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I do not want to be the “gay Christian” anymore

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A reflection by Lindsey

There are times when certain kinds of conversations seem inescapable. In the aftermath of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family and the ERLC conference on the Gospel, Homosexuality, and the Future of Marriage, I find myself caught in a fire fight. Like many fights in the culture war, it concerns an entirely small territory. There’s a 3-letter word that gets in the way of other people’s ability to see my humanity. I don’t know anywhere I can go to possibly escape the fight. Even trying to hide out at home doesn’t shield me from people’s callousness.

I remember my first interaction with the word gay. I was 14 years old, and Kevin Kline had a starring role in the movie In and Out. Please take a couple of minutes to watch the trailer.

I remember having an uncomfortable sinking feeling in my stomach. One day, I’d have to deal with someone else making a public declaration of “Lindsey’s gay.” And then I’d be caught in an awkward limbo, feeling unable to deny the accusations and too afraid to confirm them as true. The word gay is an oddly expansive cultural signifier. When other people call you gay when you’ve not said that you actually are, they are usually suggesting that you flaunt gender norms so strongly that you’d rather couple with a person of your same sex. When other people call you gay, they are considering you a particular kind of person rather than suggesting you have a fondness for specific sex acts. Playground bullies have all sorts of vulgar language to use when it comes to sex acts that they employ liberally.

Fast forward 17 years later and I’m still feeling caught in that limbo. We have people who proudly proclaim, “I love Jesus too much to call myself a gay Christian.”

But, what happens when other people in the church foist a label upon you to justify their mistreatment? What happens when people cite simple matters of hair style, clothing choice, preferred forms of sentence structure, subconscious ways of holding one’s body, and most common vocal ranges used when singing in order to declare that you’ve never given your life to Jesus, that you don’t care about the ways of Christian morality, and that you certainly have never been a part of Christ’s Church?

I long for the day when I can simply go to church, say my prayers, search my heart with the safety of knowing that I am God’s child, determine how to participate best in the sacramental life of the Church with the help of a trusted confessor, and enjoy in fellowship with all those gathered. I long for the day when people assume that I’m doing my absolute best to unite myself fully to Christ seeking support from the teachings of my Christian tradition. I long for the day when I am truly treated “just like everyone else.”

The people who tell me that I just need to find my identity in Christ fail to realize that Christ is at the very core of my identity. They also fail to realize that He alone has kept me alive even during the seasons of their most aggressive, hostile, and repeated attacks of telling me that there’s no way I exist. When I was a teenager trying to sort through why everyone else treated me as though I was impossibly different, I hadn’t had one moment of sexual experience. I was just being myself without concern for the fact that, as Lindsey, I’m quirky. As I’ve grown older, I’m stuck with a hard reality that when I look at the lives of my married friends, their relational lives are distinct from mine and there’s nothing I can do about that. The only people who seem to understand this difference are those who can appreciate that not everyone is called to heterosexual marriage, and not everyone has a pattern of relating that consistently points to the marital vocation.

A lot has changed since I was 14 years old. I can’t imagine how my life would have looked differently if I would have known that Sally Ride was gay. I’d be hard-pressed to identify a more significant childhood hero. I admired Sally Ride even more than I admired Neil Armstrong, and that’s saying something. This week, Tim Cook has decided to speak clearly about the simple fact that he’s gay. What he says here really resonates with me:

Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.

I have to wonder if conservative Christians who tell me not to identify as gay are trying to ensure that I build that rhinoceros skin. I can’t help but wonder if people say “Don’t identify as gay” in an effort to really say, “There’s no way these hateful and hurtful comments would get to you…. unless of course, you are, you know…. living immorally.”

It’s much easier to assert that gay people are 100% opposed to Christ than it is to appreciate that “gay” and “LGBT” are used frequently as broad umbrella terms to communicate something of a shared social experience. In reporting on the experience of celibate gay Christians, Vanessa Vitello Urquhart wrote, “Make no mistake—celibate or not, these people are a part of the LGBTQ community. They share the same fears we do, experience the same stigma, and have felt the same tension, between hiding and safety on one side and openness and self-acceptance on the other, that defines the LGBTQ experience in 21st-century America.”

