For “the key to the next 30 years of gay America” writes The New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, “keep your eye on the churches.” In an essay in The Advocate, the national gay and lesbian news magazine, Sullivan states: “No civil rights movement has ever succeeded in this country without the support of the churches. They provide the moral ballast and spiritual witness that raises a civil rights movement from being a footnote in interest-group politics to being a moral and human crusade. And this is particularly true of the gay civil rights movement. By far the most common reason people give to oppose equality for gay men and lesbians is a religious reason. Until we have tackled those religious reasons at their core, the political opposition will be impossible to fully dislodge.” Sullivan notes that “for the past three decades many in the gay civil rights leadership ignored this truth. They were not only theologically ignorant, they were actively dismissive of religion and even sacrilegious in their public demonstrations.” He concludes that “the troops in the pews” will “increasingly form the vanguard of the cultural and spiritual war” and that “in 30 years they will be the soldiers we remember.” Sullivan is openly gay, Roman Catholic, and the author of Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con and Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality.
“Should gay men and lesbians seek the endorsement of organized religion in order to win civil rights?” This question was asked of Advocate readers in The Advocate Poll this summer. The responses: 43 percent agreed that “Gays and lesbians should work with religious institutions on issues like same-sex marriage but keep a strict boundary between the religious and civil aspects of those issues,” 33 percent said “Yes. We have to recognize the influence of organized religion in civil matters and win those forces over to our side,” and 24 percent said “No. Religion should be kept as far away as possible from issues of civil equality.”
A 1997 Christianity On-line survey and a 1996 Gallup Poll survey find that 69 percent of Christians and 44 percent of Americans in general say that homosexual relations between consenting adults should not be legal while 64 percent of Christians and 84 percent of Americans in general say that homosexuals should have equal rights in the workplace.
According to 51 percent of American Roman Catholics in a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, “a practicing homosexual” can be a “good Catholic.” They say a person may be a “good Catholic” and have sex before marriage (83 percent) or divorce and remarry without church approval (85 percent).
“The number one threat to your family and to our country today” according to a fund-raising letter from Alliance Defense Fund, “is the radical homosexual agenda.” Urging Christians to send “your generous gift very soon” so that ADF’s “Legal ‘S.W.A.T.’ Teams” can be put into action “within 24 hours of the passage of a domestic partnership ordinance … or even before,” ADF’s president Alan E. Sears explains: “We see the big picture — where the troops are massed, where the next firefight will likely break out, and what weapons are needed for victory.” Sears, identified as a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice and “one of the world’s foremost experts in the prosecution of obscenity,” has endorsements from Right-wing fundamentalists Don Wildmon, Bill Bright, D. James Kennedy, and Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. Says Bright: “I truly believe we are fighting for the very survival of the gospel and of evangelicalism in America today.”
Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, says that his worst-ever editorial judgment was publishing an antigay selection from a book by evangelical Quaker Richard Foster. “If there is one article I could take back from three decades of publishing, that would be the one,” says Wallis. He says he didn’t give that decision enough thought. Addressing a meeting of conservative religionists recently, Wallis told them that blaming gay men and lesbians for the breakdown of the family is “stupid.” He says that “not a single person in the room objected when I said it’s ridiculous to blame gays and lesbians for heterosexual dysfunction.” Wallis is a founder, along with sociologist Tony Campolo and other evangelical activists, of a group aimed at countering the Religious Right. It’s known as Call to Renewal.
The Episcopal Church has apologized to homosexuals for years of rejection and mistreatment. The statement of apology was approved by both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies (clergy and lay leaders) at the 2.5-million-member denomination’s summer convention. Meanwhile, a group of bishops representing about 10 percent of Episcopalians says that same-sex marriage and the continuing ordination of gay and lesbian clergy will force them to consider leaving the denomination.
