Max Lucado, 11-million best selling author and pastor of Oak Hills Church of Christ in San Antonio, was interviewed in a recent issue of Christianity Today. Asked how he’d assess the state of the evangelical movement today, Lucado replied: “We’re struggling to deal with some tough questions, like abortion. We don’t know whether to be militant against a homosexual or work side by side with homosexuals.” He went on to say that Jesus “lived in a society [where] treatment of the less fortunate was just horrible. But I don’t see Jesus being politically active.” As Lucado sees it, Christians should so live that people would see them and want to follow Christ, even if we never “verbalize that we are Christians, or put a fish sign on our car.”
Marsha Stevens “is a nightmare for conservative Christians: she is a Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, God-fearing, lesbian Christian.” That’s the way the mainline periodical, The Christian Century, headlined a recent feature article on the Jesus Movement composer and singer best known for her Christian folk song, “For Those Tears I Died.” She wrote it when she was 16, back in the 1960s, and it’s been translated into 12 languages, appearing in many song books and hymnals. Stevens was once very popular on the contemporary Christian music circuit but since coming out as a lesbian she has been unwelcome in establishment evangelicalism. She now sings her praise and gospel songs in mainly gay/lesbian venues – including concerts at both east and west coast conferences of Evangelicals Concerned.
Interviewed by Lutheran New Testament professor Mark Allan Powell, Stevens notes that “Jesus did not say we’d be known by our righteous standards or low divorce rate or obedient children. … He said we’d be known by our love.” She says that too many gays have only negative associations with Christians. She recounts an incident at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Training Camp last summer, where a missionary challenged her ministry. Stevens responded: “It’s not for you to decide whether I’m a wheat or a tare. … I love our Lord and I will sing for him and witness for him till the day I die. Then, if he says I’m a tare and sends me to hell, so be it. It isn’t your concern.”
Singer Jeremy Enigk, of the rock band Sunny Day Real Estate, interviewed in The New York Press, was asked if he gets tired answering questions about his being a Christian. “No, not at all,” he replied, though he said it does bother him when people “judge me … because of the choice that I made, when I became a Christian.” The interviewer admits: “When I heard you were a Christian my first reaction was, ‘Oh, no!’” but he goes ahead and asks what it means to be a Christian. Enigk says : ” a Christian is basically a follow of Christ. … When I’m lost I can be found. When I’m weary I can be rested.” He’s asked what he’d do if someone came up to him and revealed that he was gay. Enigk says it’s already happened. “I basically told this person that I’m not here to sit here and judge. … But he was … expecting me to disagree with him, and he was prepared to say I’m not going to listen to anything you ever do anymore because you are a Christian. And I was like, what? Who cares? Then don’t. He judged me before I judged him.”
“Tinky Winky Comes Out of the Closet.” That was the heading of the “Parents Alert” in the February issue of Jerry Falwell’s National Liberty Journal. The alert warned that while this purple Teletubby “has been the subject of debate since the series premiered in England in 1997,” there is “now further evidence that the creators of the series intend for Tinky Winky to be a gay role model.” Falwell’s warning about Tinky Winky became a joke in the national media. USA Today editorialized: “If the Teletubby known as Tinky Winky is gay because it’s purple, then the red Teletubby Po must be a Marxist, orange Laa-Laa a Protestant militant, and green Dipsy an eco-terrorist.” An editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle asserted: “It’s ludicrous that anyone would have to defend Tinky Winky, who is about as sexual as a Furby.” The San Antonio Express News political cartoonist drew the Teletubby standing next to the “Tubbytelevangelist,” a portly depiction of Falwell. The cartoon carried this caption: “Which one is more suitable for children?”
Mel White, who used to write for Falwell and is now a nationally-known gay activist, has appealed on the Internet for a gentler tone on Falwell: “Treating Jerry like the village idiot … hurts our cause.” White says that “Without meaning anyone harm, Pastor Jerry has become one of the six or seven primary sources of misinformation about God’s gay and lesbian children. He doesn’t understand let alone believe that his false and inflammatory rhetoric leads (directly and indirectly) to discrimination, suffering, and death.”
Falwell now claims that he has never seen the pre-school television series and points out that the original item in his “Parents Alert” was written by his senior editor and not by himself. But he nonetheless maintains that Tinky Winky is a subtle role-modeling of “the gay lifestyle [that] is damaging to children.”