If you as a conservative Christian want to end my need to find value in the descriptor “Gay Christian,” please tell the Church to stop persecuting those of us who do not fit cleanly into heteronormative molds, and stop making excuses for people who behave uncharitably toward us. When you tell me that the only place I should discuss my sexual orientation and gender identity is in confession, you’re actually reinforcing the norms of the judgmental world I know as a gay person. You’re telling me that I need to hide something even though I’ve come to seek Christ, the person who knows me more intimately than I know myself. I’d welcome it so much if I could walk into a church, pursue Christ with you, and share how he is guiding and directing me to leave my unique mark on this world that has not yet fully been redeemed.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

On Otherness, Alienation, and “Don’t Say Gay”

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A reflection by Sarah

Last night, I dreamed of myself lying on an operating table, wide awake as my own blood pooled in my open body and began to drain from it. The surgeon loomed over my torso, aware of my consciousness and abject terror but unable to see that I was dying. He tugged at my innards, working calmly and methodically, remarking several times along the way that he understood my pain but cared too much about my wellbeing to try a different protocol. Then, I woke up.

Once again, I’m writing a post on a day when we don’t usually publish. I’m doing this not to be dramatic or whiny, but because during the past four days I’ve reached new levels of spiritual exhaustion, and while I’ve attempted to reach out to others for support I still have a profound sense of alienation. As I write, I feel as though I’m bleeding out spiritually and no one from within my tradition is noticing — least of all, those whose counsel I have trusted and respected since before my conversion. And all of this began with quibbles over a three-letter word and its impact upon straight, conservative Christians.

I’m not about to give you a detailed defense of why the word “gay” is an acceptable layer of identity for a Christian who is exclusively attracted to people of the same sex. There have been several brilliant blog posts written on this topic already. I find more resonance with some of these than others. If you’re a straight Christian who is wondering why gay Christians find the word “gay” so important you should begin by reading these items by Joshua Gonnerman, Wesley Hill, Melinda Selmys, Jeremy Erickson, Julie Rodgers, Brent Bailey, and Eve Tushnet. In the future, I would like to write my own post that delves more deeply into the compatibility of “gay” as a cultural identity with “Christian” as my most important identity, but for now I’ll just link Lindsey’s and my post on why we call ourselves a celibate LGBT Christian couple and a past reflection of mine where I talked about gayness and Christian identity on a very basic level. I’ll also be completely forward in admitting that my thoughts on this topic need more time to marinate before I can articulate a full defense of the term “gay Christian.” Anyway, moving on…

I’ve noticed an increase in language policing lately, both in my parish and in the blogosphere. A couple of days ago, I found this blog post by Matt Moore who claims that he “loves Jesus too much” to refer to himself as a gay Christian. While I respect Moore’s own personal story for what it is, his post smacks of condescension, implying that same-sex attracted people who identify as gay love Christ less than those who don’t. (Gay Christians who read it and were left with a similar impression as mine should be made aware of Andrew Asdell’s response piece.) Reading Moore’s post was especially painful this week because I was (and still am) incredibly emotionally raw from a conversation that Lindsey and I were involved in after church on Sunday. If you’ve been reading our posts recently, you’re probably already aware that we’ve had some challenging experiences related to acceptance within our parish. Most people have come a very long way and are slowly coming to embrace us as part of the community, and for that we are grateful. Given that, you might be wondering, “What’s the problem? People are starting to welcome you. What more do you want?” To put it bluntly, the problem is that because we are being welcomed any instance of unwelcome we attempt to address is thrown back in our faces, blamed on the fact that we identify as “gay.” This is true even when there is some acknowledgement that Person X or Person Y was behaving inappropriately toward us.

