Edman Chapel at Wheaton College is named for V. Raymond Edman, the evangelical college’s president from 1940 to 1965. His lesbian granddaughter, Liz Edman, is interviewed in the January issue of the newsletter of the Wheaton College Gay and Lesbian Alumni/ae Association. Liz Edman, a seminary graduate, has worked for four years as a chaplain in an inner city AIDS program and is currently working in administration at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The article features a wedding photo of her and her life partner, together with both of their fathers. Says Edman: “I think ‘evangelical’ is kind of a dirty word in the gay community and a dirty word to most people who lean left of center. And I just think it’s a good thing for people who know something of evangelical faith to kind of reclaim the concept. It doesn’t need to be something that is only owned by right wing people who want to put all queer people in concentration camps.”
Wheaton College and Westmont College alumni Paul Phillips and Jallen Rix are on the Top Ten CD Best Sellers list for CDs purchased by gays and lesbians according to a report in The Advocate, the national gay/lesbian newsmagazine. “Brave Boys” by Romanovsky and Phillips placed second and “The Sacred and the Queer” by Rix placed seventh. Phillips founded the Wheaton College Gay and Lesbian Alumni/ae Association. Rix is active in Evangelicals Concerned on the west coast.
Kirby Godsey, the president of the Southern Baptists’ second-largest university, has written a book in which he states: “whether it is global warfare in the Middle East or personal prejudice toward a gay Christian, every act of rejection is an act against God.” The Macon-based Mercer University president goes on to say that “it is immoral to account for the HIV infection as evidence of God’s wrath towards gays.” Many Baptist bookstores are refusing to stock the book.
The Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) has an on going research project to track the development of student values. Survey results show that only about 60 percent of Christian college students seriously question their values and beliefs during college years. Nonetheless, the study finds that 65 percent of freshmen at CCCU schools say that government should prohibit homosexual relations but only 43 percent say so by the time they are seniors.
The Gallup Poll finds that 44 percent of adults in the United States now are accepting of their homosexual neighbors. In 1982 that figure was only 34 percent. Women hold more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals than do men.
Jimmy Carter, while on a book tour for his Living Faith in San Francisco, said: “Jesus preached and talked against a whole gamut of sins. He never mentioned homosexuality at all.”
Two Reformed church periodicals recently have carried the Christian testimony of Paul Hillegonds, former Republican Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives. Both the Reformed Review and Perspectives featured his “journey of faith” illustrated by “the discovery of God in the lives of [three] fellow sojourners.” One of these, Republican State Representative Jim Dressel, was a decorated Vietnam War pilot. He introduced a gay rights bill in an election year and lost his reelection bid. Dressel was gay. Before he died of AIDS, he said to Hillegonds: “People are rightly concerned about how promiscuity in the gay community has led to the spread of AIDS; yet at the same time they make it so hard for us to enter openly into serious, long-term, committed relationships.” Says Hillegonds: Jim Dressel “taught me to be less judgmental about an issue I cannot fully understand — and more accepting of every one of God’s children.”
Calvin Seminary’s ousting of a distinguished visiting professor of theology [see RECORD, Winter 1997] for his written support of gay and lesbian Christians has prompted another Calvin educator, Sierd Woudstra, to write in protest. According to Woudstra, Calvin’s move was “very unfair … and a terribly shabby treatment of a gentleman guest professor from abroad. … Muzzling dissent and dis-inviting professors are tactics born of fear. The real loser in this matter … is Calvin Seminary [which has] allowed its reputation to be tarnished for quite some time to come.” Woudstra’s letter was published in Reformed periodicals in both the U.S. and Canada.
“God allows homosexuals to be sexually active within the same bonds of morality that limit heterosexual activity.” This opinion, expressed by a retired Christian Reformed Church minister, is stirring opposition within the conservative denomination. Remkes Kooistra made the statement in an article in Christian Courier, a Canadian Reformed periodical. He says: “It’s my honest opinion. … I believe there should be some room for discussion on these theological issues.”
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has announced that a simple majority of its regional bodies has voted to bar any homosexually-coupled man or woman from serving as a deacon, elder or clergy member in the 2.7-million-member denomination. The vote is the latest chapter in a 22-year-old Presbyterian debate. The revised Book of Order will limit the offices of deacon, elder and minister to those who “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage of a man and a woman, or in chastity in singleness.” The voting revealed the same North-South division that existed when, in 1861, the Presbyterians split over slavery. They did not reunite until 1983. Presbyteries in the South favored the antigay measure while presbyterlea in the Northeast voted against it. According to Roberta Hestenes, a pastor and head of the committee that wrote the antigay amendment, the majority has spoken with “a clear and biblically faithful response.” Even more conservative Presbyterian and Reformed churches maintain that they speak with clear and biblicalfaithfulness when they oppose the ordination of women (such as Hestenes) to these same offices. Some who worked against the amendment predict that a campaign for repeal will succeed in a few years. The president of the denomination’s theological seminary in Georgia said: “I think there is a sizable body of people who voted for the amendment who have a secret ambivalence about it.” Said Scott Anderson of Presbyterians for Gay and Lesbian Concerns: “The Presbyterian Church is a house divided, a church divided.”
More than 80 gay and lesbian pastors and lay leaders from the Metropolitan Community Churches participated in this year’s Robert Schuller Institute for Successful Church Leadership at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. Key speakers included the founders and pastors of evangelical super-churches such as Willow Creek Community, Saddleback Valley Community, and Skyline Wesleyan of San Diego. All three books on church leadership that the MCC’s monthly for March recommended are evangelical books, two from Zondervan and one from Thomas Nelson.
