For the record, despite my Catholic upbringing, I am not a religious person. Indeed, you might describe me as the opposite of a religious person. I just don't have the capacity for faith in anybody's creed du jour these days--I tend to use my brain for other things. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I hasten to add. I understand that religious faith is a crucial underpinning in the lives of most people, including many kossacks, and I have absolutely no problem with that. For myself, however, religion just doesn't have much appeal.
I do go to church once a year, on Christmas Eve, with my sister's family, but the experience is no less excruciating than it ever was in my youth. Indeed, it's slightly worse, due to the changes that were made to the mass a few years ago. (I will never be able to stop reflexively saying "And also with you.") So while my background has schooled me somewhat in standard Christian doctrine, I really can't be bothered to pay much attention to it.
This would make little difference if I weren't gay. However, the folks most likely to be determined to make my life and the lives of other LGBTQ people hell tend to be of the conservative Christian variety. As such, it's important that LGBTQ people keep tabs on the religious haters, because who knows what they're going to do next? Steven Payne has been using his front page status to keep us up-to-date with their more outrageous shenanigans, as well as other prolific diarists, such as librarisingnsf among others.
Well, it may be that, even in the most conservative Evangelical Protestant churches in the country, the winds of change are on the verge blowing through, reducing the level of hatred in those particular pews. A very highly respected and influential conservative Evangelical theologian last year voiced his support for the rights of LGBTQ people, including marriage equality, and he has written a new book on the subject. His name is David Gushee. You'll meet him on the other side of the orange monstrance....
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David Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He obtained his Masters of Divinity at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. According to Jonathan Merritt of the Religion News Service,
It is difficult to overstate the potential impact of Gushee’s defection. His Christian ethics textbook, Kingdom Ethics, co-authored with the late Glen Stassen, is widely respected and was named a 2004 Christianity Today book of the year. He serves as theologian-in-residence for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a coalition of 15 theological schools, 150 ministries, and 1,800 Baptist churches nationwide.
The Reverend Doctor Gushee could never be mistaken for a mainstream Episcopalian, much less a namby-pamby Unitarian-Universalist. He has been instrumental in fashioning moral doctrine for conservative Evangelical Baptists for a long time.
So it was a rather big surprise when he started saying things like this:
Here's a quote:
On the issue of LGBT identity and sexuality, the pattern by which the Bible has been interpreted for centuries, actually, I'm now convinced is wrong.
The prime mover for his change of heart? His sister is lesbian. He saw the struggles she was going through, trying to maintain her Christian faith, and this eventually turned him toward true compassion for LGBT people.
He points out the well-known difficulties associated with the interpretations of the Bible verses that have been used to condemn LGBT people age unto age, and how rank-and-file churchgoers and their pastors are not necessarily prompted to challenge those hoary interpretations, because they know no better, or old prejudices keep them from thinking that they need to. He points out that the hostility Evangelicals have directed at LGBT people is at variance to Jesus' principal message of universal, unconditional love. (Well, duh!) He has written a book called Changing Our Mind, to try to spur discussion about the treatment of LGBT people in Evangelical churches, and how to make it more humane. There is no question that this is an uphill struggle, but Gushee is actively pushing an agenda of change for the church.
Need I even mention that the flying monkeys have been cued? Said Rev. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (where Gushee got his Masters degree and taught for a while), Gushee's new crusade is "tragic and causes me lots of grief." Said Professor Robert Gagnon at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, "Dr. Gushee has ignored nearly all the major arguments against his embarrassingly bad exegesis." And so on. I can only imagine what might be the opinions of Tony Perkins, Brian Brown, Peter LaBarbera and others whose stock in trade is hatred of LGBT people. Anti-LGBT bigotry is so ingrained into the garden variety conservative Evangelical, it will take a very long time to even begin to counteract this attitude. Gushee's book is just the first step in a very long journey.
Again, Gushee's Bible-parsing is not something that interests me a whole lot, but there is a significantly large community in the U. S. that lives by such parsing. In that community, Gushee's work could release many LGBTQ youth from their lives of desperation in conservative Evangelical churches around the country. It's the first light of hope that this last bastion of hatred could change from being a hostile territory to something much less malevolent. So even in the world of conservative Evangelical Christianity, which has a reputation of being a very dark place for LGBTQ people, a little light may shine, and the winds of change may bring fresh air to breathe.
And now, on to the comments!
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January 6, 2015
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