The Anglican bishops of Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Lesotho) have apologized to homosexuals, saying that “the harshness and hostility to homosexual people within our church [are] neither acceptable nor … in accord with our Lord’s love of all people. … We repent of this attitude and ask forgiveness of many homosexual people who have been hurt, rejected and marginalized because of this deep-seated prejudice.” At the same time, the bishops rejected all sex outside of heterosexual marriage!
Kalamazoo Christian High School has terminated the 30-year career of a teacher who disagreed with the school over how to view his son’s gayness. The school board says it did not renew his contract “because he takes a position on monogamous homosexual relationships that [the board] believes is unbiblical.” Responding to news of the matter in the Christian Reformed Church’s The Banner, a reader writes: “Let me get this straight. I read that a Christian school teacher was relieved of his job because he publicly declared that he loved and supported his homosexual son. … How nasty. How devoid of compassion. How smug we all are — all in the name of doing the right thing. Am I missing something?”
The oldest Mennonite congregation in North America has been expelled from its denomination for accepting lesbians and gay men. The action was the result of a mail ballot in which 80 percent of the delegates from 52 congregations in the Philadelphia area voted to oust the Germantown Mennonite Church. The congregation has some 120 members of whom 10 to 15 percent are openly homosexual. In a letter of protest, a heterosexual Mennonite from rural Pennsylvania wrote that many years ago her father was denied membership in a Mennonite church “because, as a banker, he wrote insurance policies.” After that no longer officially barred him, he was denied membership for “wearing a tie!” She concludes: “Jesus too, was condemned and suffered ‘outside the city gate.’ May we with the writer to the Hebrews (13:13) ‘go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured.”’
The United Church of Christ has appointed a national staff minister for lesbian and gay concerns. William R. Johnson, who was the first openly gay man to be ordained in the UCC and who has been the HIV/AIDS ministry specialist for the 1.5-million-member church will fill the new post.
The Disciples of Christ denomination has voted to study whether to allow “the participation of gay and lesbian persons in the full life and ministry of the church.”
America’s Roman Catholic bishops have issued a pastoral letter saying that “God does not love someone any less simply because he or she is homosexual.” The document, “Always Our Children,” goes on to explain that “homosexual orientation [is] experienced as a given, not something freely chosen” and “by itself, a homosexual orientation cannot be considered sinful, for morality presumes the freedom to choose” but that homosexuals should not have “genital sexual involvement” with anyone of the same sex. To parents of gay and lesbian children, the bishops say: “First, don’t break off contact; don’t reject your child.” Parents are urged to “accept and love” their gay and lesbian children.
The University of Notre Dame has adopted a statement supportive of its gay and lesbian students. It reads in part: “We welcome all people, regardless of color, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social or economic class, and nationality … precisely because of Christ’s calling to treat others as we desire to be treated. We value gay and lesbian members of this community as we value all members of this community.” The statement will be published in all major campus publications.
Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit endorses a new Saint Mary’s Press book with these words: “Any reader of this book will learn not just to accept or tolerate gay, lesbian, or bisexual people, but to rejoice in them and the special gifts they bring to all of us.” The book is by liturgical theologian Edward F. Gabriele. The author says that his book, Cloud Days & Fire Nights, “has been forty years in the making. … Ever since I was very young, I knew that something was different about me. From early in life, I took an ‘exodus’ from myself and wandered like an exile in many deserts.” He says that “Today I count myself as a gay man, a disciple of Jesus, a professional theologian, and an ordinary human being trying to be at peace with myself, with my God, and with my companions on this earthly pilgrimage.”
The new off-Broadway AIDS musical, The Last Session, is the work of Steve Schalchlin, a Texas-born Baptist minister’s son (who has AIDS), and his collaborater and companion of 12 years, Brooklynite Jim Brochu, (who is HIV-negative). In a cover interview in A&U, “America’s AIDS Magazine,” Brochu says the musical is about “the conflict between the Christian boy and his hero — who is a gay man. …. The thing I wanted to write about most was the conflict between gay and Christian. All the people who say these worlds cannot coexist — they can.” Says Schalchlin: “It also tackles homophobia in the fundamentalist Christian community which is not only destructive to young people who are being raised in that environment but destructive of whatever testimony they are trying to bring to the world.” The Village Voice review of The Last Session states: “Gideon, a songwriter depressed about his condition, decides to end his life, not counting on the arrival of a guardian angel disguised as a warbling born-again Christian.”
