect the normalcy of the normal--is all about finding powerful symbolic ways to relegate gay and lesbian persons to a demi monde of stigmatized second-class citizenship.  So that the normalcy of the normal can be demonstrated.

Gomes wrote these observations in 2007.  But the quest to enact constitutional amendments to "protect" marriage continues to be at the forefront of the agenda of the American Catholic bishops--as the recent lobbying of the Minnesota bishops on behalf of Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer suggests.  In the DVD the bishops of Minnesota sent to every Catholic household in the state in an attempt to give the edge to Emmer in this election, Archbishop Nienstedt of St. Paul-Minneapolis overtly endorses a constitutional amendment to "protect" marriage.  As did the Catholic bishops of Iowa in the same election.

And as, presumably, the signatories of the Manhattan Declaration, whose organizational meetings were hosted by the new president-elect of the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference, Timothy Dolan, also do.  The Manhattan Declaration states,

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage. Marriage is an objective reality—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow.

And so it is highly unlikely that the U.S. Catholic bishops will be breaking anytime soon with the religious and political right's culture-war model of attacks on the human rights of their brothers and sisters who happen to be gay, or that they will turn their attention to attempts to outlaw divorce, which really does threaten the stability of the traditional model of marriage the bishops claim to be defending.

Peter J. Gomes on the Failure of the Churches Today Vis-a-Vis Gay Human Beings

And, in a journal from 2007, I find several passages I had copied from Peter J. Gomes's book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good about the Good News? (NY: HarperOne, 2007), as I was reading that book after its publication.  Here are two of them:

If there remains one area in which our parochial obduracy continues to obtain, however, it is in the church’s treatment of its homosexual brothers and sisters; if there is an area in which we are to be weighed and found wanting, this is it.  It is not out of ignorance alone that we behave as we do towards sexual minorities; it is out of ignorance, fear, and in certain cases, malice.  None of it is excusable: private judgment on sexual matters does not excuse our unwillingness to include in full participation in the household of faith those who engage in sex differently.  Two generations of biblical scholarship have shown that the scriptures cannot be used as a basis for our discrimination on the subject of homosexuality, so why are our churches as divided today on this subject as they were a generation ago on the subject of women, or a century ago on the subject of slavery? (p. 199).

Thus I have been disappointed, to say the least, to find that the Bible becomes the first refuge of those who are unwilling to reconsider their extrabiblical prejudices against including homosexuals in the full life and ministry of the church.  I had hoped that, as has happened with women and racial minorities, our predominantly Christian culture would recognize that God’s children, the homosexuals in our midst, cry out for compassion and acceptance.  In this decade, alas, exactly the opposite has happened.  Positions have hardened and homosexuals have been demonized, condemned to a ‘lifestyle’ rather than invited to a life in the household of faith.  It amazes me that any thoughtful homosexuals would continue to want any part of a community, religious or otherwise, that in the name of God has behaved toward them with such contempt (p. 200).

This is the kind of moral insight and moral teaching that it would make a world of difference to hear coming from the mouth of Pope Benedict or Timothy Dolan.  Instead, Benedict has remained totally silent about the kill-the-gays legislation in Uganda, though that legislation remains on the table.  And the U.S. bishops have had not a word to say about bullying of gay youth, even as the culture at large begins a significant conversation about that issue.

Parochial obduracy, demonization, contempt, malice, discrimination, as people suffering injustice cry out for compassion and acceptance: every word of condemnation of the churches that Gomes speaks in these passages applies to the Catholic church among other churches.  And this behavior completely undercuts the claim of the church to be light in the darkness, a home for those seeking a place in the world, and a sacramental sign of God's all-embracing, salvific love in the world.

Faith in America's "Addressing Religious Arguments" Report: Framing the Educational Challenge with the Churches, re: Gay Issues

Last week, when I blogged about Faith in America’s recent report outlining “core messages” that those working to combat religion-based homophobia might use in their interaction with faith communities, Colleen Baker of the Enlightened Catholicism blog commented,

Bill I think most of us who have looked at the gay obsession in our Catholic leadership have connected these dots a long time ago. God's chain of command seems to be rooted in control, dominance and exploitation of the lesser ranks.

I think Colleen’s exactly right with these observations.  They touch on the conclusion to my own posting, and today, I’d like to say a bit more about that conclusion—to elucidate my concern with the educational approach taken by Faith in America and other groups like it.

In my conclusion, I note that the anti-gay attitudes of religious communities aren’t going to change until members of faith communities undertake the task of educating themselves and their constituents.  Though I applaud the Faith in America report and its educational approach—above all, I welcome its frank recognition that hostility to gay people is rooted in religious concepts and attitudes—I have reservations about education as the sole or primary key in unlocking religion-based anti-gay bigotry.  Or, rather, I have reservations about the precise type of eduction Faith in America envisages.