To be clear, we are not claiming to be victims or martyrs. We are members of the Body of Christ, just like every person at our church, and our stories matter. Our lives matter. No one in our Christian tradition would argue otherwise. Many would likely cite how much they love us and care about our lives as their primary reason for admonishing us to find identity in Christ and reject terminology that’s easily associated with sin. What goes unnoticed — sometimes willfully ignored — is the spiritual toxicity of this admonishment when it’s offered to gay Christians. We’re all different, and it’s true that some Christians with same-sex attraction don’t find it helpful to use the word “gay.” I don’t advocate forcing anyone to use the same language as I use for myself. I believe that the best way to understand a person’s individual needs is to have a candid conversation with that person. In that spirit, here is what I have to say to Christians who think policing LGBT language is a good idea:

If you tell me to turn away from the word “gay” because it keeps me from finding my identity in Christ, you are refusing to believe me that the most sacred, treasured layer of who I am is my identity as a follower of Christ. If you tell me this in one breath and state in the next that I’m an exemplary person (which is far too high a compliment for me), you’re sending me mixed messages. Is something in my behavior leading you to question my commitment to Christ and my willingness to make sacrifices in order to follow him? If so, why are you calling me exemplary? Cognitive dissonance much?

If you imply a hope that at some point in my spiritual journey I will grow out of using the word “gay” and come into a holier form of identity, you are not hearing me when I tell you that understanding myself as “gay” has only increased as Christ has drawn me nearer and nearer to himself over time. You are communicating to me an assumption that people only begin to see themselves as gay when they have fallen away from God. That is not my story. Though I have been through periods of living as an especially bad Christian, I had never yet been sexually active at the time when I came out as gay. If I thought it would do any good, I would explain in detail how much I’ve changed for the better since coming out. I would tell you how strange my family and peers thought I was as a child, how I began to notice in the 3rd grade that my perception of beauty was different from that of other girls, and how at that age I experienced my first crush on the teenage girl playing the lead role in a community theatre show. I’d fast-forward to the 7th grade and tell you how baffled I was to realize that the feelings I had for other girls were the same feelings all my female friends had for boys, and how I dated the same boy throughout high school to force myself into opposite-sex attractions that would never come. I would tell you how devastated I was when we broke up because I truly believed that he was the only person in the world who would put up with such a freak. Then, I’d detail my journey of self-acceptance. I’d glow while sharing with you the peace and connectedness to Christ that I felt when I could finally say, “I’m not a mistake. I’m just gay. God didn’t mess up when he created me.”

If you say that my using the word “gay” might cause a weaker brother to stumble because the majority of straight people think all gay people are sexually active, you are making excuses for my brother’s sin and asking me to take responsibility for it. This tells me that you care more about my brother’s welfare than mine, and you’re not fully willing to remind my brother that behaving hatefully and judgmentally toward others is a sin. Or perhaps you’re willing to talk to him about this — now that I think about it, you probably are. But you’re still blaming me to an extent for another person’s moral failing, and frankly I have enough moral failings of my own to keep track of without worrying about someone else’s. Not that I want to be a source of scandal, but obsessing over other people’s neuroses is not spiritually healthy. And let’s be honest: people in the Church have a nasty tendency to be scandalized by things that are not scandalous, then respond by scandalizing the person who was supposedly the source of scandal in the first place.

If you tell me that “gay” is an inappropriate word for a Christian to use for herself, you are communicating to me that there is nothing that makes my experience of life different from straight people’s experiences, and that any discrimination I face in the Church is not real. You may not be intending to do this, but you’re creating more space for even greater hostility by minimizing my experiences and telling me that offenses I experience must be projections of past hurt onto a current situation. In saying that I might encounter less hostility if I stopped identifying as gay, what you’re really telling me is that the easiest way to deal with discriminatory behavior is to ignore it and tell myself that I’m no different from anyone else. Bring on the pat answers and generic solutions for real instances of cruelty: “Someone talked about you in uncharitable ways at coffee hour? If you stop saying ‘gay,’ maybe he won’t do it anymore.” Reminds me of my fourth grade science teacher who advised that if only I’d cut off my long hair, maybe little Justin wouldn’t be so tempted to yank at my braid every five minutes.

