A Calvin College theater professor has compiled over 100 interviews with gay and lesbian Christians. She’s crafting the material into a play. Stephanie Sandberg says the gay students she’s known over the years have gone through “a lot of stress. They are under a lot of pressure both psychologically and spiritually.” Her play, Seven Passages: The Stories of Gay Christians, is “a theater of testimony giving voice to the voiceless.” The play’s title refers to the seven Bible passages used against gay people. Sandberg says scripture will be used in the play to offer a respectful balance. Though her “goal is to love one another”, she’s been told her project is “going to cause pain and divisiveness and lead many people to an eternity in hell”. Performances will begin in September. For details go to www.7passages.blogspot.com.
This spring, twelve Gordon College students told what it’s like to be gay or lesbian in an evangelical Christian community. They did so anonymously, but with courage, nonetheless. Their stories of personal pain and lonely struggle surrounded by disapproval and homophobia as well as by refreshing support of fellow students with whom they’ve shared their secret, were printed in a campus journal, If I Told You. One thousand copies of the 25-page publication were distributed.
One student says his parents advised him to date a girl from high school. He says, with good sense and humor: “Right. Great idea: ‘Excuse me, allow me to use you as a cure for my homosexuality. It’s my parents’ idea and God’s plan.’” He concludes that, though others may try to deny him everything else, they can never take away God’s love. For her support, another student turns to Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. She cites the moving witness of a sideshow hermaphrodite in A Temple of the Holy Ghost. One young man thanks Gordon’s homophobia for giving him “thick skin” before finding deepened friendships with heterosexual buddies to whom he’s revealed himself. He writes: “This assures me that there may be a disparity between official policy and the hearts and minds of its students.” He concludes by thanking the college “most importantly” for producing “some critical thinkers and Christ-like lovers who accepted me as I am.” The students’ stories can be downloaded at http://www.ifitoldyou.org.
A Gordon College spokeswoman, quoted in Boston’s gay paper, Bay Windows, says the administrators consider the If I Told You project to be a positive contribution to the campus dialogue on the place of gay and lesbian students on campus. She says: “Certainly everyone has read it and we’re very pleased that the students did this.”
On views of homosexuality, there’s a generation gap between younger and older evangelicals. Younger evangelicals are more accepting of homosexuality and civil rights for gay people than are their parents. But they agree with their parents in opposing abortion. These are findings of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life as well as the Barna Group, the major pollster of evangelicals.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler warns that “all is not well” in the Southern Baptist Convention. Writing in the Religious Right’s World magazine, he laments that many of the SBC’s adults “loudly claim that the Conservative Resurgence has gone too far.” That movement began in the mid-1970’s with the adoption of an extremely Fundamentalist twist on the nature of the Bible, calls for Disney boycotts to protest “gay days” at Disney World and a linking of the SBC with the politics of the Religious Right. Mohler also decries the fact that “the denomination is losing many of its young people, especially at the crucial transition between adolescence and adulthood.”
Today, 42 percent of American evangelicals say school boards should have the right to fire gay teachers. In 1987, 73 percent said this. These are findings of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. They exemplify Southern Baptist Convention president Frank Page’s observation: “The evangelical movement as a political force is in a serious state of transition.
A Gallup Poll finds that 59 percent of Americans say “homosexual relations between consenting adults” should be legal. Only 43 percent agreed with this back in 1977, when this Gallup Poll’s Values and Beliefs survey was first conducted. On same-sex marriage, 46 percent of today’s Americans say it should be legal.
“Gone is the solid evangelicalism” at Christianity Today! This is what blogger Jason T. Christy declares in his complaint against the evangelical flagship magazine. He claims it’s “leaning left” these days. And though he says a colleague at the Religious Right’s World magazine agrees with him, one of his readers replied: “Yes, and it’s so exciting.” But another said she was canceling her subscription to a CT-sister publication because of the “leftward” drift. Ralph Blair emailed: “If we remember that ‘evangelical’ refers to ‘the gospel of Jesus Christ’ and is not a synonym for the Religious Right’s cultural or political agenda, it wouldn’t be so strange that CT is not like World magazine.”
Conservative Republicans are the least likely to say they have a close gay friend or family member (33 percent) while liberal Democrats are the most likely to say so (59 percent). These are findings of the Pew Research Center. Geographically, 37 percent of southerners say they know gay relatives or friends while 44 percent of westerners and northeasterners say this. The numbers reflect relative willingness to reveal gay identity within communities of varying degrees of tolerance. The Center further finds that “those who say they have a family member or close friend who is gay are more than twice as likely to support gay marriage as those who don’t – 55 percent to 25 percent.”
Fuller Seminary New Testament professor David Scholer talks of his coping with cancer and, along with Paul, rejoicing in all circumstances. In a Los Angeles Times article (June 5), it’s reported that Scholer’s “students will often hear him say that a sign of maturity is to be able to ‘live with ambiguity”. As he describes it, he tells each class something like this: ‘People who think they have all the answers to all of life’s questions are fake. You have no right to oppose women in ministry until you have made a friend who is called to ministry and you’ve listened to her story. You have no right to make a statement about homosexuality until you have made friends with a Christian homosexual person. The conclusion you draw is another matter.”
