The politics of Barack Obama's anti-gay activist and self-professed fan of Jesus of Nazareth Donnie McClurkin have already been beaten into a coma. Beyond McClurkin, however, lies an embarrassing and difficult political reality: that much of "our base" in the South includes deeply conservative people who oppose the liberal policies favored by many on both coasts and in the more liberal enclaves of the Midwest. This opposition stems largely from the religious "values" (a degraded word if American English has ever produced one) of that most religious and most conservative section of our republic. I conclude that, in respectful disagreement with Pastor Dan's well-written diary, we must cope with organized, right-wing Christianity as an ideological opponent rather than merely to declare it to be "false goods" and pull it off of our collective shelf.
This is not a "call out" diary; I respect Pastor Dan and consider him, if his writings at all reflect his character, a very good man with whom I have an intellectual and philosophical disagreement.
He is a Christian and a religious minister; I am neither. One might be tempted to discount the views of a secularist like myself on the grounds of lack of expertise, that "Christianity" is what its most eloquent proponents claim it to be and that he is just such a qualified proponent to state what "Christianity" is and is not. A brief overview of Western Civilization, however, renders that proposal moot. The graveyards of multiple continents are filled with the victims and perpetrators of murders and wars, mass and petty, over who "gets" to decide what Christianity "is." One such murderer was Jean Calvin, whose murderous theocratic rule in Geneva might make even Calvinist Fred Phelps blanch. Among the victims of his violence was Miguel Serveto, who dared to challenge the Trinity and died when Calvin had him killed. The Five Points of Calvinism can be recited by many a American Christian child even in 2007 America.
Other Christian advocates of murder never got around to pulling the trigger or swinging the axe themselves. Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies remains a classic of Protestant criticism of the Jewish community, though probably less popular today than when Hitler's largely Lutheran army - decked with standard (HAT TIP comment below) beltbuckles stating "Gott Mit Uns" - and other special forces put most of Luther's agenda towards the Jewish community into action: burning down synagogues and Jewish businesses, confiscating Jewish lands, etc.
Calvin and Luther form the intellectual backbone of most of Protestant history; there were of course other Protestant reformers of less bloody appetites but men such as John Knox and John Wesley owe large intellectual debts to Calvin and to a lesser extent to Luther. Most of today's American Protestants are children of Calvin and, to a lesser extent, Luther. Certainly the hard core of Calvinism lives well in the South and in other enclaves such as Grand Rapids, Michigan and a few other places, though Calvinism is not the only tradition to inform right-wing Southern religion, by any stretch. Calvin were the intellectual forbear of the Puritans, which later became the Congregationalists and, ultimately, the United Church of Christ.
Of course the Protestant tradition was a reaction to the Church of Rome, which considered itself authoritative and still does, of course. Eastern Christianity is diverse and difficult to sum up in a paragraph, but its diverse conceptions of Church authority in different administrative structures offers yet a different set of authorities who claim the right to say what "Christianity" is - sometimes with an emphasis on different Church councils of bishops.
None of these churches, save the most liberal bleeding edge of North American churches and a few truly separated and bona fide "Non-Christian" churches such as the Unitarian Universalist Association, have ever made any normalization of same-sex relationships in their sacramental, administrative or moral instructions and teachings. While these different churches use approximately the same Bible (not exactly, approximately), they have very different ways of interpreting that Bible, subordinating some parts of that Bible to other parts or to Holy Tradition/Magisterium, etc.
It's possible that there has been no Christianity before Pastor Dan, that he is the first Christian and the rest were erroneous pikers since the first Christian "churches" were formed in Armenia and Jerusalem and Antioch and Corinth, etc. But secularists like me - even if trained as lawyers, as I sadly am - are not likely to entertain a "brief-writing" definition of Christianity, wherein the parts of the scriptures that support decency, fairness, generosity, tolerance, etc., get to be "authority" and others do not. Mind you, I don't know that Pastor Dan's formulation is worse than the 10,000 or 10 million that preceded it, only that it's claim to state what Christianity "is" is no greater than that of the views of Pope Benedict in Rome, the Coptic Pope in Egypt, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Gordon B. Hinckley in Salt Lake, Pat Robertson in Virginia Beach or Donnie McClurkin wherever his hatemobile drives him.
