2010-04-04 11:07:40

EASTER MESSAGE: How A High Road To God Ended In The Rape Of Children And What’s To Be Done About It

Filed under: Faith, Featured, Jesus Christ, Media, Sex, Vatican, politics
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Pagans of the ancient world knew something that pious Roman Catholic officials of our own day appear to have forgotten. An offended god is a thing to be feared.

Reading Easter morning comments by high-ranking cardinal Angelo Sodano, who defended Pope Benedict XVI by calling news about the sexual abuse of children by priests “petty gossip”, it was tempting to think that the man feared nothing at all on this earth, neither the condemnation of offended human beings around the world nor the retribution of his own outraged god. The New Testament introduces a new and radical notion of ultimate forgiveness, it’s true, but traditional theologians often insist on the importance of the god of judgment.

The god of judgment wiped out the Egyptians and decimated the Amalekites, and all they did was oppose the Hebrews.

Most human beings, even the most skeptical, have an innate sense of violation. The pre-Christian classical world didn’t have a single word for sin, but half a dozen terms covered a multitude of ways to offend divinity. The many gods had their many laws, and human beings broke them at great risk. The closest to the Christian conception of sin, hamartia, is a fault or error that could be committed either intentionally or unintentionally. More familiar is hubris, the sin of pride committed against individuals or communities or divinities. Either of these offenses could end in the doom of kings, cities and peoples.

When was the last time Vatican officials read Oedipus? Or Homer for that matter? Maybe it’s time.

If the Roman Catholic god seems weirdly forgiving of or unconcerned with the rape of children by his clergy, and yet these torments and troubles persist, why not have a look back to those classical texts famously preserved by the monks of Ireland for understanding of these current troubles?

Or look closer to home. It doesn’t take a 1st Century pagan to grasp the wickedness of a systematic policy of hiding the sexual abuse of the very young. In our own time, as the religions of the world proliferate side by side, as Muslims celebrate Ramadan not far from neighborhoods where Hindus do puja before images of Ganesh, when Jewish passover, Haitian voodooo and neo-pagan equinox festivals can be found in the same zip code, there are any number of religious communities to consult and all are likely aghast at the license taken by officials of the Roman Catholic Church in their response to this problem.

Even supposedly amoral atheists with their godless ways and time-bound sensibilities acknowledge the horrendous nature of a crime that appears both vast in its scope, particularly if one begins to look back through time, and catastrophic in its implications for an institution that claims to represent the ultimate authority for tens of millions of people the world over.

Only among certain segments of the Catholic clergy does the problem seem incidental, a machination of the devil, as one Vatican official described it last week, or a matter of “petty gossip”.

Still, if I were a devout priest or observant nun anywhere in the vicinity of the Vicar of Christ, and I had any familiarity with the plays of Sophocles, I might seriously concerned about the fate of the Pope. The most cursory glance at classical literature suggests the imminence of disaster.

*

In 1981, Pope John Paul II named Joseph Ratzinger to the office of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, also known as the Holy Office. In this role, Cardinal Ratzinger ruled on questions of doctrine, a singularly important job under John Paul, who made it a primary goal to reaffirm the traditional goals of the church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, which had gone some way toward liberalizing the institution.

In addition to his role as lead doctrinal interpreter and enforcer, Cardinal Ratzinger also functioned as a kind of high judge of clerical matters that related to, among other things, sex crimes in the clergy. In this capacity, he’s often acknowledged as the most effective reformer in modern times, which probably laid the groundwork for his greater openness to the issue as pontiff.

Still, that openness has had its limits, and those limits don’t begin with Benedict XVI. They cannot be divorced from the two thousand year history of the institution itself, which is a much modified, radically transformed relic of a classical Mediterranean world that vanished everywhere else centuries ago.

So far, and that’s a very important distinction, nine countries have been caught up in the scandal. Most of them are European: Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, the Netherlands and Austria. These form part of the earliest core of Roman Catholic territory.

Significantly absent from this list are France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, where it would be hard to imagine a complete absence of the sort of behavior seen elsewhere. More likely, Catholics in those countries are so steeped in the faith that to openly criticize the church over habits long established must be seen as a sort of crime against nature.

The non-European exceptions are the United States, Australia and Mexico, with by far the preponderance of openly acknowledged cases in the US. A quick rundown of incidents reads like a preview of coming attractions, even though these disturbances were classified by the church at the time as aberrations.

The following details come courtesy of a Fact Box at Reuters. In June 2002, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops barred “pedophile priests from ever again acting as clerics”, but “did not necessarily expel them from the priesthood.” Two years later, research concluded that 10,667 people “accused US priests of child sex abuse from 1950 to 2002. More than 17 percent of accusers had siblings who were also abused.”

“In July 2007, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay $660 million to 500 victims of sexual abuse dating as far back as the 1940’s, the largest compensation deal of its time.” The following year, Pope Benedict met with victims. Over all, the US church has paid $2 billion to settle cases with victims.

All of this has been overshadowed by recent revelations that the Rev. Lawrence Murphy abused 200 deaf boys in the 1950’s and 1960’s, a case that the Pope as Cardinal Ratzinger evidently knew about and now stands accused of concealing from the public eye. Rev. Murphy was not defrocked.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued a five-volume report that said priests abused children for decades. The Pope has apologized extensively for these crimes and admitted to feelings of “shame and remorse”. The report prompted an official Vatican investigation into the crimes, announced by Benedict, who also accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee for mishandling of cases.