The Brethren/Mennonite Council for Lesbian and Gay Concerns reports that the sixteenth Publicly Affirming Congregation has been added to its list of gay/lesbian-supportive churches. They are located in Baltimore and Boulder, San Francisco and St. Paul, Kansas City and Kalamazoo and points between. An additional 34 churches are considered Accepting Congregations.
United Methodist Church pastors have launched a gay rights campaign by the distribution of a statement arguing for the ordination of gay men and lesbians and same-gender union rites. One of the signers, Gilbert Caldwell, is pastor of Harlem’s St. Mark’s UMC: “I am an African-American, and … we, too, know what marginalization means.” Other signers include professors from Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology, and Saint Paul School of Theology as well as ministers from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada has announced that the Reform and conservative movements of Jews are “not Judaism at all.” Some of the Orthodox rabbis were said in The New York Times to characterize their pronouncement as a response to Reform and Conservative tolerance of homosexuality and interfaith marriage, but others attributed the move to the current political debate in Israel over whether Reform and Conservative rabbis should be allowed more equality with the Orthodox who have enjoyed religious preference in the officially secular state. In their turn, Reform and Conservative rabbis argue that Jews for Jesus are not true Jews.
“Homophobia is alive and well in the black church,” according to Keith Boykin, executive director of the National Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum. He says that the Traditional Values Coalition holds seminars to push antigay indoctrination among black ministers. “Unfortunately, lesbian and gay leaders have all but conceded this territory — including the larger debate over morality and values,” he says. Boykin urges readers of The Advocate that “to be effective warriors on this new, moral battleground, more of us need to educate ourselves about God, religion, and sexuality. … the truth is that Jesus Christ said nothing negative about homosexuality. We need to spread that truth. Many of us are still worshipping at homophobic churches.”
The so-called Reformation Press of Bowie, Maryland publishes a quarterly called Capitol Area Christian News. The paper backed Buchanan for President, pushes bumper stickers that read “I BELIEVE PAULA JONES” and “FREE PAUL HILL.” Gays and lesbians are called “sodomites.” In a recent item on the murder of two women in Shenandoah National Park, editor Michael Bray wrote: “Janet Waco Reno wants to be sure they weren’t killed because of their ‘sexual orientation.’ … The problem is that 97% of the population are homophobiacs — most of them incurable! Your own editor suffers from the disease and is coming out of the closet at this very time. … We recommend a simple tax deduction for all sufferers.”
Christian Coalition is a “900-pound gorilla.” That was something that a panelist said during a recent meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association. Christian Century editor James Wall picked up on the comment and asked: “Who created this 900-pound gorilla?” He answered: “My people did,” referring to the liberal churches. Wall went on to say that “we became so secular, so partisan that we created a spiritual and moral void. … We abandoned our task as spiritual and theological leaders.” He said that the liberal churches “became so much a part of the Democratic Party and the radical left camp that we had nothing to say on our own.” Wall acknowledges that he was the whip of the Illinois delegation to the 1996 Democratic Party convention.
Conservative political analyst Laura Ingraham called gay people “sodomites” when she edited the right-wing Dartmouth Review in the 1980s. Now she says that such “callous rhetoric can wound.” Since learning of her brother’s homosexuality and seeing how caring gay men and lesbians have been in the AIDS crisis, she says her “rhetoric about homosexuality has been tempered.”
James Dobson of Focus on the Family writes in a recent newsletter: “Today’s generation has been bombarded with more evil and more dangerous ideology than any comparable age group in the history of Western nations. Dogging the young like hungry wolves are those who … would use them to revolutionize the culture, including homosexual activists.” He goes on: “A classic example of this manipulation hit my desk a few days ago in the form of an article published in The Weekly Standard. It is entitled ‘Gay-Ed for Tots,’ which describes a pro-homosexual curriculum for kindergartners and first-graders. This is the convoluted world in which we are raising our children … is entirely legal to teach perverse lifestyles to babies at taxpayers’ expense.” Examination of the actual curriculum shows that the so-called “Gay-Ed for Tots” is but an hour’s worth of discussion aimed at encouraging respect for diverse family structures
The National Education Association endorses high school level inclusion of historic aspects of homosexuality — along the lines of Black History Month. This has prompted Beverly LaHaye, head of the religious right’s 600,000-member Concerned Women of America, to send out a fund-raising appeal. She writes: “We must act to ensure [that] the innocence and purity of children we love are not destoyed … [by] forcling] our children and schools to ‘celebrate’ homosexuality.”
Jerry Falwell spoke at a “National Pastors’ Policy Briefing” in February. Lamenting that “38 percent of our people voted for Bill Clinton,” Falwell urged some 450 ministers and their wives in attendance to mobilize for the agenda of the religious right. Falwell spokesperson Mark DeMoss admitted that the briefing was, “quite frankly, a promotional tool for [Falwell’s] Liberty University.” Other speakers at the meeting were Gary Bauer of Family Research Council, Representative J. C. Watts (R., Okla.) and Senator Jesse Helms (R., N.C.).
Homophobic heterosexual men are far more likely to become sexually aroused while watching gay sex videos than are nonhomophobic heterosexual men. This was a finding of a University of Georgia psychological research team reporting in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Responses measured by a gauge detecting penile erection showed that 80 percent of the homophobic men became aroused while only one third of the nonhomophobic men did. Clinical psychologist Henry Adams led the research team and concluded: “The thing you dislike most in yourself is the kind of thing you might jump on somebody else for.”
AND FINALLY:
The full-color back-page ad in the religious right’s World magazine is for something called Worldview Academy Leadership Courses for “Christian students 13 and older.” The ad warns of dangers on both secular and Christian college campuses. It claims that “One Christian college offered a feminism class in which a professor taught students that there was no physical difference between men and women.” The ad is headlined, in big bold letters: “’TRUTH’ IS CHEAP.” Indeed.