For some time now I’ve been trying to find words to explain
how I view the place of religion in modern times, particularly in regard to the
rights of gay and lesbian people to dignity and equality before the law. In reading over what I have written the past
few years I have to laugh at how I seem to alternate between outrage and dismissal. I seem to run back and forth like a headless chicken between defining religion as a force for evil and seeing it as largely irrelevant. Some
time ago (August 2014) I titled a thought piece Religion is not the problem. All the while banging on in the belief that religion can be toxic, and that Steven Weinberg hit the nail on the head when
he said,
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good
people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people
to do evil things, that takes religion.
It's not that the truth is in the middle. It's that how you see religion depends on how you define it. Turn it one way and it is clearly toxic. Turn it another and it is benign. I'm my own collection of blind men and religion is my elephant.
That said, here's what I've been thinking about lately on the topic:
* * *
When you hear about the quest for gay rights in America,
often the struggle is described as one between a battle between God's word and the willful self-centeredness of the wicked. Or, to view it from the other side, between a retrograde religion-based homophobia and a secular humanist notion of individual freedom. Both sides buy into the notion it's all about religion. Right-wing homophobes routinely frame the arguments against
homosexuality in terms of sin. Gays can
only “get right with the Lord” by renouncing their homosexual ways and becoming
heterosexual – or if that is beyond them, at least becoming celibate. Even when they frame it in terms of the "destruction of civilization," what they mean is the destruction of God's plan for civilization. Now that homophobia has become a bad word, most religious groups insist they are
not homophobic at all. They are merely trying
to do God’s will, they tell you. Which
appears to be that you can look, but you can’t touch (conveniently ignoring
Jesus’s claim that if you lust after someone you’ve already committed
adultery.)
This claim that homosexuality is an insult to religion and to God is
based on a false dichotomy. The cultural struggle is not between religion on
the one hand and secularism on the other.
Increasingly, non-LGBT people of a religious orientation are throwing
their support behind their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, some just
barely, others with unabashed enthusiasm.
Where the groups stand along this spectrum can be seen from their stance on
same-sex marriage. To start with the
Protestants, a "low enthusiasm" example is the Episcopal Church, which blesses same-sex relationships
and sanctions their union, but will not marry gay people in most cases. At the same time, however, twelve years
ago they installed a non-celibate gay man as bishop in Vermont and more
recently, in 2009, a lesbian became a suffragan bishop in Los Angeles. Other mainstream Protestant Churches represent the full embrace end of the spectrum. The
United Church of Christ, The Unitarian/Universalists, the Quakers, the
Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Presbyterians all sanction same-sex
marriage and welcome lesbians and gays into membership without
reservation. Lutherans have appointed
gay bishops and priests in Sweden and in Germany, and the first gay bishop was
appointed to the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) in California in 2013.
If someone tells you Christianity and homosexuality are incompatible,
they are making the mistake of claiming they are Christians and Lutherans,
Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Quakers are others are not.
Anti-gay sentiment comes from such Protestant groups as the
Baptists, both American Baptists and Southern Baptists, Methodists, Mormons,
Missouri Synod Lutherans, and Pentecostalists.
Opposition to gays is not universal, however, even among these groups,
as attested to by the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, a group
started in San Jose, California in the 90s which has taken a pro-gay stance.
Just as Lutherans are divided on this issue, the Lutheran Church
Missouri Synod (LCMS) representing a conservative (anti-gay) view, and the ELCA
representing a progressive view, the Roman Catholic Church can be seen as a
barbell with “cultural Catholics,” centrists and others in the middle who don’t
ask questions, and two critical masses taking opposite positions. On one
side are those who insist only the pope and the hierarchy may speak about doctrine with
authority; on the other are those who follow their conscience and routinely turn a blind eye to the dictates of their supposed leaders. The difference, of course, is that the LCMS
does not claim to speak for the whole Lutheran body of believers, while Catholics on the right maintain they have an infallible right to speak for God. Any survey of Catholic attitudes, whether on birth control, same-sex
relations, acceptance of divorced persons, and stem-cell research, to name the
chief flash points within the church, reveals the weakness of that
assertion. Most Catholics, in America at least, show up on polls to be more progressive than most of their countrymen on social issues, well ahead of the average.
American Jews are similarly divided. Orthodox groups are in opposition to same-sex
marriage; Conservative and Reform Jewish groups are in favor.
Muslims are known round the world to be virulently
anti-gay. Only in three Muslim countries
do as many as 10% of the population find homosexuality morally acceptable –
Uganda, Mozambique and Bangladesh. Ten Muslim countries impose the death
penalty. A Saudi Ministry of Education
textbook from 2007-8 advocates burning
gays to death or throwing them from cliffs and tall buildings. Iran has executed over 4000 homosexuals since
the advent of the Islamic Revolution. In Lebanon, on the other hand, polls show
younger people are displaying the same patterns of greater acceptance of gays
and lesbians as elsewhere in the world, with 27% of those under 30 saying
homosexuality should be accepted. That
figure is deceptive, of course, since Muslims are not distinguished from
non-Muslims in this poll. Nor, I should
point out, are “religious Muslims” distinguished from those who are
non-religious and more accurately identified as “culturally” Muslim, a
distinction difficult to make in countries where identifying oneself as
non-religious can cost one one’s freedom, or even one’s life. Once they leave their more restrictive places of origin, they tend to take on the cultural values of their new home. In Germany, for example, a number of feminist women have emerged, still identifying themselves as Muslims - even religious, and not merely cultural Muslims - seeking to reform their faith from within. I'm thinking of Necla Kelek and
The point is there is no foundation for the claim that gays
are hostile to “religion.” The claim is
a category error. A more accurate
category line would run between those open to change and those holding fast to
tradition for the sake of tradition. The
labels commonly applied to these two groups are liberal/progressive and traditional/conservative
respectively. As is often the case, the
labels fail to capture the full complexity, since both groups wish to conserve
some things and change others. I prefer
the terms open and closed.