The Faith in America report states,

Religion-based bigotry exists in the mind, not the heart. Most people of faith who hold anti-gay views do not hate gay people but rather have simply internalized religious teachings and beliefs that condemn homosexuality as sinful. Effective messages to the religious movable middle must avoid any suggestion that people with anti-gay attitudes based on religious teaching are motivated by hatred or personal animosity toward gay people.

And this is where my problem with education as the key to dealing with religion-based prejudice against gay people begins.  I seriously doubt that bigotry of any sort “exists in the mind, not the heart.”  The kind of thinking that brings us to a position of prejudice and keeps that prejudice alive is inherently rooted in the heart—in our attitudes, in our affective domains.

And we will not root out that prejudice—either from ourselves or from our communities of faith—until we confront it at that root affective level.   My problem is not with education per se, as a corrective to anti-gay bigotry based in religion.  It’s with an understanding of education that does not see the links between anti-gay ideas within religious communities, and anti-gay feelings, sentiments, and attitudes—which run underneath ideas, give them force, and are the ultimate raison d’être for the bigoted ideas to which they give life.

And so I also doubt that people of faith who cherish bigoted notions about what it means to be gay are not motivated by personal animosity towards those who are gay.  Perhaps, as the Faith in America report notes, it’s an overstatement to call this animosity hatred—in all cases, at least.  Nonetheless it is, indeed, personal animosity, specifically aimed at those who are gay.

And using religion and religious ideas as ammunition to vent its animosity.  And it doesn’t get us far down the path to healing to deny this.

I am convinced that, in an information age in which better information about gay human beings and gay lives, better information than that purveyed by many religious adherents, is easily available, many people of faith know perfectly well what they are doing in slandering, dehumanizing, and attacking their gay brothers and sisters.  They know perfectly well that they are circulating malicious information about those who are gay.

They know perfectly well that the ideas they are promoting in the name of God fly in the face of abundant evidence that calls those ideas into radical question, and exposes them as absurd—and exposes their demonic force and intent.  People of faith cling to hateful notions about their brothers and sisters who are gay deliberately, and offering many people of faith correct or better ideas is not going to budge the dynamic underlying religion-based homophobia.  

Because the homophobia of many people of faith emanates from somewhere else inside human beings than their heads: it emanates from their hearts.  Bigotry is always first and foremost about the heart, and only secondarily about the head.  Dealing with bigotry at the head level alone is like trying to eradicate a particularly noxious and tenacious weed by lopping off the part of the weed that grows above-ground.

Weeds lopped off will inevitably grow again, often with redoubled energy, often replicating themselves and multiplying in the period in which they lie dormant under the earth after their heads have been lopped off.  Effective educational strategies to combat religion-based bigotry against gay and lesbian human beings must deal with the affective level of education.  It must address the heart as well as the mind.  And it must acknowledge frankly that many people of faith simply do not want to learn more, to know better, to correct their mistaken ideas about their gay brothers and sisters.

Once again: we won’t effectively address religion-based homophobia until we do so at the affective level, and not merely the intellectual level.

This is actually far from a novel insight in the area of moral pedagogy.  It’s a routine insight for those who think about or teach ethical theory.  If ethical awareness grows when we increase our consciousness (which is to say, when we develop our consciences), then all ethical learning must necessarily incorporate into itself a deconstructive moment that assaults what we take for granted, calls into question how we have customarily framed an ethical problem, and expands what we imagine we know about the problem we’re considering from an ethical standpoint.

Sound ethical pedagogy always incorporates, at the fundamental level of basic ethical education, some technique of assault to deconstruct what we take for granted, force us to reframe what we imagine we have already known, and force us to see the emotive roots and attitudes that shape our conscience, our awareness of ethical issues.  And for this reason, many people resist good education in the area of ethics: learning to think more carefully about ethical issues, and developing our consciences, is a painful, ongoing process in which we constantly recognize the limitations of our perspective and the inhibiting effect of our emotional and attitudinal life on our ethical knowledge.

In my last unhappy stint of teaching introductory ethics—at Loyola’s (New Orleans) Institute for Ministry—I had a student in the class who bitterly resisted every attempt I made (in conjunction with the course texts, one of which I had written) to open her eyes to what lay beneath her understanding of ethical issues.  A timeworn technique some ethicists use to teach introductory ethics, and one I used in this class, is to incorporate poetry into the teaching process.  Poetry distills breakthrough insights into a manageable, sharply crafted set of words.  It also probes, assaults, lays bare the emotional roots of our ideas.

