Slog
News & ArtsTuesday, September 28, 2010
Homo / Religion Christian Caught Acting Like One
Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 1:34 PM
Just thought you should know that the Christian blogger John Shore—www.johnshore.com—is doing a series of blogposts about gay teen suicide, in which being gay is not vilified. He has a positive interview with Charles Robbins, the executive director of The Trevor Project. Thought you might like to see at least ONE Christian in the media (he blogs for Huffington Post and some very conservative Christian zines too) who isn't in the douchebag Family Research Council mold.
1
Well, he can't be mainstream Christian, can he?
'Cause they're always silent everywhere but with their checkbooks and ballots, right?
'Cause they're always silent everywhere but with their checkbooks and ballots, right?
3
There are mainstream Christians who support LGBT people -- without reservations. We welcome them to sit in church with their partners, ordain them, marry them, and baptize their babies.
And yes, I'm talking about mainstream Christians.
Evangelical Christians are not the same as mainstream Christians, but even some evangelicals are tolerant.
According to a friend of mine who attended a certain evangelical Christian school back in the 1980s, it was a safe haven for kids who were being teased unrelentingly in their public schools. It helped that nearly all these kids hadn't come out to themselves -- it was kind of like an early version of don't ask, don't tell -- but at least it was a safe place.
And yes, I'm talking about mainstream Christians.
Evangelical Christians are not the same as mainstream Christians, but even some evangelicals are tolerant.
According to a friend of mine who attended a certain evangelical Christian school back in the 1980s, it was a safe haven for kids who were being teased unrelentingly in their public schools. It helped that nearly all these kids hadn't come out to themselves -- it was kind of like an early version of don't ask, don't tell -- but at least it was a safe place.
4
Nice posts, but I regret reading the blog comments that quickly devolve into endless hair-splitting about theology and Biblical translations, trying to deflect the discussion away from real people living with real pain. Depressing.
5
A number of mainstream protestant, Christian and Unitarian denominations have made great strides toward full acceptance of LGBT members, and would unite them in marriage if the law allowed. Why are the rights of these believers trampled by the claims of the papists and fundamentalists?
6
Whenever Dan tells Christians to stop bitching at him that there are reasonable Christians out there, and start cleaning their own houses, I always think of Fred Clark:
The Bible is not a book about homosexuality and it will not allow itself to be treated as a book about homosexuality. Nor is the Bible a book about sex. But the Bible is, in fact, very much a book about wealth, possessions and the poor. That is not the central theme, but it is a massively important theme that pervades every portion of the book. If you don't agree with that then I don't know what it is that you've been reading, but it surely wasn't a Bible.
Did that work? That last sentence was deliberately confrontational and accusatory -- did it make you angry? Because I want you to get angry. I want you to become so angry that you won't rest until you prove me wrong.
So please do that. Prove me wrong. Go for it. Take all that anger and angrily go back to your Bible. Open it at random or start at the beginning and channel all that anger into a determined search to prove that wealth, possessions and the poor is not a major theme of the entire book and that the Bible does not contain anything like 2,000 verses on the subject. Get angry and don't stop until you've proved, conclusively, that this isn't an overwhelming, obsessive theme in the Bible.
7
Thanks so much for this, Dan.
I'm gay, and I'm a Christian. By the Grace of God, I was raised in the Episcopal Church. The rector of the parish where I spent my teen years was... ummm... pretty much a flamer, and although he never proclaimed it from the pulpit, he didn't catch a lot of flack for it. And this was the late-'70's, early-'80s.
The thing I like about being a Christian is it keeps me from thinking too highly of myself. I like and I need exhortations to get off my lazy, self-satisfied ass and go out there and do God's work in healing a broken and hurting world. I don't get a license to judge anyone or their life choices; quite the reverse: it's a sin for me to do so.
But dammit to hell! I've got to share this thing I like a lot with a bunch of hate-filled pathological monsters. AND live with the knowledge of so many children who have been damaged terribly in the name of christianity. Such as, just about every gay man and lesbian I know who had to go to church growing up.
I totally take responsibility for the sins committed by my fellow christians. I'm not asking for any special pleading to be let off the hook because I'm a homo and my particular community of faith is in many ways the best of a bad lot. But we're not all twisted and evil, I swear.
I'm gay, and I'm a Christian. By the Grace of God, I was raised in the Episcopal Church. The rector of the parish where I spent my teen years was... ummm... pretty much a flamer, and although he never proclaimed it from the pulpit, he didn't catch a lot of flack for it. And this was the late-'70's, early-'80s.
The thing I like about being a Christian is it keeps me from thinking too highly of myself. I like and I need exhortations to get off my lazy, self-satisfied ass and go out there and do God's work in healing a broken and hurting world. I don't get a license to judge anyone or their life choices; quite the reverse: it's a sin for me to do so.
But dammit to hell! I've got to share this thing I like a lot with a bunch of hate-filled pathological monsters. AND live with the knowledge of so many children who have been damaged terribly in the name of christianity. Such as, just about every gay man and lesbian I know who had to go to church growing up.
I totally take responsibility for the sins committed by my fellow christians. I'm not asking for any special pleading to be let off the hook because I'm a homo and my particular community of faith is in many ways the best of a bad lot. But we're not all twisted and evil, I swear.