In Germany, it was revealed that more than 250 people were abused at church-run schools. Pope Benedict’s own brother ran a choir in Regensburg and has been linked to sex crimes.

The list goes on and is certain to grow.

*

It’s not whimsical to look at the problem through the lens of the ancient past. Celibacy in the priesthood is not a matter of Biblical truth. It’s a development in church tradition that has its roots in the earliest years of the church.

A logical place to start is the Greek word askesis, which dates back to Homer and suggested then a “disciplined and productive effort”, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Askesis is the root of asceticism, which we know now as a renunciation of the routine physical world in the name of a higher calling. The original meaning of askesis carried an athletic connotation, and it might be helpful to see its practitioners as Olympians of the mind.

Pagan philosophers, including the followers of Pythagoras, practiced sexual abstinence and enforced their own dietary restrictions, but this asceticism differed from the Christian kind in that it didn’t necessarily require a total renunciation of wordly affairs, especially sexual ones, in the name of a close relation to divinity. The pursuit of knowledge, of a higher state of awareness, might better describe the effort.

A few early Jewish and proto-Christian anchorites and cenobites withdrew from the world, but they sought contact with the divine rather than wisdom. This transition accompanied another one, as Christianity began its remarkable rise as a faith in pagan society. Inspired by the example of Christ, believers helped to differentiate themselves from other Romans by a striking rejection of the earthy delights of sex. These weren’t philosophers in their lofty discussions but ordinary men and women for whom celibacy signified a decision to leave behind the pollutions of the flesh in order to become more intimate with the Lord.

That communion came to be seen as an analogue to marriage, so that women who rejected husbands and lovers became literal brides of Christ. By the fifth and sixth centuries, there were several monastic orders, and the Latin Church encouraged these orders to celibacy, but there was no strict rule until the 12th Century, when the practice became mandatory. Among other things, it was an act of reform. Monks who didn’t have wives and children couldn’t start dynasties that challenged the authority of doctrine for control of the church.

In his standard work on the Catholic faith, Catholicism, Father Richard McBrien stresses the difference between Tradition with a capital T and tradition. “Tradition (uppercase) is the living and lived faith of the church,” Father McBrien writes. “Traditions (lowercase) are customary ways of doing or expressing matters related to the faith. If a tradition cannot be rejected or lost without essential distortion of the Gospel, it is part of Tradition itself. If a tradition is not essential (i.e., if it does not appear, for example, in the New Testament, or if it is not clearly taught as essential to the Christian faith), then it is subject to change or even to elimination. It is not part of the Tradition of the Church.”

Such is the rule of celibacy, a relatively late addition to canonical law that has little or nothing to do with Biblical injunction, writes Father McBrien, however secure its roots in norms of classical and early Christian forms of asceticism might be. McBrien’s book has come under repeated criticism from Vatican authorities for errors in doctrine, particularly when it comes to matters of gender and sexuality. In the current environment, that almost qualifies as an endorsement.

*

Celibacy may not be the issue, though. Secrecy has shrouded so much of this behavior that few if any reliable studies exist to sort out the details.

Did a lack of sexual activity bring in priestly orders bring on the abuse or did the existence of a secret state in which pedophilia was known to be common and essentially legal attract people who then staffed the priestly class? No one seems to know for sure.

For that reason, It’s not at all clear that married priests would be any less likely to commit the crimes, if, in fact, there is institutional neglect to such a profound extent that it amounts to a form of encouragement. A married man with pedophiliac tendencies and access to children remains a threat. Much more critical is a revolution in how the church understands the crime.

Official murkiness has led to false conclusions, as some people have drawn a link between homosexuality and this particular brand of Roman Catholic pedophilia, though no link of that kind is seen to exist outside the church. Another obvious mistake resulting from misguided discretion? The understanding of this behavior as isolated and anomalous. That conclusion now lies at the heart of the calamity.

The behavior is clearly not isolated and anomalous. For at least the last twenty years, the church has known this. The suspicion is growing in the public that the church has known for much longer and that its knowledge and accompanying inaction enabled thousands of cases of child rape. If that’s true, and if the current pope was part of a systematic blind eye, the truth is monstrous and will be punished, whether by the gods or, more likely, by courts and governments.

*

What can Benedict do? It’s possible to imagine three equally stark choices. His ethical character is at stake in each and will be a matter of public record. Using the analogy of Eastern Europe during the period of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it doesn’t seem fanciful to seem him as either a Mikhail Gorbachev, an Erich Honecker or a Nicolae Ceausescu.

All of these men started their careers as authoritarian leaders, even dictators, with power that verged on the absolute. Each faced the loss of that power in revolutionary transformation, and the outcomes of their careers depended directly on how they managed the transition.

Gorbachev, the pivotal character in the devolution of the Communist states of Eastern Europe became a worldwide hero and even icon of change, but was badly discredited in Russia, where is still widely reviled for giving away the Soviet imperium. The end of his rule coincided with the end of the Cold War, and he has played little or no role at all since in Russia or world affairs, but history has been and will continue to be kind. At the very least, he saved millions of lives by peacefully withdrawing from Europe.

Honecker, the gray bureaucrat who ran East Germany for two decades, thought at first he could ignore and then manage the transition. In the event, he was removed by his own party and quickly fobbed off. This is the quintessential figure of the historical dustbin. He died unloved and almost unknown, and it will be a miracle if any but a handful of people remember him in fifty years.

Ceausescu misjudged everything, and when the problem flared, as Romanians took to the streets, he overreacted with violence and was murdered by his own internal machine. His final reaction confirmed the impression that his regime was diabolical, and his summary execution, though horrible and fascinating at once, seemed an apt and dramatic end to a gargoyle’s arc. He is remembered as a five star freak of the Cold War.