The closed church
focuses on who’s in and who’s out, who are sinners and who are saved. The open
church tends to cite the “judge not, lest ye be judged” passage. The closed church is driven to impose law and
order (God’s will as they insist they know it); the open church focuses on
compassion, mercy, understanding, forgiveness and leaves the punishment, if any
is due, to God. The closed church insists those in the open camp are not legitimate
believers. The open church bewails the
fact that the closed church worships the golden calf of literalism and misses
the message of inclusion. The closed
church walls itself from error. The open
church is by nature ecumenical and seeks to tear walls down.
I’ve been reading a lot of analysis of the Irish Referendum
on May 22 in which the Irish voted 62% to 38% to amend their constitution to
allow same-sex couples to marry. It's worth noting that the preamble to this 1937 constitution, still in effect,
begins:
In the Name of the Most Holy
Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions
both of men and States must be referred,
We, the people of Éire, Humbly
acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who
sustained our fathers through centuries of trial…
Ireland has always
been seen as one of the most catholic countries on the planet. The church still controls all the public
schools, and as recently as 2011, 84.2% of the Irish Republic still identified
themselves as Catholics. Only women who had the means to travel to England had access to abortion until
recently and children of mixed marriages had to be brought up Catholic,
according to the Ne Temere policy dictated by the church in 1907 and in effect
until 1970. The 1937 Constitution also
made divorce illegal, a ban appealed only in 1996.
The Catholics of Ireland, like Catholics everywhere, had long
ignored the ban on contraception, but the in-your-face figure of 62% sounded to many like the death-knell of the Church in Ireland.
I doubt it's the death-knell. A knock-out blow, to be sure, but it’s premature, I think, to claim that the Irish Catholic Church no longer speaks with authority on matters
of morality. I think what is going on is
that the Irish who still identify with the church, a number much smaller than
in previous years, but still significant, apparently, are now increasingly
identifying with the open church, and no longer with the discredited closed
one. They have not become atheists
overnight. They have simply recognized
that their leaders have made themselves largely irrelevant. It’s not just the irreligious who voted for
gay rights. It’s the open-minded folk of
Ireland.
Something similar
is happening in Australia. According to the 2011 census, just over a quarter of the Australian population
identifies as Catholic, only slightly more than those who identify with no
religion. But they are faced with a
scandal of huge proportions that will no doubt lead many Australian Catholics
to lose faith, if not in their religion, certainly in their official
church. First off, it is headed by the
Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, a man who has been identified as heavily
involved in cover-ups of child abuse. A
great enabler. Just last night the story
of Pell’s decision to throw victims of priest abuse under a bus and save the
institution – a classical move on the part of the closed faction of the
church – was featured on Australia’s 60 Minutes program, available
here.
By using the open to closed scale, rather than the religious to non-religious
scale, you can see why it is that people who see religion in terms of
poetry, metaphor and inspiration, and something to center one’s life
around, outside the realm of science and evidence-based truth – the open
sort, in other words – tend to get
along with people of other religions and no religion at all (provided they too
are open). And you can see how it
is that the clerics and their allies among the Catholics can team up with
groups like the Mormons on things like Proposition 8 in California, despite
each group’s oft-expressed conviction the other group is going straight to hell. They are simply two closed groups being
practical about shutting down a common outsider.
Evangelicals, like Mormons and Muslims and hierarchy-based Catholics,
are, for all their claims to have “seen the light” just another closed
group. Like the Catholic priests unable
to deal with sexuality except to deny it, because that’s what their closed
system demands, Evangelicals are notorious for producing one sexual hypocrite
after another, many of whom go down in flames after representing themselves as
models of virtue – precisely because their closed system forces them into
denial about their problems, whether that problem is with sex or some form of
addiction. A particularly tragic case
recently was the Duggar family. They
began by representing themselves as the model Christian family. God, we are told, had dictated that they
should have “19 children (and counting?)” and Josh, the oldest son would find
his way onto the so-called Family Research Council, an
organization whose purpose it is to hold back the rights of LGBT people. The FRC has
been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate-group. The problem is not so much his homophobia as
his hypocrisy. While his mother was
campaigning against the rights of trans-gendered people to use
gender-appropriate rest rooms, claiming they would use the opportunity to abuse
children, she knew that her own son, Josh, had sexually abused his sisters at a
young age and she had covered it up. The
parallels to Archbishop Pell are obvious – in a closed system, one acts to
protect the institution at the expense of the individual.
The conflict
between those on opposite sides of the open-closed axis is routinely described
as a clash of cultural values, often as a war between Culture A and Culture
B. It’s really not a war. It’s a reflection of a deep-seated
disposition to adhere to authority on the one hand and to lift oneself out of
the webs of self-deceit all cultures spin and all parents raise their children
to embrace, on the other. It’s not
coincidental that church sexual scandals seem to happen more frequently among
closed groups or that scandals are so common.
Today, it’s a Missouri Synod (read: conservative, more closed Lutheran
than open Lutheran) preacher who is discovered to be trolling
the gay sites for sex. Tomorrow it will
be another paragon of orthodox virtue – they have more at stake in trying to
represent themselves as true believers, true followers, insiders who toe the line. Careers will continue to be destroyed, and
there will be pronouncements of the need for prayer and forgiveness from
friends and condemnations to hell from others.
But for all the storm and the stress, religion is not the culprit, but
rather just one of the fields of battle.
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