New York Times
December 12, 2006
Gay and Evangelical, Seeking Paths of AcceptanceBy NEELA BANERJEERALEIGH, N.C. — Justin Lee
believes that the Virgin birth was real, that there is a heaven and a
hell, that salvation comes through Christ alone and that he, the
29-year-old son of Southern Baptists, is an evangelical Christian.
Just as he is certain about the tenets of his faith, Mr. Lee also
knows he is gay, that he did not choose it and cannot change it.
To many people, Mr. Lee is a walking contradiction, and most
evangelicals and gay people alike consider Christians like him horribly
deluded about their faith. “I’ve gotten hate mail from both sides,”
said Mr. Lee, who runs gaychristian.net, a Web site with 4,700 registered users that mostly attracts gay evangelicals.
. . .
[O]ver the last 30 years, ... gay evangelicals have ... created organizations where
they are accepted.
Members of Evangelicals Concerned, founded in 1975 by a therapist
from New York, Ralph Blair, worship in cities including Denver, New
York and Seattle. Web sites have emerged, like Christianlesbians.com
and Mr. Lee’s gaychristian.net, whose members include gay people
struggling with coming out, those who lead celibate lives and those in
relationships.
Justin Cannon, 22, a seminarian who grew up in a conservative
Episcopal parish in Michigan, started two Web sites, including an
Internet dating site for gay Christians.
“About 90 percent of the profiles say ‘Looking for someone with whom
I can share my faith and that it would be a central part of our
relationship,’ ” Mr. Cannon said, “so not just a life partner but
someone with whom they can connect spiritually.”
But for most evangelicals, gay men and lesbians cannot truly be considered Christian, let alone evangelical.
“If by gay evangelical is meant someone who claims both to abide by
the authority of Scripture and to engage in a self-affirming manner in
homosexual unions, then the concept gay evangelical is a
contradiction,” Robert A. J. Gagnon, associate professor of New
Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, said in an e-mail
message.
“Scripture clearly, pervasively, strongly, absolutely and
counterculturally opposes all homosexual practice,” Dr. Gagnon said. “I
trust that gay evangelicals would argue otherwise, but Christian
proponents of homosexual practice have not made their case from
Scripture.”
In fact, both sides look to Scripture. The debate is largely over
seven passages in the Bible about same-sex couplings. Mr. Gagnon and
other traditionalists say those passages unequivocally condemn same-sex
couplings.
Those who advocate acceptance of gay people assert that the passages
have to do with acts in the context of idolatry, prostitution or
violence. The Bible, they argue, says nothing about homosexuality as it
is largely understood today as an enduring orientation, or about
committed long-term, same-sex relationships.
For some gay evangelicals, their faith in God helped them override
the biblical restrictions people preached to them. One lesbian who
attends Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh said she grew up in a
devout Southern Baptist family and still has what she calls the “faith
of a child.” When she figured out at 13 that she was gay, she believed
there must have been something wrong with the Bible for condemning her.
“I always knew my own heart: that I loved the Lord, I loved Jesus,
loved the church and felt the Spirit move through me when we sang,”
said the woman, who declined to be identified to protect her partner’s
privacy. “I felt that if God created me, how is that wrong?”
But most evangelicals struggle profoundly with reconciling their
faith and homosexuality, and they write to people like Mr. Lee.
There is the 65-year-old minister who is a married father and gay.
There are the teenagers considering suicide because they have been
taught that gay people are an abomination. There are those who have
tried the evangelical “ex-gay” therapies and never became straight.
Mr. Lee said he and his family, who live in Raleigh, have been
through almost all of it. His faith was central to his life from an
early age, he said. He got the nickname Godboy in high school. But
because of his attraction to other boys, he wept at night and begged
God to change him. He was certain God would, but when that did not
happen, he said, it called everything into question.
He knew no one who was gay who could help, and he could not turn to
his church. So for a year, Mr. Lee went to the library almost every day
with a notebook and the bright blue leather-bound Bible his parents had
given him. He set up his Web site to tell his friends what he was
learning through his readings, but e-mail rolled in from strangers,
because, he says, other gay evangelicals came to understand they were
not alone.
“I told them I don’t have the answers,” Mr. Lee said, “but we can pray together and see where God takes us.”
But even when they accept themselves, gay evangelicals often have
difficulty finding a community. They are too Christian for many gay
people, with the evangelical rock they listen to and their talk of
loving God. Mr. Lee plans to remain sexually abstinent until he is in a
long-term, religiously blessed relationship, which would make him a
curiosity in straight and gay circles alike.