It may seem an overdrawn analogy–bloodshed is unlikely–but the stakes are huge, and the crime obscene. The Pope’s problem is that he has already admitted too much to turn back, and if it is proven that he knew much more than he has even let on so far, a forest fire will inevitably become a conflagration.

The Gorbachev option is the best, but it comes with dire consequences. If he truly cleans out the stables and puts an end to unofficial sanction of the practice, the Roman Catholic Church itself will have to be transformed and in ways that will not be loved by many in the rank and file and upper echelons. To save the reputation of the church, he may have to cut off a limb or two, and at the end of that process, he may well be revered outside the institution and loathed within.

The Honecker option may seem the safest bet, and it may be the most likely, because inertia is easy, but it could result very quickly in a removal and disgrace that would look similar to the East German case. Pope Benedict is old, like Honecker, and may find that he’s simply not up to this fight, in which case he may rapidly become both a liability and an impediment to all future action.

The Ceausescu option is a worst-case scenario and will only occur if there are no clear heads or cunning survivors in the halls of the Vatican. Cardinal Sodano’s remarks suggest that real dangers lie ahead, though. His crack about “petty gossip” reminded me of the moment when Ceausescu stood above a televised mob of angry Romanians in the last days of his life and tried to use the same old slogans of party solidarity. Cameras caught his look of utter disbelief as the rage broke free of its bonds.

A Ceausescu finish wouldn’t just destroy Pope Benedict XVI. It might well undo years of work done by Pope John Paul II to rehabilitate the name of the church as a force for social justice. It might damage growth in less developed parts of the world, in Africa and Asia, where the future of the institution inevitably lies.

Those who despise the church may cheer, and for its crimes the church probably deserves the scorn. But it’s worth pointing out the great good that Roman Catholicism does throughout the world in working with the poor, in caring for the sick, in healing the wounds of war and other conflicts. Its message is a consolation to millions of afflicted people, and its devastation would be a tragedy that non-believers could scarcely imagine.

It will be a matter of indifference whether that suffering is ascribed to divine wrath or worldly corruption or both.

Comments (4)

2010-03-27 10:09:30

CIVILITY COLLAPSE: When Wild Parties Attack

Filed under: Barack Obama, Democrats, Evangelicals and Politics, Featured, Jesus Christ, John McCain, Nancy Pelosi, Purple State Of Mind, Republicans, Stimulus, Television, Tiger Woods, birthers, politics
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

This week, there were at least two different schools of thought on how Democrats should deal with Republican apoplexy at the passage of the healthcare bill. The first came from the Democratic National Committee and might best be summed up as the ’sweet’ approach. The second came from Bill Maher on his weekly HBO talk show Real Time and can safely be described as the ‘rough’.

In the first, Tim Kaine, leader of the DNC, asked the Republican National Committee leader Michael Steele to co-sign a document promoting civility between the parties, calling for “elected officials of both parties to set an example of the civility we want to see in our citizenry.”

“We also call on all Americans to respect differences of opinion, to refrain from inappropriate forms of intimidation, to reject violence and vandalism, and to scale back rhetoric that might reasonably be misinterpreted by those prone to such behavior,” read the proposed joint statement, the details of which emerged over at Politico. Needless to say, the Republicans rejected the notion out of hand.

They didn’t want to be put in the position of playing by Democrat rules, Politico informs us, but I suspect it’s also because plenty of Republican members of Congress and their constituents thoroughly approve of “inappropriate forms of intimidation”.

Which brings us to the Bill Maher approach. In his Friday night show, the comedian of record suggested that the Dems use Tiger Woods as a role model, specifically the content of his sext messages. “I want to treat you rough, throw you around, spank and slap you,” Tiger wrote to one mistress. And: “You are my f**king whore. Hold you down while I choke you.” That, Maher said, is exactly the medicine for the GOP in its current agitated state.

Both approaches demonstrate a sense of humor, if you ask me. The first is exquisitely droll. Republican members of Congress speak of “Armageddon” and “a devastated country”, bricks fly through windows and mobs yell racial epithets, and the leaders of the DNC want to co-sign a civility letter? Offer a cornered pit bull a snausage, and you will get roughly the same result.

But then Dems know that. The civility document is a bitch slap disguised as an olive branch.

Maher’s S&M approach makes more sense in today’s political climate. He seems to have a better understanding of the dynamic in Washington than the politicians, anyway, but then he’s Hollywood, and those people don’t play.

Maher recognizes that the Republicans have been fighting dirty since before the 2008 election, and a classic example of technique can be found in John McCain’s run for president. Those who are surprised at his unstatesmanlike comments this past week should revisit those town hall meetings where the Arizona Senator tries to defend Obama against a bigotry that he himself whipped up. If he had to tell a woman in his audience that his opponent was neither a Muslim nor a terrorist, it’s only because his running mate Sarah Palin encouraged that sort of thinking in the first place.

So there’s a logic to Maher’s idea that the GOP might not only respect, might even relish the rough stuff.

Still, it’s a skewed logic, because it misunderstands the current moment. Republicans and their cohorts are not ultimately angry about healthcare. Their constituents don’t show up to political events with guns or throw bricks through Democrat party windows just because Congress passed legislation on medical insurance.

Healthcare is the proxy. This rage has been thirty years in the making, and it’s pitched high for a very obvious reason. The conservative movement, as we know it, has ended in disgrace, leaving a massive part of the population completely stranded, politically rudderless and leaderless.

