“AIDS: An Evangelical Perspective” by Ron Sider, The Christian Century, January 6-13, 1988.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
This essay’s subtitle begins with an indefinite article. It would be a mistake if The Century’s rather liberal readership inferred – as it yet might – that the director of Evangelicals for Social Action presents the evangelical perspective on AIDS. Still, Sider does use the term in an unqualified and inclusive way. What he says, of course, does not reflect all views of even ESA members. But it’s worse than just a mistake if gay men with AIDS, their families and friends, find no better evangel than Sider’s homophobia and heterosexism. In a recent ESA membership drive, Sider wrote that he was “frustrated and embarrassed” because most people think “the so-called leaders of the ‘Christian right’ speak for all Christians. You and I have been painted by a very broad brush”. He therefore should be able to imagine at least a little of how homosexuals feel after being hit by his own very broad brush.
Sider’s complaint is that “Evangelicals should be able … to condemn homosexual practice as a sinful lifestyle without being charged with homophobia or blamed for many of the problems emerging in the AIDS epidemic”. In demographic ignorance or a mean spirit, he contends that “no matter what Hollywood or Greenwich Village says … I insist on the right to say that and to seek to shape public policy in ways consistent with that belief without being called a bigot”. So did Christian slaveholders, segregationists and anti-Semites. So do Christian anti-feminists and Christian apartheid advocates. Sider rightly views these as bigots. He seems sensitive enough to say that hearing of “an evangelical chaplain who began every initial conversation with gay AIDS patients with a harsh denunciation of the sin of homosexual practice … [makes] one want to scream”, but Sider himself merely delays such attack for a later visit. At bottom, Sider’s is a more insidious homophobia and heterosexism. He’s not simply another unthinking and uncaring fundamentalist. What’s so tragically wrong with his perspective on homosexuality and AIDS is that he should know and care better. He’s quite capable of it on other issues – even on AIDS. His article is not really about Sider’s perspective on AIDS; it’s about his perspective on homosexuality – a blind spot. This is very clear from the way he explains AIDS in blacks, Hispanics and female prostitutes as over against the way he explains AIDS in gay men. With reasoned compassion, Sider argues that “the unusually high proportion of blacks and Hispanics in the population of drug addicts, including intravenous drug users with AIDS, is surely related to the incredibly high unemployment rate for black and Hispanic teen-agers, which in turn is related to racism and economic injustice. Similarly,” he asserts, “the increasing number of female prostitutes with AIDS is related to female poverty and the tragedy of battered women”. If Sider can uncover this systemic complexity in drug abuse, female prostitution and AIDS, why can’t he just as well see that closets, unstable relations, promiscuity and AIDS in many gay men are just as “surely related” to homophobia and heterosexism of family, church and the dominant society? Sider can resort to this argumentation in matters of street crime, 60% of which is perpetrated by black juveniles. When 2 million children die of measles every year it isn’t hard for Sider to see the complicity of militarism and greed of people half a world away. Each year 50,000 people die as a result of acid rain and Sider can easily blame greedy industrialists. What has gone awry when it comes to Sider’s refusal to see the same sorts of complicity at work in issues of AIDS and gay men?
Overlooking the fact that the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s was a heterosexual as well as a gay male phenomenon – though certainly not all in either group participated – Sider misrepresents gay people by linking AIDS to promiscuity. Forced to hide their homosexuality, of course many men sought anonymous contacts and became promiscuous. But even today, Josh McDowell finds that 43% of even evangelical 18-year-olds are having sexual intercourse! Sider must understand that systemic injustice is the background for much of what he criticizes. He must learn that those gay men who have already died and those who are now being diagnosed with AIDS were infected before they knew the danger in even a monogamous relationship with an unknowingly infectious individual. The term “AIDS” itself has been around for fewer years than the 8-year average length of incubation of the virus. Sider fails to grasp that most gay men who are already HIV-positive were simply trying – in spite of their homophobic upbringing and the counter-productive “help” of much of gay liberationism – to meet their own unasked for basic human needs for deep sexual intimacy, most of which has nothing to do with genital acts.
The Gospels tell of only one instance (Mark 3:1-6) when Jesus displayed wrath, the strongest penetrating expression of anger. Intense indignation flashed from his eyes as he gazed at religious leaders who refused to see that human need takes precedence over legalistic use of Mosaic Law. The obstinate stupidity of their closed minds and selfish hearts both enraged and grieved him. Jesus’ purpose was to show mercy to a man with a deformed arm. But it was the Sabbath. That didn’t matter to Jesus. It mattered, though, to the Pharisees who saw in Jesus’ act of kindness only an excuse to join with secular lobbies to kill him. They resisted any acknowledgment that the Sabbath was made for the sake of human beings instead of the other way round. Since it was not an emergency, couldn’t Jesus have postponed his act of mercy? Evidently love does not postpone legalistically. Since life was not at stake, couldn’t Jesus have postponed mercy? Evidently Jesus thought that life was indeed at stake. When we dare ask whether sexuality was made for the sake of human beings or the other way round, today’s conservative religious leaders respond as did their predecessors. But there is something even more evil in the attitude of today’s Pharisees. Their ancestors seemingly demanded only that a desire for a second arm be met the following day. Today’s Pharisees demand that the need for embrace in a second pair of arms be forfeited for the rest of one’s days.