“I had knelt by my bed to pray. But all I could do was scream at God, ‘No, no, no’.” Mary Ann Shaw, 75, tells other parents of gay sons and daughters about her first response to learning of her son’s homosexuality. Now, she assists other parents to understand that they did not cause their child’s same-sex attraction nor did their child choose it. Barbara Robinson, 68, says that when she learned that her son was gay, “I did a lot of praying.” Her prayers eventually turned to asking God to give her son a gay partner: “Three years later, he did.” Shaw and Robinson are two of the “Methodist Moms” in the national PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) support association.
On April 18, thousands of high school and college students – gay and lesbian and their allies – observed the 11th annual Day of Silence. The event is a demonstration of the culturally imposed silence of those who struggle every day with same-sex attraction in homophobic communities. This year it was a mostly peaceful day. But at Kutztown University, an out-of-town, antigay Fundamentalist preacher, Michael A. Marcavage, was charged with disorderly conduct. The charges were later dismissed.
“Efforts to use Christianity for public or political ends fundamentally distort the Christian religion.” This is what historian of religion Darryl Hart’s argues in his book, A Secular Faith, published in 2006. He states: “When Christians have tried to establish a Christian basis for the planks of political party platforms, or even for broad-based social reforms, they have fundamentally misconstrued their religion.” Not surprisingly, his viewpoint is not well received by either the Religious Right or the Religious Left. His response to those who nonetheless go ahead and use Christianity to support their political agendas is a good-humored: “It’s a free country.” Hart is with the Intercollegiate Studies Center and has taught at Westminster Theological Seminary. Among his many scholarly writings are two books on Westminster’s founder, J. Gresham Machen.
San Antonio’s Trinity Baptist Church pastor, Charlie Johnson, says: “God has been kidnapped, co-opted for political ambitions. Houses of worship have been turned into precincts of partisanship.” He asks: “Would somebody show me in the Bible where it says we have to get our guy elected to office before we can advance the kingdom of God? I may have missed it, but I don’t remember one single instance where the church ran a candidate for the Roman Senate.”
Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and mutilated 16 young men. “Jeffrey Dahmer’s Story of Faith” is the subtitle of a new book by the pastor who baptized him in prison. The book, Dark Journey, Deep Grace, by Roy Ratcliff, is testimony to God’s amazing mercy. But it’s met with bursts of outrage from some: “If Jeffrey Dahmer’s in heaven, I don’t want to go there!” Says Ratcliff, a minister in the conservative, non-instrumental churches of Christ: These angry people “seemed to be looking for a way to reject Jeffrey as a brother in Christ instead of seeing him as a sinner who has come to God.” The book is published by Abilene Christian University.
With Jerry Falwell’s death in May, Mel White says he’s lost his chance to see his old friend change his mind about homosexuality. White wrote Falwell’s autobiography and went on to found Soulforce to oppose the Religious Right’s antigay efforts. He told CNN that while Falwell was a “good pastor” and sincerely believed what he said about gays and lesbians, “he was sincerely wrong”. Some years ago, White moved to Lynchburg to attend Falwell’s church and try to enlighten him. But, White said, “he was deaf to that appeal”.
Denouncing Falwell as a friend of “fags”, antigay protesters, from Fred Phelps’ small, family-run congregation in Kansas, picketed the funeral. They’ve picketed funerals of people who died of AIDS and funerals of military personnel who died for what it calls a “sodomite”-harboring country. The group has also picketed Billy Graham, predicting the evangelist will spend eternity in hell.
Yolanda King died on May 15. She was the eldest daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and she supported the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. She and her late mother often said that the assassinated civil rights leader would have stood side by side with gay men and lesbians in today’s civil rights struggle.
The second annual Black Church Summit was held in Philadelphia in March. Some 150 conferees met at historic Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, a congregation established by slaves and former slaves in 1791. The theme of the conference was “Keeping Pace with God’s Grace”. Most of the speakers were GLBT-friendly, but one, Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr., argued that homosexuality is a choice which must not be made.
A Tufts University disciplinary committee is punishing a conservative student paper, The Primary Source, (www.tuftsprimarysource.org) for “creating a hostile environment” through its political satire. The student group published a satire on “Islamic Awareness Week”, noting Islamic oppression of women and homosexuals and included a quotation from the Koran that instructs Muslims to “strike off [the] heads and strike off every fingertip” of unbelievers. An alert from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org) states: “It is no surprise that the satire amused some students and offended others – which is often the point of satire and why it garners such strong protection under the First Amendment. To call satire of controversial issues ‘harassment’ woefully ignores the legal definition of that term and makes a mockery of actual harassment”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has refused to invite two major figures in Anglicanism’s homosexual controversy to the church’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference, next to be held in 2008. Both Martyn Minns, whom the antigay archbishop of Nigeria recently consecrated a “bishop” in Virginia, and New Hampshire’s openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, expressed disappointment at their being snubbed. The Nigerian archbishop, Peter Akinola, said he took Minns’ exclusion as an insult to Nigeria’s entire House of Bishops. Integrity, the gay Episcopalians’ caucus, said it was “outraged and appalled” at Robinson’s exclusion. Williams explained that he had to exclude those “whose appointment, actions or manner of life have caused exceptionally serious division or scandal within the communion.”