Outraged politicians like John Boehner and John McCain aren’t whipping people in a frenzy in order to win races in November. They themselves are in a frenzy because their ideology has collapsed like a rotten floorboard beneath them, and they have nowhere to turn but demagoguery. It won’t save them, but what else are they supposed to do?

I can think of at least three reasons for this perilous state of affairs, and they aren’t state secrets.

One, the previous administration turned out to be a spectacular failure in its effort to turn conservative idealism into good governance. If its ideas about Iraq had been sound, our troops would have been home years ago. If its belief in financial deregulation had been correct, we wouldn’t be in the worst economic recession in eighty years. If its competence at the most basic tasks of government had been real, the people of New Orleans would not be rebuilding a destroyed city.

In all of these areas and more, the most conservative White House in modern times failed to deliver. In a democracy, such failure is punished at the ballot box.

Two, arguably the most vital pillar of American conservativism, free market enterprise, turned out to be deeply flawed when practiced without restraint and unsustainable without a Republican-mandated government rescue.

“Conservatives’ rejection of liberals’ claims that they may, if only given the political power, reshape individuals into more caring, healthy members of richer communities rests in part on an appreciation of the importance of private property and free markets,” according to The Encyclopedia of Conservatism. “These social institutions serve as important bulwarks of individual and group initiative against state planning.”

Do tell. It was government initiative that unleashed the markets, and taxpayer-funded government-initiative that bailed them out. Nothing in the behavior of the American financial community of the last decade corresponds to the above definition of the importance of private property and free markets. On the contrary, unfettered capitalism destabilized the country by sending millions into bankruptcy and foreclosure. And if you think about it, from Enron through AIG, it’s been one disaster after another for American business for almost a decade.

So when conservatives point to private enterprise as the answer, they genuflect towards a fallen idol, and everyone knows that if you’re going to genuflect, your idol better be standing up.

What a perfect transition to the third reason for the demise of conservative politics as we know them. The attempt to mobilize vast numbers of evangelical Christians in the name of GOP politics worked through most of the last decade, but it had a curious side effect over time. The more mobilized Christians became politically, the more the complexities of their politics began to reflect the complexities of their theology.

Glenn Beck can talk all he wants about the evils of social justice. It won’t stop the most successful evangelical pastor in the Unite States, the Rev. Rick Warren, from making social justice a foundational aspect of his ministry. Politicians and media personalities who want to divorce Jesus from caring for the poor have come to the end of their ability to persuade. The Christian message on that point is simply too clear, and centuries of engagement with the lot of the least privileged, from Christ himself through Saint Francis and Martin Luther King, Jr., merely underscores the historical reality.

Religion, when misused, doesn’t disappear. It migrates. Hence the presence of Bart Stupak in the Democrat ranks. He may have made headaches for Obama on abortion, but his conservative religious principles found a place in the party nevertheless.

Need I say more? The GOP isn’t just in crisis. At some level, it faces extinction. Genuine conservatism can help, but it’’s got to get back on its feet. Like Guinevere in the King Arthur saga, ideally it needs to retreat to a monastery and pray for a decade, but there’s no time for that. In its absence, Republican Party politics descended too quickly into a radical rowdyism that is almost as bad for the country as it is for the party.

And just as you can’t negotiate with terrorists, you can’t co-sign civility documents with rowdy radicals or bend them to your sexual will with sext messages of tough love. You have to try to understand the reasonable ones at some level and respond to their actual concerns and not the body of falsehoods that a dying political movement and party have been propagating in the desperate struggle to survive.

Even then, I suspect we’re all in for a rough ride. Conservativism in its heyday provided real answers for millions of people. It organically yoked together security issues, family values and free enterprise, no small feat in hindsight, and it won’t be easily replaced or resuscitated. In the meantime, in the vaccuum, incivility may be the least of our problems.

Comments (2)

2010-03-01 08:41:13

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Stephen Parelli Talks Being Gay And Christian In A World Divided By Culture War

Filed under: Faith, Featured, Purple State Of Mind, Reasons To Believe, Sex, Stephen Parelli, The Purple Interview, politics
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

In a polarized world, gay Christians face a tough choice. Their identities often lie on one side of a gulf, their beliefs on the other. How to choose when so much is at stake? Stephen Parelli, pictured on the right with his married partner Jose Ortiz, says you don’t. Once the pastor of an evangelical church, Parelli was ejected from the pulpit for homosexuality. In the process, he lost his congregation, his marriage and his way of life. Yet he refuses to give up his faith.

As executive director of Other Sheep, an organization dedicated to offering ecumenical support and guidance to gay Christians around the world, Parelli criss-crosses the globe with Ortiz, mapping a rough terrain. Constantly on the move in Asia, Africa and Latin America, meeting with communities of gay men and women in places where homosexuality is far from accepted, and where the idea of a devout gay man or woman is almost unheard of, this married couple from the Bronx have turned their own personal history into a mission.

Before meeting each other and marrying, Parelli and Ortiz underwent religion-based therapies to alter their sexuality. Their decision to accept themselves and each other led ultimately to the work for Other Sheep.

That work carries a particular burden now, as the battle over gay rights gathers steam on several fronts. In the United States, the first federal trial over marriage laws is underway in San Francisco, and the military’s ‘Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell’ policy is under review by the White House. Meanwhile, a draconian new law in Uganda would make it a capital offense to get infected with HIV and a very major crime to withhold information about homosexual behavior.