If you are worried about what words I use to describe myself when I don’t even use them at church anyway, you are telling me that celibacy is not enough. Our Christian tradition teaches that sex ought not to take place outside of marriage, and marriage was intended to unite one man and one woman in an eternal commitment that is open to children. Okay. My partner and I are celibate and draw much of our model of doing life from monastic patterns of living. Our relationship does not include anything that our Christian tradition teaches as reserved for marriage. The tradition recognizes two types of vocations: married and celibate. We’re trying our best to figure out what a celibate life in the world ought to look like, and I think we’re not doing too terribly considering that non-monastic celibacy is a relatively new topic for discussion. Why isn’t that enough? How is it that I can be making every possible effort to live into the vocation to which God has called me, and a three-letter word has the power to diminish what I’m doing? Somehow, I just can’t see Jesus caring as much about the word “gay” as Christians do.

If you will not even consider my words when I tell you that I see being gay as a kind of “otherness” that is just as beautiful and valuable as other kinds of human differences, you are denying my experience of life. You are denying that I exist. This is perhaps the most detrimental, alienating, soul-crushing aspect of shaming a gay Christian for how he or she self-identifies. No, it doesn’t help to tell us that we do exist, but as people made in the image and likeness of God, not as gay people. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument that gayness couldn’t possibly be a kind of otherness that is good and meaningful. Until I do hear one, I’m going to continue saying that straight Christians ought to listen to those of us who describe our experiences in this way. Not to suggest that racial minorities experience life in remotely the same way as sexual minorities, but saying to a gay person, “We’re all the same in Christ” is like saying to a black person, “The Church should be colorblind.” Try telling a black person that there is nothing good in the black identity, a poor person that there is no good in the poor identity, a Deaf person that there is no good in the Deaf identity, or an addict that there is no good in the addict identity. Try telling a Russian, Romanian, or Greek person that there’s no good in any form of ethnic identity. The reactions would not be pleasant. By telling me, “Don’t say gay,” you are attempting to strip me of a different yet equally meaningful cultural identity.

If you insist that “gay” means only what you — a straight, conservative Christian — think it means, you are closing yourself and your parish off from a vibrant, committed, faithful group of people who are eager to serve Christ. Instead of showing us love, you’re showing us the exit. You are telling us that you would rather we bleed out on the operating table than give us the support we need to heal from past wounds that other Christians have caused. You’re implying that policing the language of the LGBT community is more important to you than leading LGBT people to Christ. Don’t you realize that there are LGBT people who would love to be part of your church community if only you would help us with our real spiritual problems and stop assuming that the gay identity is a spiritual problem? You need to know that even celibate gay Christians feel unwelcome at church — even forced out — by your inability to consider how we understand identity. It might be easier to think after we’ve left, “They’ve fallen out of the faith. They’ve gone back out into the gay lifestyle because they love their homosexuality more than they love Christ.” I don’t know a single gay person who has left church because of a desire to have sex. Not one. But I know hundreds who have left because of alienation.

Speaking of alienation, that’s the emotional space I find myself in at present. In the spirit of our value vulnerability, I’ll admit that right now the idea of setting foot in church makes me feel hatred toward myself and anger at God and the Church. I don’t understand how it’s possible that the Church has failed so miserably to minister to such an expansive group of people. It makes no sense to me that even the best parish experiences I’ve ever had have come along with undertones of authoritarianism, spiritual abuse, and stubborn refusal to hear the cries of wounded parishioners. I don’t see why it’s so difficult just to be loving, and to reevaluate one’s approach when someone else points out, “I know you’re saying x, y, and z out of love, but these assumptions are causing harm to people who are different from you.” I have no idea what I’m going to do this Sunday, or any Sunday in the near future. When the options are 1) risk triggering depression and addiction in order to receive the Body of Christ at Liturgy, or 2) spend Sunday at home with Lindsey, God, and the angels and saints in our prayer corner, the decision is not straightforward. I have no intention of apostatizing. I love Christ far too much, and no matter the negativity I experience at church I simply cannot stop loving him. But I might need to be an inactive non-communicant for a bit. At the moment, it may be the best survival strategy I can pull together.