In this particular course, and in many previous courses in introductory ethics I had taught, I had the class read a carefully chosen poem daily—I had the class read a poem daily as a class, to take the poem apart line by line, to talk together about the way in which the poem subverted their expectations and challenged them to look at an aspect of the world in an entirely unexpected way.  I had the class work together to identify what it is, precisely, in this particular poem that gets under the skin and makes us itch emotionally, so that we become uncomfortable with attitudes, preconceptions, and feelings we have previously taken for granted.

The young woman who resisted this pedagogical technique of assault didn’t, unfortunately, ever do me the courtesy of telling me that she found the daily reading and discussion of a poem, as a preface to the class’s consideration of an aspect of fundamental ethical theory, discomfiting.  Instead, she vented her anger in the final written evaluation of the course and of me as a teacher, though she interacted with me after that at parties before I had read the evaluation, as if she were perfectly content with me and the course.  I learned only later, from her written evaluation of the course and from students who wanted to keep up with me after the course ended, that she had sought to subvert the course throughout the entire summer, by attacking it and me in meetings with other students outside the course, and with faculty members who gave her a hearing but never spoke to me.

And here’s why I tell this story, and what’s particularly interesting about it: this student was among the growing number of self-styled John Paul II Catholics who had begun, by the latter half of the 1990s, to give a very different complexion to this program of lay ministry than it had had when it began after Vatican II.  And she worked for the chaplaincy office at the university.  She was, in fact, closely allied to several Jesuits connected to the chaplaincy office and on the university faculty who, I later discovered, were unhappy with my teaching in the Institute for Ministry program after I had been fired by Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina and outed as a gay theologian.

The resistance of this student to what I was teaching in a course in fundamental ethics had everything to do with the resistance of a powerful, growing wing of the American Catholic church to any kind of ethical pedagogy that seeks to deconstruct or assault what they have decided to take for granted, doctrinally and in terms of moral teaching.  It was deliberate, bitter resistance to the pedagogical technique of assault itself, which seeks to overturn what we imagine we know, and to invite us to see beneath the surface of what we take for granted.  It was organized resistance to their catechetical, formulaic, God-says-and-so-I-believe approach to moral thinking.

And it was fueled by the student’s awareness that I was gay and had become public about that fact, and by her ties to the chaplaincy office at Loyola University in New Orleans, and to some of its key players.  Though the topic of homosexuality never once came up during this course, throughout the course, she persistently informed me that there was what I was teaching in this course, and then there was the Catholic position—her position.  The position she owned in a proprietorial way I did not own it, as a dispossessed Catholic theologian who had been given his walking papers.  Because he was gay.

There was her position, the Catholic position, which she did not intend in any shape, form, or fashion to reexamine, certainly not when the professor challenging her to reexamine everything she took for granted happened to be a homosexual.  It was a Catholic “ethical” position that was right because it was Catholic (and I wasn’t; because I was a homosexual).  And it was right because she believed it.

And so for an entire course, this student who represented “the” Catholic position in the course, and who had strong ties to the chaplaincy office of this Jesuit university, deliberately subverted what I was teaching—apparently with the belief that she was doing a right, good, and holy thing because she was holding up Catholic side against the homosexuals.

The homosexuals who call things into question.  Who make us think twice about what we have taken for granted, particularly vis-à-vis gender and gender roles and morality.

What I’m trying to demonstrate here—what I’m trying to describe—is a common dynamic of people of faith as they deal with their brothers and sisters who are gay.  Because many people of faith begin with the presupposition, deeply rooted in unexamined emotion-based attitudes, that gay and lesbian people are dirty and unholy, many people of faith assume that anything they do to their gay brothers and sisters, no matter how dirty and unholy, is done in God’s name.  And is good.

You simply can’t teach morality—you can’t teach ethics at all—if you are not free to subvert people’s expectations about what they imagine they know, about what they take for granted.  About the affective roots of the ideas they take for granted.  And, in the case of anti-gay attitudes of people of faith, until you expose the malicious hidden roots presupposing that dirty, unholy treatment of gay and lesbian people in God’s name is warranted, because gay and lesbian people are dirty and unholy.

One reason the Catholic church is in major trouble today is that it is not teaching people to think ethically at any profound level at all, for the most part—not anymore.  The kind of pedagogy foundational to any course in ethics that seeks to be academically sound went out the window with the restorationist turn in the Catholic church during the papacy of John Paul II, a turn whose impact on Catholic universities became particularly pronounced in the 1990s, with the papal document Ex corde ecclesiae.