As the following interview makes clear, the state of being torn between one’s sexuality and faith is fraught with complication and difficulty, not the least because the principles of Christianity both thwart and undergird claims of social justice. Like few otehrs, Steve Parelli has been on both sides of that reality.

Q:We seem to be at a moment of serious engagement with gay issues in the world of politics. The ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy is under serious review. The anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda has received a lot of press and some pushback. The Prop 8 trial in San Francisco is still underway. Depending on outcomes, it’s possible to see this moment as the sea change for the better in gay rights or a series of real setbacks. How do you view this particular moment?

A:From the outset of this Uganda mess, I wrote my following thoughts on the Other Sheep East Africa website in one succinct sentence, which is of course, a distilling of my Baptist tradition:  “I fear for Uganda or any state, when the church, by how it acts, might as well be parliament, and parliament, but how it acts, might as well be the church.”  An original wording of my own which puts it neatly and pointedly for me.

This is a decisive moment for Uganda and free, democratic countries in Africa, in which clear headed leaders in both the secular and religious arenas must clarify the difference between church and state.

Obama also comments about this – the State’s place in all of this – in his book The Audacity of Hope:  “Our argument is less about what is right [and more] about who makes the final determination – whether we need the coercive arm of the state to enforce our values, or whether the subject is one best left to individual conscience and evolving norms” (page 221).  And this, too, he writes:  “Contrary to the claims of many on the Christian right who rail against the separation of church and state, their argument is not with a handful of liberal sixties judges.  [Their argument] is with the drafters of the Bill of Rights and the forebears of today’s evangelical church” (pages 216-217, emphasis mine).

Obama is saying, in his The Audacity of Hope, the question of same-sex sex between two consenting adults is a moral question for the individual to decide for himself, not a question for government to determine on behalf of its citizens.  It is a private decision left to the individual.  And Obama is saying the first American evangelicals knew that, so they therefore created a government where the church does not rule through legislation and the government does not dictate to the conscience of the individual.

In the matter of same-sex sex, the question for any society to ask is not “What is right?” but rather, “Who should determine what is right:  the church, the state, or the individual?”  The answer is the individual.

Q:In Uganda, the homosexuality bill is still before the Ugandan parliament. Where do things stand?

A:I have read that the President of Uganda is pulling back on his support of the bill due to international pressure applied from the outside world.  I have also been told by a Ugandan citizen that Uganda is flexing its muscle for show with no intention of passing the bill.  However, I do understand the social, religious and political climate to be very intolerant of homosexuals, volatile, with a history going back to the 1990s.  Yet, there is a large coalition of human rights activists within Uganda calling upon the government to denounce this bill.  If the bill passes it will be in the face of the strong vocal objection of Ugandan human right activists as well as some Ugandan church leaders with pressure from the outside world – both political and religious.

Uganda’s legalization of the bill will not go unnoticed by the rest of Africa. Already in countries like Nigeria and Cameroon and even South Africa, gays are persecuted, and in some cases by the police force themselves.  Christian Africa is extremely homophobic, intolerant, and potentially violent towards gays.

Q:Evangelical leader Rick Warren and others have condemned the bill. How effective has the condemnation been? Does more need to be done?

A:If I recall correctly, some Christians in Africa have called for an apology from Rick Warren for his condemnation of the bill.

Uganda needs to hear evangelical Africans speak out against it.

So, yes, much, much more needs to be done in terms of the Christian right speaking out against this bill (James Dobson is on record as denouncing the bill, I believe).  But, especially the African Christian right leaders themselves.

Q:In general, have you see much support from straight Christians for the work you do?

A:Yes.  For all the oppression we speak of and see coming from Christendom, it is amazing how many individuals are supportive – whether from the wings of conservative Catholicism or evangelical Christianity.  Where ever conservative straight Christians have had a real life experience with someone “gay and Christian” – a gay family member, a gay friend, the felt presence of gay Church members, HIV/AIDS and gay Christians – these straight Christians often become allies, and activists.

The image of evangelicals as homophobic, while a fair generalization does not hold up consistently from person to person.

In East Africa we have two straight ordained ministers as Coordinators for Other Sheep.  Rev. Michael Kimindu, an Anglican priest, and Rev. John Makokha, a Methodist minister – both activists for LGBT human rights and both are straight.

In Nepal we have a straight Christian Coordinator Indira Ghale.  Also a vocal activist for LGBT human rights.

The Free Community Church in Singapore that I refer to in this article (later on) was started and is led by ordained straight ministers from within Methodism.

http://www.freecomchurch.org/

It is not just gay Christians who support full inclusion of LGBT people within the Christian church, but straight Christians.

On our Other Sheep board since 1992, we’ve had many straight Christian ministers and church members.

Q:It seems clear that if this bill passes, life will get a lot worse for gay people all over Africa. Is that your sense?

A:Yes, I feel that Christian Africa has the potential to take on, whole-sale, the inhuman anti-gay, irreligious actions generally practiced only in Islamic countries.  Of course, Christian Africa is already known for its many hatful, hurtful, murderous anti-gay attacks upon gay Christians.

I answer “yes,” not based on any studies I could cite, but based on the religious fervor of evangelicals in Africa, the narrow-mindedness of evangelicals with regards to homosexuality in Africa, the corrupt attitudes and actions of government that are seen within the democracies of Africa irrespective of a religious presence, and the failure of certain churches in Africa – whatever denomination – to denounce wholeheartedly, with a unified voice, this Ugandan bill as inhuman, and unsuited for civil government.