(In case anyone is about to tell me that I should “just go to an open and affirming church,” read this first. Also, stay tuned. Lindsey will be reflecting tomorrow on the same topic I addressed today.)

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

The sermon I wish had been preached at #ERLC2014

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A reflection by Lindsey

I have been a participant in the gay Christian conversation for 14 years. Sometimes, it’s a conversation. Sometimes, it’s a debate. And most of the time, it’s a lot of pontificating. I’ve been in environments where people have been actively seeking orientation change and healing from sexual brokenness. I’ve eaten many a meal with LGBT Christians waiting eagerly for the day when they would meet their same-sex spouses. And, hopefully unsurprisingly, I love talking with other people about celibacy and how LGBT people can show Christ to the world through living celibacy. Certain voices are well-known, and you can almost guarantee what a particular speaker will say. Yesterday, Albert Mohler addressed the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission 2014 Conference on The Gospel, Homosexuality, and the Future of Marriage. When I saw on Twitter that Mohler had opened up his Bible to Romans 1, something in me went off and I tweeted:

For an LGBT Evangelical Christian, these conversations are absolutely predictable. As a former Evangelical, I’m well aware of this. Yet, as I threw around the list of the Scriptures in my head… Romans 1, Genesis 3, Matthew 19, Genesis 1… some different thoughts took root in my heart. In following the same order of the Scriptures, I arrived at a very different place than “Don’t be gay.” Although I no longer consider myself an Evangelical with a capital E, I know far too many LGBT Christians screaming out to the Evangelical Church. This post is an offering to friends within Evangelical traditions and anyone else who finds it helpful. It’s deliberately written to have a preacher’s tone, and I hope you can imagine it being delivered by a sort of unknown, robust voice that carries some authority. Like any message delivered at a conference, it’s bound to miss the mark in a number of ways. In many ways, I’m trying to preach to my 22 year old self who desperately needed assurance that God had not abandoned me and had a plan for me in the part of the church I recognized.

Without further ado, I offer to you the sermon I wish had been preached at ERLC2014.

Hello, my name is Lindsey. I’d love a chance to get to know you more. I’ve been doing my best to follow Jesus in the company of friends since 1996. My faith journey began in high school and underwent significant growth in college. I met virtually all of my college friends through Intervarsity: I loved learning more about encountering Christ through intelligently reading the Scriptures and seeking to apply them to my life. I learned that following Christ is costly but that Christ alone offers the only form of life that could possibly be worth my everything. Now that I’ve introduced myself, let’s pray before we dive into God’s word.

Heavenly Father, you know each and every one of us. You created us, called us to be your own as sons and daughters in your eternal kingdom. You delight in us. You have fashioned us according to your image and likeness. Give us the confidence that we are, first and foremost, your children. Father, with the confidence that we are loved deeply and completely by you, we ask you: Search our hearts and know us. Try us and know our thoughts. See if there be any grievous ways in us, and lead us in the way everlasting. Amen.