It was no accident that I encountered the student about whom I’ve just blogged (and several others like her) in a lay ministry program at a Catholic university in the latter half of the 1990s, as the crack-down in Catholic universities caused by Ex corde ecclesiae got underway.  And it’s no accident that this was the last course Loyola’s Institute for Ministry invited me to teach, that the university chooses to promote students of this sort while shunning faculty who challenge such students to think more carefully and question more critically.

We’re in a different world today—in most of the Christian churches.  We’re in a different world than we were in during the brief, heady period of ecumenical hope and theological ferment in all churches around the period of Vatican II.  The problem, in the moment in which we now find ourselves, is not at all that people don’t know, or don’t have access to information.  It’s that they don’t want to know.  It’s that they don’t want to question the disinformation to which they intend to cling, because it supports a prejudice firmly rooted in their hearts, in the powerful, unexamined emotional sphere from which their ideas about homosexuality arise.

This is the problem today with the churches in general when it comes to anti-gay prejudice.  There is not any strong intent or will to change or call into question homophobic attitudes, because most churches are content with those attitudes.  Nothing will change until the churches themselves—until members of churches themselves—stop putting up with the entirely comfortable homophobia and challenge it from within.

And educational strategies premised on the idea of polite conversation that refuse to recognize how deeply rooted in the emotional lives of people of faith—and how absolutely malicious in intent—homophobia really is won’t do much at all to move the stone from believers’ hearts.  Which is why, I take it, Bishop John Shelby Spong issued his "Time Has Come" manifesto a year ago, leaving behind the fruitless conversations with people of faith intent on resisting but not intent on learning.

The manifesto leaves those fruitless conversations  to the dead who intend to keep talking to others who are dead.  It calls on those who want to build a different future to recognize, whether people of faith intend to recognize this or not, that we have turned a corner in history when it comes to recognizing the full humanity of those who are gay and lesbian.  And to move forward together, around the corner.

Leaving the dead to bury the dead.

The graphic, with its depiction of an empty head, is not intended to be commentary on the Faith in America report, but, instead, commentary on what happens to our heads when they are divorced from our hearts, and when we imagine that head knowledge can be divorced from heart knowledge.

Brandy Daniels on Border Logic of Contemporary Christianity and Gay Teen Suicide

Two valuable points in Brandy Daniels' analysis of the connection between what some Christians think, say, and do, and the suicides of gay youth:

1. Taking her cue from J. Kameron Carter, Daniels argues that there is a pathological "border logic" at work in contemporary Christianity, which is intent on seeing some members of the human community as threats to the purity and integrity of the churches, and which must constantly police the boundaries to keep those threatening others outside.

2. The tremendous pain some Christians inflict on their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters today is, quite specifically, the pain of being placed outside: outside the pale, outside the circle of salvation, outside the beloved community.

Gay and lesbian people are frequently made homeless today by their brothers and sisters in Christ.  And that pain--the pain of exclusion from home and family--is at the heart of the problem of suicides of gay youth.  It is a terrible indictment, indeed, of Christianity as it is now understood and practiced by many Christians, that many of its adherents seem unable to understand the cruelty and hurt they are inflicting on other human beings by their commitment to a ruthless border logic that turns some human beings into unwelcome outsiders, simply because of who God has made them to be.

As I read Daniels, it occurs to me yet again that the conversation about the connection between religious belief and gay teen suicide would be enriched if the anthropological insights of Mary Douglas informed this conversation.  In her classic work Purity and Danger, Douglas notes that human communities mimic human bodies in policing their boundaries and access points against threats from the outside perceived as potential pollutants of the body politic.

The police work of the body intensifies when threats appear to loom larger.  When a potentially infectious agent is detected in the outside world, the body begins to monitor access to its orifices--it monitors access to the points of contact by which pollutants enter it--with heightened vigilance.  And so at moments of increased stress, the body politic frequently imagines any and all outsiders or newcomers as possible security threats and patrols its borders to keep these threats outside.

When I blogged about the recent papal visit to Spain yesterday, I asked why some Christian religious groups need to keep postulating enemies against which to define themselves and their purity.  I suggested that this posture of enemy-making and border-monitoring, premised on the notion of a threatened purity at the heart of the defensive community, departs from the gospels.

I am speaking, in particular, of the need of the current papacy and its defenders to project demonic images of modernity and secularism, and to define doctrinal purity and orthodoxy over against those perceived demonic threats.  I am also speaking of the strong need of the current pope and many members of the hierarchy to paint a malicious picture of their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ as enemies of the church to be kept at bay, lest these brothers and sisters pollute the church's purity.