In the meantime, Falwell’s gay cousin says the attack on Tinky Winky was too much. Brett Beasley says “This whole thing set me off. It’s like, hello, Jerry.” Though Falwell conducted Beasley’s grandmother’s funeral, he has told the gay press: “The name Brett Beasley is not familiar to me, though my mother was a Beasley.”
D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries told his followers “We are winning the culture wars!” at his “Reclaiming America for Christ” rally in the Broward County Convention Center in February. During the conference, “ex-gay” movement strategist Janet Folger emceed a “Homosexual Panel” featuring “ex-gays” John and Anne Paulk. Robert H. Knight of the Religious Right’s Family Research Council warned that “The end goal of gay activism is the criminalization of Christianity” and accused gays of advocating pederasty: “It is about going after the kids, ultimately,” he said. “It’s about teaching them in schools that gay is okay, and they might be gay and if they’ve even had a single thought about it,you might as well try it, otherwise you may damage your self-esteem.”
The newsletter of Family Research Council has attacked Rep. Tom Davis, chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee for “lending legitimacy to radical homosexual groups.” Davis had met with members of the gay Log Cabin Republicans.
GOP pundit Mary Matalin, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on February 14, said: “I will demonize Republicans that gay-bash in 2000. If we don’t get off that, we don’t deserve to be a majority party. Give me Tinky.”
Elizabeth Dole has hired pollster Linda DiVall who has done work for the Human Rights Campaign for gay and lesbian civil rights. This so upset Christian Coalition’s former national operations director Chuck Cunningham that he sent off an e-mail to many top conservative activists saying that Dole’s hiring of “the left’s favorite Republican pollster … sends a deafening message to conservatives: Get to the back of the bus and shut up!”
Donna Red Wing of the Human Rights Campaign for gay and lesbian civil rights was one of two recipients of the Interfaith Alliance’s new Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award in April. The other honoree was Rev. Chriss H. Doss of Samford University’s Center for the Study of Law and the Church. Former President Gerald R. Ford is one of the six-person committee responsible for selecting award recipients for the alliance that represents a broad spectrum of religions.
Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, founders of the Moral Majority, have come out with a book in which they criticize the Religious Right. They argue that the movement is using the wrong tools in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. The book, published by Zondervan, is entitled Blinded by Might: Why the Religious Right has Not Changed America.
David Gergen, editor at large for U.S. News & World Report, is urging the Religious Right to “Call off the War on Gays.” Gergen says that “denunciations of gays … is almost as mysterious as homosexuality itself” and that “inflammatory attacks … contradict the Christian message of love and reconciliation.”
A “Thriving Gay Underground” is said to exist at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention. According to the newsletter of the Southern Baptist gay and lesbian caucus, the gay seminarians’ network has the support of at least two heterosexual faculty members and one administrator. The seminary is otherwise in the grip of anti-gay fundamentalists under the direction of President Al Mohler.
The top 10 best and top 10 worst schools for students who are gay or lesbian are listed in the new Princeton Review Guide: The Best 311 Colleges – 1999. The lists were generated from a survey of 56,000 students from across the nation. The top 10 gay-friendly schools are: 1. St. John’s College (Santa Fe, NM), 2. The Cooper Union (New York City), 3. Warren Wilson College (Asheville, NC), 4. Marlboro College (Marlboro, VT), 5. St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD), 6. Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA), 7. Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY), 8. Hendrix College (Conway, AR), 9. College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME), 10. Boston Conservatory (Boston). The 10 worst schools are: 1. Valparaiso University (Valparaiso , IN), 2. Morehouse College (Atlanta), 3. Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA), 4. University of Rhode Island (Kingston, RI), 5. Westminster College (New Wilmington, PA), 6. University of the South (Sewanee, TN), 7. Baylor University (Waco, TX), 8. Miami University (Oxford, OH), 9. Hamilton College (Clinton, NY), 10. Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN).
It is surprising how many of the gay-friendly schools are in small towns. Each list is a mix of church-related and secular institutions. The listings are not complete since such anti-gay schools as Bob Jones University, Moody Bible Institute, and Pat Robertson’s Regent University are not listed with the gay-hostile schools.
Indiana Wesleyan is not a gay-friendly school. IW’s president, James Barnes, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that although the school is looking for more minority students, it does not want gay students. In this regard it resembles many other conservative Christian colleges. Gay and lesbian students are not welcome on most such campuses. The Chronicle article points out, however, that one conservative Christian college that does allow openly gay students to enroll and even has support groups for them is Calvin College, an institution of the Christian Reformed Church.