Q:You’re in an interesting place in the gay rights movement. On the one hand, like every other gay person on the planet, you have to deal with the curtailment and infringement of your civil rights. The laws restricting gay marriage directly impact you. Unlike many, however, you are a believing Christian who feels some sense of solidarity with the faith that is the basis for condemnation of your way of life. How do you square that circle?

A:Other Sheep has the unique opportunity to address this concern of gay and Christian from a place of strength and force, i.e., from the inside.  Personally, when my partner and I travel abroad and ply ourselves for an audience with conservative evangelical Christian leaders, we are speaking to their religious experience as our own, at least our own traditionally.  While I have come to a place in my life where I question more than I actually affirm in terms of my evangelical Christian faith,  I can still relate myself to the story of my personal evangelical experiences when I approach the subject of gay and Christian.   This gives Jose and me an edge in speaking to the conservative religious right.  We come from their stock.

And not just to leaders, but to the many evangelicals worldwide that are gay and Christian in the pews and feeling abandoned, rejected, misunderstood by church and family, and society.  Jose and I, coming from an evangelical background, become for them a representation of what can happen as well as personal friends for hope and self-acceptance, and affirmation as gay Christian.  This was especially true in East Africa.

In a live radio broadcast in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007 – in which listeners called in their questions (which were ALL, as I recall, on the Bible and homosexuality) – Jose and I were featured on the show as “gay and Christian,” and the response from gay Christian listeners who thought there was no hope “until now” (as one person wrote us afterwards) was overwhelming.

Kenya is a very evangelical country, and by evangelical we mean the Bible is taken literally and is final in its authority in whatever it says.  And this becomes the dilemma for evangelical Christians in Africa – how to reconcile the Bible and their sexual orientation.  We’ve witnessed this first hand in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.

In Singapore in 2009, at the Free Community Church – a very impressive church with about 100 LGBT people   – I preached a sermon in which I challenged them, indirectly, to reexamine the precepts of the evangelical faith by telling them my journey as a Baptist minister away from evangelicalism.  For myself, as a theologian by training and calling, once I realized how unjust the (evangelical) church is in its unyielding dogmatic position towards homosexuals, I eventually started down the road of asking, what some would call “irreverent” but relevant, questions rather then simply asserting traditional evangelical values and dogma.

For me, the square and the circle don’t fit.  I find this to be especially true in the context of the closed-mindedness I find within evangelicalism.  The Bible-based faith of the evangelical is warped into a kind-of bible-worship of blank ink on white paper – words and verses – so that they no longer have the trinity, i.e., God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but a quad-unity of God, Jesus, Holy Spirit and the Bible, where in actuality the Bible is worshipped as a god, and in practice supplants the Triune Godhead itself.

Q:Before you came out of the closet, you were a pastor of a church that had strong teachings against homosexuality. Can you talk a little about the perspective from the other side? Why is this issue so important for so many Christians? What is at stake?

A:In reality, same-sex sex between consenting adults is a cultural war for the evangelical and not a theological question within the religious domain where it could have been, theoretically, open to reinterpretation.  Evangelicals are, and have been since the scope trials, scared that the American society is eroding.  The Moral Majority of the 1980s was a national movement/manifestation of this evangelical hysteria to save America from its post-Christian (1960s) irreverence towards the sanctity of human life (apportion legalized – 1972?) and the displacement of God from public education (no prayer in the public schools, 1961?).

Taking on the “homosexual agenda” in the 1980s (and with the evangelical ex-gay movement starting in the mid 1970s), evangelicals were continuing their knee-jerk reaction to the perceived national eroding of what it calls the Judeo-Christian foundation of America.  Instead of a battle-cry response to open same-sex sex, evangelicals should have called for a theological congress on a national scale within evangelicalism to address questions around same-sex sex.  Instead, the evangelical response to homosexuality was, and still is, a backlash of its own momentum of non-stop denouncement, since the scope trials, of the cultural changes within America that evangelicals have perceived as un-American, as eroding the Judeo-Christian foundation, and as inviting the disfavor of God.  With homosexuality becoming more and more widely accepted in America, evangelicals see this as the final stage of our national-existence-as-we-know-it, and that God will, in some form and measure, allow us to falter as a nation under our own weight of sin (and especially this sin of same-sex sex).

Q:Let’s talk Prop 8. You were married in California, but thanks to a grandfather clause, your marriage survived the repeal of the law that allowed gay men and women to marry. It seems likely that, no matter the decision, this case will end up at the Supreme Court. That promises a battle royal in the public arena. How do you view that prospect?

A:I have read the decision of the Iowa Supreme Court in their legalizing same-sex marriage in Iowa.  It is a wonderful document.  Every Christian who opposes same-sex marriage should read this document.   If the Supreme Court follows the  logic and reasoning of the Iowa Supreme Court, it cannot but grant us this civil right.

Q:What sort of role do you see yourself playing in this environment? Do you consider yourself a mediator between gay people and the conservative Christian movement in any sense?

A:A mediator works for both sides to come to the middle.  I do feel that the “gay agenda” fails to understand legitimate concerns, as it would appear in a free society, of the evangelical religious right.  You know, former Mayor Giuliani, when he was running for the Republican bid for the presidency for the election of 2008, he said that the issue of the 21^st century is the voucher idea in education, that parents can choose, with a tax break, to send their children to non-public schools of their choosing.

The pro-LGBT movement, and other movements that we term liberal, fail to understand, I feel, a basic civil right that belongs to parents:  the right to educate their children within a context that is supportive of the parents’ values.