Secularists like me are likely to judge Christian civilization, churches and people according to their deeds, or by their "fruits" as some would have it. Christian civilization made peace with slavery; indeed, the most religious parts of American society - the South - then and now instituted and fought bloody wars to keep slavery, and fights to day to keep as much of the badges and incidents of slavery and Jim Crow as it can. True - a few northern ministers including a lot of Unitarians marched in the South to fight the immoral, depraved wreckage caused by millions of good Christians and their leaders. To this day, much of the Religious Right's (literally dying) leadership emeriti cut their teeth smashing that very movement for justice and freedom. So a few hundred ministers from Boston and Seattle and Brooklyn against 40 million White Southern Hyper-Christian revanchists don't amount to much. It took a nation of millions to hold justice back, and those millions were faithful Christians who tolerated no immorality, no perversion, no atheist scum like me. By their acts I judge their community.
Black American Christianity is innocent of racism, of course; it formed a bulwark to defend Black Americans against the racist "Christian values" of their neighbors. But to pretend that Black Christianity - largely homophobic, like most of Christian history has been - is not "Christianity" is again to engage in a brief-writing exercise rather than to observe the Christian reality on the ground. A majority of Black American Christians find homosexuality objectionable, unacceptable, to'evah to use the Hebrew term. Not all do, certainly. But the hostility of the overwhelming bulk of Christian civilization to queer people and queer life and queer happiness is real. Defining the queer-hostile sections of the Christian Bible (whichever one, whichever canon, whichever language and translation) out of existence is Pastor Dan's right over his own life, but it has no valence whatsoever to anyone who does not already accept both his specific reasoning and his specific authority to make this pronouncement. Most of the rest of Christendom, with different accents and different languages and different heroes and heritages, is looking queerly at him, wondering how he got so incredibly far away from the Christian flock on these points.
The reason that I, a secularist, took the time (that Pastor Dan says that his critics really shouldn't really have) is that the theocratic has never truly left Christianity. It's nice if a few Quakers and Anabaptists and modern Congregationalists are willing to let go of the apparatus of government to avoid inflicting their own Genevas-lite on the rest of us, but the rest of us need to keep our powder dry and our bloodstreams well-caffeinated against the Christian authoritarians and, indeed, Christofascists by a technical definition of fascism who love their theological vanities, their government payoffs and their ability to "lord it over" us unwashed atheists, agnostics, heretics, infidels, apostates, etc.
While it is decent for Pastor Dan to try to make his church and his faith a safe place for queer people, I am more focused on the indecency of his co-religionists. Intently focused. Indeed, the Christofascist threat is why I left the Libertarian Party and joined the Democrats. Secularists like me are focused on the other 3 million-odd square miles of land that lie outside the churches, seeking to keep that space safe for us and ours - whether we are straight Dads like me or queer or anything else.
I wish Pastor Dan were right, but right-wing American Christianity remains the single greatest threat to my freedom. The folks who read the parts of the Christian Bible [sic] that Pastor Dan did not quote are ready willing and indeed able to use those passages as the intellectual and political equivalent of Bull Connor's dogs against us. So I will remain vigilant against Christianity until Pastor Dan's flock is larger than Pastor Robertson's, Pastor Dobson's, Pastor Falwell's, Pastor Bakker's, Pastor Graham's, until people know Pastor Dan's name and don't know Bill Donohue's, until an open atheist has a shot at coming in above Dennis Kucinich in a Democratic primary for President, or at least keeping her job as a fucking blogger for a such a candidate.
When Pastor Dan's view of Christianity supplants the views of 30-40% of this country's theocratic Christian core, on that day I will pen him an "You were right, I was wrong" letter in gold ink and deliver it to him in front of the camera and audience of his choice. Until then, his words give me comfort about his character, but no comfort about Christianity's character at all.
UPDATE: I just realized that Pastor Dan will be away for a while today per his diary. Accordingly, I fear that I may not have shown him due process. Please assume that had Pastor Dan been available, he might have offered an eloquent rebuttal to the foregoing, or perhaps not judged it worth his time. But I feel a little bad as if I sandbagged him.