Trashing it as “The Unisex Bible” or “The Feminist Bible” or “The Stealth Bible,” leaders of the male-supremecist Religious Right have succeeded in stopping the publication of the New International Version’s inclusive language edition of the Bible. Since the NIV accounts for almost half of all North American Bible sales, the publisher, Zondervan, could not afford to overlook the rage of Right-wing alarmists. Opposition has been mounted by the fundamentalist World magazine, Focus on the Family, R. C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and Baptist leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Paige Patterson and Albert Mohler. The editor of World insisted that the changes in the NIV “would misquote God.” He editorialized: “Don’t misquote God.” What they fail to realize is that inclusive language Bibles are nothing new. Bible translation scholars point out that William Tyndale and, later, the King James Bible translaters used inclusive terms to render masculine gender terms. The new NIV merely sought to replace “man” with “people” or “human beings” where the original Hebrew and Greek meant both men and women. There was no attempt to go further and use inclusive language for references to God. The Right-wing hostility has escalated to a point that NIV Bibles have been torn up with rotary drills by protesters.
Among the supporters of the inclusive language NIV are evangelical scholars such as Kenneth Barker, Grant R. Osborne, Ronald Youngblood, David Scholer, Douglas Groothius, and others at all the major evangelical seminaries. Says respected British preacher-author John R. W. Stott, in his support of the inclusive NIV: “When man means human being, without any intention to exclude women, and when the use of brothers was never intended to exclude sisters, then to retain such gender-specific words would be offensive. Even worse, it would actually misrepresent the meaning of the biblical text. The revisers have done their work with skill and sensitivity, and without in the process developing a clumsy, ponderous, or repetitive style.” After discussing the weaknesses in the arguments of the opposition, Gordon-Conwell New Testament professor Aida Besancon Spencer writes: “All this money and time will be expended so that not one more child should read ‘So God created human beings in his image’ or that John ‘came to tell people about the light. Through him all people could hear about the Light and believe.”’ Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Grant Osborne reminds the anti-inclusivists of Paul’s evangelistic principle of “becom[ing] all things to all people so that by all possible means” some might hear and believe.
If such was the fuss made at this level of inclusive language translation, what would have been the outcry if the NIV had moved into feminine terms for God or Jesus? Yet Christians from Clement of Alexandria through Augustine and John Donne and all the way to this century’s founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, A. B. Simpson, have followed the Bible in writing of God and Christ in both masculine and feminine terms. As Simpson put it, Jesus “is just as much a woman as He is a man.” And to be really literal, we’d call the Holy Spirit “she” (the Hebrew is the feminine ruach) or “it” (the New Testament Greek is the neuter pneuma). C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape knew that the devils can capitalize on the biblical and historical ignorance of some Christians.
Bible scholar Catherine Kroeger of Christians for Biblical Equality says: “We are finding ways and means of bringing in the NIV Inclusive [from Britain]. Now that they can’t have it, everybody wants it.” In February, a conference on inclusivity in Bible translation will be held at Wheaton College, sponsored by the International Bible Society, the United Bible Societies, Wycliffe Bible Translaters and Zondervan.
AND FINALLY:
The evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, has spoken out against any ecclesiastical support of committed relationships for same-sex couples. He also argues for church acceptance of marriages for the divorced, even though as church historian Martin E. Marry notes, “the scriptural texts prohibit remarriage of divorced persons far more frequently than they criticize homosexual behavior.” Defending the Bishop of Birmingham, who is marrying a divorcee, Carey says: “It is very sad that people can deprive him of the love and joy in this relationship.”