Public education is a monopoly, a union, with money and power.  In colonial Massachusetts, taxes were levied to pay the state preacher.  If you were a Baptist in colonial Massachusetts no taxes went to pay your pastor.  So then, while you paid a state tax to support the recognized religion of the state, you also paid in offerings to your church, in addition to the tax, the money that would support your pastor in his livelihood.

Public education is the new state religion in terms of how the whole pay-the-tax-go-to-school-get-indoctrinated with say, “hey, a family is a mom and a mom, and a dad and a dad” and that’s the new curriculum.  That’s where evangelicals say “Enough,” and they say, “I’m paying taxes for it, too.  And I don’t want to anymore.  Give me a voucher, a tax break; so that my money can go to pay for the education I want my child to receive.”  That’s what Giuliani was talking about when he said the issue of the 21^st century will be vouchers for education.

When an evangelical parent says “I want more control on the values my child is learning in the public school – especially since I pay the taxes,” they stand in kind, I believe, with the forefathers in Massachusetts who called for separation of church and state:  “I will not pay taxes for a belief system that is organized and standardized for the purpose of inculcating my child, and in which I do not believe.”  That’s the problem we have today.  Do you know that in th1890s the Supreme Court ruled that secular humanism is a religion?  Whose belief system is going to be taught?  Evangelical parents want their belief system to be respected in the public arena especially when it comes to inculcating their children with their dollars.

And I think this is where the liberals (to use that term) fail to meet the evangelical half way.  If America is for all, then where will the evangelical go to teach their children consistently that same-sex marriage is not a value for them, that abortion is not a value for them, that education is not education without a moral core centered in a belief system that is by and large “Christian” in its moral content, and that one should be able to do so without having to pay a double-tax (public school taxes and private school tuition)?  If gays want the tax benefits of same-sex marriage, where is the tax break for evangelicals who want to educate their children in an educational system that reflects their own values?  Is the right to marry more significant than the right to educate one’s children in the context of one’s values? Or do the values of the state trump the values of parents?  That’s fine until the state doesn’t hold to your values.

This is in part the thrust of the evangelical:  raising their children in a “godless” society; that, perhaps more than anything, gets the evangelical enraged and moves him/her further committed to the cultural wars.

This may be simplistic, but now we have the golden rule coming into play.  Evangelicals need to yield to same-sex marriage and pro-LGBT people need to yield to tax vouchers for parents so that they can educate their children according to their values (to use this paradigm we’ve been discussing).  But the public schools won’t do that because that takes money away from their system; so now who’s taking what “tithes and offerings” as mere hawking – “here’s the product, you need it, makes us all better, just pay here” – ala TV evangelists? Dare we say public education?  (How un-American am I?)

But however we slice it – this is a real American problem:  What values, whose values, at what age, and how far in public education?

So, yes, as a one-time staunch evangelical, I still empathize with the question of what is fair and right for the evangelical in this pluralistic nation; most likely a problem that many, if not most, LGBT organizations have not seriously considered.

Q:Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell is under review at the moment. It would be easy too imagine that a fair number of the gay soldiers in the military might also be religious Christians. That strikes me as an exquisitely difficult line to walk, particularly in the army environment. Can you speak at all to the challenge faced by these men and women?

A:My own partner, Jose, was in the navy and a practicing Christian in the 1990s.  Though he was gay, he was still in denial and not out to himself.  Nonetheless, his comment is this:  In the military, it is always about fitting in.  As a serious evangelical Christian, it was difficult to belong; the navy was a “raunchy” place for a Christian where one works hard, fights hard and then parties hard.  As a gay Christian, a military man will find he’s on the outside looking in a two counts:  he takes his religious practices seriously which goes against the hedonistic culture which often prevails when military personal are on leave, and his sexual orientation is a nonentity, he is in many ways, a nonperson; at least not a person that has value and worth that the military will recognize in terms of his sexual identity.  As a matter of course, every soldier brings his sexuality to the military – he’s married, he has children, he has a girlfriend, he’s in love, etc – the gay soldier cannot.  He is without identity in these terms.

Q:Finally, a lot of people might want to know why you bother to adhere to a religious belief that has historically oppressed people like you for centuries? What is the appeal for a gay man or woman of a faith that makes homosexuality an aberrant sin and ultimately a crime?

A:Sadly, the history of Christianity has often been a history of religiously induced oppression: women, heretics, Jews, Africans, all oppressed in the name of Christianity.  Gay Christians are not unique to this, and it is simply their turn now so it appears.  Religion does not exempt its constituents from the problem that Cain slew Able – that mankind can be a violent creature who will use unjust means to manipulate the outcome of his (often unjust) objectives.  This seems to be a trait common enough to the human race.  This is the force of brutality, and it can be a violence used, in the name of religion or in the absence of religion, against the spirit (in words, dogma, laws, excommunication, and isolation) as well as against the body (in actual cold blood murder, incarceration, torture, attacks, etc).

Historically, Christians oppressed by Christians have said, “That’s not God.” And to find God within Christendom, these marginalized people of the faith have lifted up God from within – or from out of – the received stories of the faith, the Biblical narratives, as the God-other-than-the-god of their oppressors.   The African American Christian is an outstanding example of this. They adopted and adapted the Christian faith of their white Christian oppressor to suit their need of hope for an exodus from slavery.