It might be argued that the intense preoccupation of the current pope and many members of the Catholic hierarchy with their gay brothers and sisters as potential pollutants to be expelled from the body of Christ has everything to do with very personal dramas of policing, purity, and expulsion, precisely because many Catholic clergy, including those at top levels, are themselves gay.  The personal drama of self-policing and expulsion of unwanted sexual urges--the personal drama of many Catholic clergy--is writ large for the church they control, as they imagine their own inner struggle for purity as the decisive struggle of the church itself, at this point in history.

As a priest-theologian friend of mine often notes, the pronounced penchant for anti-gay cruelty that is particularly noteworthy in contemporary Catholicism arises out of the need of a clerical caste many of whose members are gay to control, demean, and keep outside threatening energies found within that caste itself.  The current Catholic leadership structure reserves a particular kind of cruelty--with a particularly savage intent to expel--for gay folks, and for gay men especially.  And this savage cruelty towards those who are gay goes hand in hand with a strong cruelty towards women, who are seen as a decisive threat to the all-male clerical club that must constantly police its boundaries in order to assure its ritual purity at the heart of a church struggling for ritual purity under the leadership of this defensive, self-absorbed, centripetal ruling elite.

How does it happen, some good readers of this blog keep asking, that a church so dominated by gay men can become so obsessively bent on humiliating those who are gay and lesbian?  The answer to that question lies, I think, in the need of a threatened clerical club controlling the governance structures of Catholicism to imagine that its own inner drama is the drama of the church as a whole.  And in the need of that threatened club to imagine enemies to its ritual purity, and to imagine that in vanquishing perceived enemies of its club, it is engaging in holy war.  And in the need of that club, as well, to imagine that the future of the church itself depends on what happens to the clerical club--as if the church as a whole is merely an extension of its tiny clerical elite.

Religious Roots of Anti-Gay Attitudes: Two Recent Commentaries

Two noteworthy pieces in the past several days dealing with the significant connection between religion and people’s approach to issues of sexual orientation.  At Religion Dispatches, Constance Chellew-Hodge dissects the divine “chain of command” argument that structures many conservative Christians’ approach to homosexuality.

As she notes, 

Christianity, especially in its most conservative or fundamentalist form, is obsessed with gender norms, and will tolerate little deviation from them. A 5-year-old boy dressed as a girl offends the senses — and breaks, what Soulforce founder Mel White calls, “God’s chain of command.”

In my book, Bulletproof Faith, I quote White from an interview I did with him on this topic. For conservative Christians, he said, the universe falls apart if this chain of command is broken.

Chellew-Hodge argues that what is particularly threatening to some Christians is the notion of women getting out of control: resistance to gay and lesbian folks (particularly to gay men) flows from a more general intent of conservative Christianity to assure that women remain in their place, underneath men in the divine chain of command, because any lapse in that chain will produce social and cosmic chaos that threatens the divine rule of the world.  Chellew-Hodge writes,

Feminist theologian Beverly Harrison has written that the connections between homophobia and misogyny run deep because “the social control of women as a group has totally shaped our deepest and most basic attitudes toward sexuality.”  That control is so complete that society expects “compulsory heterosexuality” and its only alternatives are celibacy or asexuality.

This social control then, Harrison posits, is at the heart of not just the inequality of women, but the inequality faced by gays and lesbians.

“We must acknowledge that it is through our socialization to sexuality that we begin to learn ‘fear of equality’ and either to feel ‘strong’ by lording it over others or to feel ‘safe’ by being controlled by them. By conforming rigidly to ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ roles, we learn, at a foundational level, to tolerate inequality.”

And so, Chellew-Hodge concludes, there is no way effectively to address issues like the bullying of gender-transgressive or gay teens without confronting the religious roots from which hostility to gay and lesbian people grows:

You don’t break the chain of this violence by simply punishing the bully, or his parent, but by working for deeper change within both church and society to end the misogyny — and the homophobia and fear of any gendered “otherness” that arises from it.

Chellew-Hodge’s conclusion closely parallels the conclusion of another significant study released this week by Faith in America, a report entitled “Addressing Religious Arguments to Achieve LGBT Equality.”  As Steve Hillebrand writes in this report’s foreword, the primary reason it has proven so difficult even for a pro-equal rights President and a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass legislation forbidding workplace discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or to abolish the discrimination represented by DADT is “because there is an air of acceptability in America to be against LGBT people based on one’s religious beliefs.”

Hillebrand and Faith in America maintain that, 

For faster, significant change, the mood has to change.