We’re gathered here to talk about the Gospel, homosexuality, and the future of marriage. We come from many places, but we’re here because we’re deeply concerned about how we live faithful lives in Christ. I speak to you today with a firm conviction that each and every one of us here present longs for an authentic relationship with Christ. With that in mind, I’d like to acknowledge publicly the gay, lesbian, and bisexual Christians I know who have decided to attend this conference, as I know you braced yourselves for great hostility. I don’t know any transgender Christians in attendance tonight. If you are here, I’d love to meet you. I cannot fathom the depths of your courage. Tonight, I feel compelled to walk down a well-trodden road through the Scriptures. I do hope you’ll hold out for what I have to say because I hope to use incredibly painfully familiar passages to mark out a road far less travelled. For the sake of our LGBT brothers and sisters, I’m going to let you know that I’ll walk through Romans 1, Genesis 3, Matthew 19, and Genesis 1. I hope you’ll take a deep breath, and I invite you to trust me even though I’ve given you scant reason to hope that I’ll say something different from what you’ve already heard. God has set this message on my heart. And l implore your forgiveness for any ways I fall short.

Let us turn to Romans 1, beginning with verse 19:

What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Church, if we are going to have an honest conversation about the Gospel, homosexuality and the future of marriage, then we need to be frank: we have made an idol out of marriage. To be absolutely clear, God has imprinted His loving design on marriage. However, marriage is not the Gospel, especially when we consider how we present the Gospel to LGBTQ people both inside and outside the Church. How has it come to pass that Christians are better known for standing in a fried chicken line than we are for feeding the hungry? How has it come to pass that Christians are better known for resisting anti-bullying legislation in schools than we are for treating absolutely each and every person with the love of God? How has it come to pass that Christian parents are better known for kicking their LGBTQ children out on the streets than they are known for binding up the broken-hearted? How is it that 91% of young people between the ages of 16 and 29 who are outside of the church describe the church as anti-gay? These are our kids. And we are failing them. We are failing to show them the Gospel of Christ. We are failing to provide a broken world with hope of restoration and fullness, a promise that we Christians can only be fulfilled by uniting our lives wholly and completely to Christ.

We can find an important piece to this puzzle if we look at Genesis 3. Now, there’s a lot that can be said about Genesis 3 if we are talking about a broken world. Given our topic tonight, I’d like to zoom in on verse 16:

To the woman he [God] said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.

Now, let me first say something absolutely clear to the women gathered in the audience. This verse is not about you. This verse is not about your failings. This verse is not about your specific individual sins. This verse has been all too often wretched from its context and has been abused, completely and wholly and utterly abused by men seeking to demean women. We cannot have an honest conversation about the future of marriage if we deny the historic injustices of misogyny: and our churches have been anything but innocent when it comes to perpetuating the abuse of women.

At this point in Genesis 3, God delivers His judgment on the serpent, the woman, and the man. Some people will describe this passage as God cursing Creation. Yet we know that God, in infinite mercy and majesty, disciplines us as a father cares for his children. We also know that God wants all things to work together for our good and that He gives us good gifts. So here, in Genesis 3, we see that God has given the woman desire for her husband. The mysteries of attraction and marriage are both a blessing and a curse. No wonder it’s so easy for us to fail so miserably in areas of sexual morality!

Turning to Matthew 19, we read:

He [Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

The important thing to note here is that Jesus is talking about divorce. Jesus ups the ante even further when he says, “And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” Friends, brothers and sisters, if we’ve read the Gospels, we know that when Jesus says, “And I say to you” he is looking us right in the eye and telling us that we so easily miss the boat completely on the core issue. Marriage is a commitment that matters to Christ. It is profoundly important. Marriage reflects the world that God created, and marriage is good. Nonetheless, Christ knows that our fallenness we experience marriage as both a blessing and a curse, and he recognizes that sexual immorality has the power to destroy a marriage. That’s why we need to pray for those who are married in our midst: sin can enter in and destroy a covenantal bond. And that’s why we need the Cross because only on the Cross can Christ give Himself completely, fully, and freely to the church. Only through the Cross can Christ destroy the many forces of death that seek only to destroy God’s covenantal bond to His people.