Gay evangelicals seldom find churches that fit. Congregations and
denominations that are open to gay people are often too liberal
theologically for evangelicals. Yet those congregations whose preaching
is familiar do not welcome gay members, those evangelicals said.
Clyde Zuber, 49, and Martin Fowler, 55, remember sitting on the curb
outside Lakeview Baptist Church in Grand Prairie, Tex., almost 20 years
ago, Sunday after Sunday, reading the Bible together, after the pastor
told them they were not welcome inside. The men met at a Dallas church
and have been together 23 years. In Durham, N.C., they attend an
Episcopal church and hold a Bible study for gay evangelicals every
Friday night at their home.
“Our faith is the basis of our lives,” said Mr. Fowler, a
soft-spoken professor of philosophy. “It means that Jesus is the Lord
of our household, that we resolve differences peacefully and through
love.”
Their lives seem a testament to all that is changing and all that
holds fast among evangelicals. Their parents came to their commitment
ceremony 20 years ago, their decision ultimately an act of loyalty to
their sons, Mr. Zuber said.
But Mr. Zuber’s sister and brother-in-law in Virginia remain
convinced that the couple is sinning. “They’re worried we’re going to
hell,” Mr. Zuber said. “They say, ‘We love you, but we’re concerned.’ ”
Monday, December 11, 2006
Here's an interesting article
about a new breed of executive, referred to in the article as "extreme
workers," who eagerly work 70 hour weeks with little vacation. In
reading Catholic Social Teachings on labor (e.g., Laborem Exercens)
for my CST class, I've
often strugged to make its lessons relevant to a class full of future
(usually highly paid) lawyers.
Part of the problem is that
the CST discussions wage and hour issues
typically address the question of workers who work long hours in order
to put food on the table. Most of my students, however, are heading
for the law firm world, where they will bill anywhere from 2200 to 3000
hours per year and work many additional non-billable hours and be well
compensated for their sacrifice. The question of what to say to
workers who would volunteer to work overly long hours is, apparently,
not something the encyclical writers have even considered. But many of
the harms identified in the CST writings as resulting from too much
time at work -- e.g., not enough time for family, leisure, worship, or
spiritual reflection -- are the same, whether the long hours are chosen
or imposed by necessity.
In
our culture, the idea of too much work as a bad, even sinful, thing
just has no traction. Maybe it's our Calvinist heritage. Or maybe
it's that, while many sins are conceived as paired examples of excess
(e.g., cowardice and foolhardiness), with virtue (courage) as the mean,
I'm not sure there is a counterpart to the sin of sloth. We would do a
better job of discouraging people from working too hard, I've
concluded, if we had a name for this sin and understood
industriousness, like courage, as a mean. My question is: if there were, what would a good name for it be?
I agree completely with Eduardo (posting at the Commonweal blog) that "the dubious origins of the discourse of 'separation' do[] not mean that, as a substantive matter, the consequences of separation of Church and State" -- properly understood -- "are not as good for Church as they are for the State." And, I agree entirely with him that we would do well to think long and hard before endorsing a program that involved "straight-up state funding for a program in which Catholic inmates can be browbeaten by evangelicals in order to receive more comfortable cells." As I suggested in my earlier post, though, I remain skeptical that this statement fairly describes the operation and aims of the program.
Reading the comments to Eduardo's post over at Commonweal, I am struck by the antipathy that many smart, progressive Catholics seem to have toward the "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" movement. My own experiences with thoughtful Evangelicals -- and, to be clear, I have had lots of experience with hard-core anti-Catholic Protestants -- makes it hard for me to join some of those commenters in dismissing the movement as merely involving a convenient political alliance relating to abortion and culture-wars issues. Of course it is true that Catholics and Evangelicals differ, on important things and in important ways -- even those of us born after the Council know this. Still, I think it is a mistake to turn too quickly, perhaps because one just doesn't like Fr. Neuhaus's politics, against a movement that, perhaps, holds real ecumenical and evangelical promise.
Rick says: For starters, the title -- "Religion for a Captive Audience" -- seems a
bit misleading, since no inmates are required to participate in the
"Inner Change" program or others like it.
This is true, as far as it goes, but one key question about this program is how many "others like it" there were. My guess is that this is not some sort of open forum or school-vouchers-like program where anyone can open up shop to try out their own rehabilitation scheme. Almost by definition, then, this cannot generate equal treatment, even on the most religion-friendly understanding of that question. Only a favored few groups will be able to participate and the idea that the state would fund proselytizing by one of those select groups is fairly troubling.
It's also worth noting that goods that seem trivial to those of us not in prison -- e.g., private toilets -- might well be viewed as extremely significant benefits to those inside. As a consequence, there might be more than a trivial amount of pressure to at least give a program like this a try.