We should keep trying to change laws, but until we deal with core issues causing discrimination, progress will continue to be slow. Religion, morals, harm, bigotry, science, fear, understanding – these are core issues we need to confront head-on if we want to reduce discrimination toward gay people.

Hillebrand notes that “the biggest barrier to achieving LGBT equality is religion-based bigotry, coupled with the failure of the gay community to confront religious arguments.”  Hence Faith in America’s report, which seeks to provide those confronting religious-based bigotry against gay and lesbian persons with a set of “core messages” to use in this educational process, as well as guidelines for dealing with people of faith.

“Addressing Religious Arguments to Achieve LGBT Equality” frames its core messages by noting that “[r]esearch has confirmed that most anti-gay prejudice and discrimination are based on religion. ” The report proposes three core messages for those dealing with religion-based anti-gay bigotry to seek to communicate in discussions with people of faith:

1.    Religion-based bigotry causes enormous harm to LGBT people, especially young, vulnerable teens.

2.    Sexual orientation is a natural part of a human being, whether it be heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. Same-sex orientation is not a choice to go against God’s will. It is a normal, natural and healthy expression of human sexuality that is innate for some people.

3.    Religion-based bigotry against LGBT people is wrong ... just as it was wrong to use religious teachings to justify discrimination against Native Americans, African Americans, minority religious groups, women and interracial couples.

Sound guidelines for dealing with the objections that many people of faith continue to raise to the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in church and society, and to the eradication of discrimination against people on grounds of sexual orientation.  But, unfortunately, the attitudes of religious communities are not going to change significantly until members of those communities themselves undertake the task of educating their constituents--though I very much applaud Faith in America for continuing to try to educate, and I recommend this report.

Joy to the World: McDonald's and the Christmas Message

Saturday, on our way to an early-morning meeting, Steve and I decide to stop at McDonald’s for a quick bite to eat, as the first frost of the season lies sparkling on the low-lying fields beside the Arkansas River.  Between us and our destination, there is no other place serving a fast and easy breakfast—not one we can think of.

I know that Michael Pollan is right when he says that it’s not real food if it arrives through your car window.  I know he’s right because I’ve sampled said food (all too often) and have always found it wanting.  While it fills the gullet, it insults the innards, making me invariably regret my weakness in succumbing once more to its media-hyped wiles.  Still, what to do when you have limited time and few options, and need to eat a quick meal because your blood sugar levels won’t remain constant if you forego a bite to eat?

So stop we did.  And as we sipped our coffee and munched the egg sandwiches, I was surprised to see that McDonald’s has incorporated into its advertising themes for this season a Christmasy logo—a specifically theological one—focusing on the word “joy.”

Joy surrounded with little red snowflakes.  A Christmas message.  Or, rather, an advertising message wrapped up in a Christmas message, one with strong theological resonance for those of us raised on the Lucan nativity narrative with its stirring evangelical announcement, 

And the angel said unto them,
Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

McDonald’s as joy.  An egg McMuffin as joy oh joy.  American consumerism as an extension of Christmas joy, of the angelic announcement that all people will find in the birth of the Savior something to rejoice about, good tidings of great joy to all the people.

It’s easy to turn a meditation like this in the direction of consumerism and its illicit appropriation of religious messages for commercial gain.  But something else struck me this weekend as I looked at the announcement of joy on the side of the bag in which our fodder landed through the car window.

And that’s the incoherence of the Christian message itself, insofar as it has been appropriated by people of faith from the beginning of the Christian movement.  There is, woven into the very fabric of how we people of faith appropriate the central symbols of our faith, an incoherence that fails to probe the significance of those symbols at almost any level that goes beyond the superficial. 

We are seduced by the surface glitter, the smooth, dancing charm of the symbols.  And we fail to dive beyond the surface, to ask what the symbols mean for our everyday life—as signposts to a spiritual pathway that moves us outside the everyday, to deeper levels of experience and meaning than we encounter in the everyday, insofar as we remain always seduced by the surface.

The most obvious incoherence to which we don’t pay attention as we listen to the jingoistic renditions of the Christmas story rattling through the airwaves each year is this: as that story has come to be told in most communities of faith following Francis of Assisi and his development of the crèche, it’s a story about Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the angels.  And animals.

It’s a story about tidings of great joy that includes the holy family and the animals surrounding and celebrating the birth of the Savior in a manger: cattle, sheep, donkeys, all watching with reverence, and in some midrashic renditions of the story, talking together about the significance of the Messiah, kneeling in knowing reverence before the holy baby.

Sensible beasts, as sensible (and as beastly) as all the people hearing the evangelical tidings—welcoming it with the same joy with which the sensible human beasts who hear the angels’ announcement welcome it.  Joy on the side of a McDonald’s bag used to hold hamburgers and sausage biscuits and egg McMuffins overladen with slices of ham, carved out of the bodies of the animals adorning and extending the message of joy to the earth in the Christmas narratives.