The disciples know that Christ’s teaching on marriage is a challenging teaching. Let’s continue in Matthew 19:

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

And friends, here is where we really experience how we have made an idol of marriage in our society. We have made marriage an idol when we jettison its complement–celibacy. What is even worse is that we thrust this rejected way of life on gay and lesbian people expecting them to figure it out with no support when Protestants, by and large, have neglected the celibate vocation for hundreds of years. Could it be that God has whipped up such fury in the church about homosexuality so we can finally start to have honest conversations about the goodness of celibacy? Church, we need to be honest: do we even know what Christ was talking about when he said “there are eunuchs”? For my part, I have to wonder if there were people running around shouting at those on the margins of society, saying “Don’t call yourself a eunuch!” This passage from Christ is eerily reminiscent of how we talk about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in our cultural context. Moreover, we must be especially mindful that there are some people who do not feel like they can elect into a heterosexual marriage owing to any range of factors. How are we support these people who feel like celibacy is their only realistic option?

I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question, as I do not have the mind of God. Try as I might, I’m a sinner, I’m a fallible human being, and I know that the way of Christ is hard to find. I know that there is great promise in celibate vocations if for no other reasons than Christ was celibate, Paul was celibate, and so many heroes of faith in the modern world like Mother Teresa have been celibate. May God guide the journey, and may we have confidence to undertake this journey in faith.

And, I promised, I’d finish with Genesis 1.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. … And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

God created us in God’s own image. As we go out into the world, whether we are married or unmarried, LGBT or straight, weak or strong, let us remember that we are created in God’s image. May God grant us the strength to be image-bearers so that we reflect Christ in all we do and say.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

To my friends at my baptismal parish

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A reflection by Lindsey

I always start thinking about my baptism in October. I was baptized in my current Christian tradition on 31 October 2009. It’s a movie that I can replay in color immediately as I start reflecting on it. I invited friends from virtually every season of my life. It was an incredible day, and I’m immensely grateful of how God graced me with community, hope, and Himself in the sacraments.

Over the course of the last few days, many friends from my baptismal parish have gotten in touch with me. They’ve seen our posts about how we’ve been welcomed in our church here; and they’ve been contacting me to tell me that they’re sorry Sarah and I are having to endure these things. Some have even made their first comments on the blog in an effort to show me that they love me and that they want to support me, Sarah, and the relationship we have together.

To my friends at my baptismal parish: I’m sorry.

I’m sorry because I had no idea how to share my celibate vocation with you. I’m sorry that when you now click on my Facebook profile, you can see that I’ve shared every post we’ve ever published on A Queer Calling. Until today, I had the vast majority of you on a special Facebook list in order to try and preserve my privacy. I’m sorry for determining that I’d be taking far too great a risk if I shared our writing here with you.

I’ve decided to write to you today because some of you took the bold step of reaching out to me before I reached out to you. You could tell that I was struggling to figure out how to get myself to church on Sunday, and you reached out to me. Even though we’re separated by hundreds of miles, you managed to reach out and touch my heart. Thank you.

I’m sorry I’ve been so terribly gun shy about discussing my sexuality, my vocation, and my relationship with Sarah. I’ve taken to hiding in a hermetically-sealed cage because I have come to expect “welcomes” like the one I received on Sunday. I hid because I was afraid. I was afraid that the moment I actually confirmed the rumors that I am, in fact, a part of the LGBT community, I would be asked to leave the physical premises of most churches. I’ve developed a lot of coping strategies for when Christians discuss LGBT people as Public Enemy #1 or that it’s impossible to be gay and Christian. I’m constantly afraid that if Christians see me doing anything to help other LGBT people deepen their relationship with Christ, then they will demand that priests deal with me swiftly and decisively. The walls have been up for a reason, but I’m so grateful for every small way you’ve tried to edge just a bit closer to me.