The evangelical separatists (from which I am hewed) at the beginning of the 1900s, did the same.  They extracted from the Biblical narratives the stories that answered to their form of oppression and then used these stories to give them their identity, mission and vision (I place Paul, here, too, as “Biblical narratives” more as to his present-day effect than to his literary style; making his epistles a NT narrative).   The evangelical separatists of the early 1900s saw themselves as the oppressed.  Modernist Christians were taking over their seminaries and then their churches with liberal teaching.  Fundamentalist preachers were told to surrender their pulpits to the causes of the liberal denominational machinery or be ruined.  These fundamentalists, as they came-to-be called, found themselves losing valuable property, i.e., their seminaries and churches.  From the Bible narratives, these forerunners of present-day evangelicals (as a movement, i.e., the NAE, though not separatists themselves) saw themselves in the Biblical record as those who must separate from the liberal in order to remain effective, not to mention to even exist.   Out of their oppression, out of their times of modernism vs. fundamentalism, they forged, from the reading of the Biblical stories, the doctrine of separation which would, if practiced, insulate them, in the future, from the kind of oppression they saw in the first quarter of the 20^th century, i.e., a takeover from within.  Fundamentalist, evangelical separatists, out of their experience and their times, found themselves in the Bible and saw separatism as the very center of how God accomplishes his mission on earth for good – always by means of a separatist people, their story, their need, their means of salvation.

At the risk of sounding simplistic (but with the clear understanding that I am using the grid of oppression as a looking glass), the Reformation might be characterized to a degree as Christians oppressing Christians, resulting in teachings and doctrine that would suffice and bring hope to the oppressed while further enraging the oppressor.  Hence the Roman Catholic Church verses the Protestant, oppressor and oppressed.  But then, too, the Protestant as oppressor and oppressed among themselves as with the New England Puritans, or John Calvin with his burning of heritic(s).

Queering the Bible is just this (for me), and queering one’s Christian faith is just this (for me):  finding the God of the oppressed in the stories of the Bible.

But, ironically, if one looks too closely at the Biblical narratives, even God himself appears as the oppressor in situations which we would judge today as unjustifiable.  If God were brought to court today on charges of misconduct as a parent, he’d be found guilty.  Now, for me that’s queering the Bible. To even find God as the unjust oppressor, whenever the narrative clearly indicts God (genocide, for instant).  So, here I go to the narrative, myself oppressed by God’s people to only find God himself the oppressor at times.  This queer reader can’t escape it, not from a realistic read of both the Old and New Testament. Take Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:  I do not accept a God who slays church people on the first count of being found deceptive. Take the Old Testament:  I do not accept a God who institutes genocide.  With regards to these acts, God could not sit as a member of the UN security counsel.

So where am I?  More humbled than my former evangelical peers would believe me to be, albeit I have superimposed an assertive “I” upon their Bible, casting me, in their eyes, as an arrogant rebel to the Word of God.  However, if , while accepting the transcendent, one finds the Bible not the god we make it out to be, then perhaps life is actually more fragile, more sacred, more deserving of mutual respect than one finds with the fundamentalist’s approach to the Bible where every single human being is neatly categorized as either “discard” or “on hold.”

So, one’s “devalue” of the Bible (which perhaps is simply a more realistic view of the Bible) does not demean God, but actually vindicates him as Who he is – beyond the Book.

The appeal for the gay Christian is this:  If you believe in the transcendent, then the narratives of the Bible are not exclusively the domain of any one religious society.  History is on the side of the queer Christian on this count:  the Biblical narratives, historically, have never been understood from one uniform method of interpretation.  Methods of interpretation and the grids we apply to the reading of the Bible have been as varied has church history itself.  The queer Christian considers the reading of the Bible to be as relevant and alive for his/her situation as the evangelical separatist of the 20^th century, or as Martin Luther of the Reformation or Marin Luther King of the civil rights movement.

When I was in Thailand last summer, especially Chiang, Mai, where my first days in Thailand were experienced, I was suddenly immersed in the presence of a religion as alive and well as the Christian faith in America:  Buddhism.  Buddhism is everywhere in Thailand, with majestic temples, and not so majestic, doting the landscape; and with monks weaving in and out of the crowds, or walking alone down a barren country road.  Buddhism, it appeared to me, is as much a part of the Thai culture as Christianity is of American culture

“Religion,” I told myself in Thailand, “is the stories we tell ourselves.”  Of course, these stories are sacred stories with a long, accepted tradition of telling and retelling.

For the Queer Christian who comes from evangelical moorings, the fundamentalist trappings that go with the Bible – that is, Biblical authority, “think Biblically,” and inerrancy – ideas in the hands of evangelicals which preclude what one will get out of the Bible, i.e., exactly the message the present-day preacher gets  out of the Bible and reiterates Sunday after Sunday from the pulpit to the pew, – What this Queer evangelical Christian must do is recover the Bible from fundamentalism by undressing the Bible from its present dressings as provided by evangelicals and fundamentalists who have defined for their constituents what it means to honor, study and know the Bible.

The foregoing view of the Bible is, obviously, not descriptive of evangelicalism and therefore whatever appeal religion may have for the Queer Christian with these markings, it comes in spite of his evangelical moorings, or as a hybrid or as a byproduct of  his evangelical faith, or as a thorough evaluation of and a final rejection of his evangelical faith.  Either way, two elements remain:  God is transcendent and religious narratives serve to tell mankind’s’ story, from his perspective, toward the transcendent.  And these stories prove powerful, especially for the oppressed.

The gay evangelical, more than anything else, must settle his score with the evangelical view of the Bible.  And if he comes down on the side of a more friendlier God than his evangelical peers have offered him, it is more likely that his view of the Bible will be more humanistic and less divine, so that his God may be more divine and less human.

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