Joy that both uses the animal players in the Christmas story as sentimental, revered embroidery decorating the holy kitsch of it all, and simultaneously slaughters the non-human sensible beasts who discuss the significance of the birth of Christ and kneel before his crib in awe.  Joy that is, if one thinks about it, hardly joy at all—not to the sensible animals, at least, whose flesh graces our Christmas tables when we come home to feast after the holy liturgies at which we sing about the joy brought to the world by the birth of the Savior.

Symbols problematize everything in the world, if they’re worth anything at all.  If they’re religious symbols, signposts pointing to the spiritual path that goes well beyond the boundaries of the everyday, and makes the everyday less certain and less monochromatic, symbols trouble us—or should do so.  Profoundly.

Because living with them calls our certainties into question.  Living with sacred symbols constantly subverts our assurance that we have a handle on the world, that we own it and everything in it.  Living with sacred symbols pulls us into a realm of thinking and practice in which all we take for granted—even the savor and nourishment of a warm egg McMuffin on a frosty fall day—suddenly becomes not precisely what we have imagined it to be.  In a way that turns everything upside down.

Chesterton was onto something when he said that the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it’s never really been tried at all.  There’s a deep inbuilt incoherence within the Christian tradition, which points back to the foundational symbols out of which the entire tradition grows, and how they have been too easily appropriated from the beginning of the Christian movement—as comfortable furniture adorning what we think we know and what we take for granted, rather than shocking proclamations of a disturbing good news that turns our world upside down.

I suspect that all those now attacking the new atheism and secularism rolling through many of the formerly Christian places of the earth have it absolutely wrong, when they see the primary problem as a loss of faith or a determination to resist the good news of the Christian gospels.  The primary problem is that what most Christian communities of faith and most of us as followers of Jesus have offered to the world as an evangelical possibility is nothing of the sort.

It’s, instead, a set of trite symbols whose meaning seems altogether too familiar to us, whose power to discomfit us in radical ways has been obliterated, in which sensible animals kneeling before the holy manger are soon to become consumable Christmas table centerpieces.  And in which we don’t hear or see the incoherence we’re proclaiming as good news to the world, and insisting that others believe in order to make us even more comfortable with things as they are. 

Righteous Christians and Unrighteous Gays: The Educational Challenge Facing Churches Today

An update to the story about which I blogged Thursday, a story unfolding in my own state the past several days: Clint McCance, the vice-president of a school board in northeast Arkansas, who recently posted offensive anti-gay comments and horrific taunting statements about suicide of gay teens on his Facebook page, told Anderson Cooper on CNN Thursday night that he will resign his school board position.  He has not yet submitted a letter of resignation, however, and various watchdog groups continue to monitor this situation.


McCance’s resignation is a good and necessary outcome, it seems to me.  But in my view, it’s only a first step in a process that now needs to take place with communities of faith in my state and elsewhere.  Yesterday,  some religious leaders from around Arkansas gathered at an Episcopal church in Little Rock to make a public statement condemning bullying of gay youth.

Obviously, much work remains to be done—educational work, ongoing educational work in faith communities.  As I have noted previously, recent research undertaken by the Public Religion Research Institute  shows fewer than one in five Americans reporting that communities of faith in the U.S. are doing an adequate job of relating to gay and lesbian human beings.  The same poll reports two-thirds of members of religious groups reporting that statements and attitudes of communities of faith are implicated in suicides of gay youth.

These are shocking findings.  In the face of such findings, the fact that religious leaders and communities of faith continue to be timid about speaking out to challenge bullying of gay youth is incomprehensible.  It is incomprehensible that religious communities have not yet, on the whole, recognized that they have been living through the greatest civil rights challenge of our times in recent years with the movement for gay rights, and they have simply missed the boat.  At best, they have been silent.  At worst, they are at the very center of the problem that must be overcome if gay people are to be treated as full human beings in our culture.

In my own Catholic community—where tremendous work needs to be done and where not a single top pastoral leader has uttered a single word about bullying of gay youth, even as the leader of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America does so—a third of respondents to the Public Religion Research Institute study indicate that the leaders of the Catholic church deserve a grade of D or F for their treatment of gay and lesbian persons.  Catholics gave a lower grade to their church’s leadership when it comes to treatment of gays than members of any other church did.  And this is in the face of claims by many apologists who want to argue that the Catholic church is exemplary in its charitable outreach to those in need . . . .