Hope College’s dean of chapel, J. Ben Patterson, stirred up controversy this spring by inviting an “ex-gay” speaker to address the students and faculty. According to Patterson, all homosexuality is sin. He says he believes homosexuals can change. But others in the Hope College family resented Patterson’s presenting only one side on the issue. The Hope Student Congress voted 12-11 to invite Christian gay activist Mel White to present the other side. The college is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America.
“Is Change Possible?” The fundamentalist magazine, Moody, invited “ex-gay” advocate Bob Davies of Exodus International to answer this question in its March-April issue. Responding to the question, Davies stated: “There is a way out. Thousands of formerly gay people are now leading changed lives as Christian believers, chaste in singleness or as heterosexual spouses and parents.” Even though Davies does not say that these people have overcome their homosexual orientation, the magazine goes on to claim in an article on the American Psychiatric Associations rejection of so-called reparative therapy for homosexuals: “those who have overcome homosexuality disagree.”
A 1997 rule for ordained leaders and ministers in the Presbyterian Church (USA) mandated “liv[ing] in fidelity within the marriage of a man and woman or in chastity in singleness.” Now, by a 4-1 vote, the Presbytery of Southern New England has decided that an openly gay man who lives with another gay man may be in leadership at the First Presbyterian Church of Stamford, Connecticut. The 38-year-old man, a financial adviser and a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, considers questions about the details of his personal or sexual life to be inappropriate for public discussion. Those who led the opposition to the ordination are considering an appeal.
First Presbyterian Church was once pictured on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post because of its unusual architecture. It’s known as “the fish church” because of its shape.
A regional board of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has ruled that a minister in New York’s Hudson Valley did not violate church rules in performing a union ceremony for two gay men. The decision now allows such ceremonies to take place throughout the region which includes some 95 churches. Anti-gay Presbyterians are threatening to appeal the decision.
The United Methodist Church’s Northern Illinois Conference has found a pastor guilty of disobeying a 1996 church rule and has suspended him from all ministry in the UMC. His offense: he officiated at a holy union ceremony for a gay couple from his congregation. Gregory Dell is now out of a job. The prosecutor, another Methodist minister, told the jury of clergy at the beginning of the trial: “Unless we are going to parse the meaning of ‘is,’” the jury will find Dell guilty.” He went on to claim that Dell’s “acts are destructive. They hurt people.” That was not the opinion of those who have found understanding and acceptance through Dell’s ministry to the 30 percent of his congregation that are gay and lesbian.
James M. Wall of The Christian Century writes: “Somewhere buried deep in the University of Chicago’s archives is a copy of my master’s thesis – a (carefully researched) condemnation of a Methodist law which dictated that only ‘innocent’ parties in a divorce could be remarried by clergy. A few years later the church’s General Conference changed this law with the simple explanation that ‘innocence’ in human relationships is not so easily determined.” Wall recalls this and the fact that “the Methodist Church of the 1950s into which I was ordained was still officially segregated by race.” He alludes to these once official ecclesiastical stands to suggest that the Methodists are again on the wrong side on the matter of ceremonies of holy bonding for faithful gay and lesbian couples. He urges that such historical perspective be brought to focus in the planning for the UMC’s General Conference set for May 2000 in Cleveland.
AND FINALLY:
“Two Homosexuals and the New International Version.” That’s the title of a British fundamentalist attack on the NIV Bible and a defense of the King James Version. The attack is distributed by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service in an effort to discredit the NIV and push a return to the King James Version.
The “two homosexuals” are Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, who assisted with the style of the English in the NIV, and the late Marten Woudstra, who was on the NIV’s Old Testament translation team. Woudstra was a long-time professor at Calvin Theological Seminary and served as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society for 1979. Mollenkott, a Milton scholar, Christian feminist, and prolific author, has retired recently from college teaching. She says she finds the FBIS efforts ironic: “It would not take much to prove that the percentage of homosexual input on the KJV was far higher than the NIV. Not only was King James I homosexual, he was known to favor homosexuals at his court – and he helped to choose the 47 scholars who worked on the KJV.”
Church historian Martin E. Marty chimes in: “James is described not only by today’s fashionable (and to me unattractive) ‘queer theorists’ but also by staid historians who use euphemisms” for his homosexuality. Marty cites Josephine Ross’s The Monarchy of Britain: “As God’s image, [he] cut a poor figure. Bandy-legged and dribbling, with a relish for obscene jokes, he loved to hang on the necks of handsome young men, showering them with caresses and extravagant gifts.” Marty notes that “sobersided Geddes MacGregor titles his chapter on the English Bible not ‘King James’ but “Queen” James.’”