9
@ Drew in Palm Springs, I'm glad to hear about your experience -- a Christian one, in the good sense of the word. But I'm curious about one thing: how does a well-meaning, LGBT-accepting Christian deal with the obvious anti-gay injunctions and rules in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament? After reading them, I think you'd pretty much have to ignore them altogether (I don't see how they could be interpreted in any way other than anti-gay); and can you do that with something that is, after all, part of the Holy Writ on which your faith is based? How does that work, for a practicing gay Christian? (I am not being ironic or anything, I am really sincerely curious. It's a topic a find interesting.)
10
@9,
I'm not Drew in Palm Springs, but I am a person of faith (Jewish) my shul includes Anyone who shows up (the former Cantor married her wife in the sanctuary). And yeah, Torah says that it is an "abomination" for a man to lay with another man as with a woman".
But it also says that anyone who breaks the Sabbath should be put to death (I would LOVE to see evangelist Xians picketing Wal-mart), that you can't eat pork, or wear mixed fibers. Says it's o.k. to beat your slave - as long as you don't kill him...
...so do we ignore them? No, we talk about these rules, we discuss the ways in which they no longer apply to society today, or find new meanings for a modern world.
@6 - thank you for the quote from Fred Clark - how true. The Torah also gives explicit instructions for the forgiving of debt, and fair treatment of the poor - funny how those aren't the verses on protest signs.
I'm not Drew in Palm Springs, but I am a person of faith (Jewish) my shul includes Anyone who shows up (the former Cantor married her wife in the sanctuary). And yeah, Torah says that it is an "abomination" for a man to lay with another man as with a woman".
But it also says that anyone who breaks the Sabbath should be put to death (I would LOVE to see evangelist Xians picketing Wal-mart), that you can't eat pork, or wear mixed fibers. Says it's o.k. to beat your slave - as long as you don't kill him...
...so do we ignore them? No, we talk about these rules, we discuss the ways in which they no longer apply to society today, or find new meanings for a modern world.
@6 - thank you for the quote from Fred Clark - how true. The Torah also gives explicit instructions for the forgiving of debt, and fair treatment of the poor - funny how those aren't the verses on protest signs.
11
The Jewish Scriptures stuff I'm not up on, but as to the New Testament, I done did some reading.
It's my understanding that most of Paul's injunctions were directed at temple prostitution, which was often coercive. And, Paul was really, really down on lust of any kind. And in the context he wrote, there weren't a lot of models for stable homosexual loving long-term relationships, so what he mostly saw were men getting it on at the baths.
But get this. A fairly well know story from the Gospels is the Roman Centurion who comes to Jesus, asking him to cure (usually translated as) "a servant whom he loved." After some back and forth, Jesus tells him that his faith has made his servant well and the servant is miraculously healed. Now they didn't have servants in Jesus' time, they had slaves. And that's the Aramaic Greek word that's usually translated as "servant." But in that story of the Roman Centurion, the word that is used is used uniquely in the New Testament: it doesn't appear anywhere else. It does appear in other contemporaneous writings, and what it means there is "the younger male lover of an older man."
So we have this man, who is highly placed in an enemy army of occupation, who comes to Jesus very upset because the younger man he loves is sick, and Jesus says, "Your faith has made him well," and heals him.
If you search on "I am not worthy that you should come under my roof but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed" you'll come up with the story I'm referring to.
And if you want to read more on the issue, check out John J. McNeill's _The Church And The Homosexual_. McNeill was a Jesuit priest who was one of the foremost authorities when he was alive on biblical languages and translation.
But most of all, and to answer your question, I'd say it's my own life as I have lived it that is the strongest bullwark. My favorite Bible verse is from Paul: "I am persuaded to believe that nothing can separate us from the wonderful love of God, neither heights nor depths nor principalities, things present nor things to come." Nothing that I can do can make God not love me, in other words.
More...
It's my understanding that most of Paul's injunctions were directed at temple prostitution, which was often coercive. And, Paul was really, really down on lust of any kind. And in the context he wrote, there weren't a lot of models for stable homosexual loving long-term relationships, so what he mostly saw were men getting it on at the baths.
But get this. A fairly well know story from the Gospels is the Roman Centurion who comes to Jesus, asking him to cure (usually translated as) "a servant whom he loved." After some back and forth, Jesus tells him that his faith has made his servant well and the servant is miraculously healed. Now they didn't have servants in Jesus' time, they had slaves. And that's the Aramaic Greek word that's usually translated as "servant." But in that story of the Roman Centurion, the word that is used is used uniquely in the New Testament: it doesn't appear anywhere else. It does appear in other contemporaneous writings, and what it means there is "the younger male lover of an older man."
So we have this man, who is highly placed in an enemy army of occupation, who comes to Jesus very upset because the younger man he loves is sick, and Jesus says, "Your faith has made him well," and heals him.
If you search on "I am not worthy that you should come under my roof but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed" you'll come up with the story I'm referring to.
And if you want to read more on the issue, check out John J. McNeill's _The Church And The Homosexual_. McNeill was a Jesuit priest who was one of the foremost authorities when he was alive on biblical languages and translation.
But most of all, and to answer your question, I'd say it's my own life as I have lived it that is the strongest bullwark. My favorite Bible verse is from Paul: "I am persuaded to believe that nothing can separate us from the wonderful love of God, neither heights nor depths nor principalities, things present nor things to come." Nothing that I can do can make God not love me, in other words.
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