Clearly, a central challenge for those who want to deal with the hatred of and discrimination against gays and lesbians fostered by religious communities is that many religious adherents are poorly educated regarding what their own churches teach, at a fundamental level.  Huge numbers of people of faith are poorly educated about how the notion of practical compassion is, as scholar of religion Karen Armstrong notes, at the very center of all world religious traditions.

In her book The Spiral Staircase (New York: Knopf, 2004), Armstrong writes:

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

This September, the Pew Forum released results of a study of religious knowledge in the U.S.   The results of this study are astonishing and embarrassing; they indicate how far communities of faith in the U.S. have to go to educate their adherents in even the most basic ways about what their faith and the faith of others means.

The Pew religious knowledge study shows that Americans can, on the whole, answer only half of 32 simple questions about world religions.  Atheists (along with Jews and Mormons) score higher than other groups on this test.  Half of those polled in this study report that they never read any books or articles about their own religions, and 70% of those polled never read any books or articles about any religion other than their own.  Religious knowledge is particularly low in the bible belt states of the Southeast, including my own state of Arkansas, which have high levels of religious adherents—the same states in which many believers profess to be most profoundly convinced that the bible informs them that gay and lesbian people are grave sinners headed to damnation.

There is, in short, a serious educational challenge facing communities of faith today, in the area of dealing with gay and lesbian human beings.  In my view, that challenge needs to focus in particular on the way in which communities of faith misuse their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters nowadays to demonstrate their own (false) righteousness to the world.

There's a perennial tendency of communities of faith to define themselves over against some despised Other.  This has been a strong, evil tendency within Christian faith communities over the course of Christian history.  Over the course of Christian history, Christians have at various points turned the following groups into demonized Others to demonstrate the righteousness of Christians: 1) women; 2) witches; 3) Jews; 4) heretics; 5) Muslims; 6) people of color; 7) non-European indigenous peoples; 8) Communists.

Today, the demeaned, hated, stigmatized Other happens frequently to be, for Christians, gay and lesbian people (and, of course, it continues to be Muslims).

The question I would encourage anyone working with and in faith communities, anyone with a position of pastoral responsibility in Christian faith communities, to pose to these communities is this: why is it necessary to define one's own righteousness over against and at the expense of some demeaned and demonized Other?  Why do people of faith seem to have this perennial thirst to build their own righteousness across the backs of a despised group that they define as unrighteous, and then exclude and oppress--and often kill?

What kind of righteousness needs demonized Others to demonstrate that it is righteous? Why are people of faith not hearing the call of their scriptures to tend to their own righteousness and refrain from judging and condemning others, since judging others is God's work alone?

I can't find the righteousness of many people of faith today who build that righteousness across the backs of their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters very convincing or attractive. It seems anything but righteous, and the force driving this unrighteous behavior seems downright demonic. 

The righteousness that many Christians today claim by turning their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters into demonic symbols of unrighteousness is precisely what the Christian tradition calls self-righteouness. It is our own defiant (and false) declaration of ourselves as righteous.  It does not depend on or wait for God’s declaration of us as righteous.

That dependence and waiting on God to define us as righteous or unrighteous people demands a humility that is nowhere on display in the treatment many Christians dish out to their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.  The treatment many Christians dish out to those who are gay is premised on their belief that they are automatically righteous and their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters are automatically unrighteous, simply because they are gay.  (And Christians are automatically righteous simply because they are not gay.)

This attitude is difficult to comprehend from the standpoint of the scriptures of the world religions, which persistently challenge the presupposition that we can build our own righteousness by declaring others unrighteous—dirty, sinful, sordid, headed for hell, a problem for us, the righteous, to solve and overcome.   The Christian gospels persistently call into question the cheap grace of those who presume to know that they are the righteous, when they project unrighteousness onto some other despised group with a smugness and complacency that have nothing to do with authentic spirituality in any of the world’s religious traditions.

Communities of faith are going to have to begin facing the significant way in which their ugly treatment of gay and lesbian human beings, driven by self-righteousness and cheap grace, is profoundly undercutting their claims to be all about salvation and love.  As I noted Thursday, Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s new book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us shows that the primary reason young people are walking away from the churches today in droves is the ill treatment of gay and lesbian persons by the churches. 

It is increasingly impossible for communities of faith to convince people that they are all about love and salvation when they continue to engage in malicious behavior towards gay or lesbian human beings that is driving younger gay and lesbian persons to suicide.  It is high time for the people of faith to face what they are doing as they continue to energize hatred of and discrimination towards those who happen to be gay—and what they are doing to their own fundamental proclamations about themselves, as well, as they keep walking down this unrighteous path.