“I am Australia’s first openly gay Pentecostal.” That’s what a former Assemblies of God minister, Anthony Venn-Brown, says these days. After many years of trying to change through prayer, exorcism, psychiatric treatment and “ex-gay” programs, he found that he was still as homosexual as ever. So he has accepted his same-sex orientation. He now regularly attends Hilllsong, Australia’s premiere Pentecostal congregation, and, he says, many people there understand and accept him, despite the official church doctrine.
Pittsburgh Presbytery’s largest congregation has voted to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) and affiliate with a more conservative denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Memorial Park Presbyterian Church, a congregation of 1,450, followed another local church, Beverly Heights Presbyterian Church, in leaving over the denomination’s drift on the Trinity, the authority of the Bible, and gay ordination. The EPC has 180 congregations and describes itself as “in the middle area of a continuum of American Presbyterian denominations.”
“If you let us marry each other, we’ll stop marrying you.” That’s a quip from supporters of same-sex marriage to their opponents on the Religious Right. The dark humor alludes to the tragic consequences of mixed-orientation marriages. John Milton, who was deserted by his wife, had something to say that’s applicable to the strains faced by gay husbands and lesbian wives and their heterosexual spouses. In his Tetrachordon, Milton asked rhetorically: “Shall we say that God hath joined … unfitness, wrath, contention, perpetual loneliness, perpetual discord; … shall we say this is God’s joining?”
Jim Wallis says “antigay hysteria” is fueled by both homophobic hate and legitimate concerns over the breakdown of families. But, this evangelical and liberal political activist says, “most of my gay friends would agree with me that we need a critical mass of healthy heterosexual families to have a good society. … But you shouldn’t scapegoat or penalize gay and lesbian people for not fitting the majority pattern. And they should feel safe, they should feel protected; they should have equality under the law. But I’ve never run into some sort of anti-heterosexual-family feeling among gay people.” Wallis continues, in an interview on Powells.com: “My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they’re glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too – their rights, their relationships – and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.”
Lesbian and gay male parents, along with their children, took part in the annual White House Easter Egg Roll this spring. The President and First Lady were on hand and the White House made clear that all were welcome. Reportedly, the different families got on well together. The gay press quoted one woman’s saying: “It was surprisingly inspiring.”
Announcing the birth of a baby boy, the White House Website said: “His parents are the Cheneys’ daughter Mary, and her partner, Heather Poe.” A White House photo showed the smiling grandparents, Dick and Lynne Cheney, beaming over their newest grandson. Last year, with news of the pregnancy, antigay leaders criticized Mary Cheney and her lesbian partner for their decision to become pregnant and rear their child. His birth has not quelled the controversy. One antigay lobbyist said there’s “a touch of sadness” in this birth.
“If Holsinger bars gays and lesbians from his own church, how will he treat them as the nation’s chief physician?” That rhetorical question is posed in a press release from GLBT lobby Soulforce, urging rejection of James Holsinger, the President’s pick to be U. S. Surgeon General. Other GLBT lobbies, including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Forcce and the Human Rights Campaign have also decried the choice.
Holsinger, a cardiologist with a master’s degree from Asbury Theological Seminary, was the chancellor of the medical center at the University of Kentucky. He has argued that homosexuality is “unnatural” and has opposed United Methodist ordination for gay people. But Phyllis Nash, who worked with Holsinger for nine years as vice chancellor at the medical center, says he supported, even in the face of Right-wing opposition, the legitimacy of a program focused on lesbian health issues. Another former colleague, openly lesbian Maria Kemplin, writes: “I am a liberal Democrat and a member of gay and women’s rights organizations. Still, I strongly support Dr. Jim Holsinger as a leader and administrator who is able to see across divisive issues and relate with integrity to people, no matter their life circumstances.”
“I thought I was the only one!” That’s what Jackie Malone of the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians says people say when they discover the PLAGAL booth at Pride events each summer. Malone reports: “Last year at San Francisco Pride alone, we had over 4 dozen people who signed up to be on our mailing list.” For more information go to www.plagal.org
AND FINALLY:
The New York Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon grills 50-year-old Mike Jones about his book, I Had to Say Something, his account of his “outing” Ted Haggard. Jones defends himself, saying: “I received a very small advance. [And] I lost everything. I lost all my massage clients; I lost all my personal-training clients. I got fired from my modeling job.” Solomon: “But, still, as a prostitute, you’re hardly a shining exemplar of gay accomplishment.” Jones: “I prefer the term ‘male escort.’ If I was strictly a prostitute, people would probably think I was working the street. And I’m not.” Jones has been honored by the New York City-based Gay and Lesbian Task Force and was given a lifetime achievement award from the Harvey Milk Club in San Francisco.