Writing to you today is hard. So many priests have cautioned me against ever saying anything remotely public about my sexuality lest I cause a scandal. However, some of you have arrived at the doorstep of our comment boxes only to assure me of your prayers, love, and support. I hope I’m right in guessing that you’ve already let the cat out of the proverbial bag. I keep trying to take big deep breaths to reassure myself that some of you have commented on the blog precisely because you’re trying to let me know that I can reach back. But I’m scared, terrified even, because I’ve been told, time and time again, that I need to be incredibly cautious when I talk about these topics.

<Exhale. Deep breath. It’s going to be okay.>

I’m a celibate LGBT Christian who is one-half of a celibate LGBT couple.

I’m writing to you today because I want you to know that, yes, you actually do know someone who is LGBT and striving to cultivate a celibate vocation. I’ve learned so much about my vocation by watching how you live your lives. I’m still asking God for the grace necessary to run the race set before me; I’d covet your prayers. I know you are praying for me because you reached out to me before I reached out to you. I’ve been trying actively to keep my writing from some of you; however, you still found your way here, and I’m grateful.

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Welcoming Gays: A Response to Fr. Dwight Longenecker

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Yesterday, Fr. Dwight Longenecker published a post called “Welcoming Gays: How Do I Do That?” We appreciate how he used a question mark in his title, and we hope he won’t mind us giving some honest feedback about welcoming LGBT people in Christian communities. Our goal in writing this post is to make some concrete suggestions about things pastors can actually do. Yesterday’s post had a reasonable litany of things best avoided.

When we welcome people, we usually want to know their names. We want to know them personally. It’s hard to feel welcome when people aren’t willing to come up to you, shake your hand, tell you their names, and ask you yours. On a similar note, welcoming a group of people means respecting how they see themselves as a group. We’ve known many a confirmation class from the United Methodist Church that has visited parishes within our Christian tradition as a part of their faith formation. We are always incredibly excited and supportive when our clergy decide to host a forum for these visitors after services to help them make sense of what they’ve seen in the Liturgy. In doing this, we’re treating them as candidates for confirmation in the United Methodist Church. There would be some differences in the ways our parishes would welcome an inquirer who is considering converting, a parishioner’s parents who are visiting from out of town, or visitors who are part of our tradition but come from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

If you want to welcome gays, it’s important to know and respect what the word gay means within the LGBT community. Specifically, the word gay is “a word describing a man or a woman who is emotionally, romantically, sexually and relationally attracted to members of the same sex.” We deliberately took this definition from the Human Rights Campaign’s Glossary of Terms because we wanted to use a definition from clearly within the LGBT community. If we look at the American Psychological Association’s website, we’d see sexual orientation defined as, “an often enduring pattern of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions of men to women or women to men (heterosexual), of women to women or men to men (homosexual), or by men or women to both sexes (bisexual).” It’s important to note that within the LGBT community, LGBT modifies people and homosexual modifies sexual orientation. Swapping the modifiers to get homosexual person is indicative that the person doing the labeling is using a clinical definition of homosexuality.

Fr. Longenecker, people who are gay cannot be described accurately as: “those who are sexually active and committed not only to sexual relations with a person of the same sex, but also to what might be called ‘gay activism’. In other words, their ‘gayness’  is more than sexual activity. It also involves political activism and an ideological stance.” Equating being gay with engaging in specific forms of political activism makes it easy for conservative Christians to assume that every LGBT person is a menace to congregations and must be opposed at all costs. When parishes perceive LGBT people as a carriers of a social plague, they’re just as likely to welcome an LGBT person at church as they are to let an Ebola patient hang out with them at home. And we know that Catholics are taking in the families of Ebola patients: Catholics help people because Catholics are Catholic, not because these families are necessarily Catholic.

If you want to welcome gays, it’s best to use language that is not deliberately inflammatory. Talk to LGBT people about the Gospel; about Christ; about His incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Talk to us about love and sacrifice, grace and truth, mercy and justice. Teach us how to pray, to fast, to feast, to serve, to worship. Guide us as we seek to follow Christ and to grow in our understanding of him. Hear our confessions. Sin is not a dirty word, but please do not assume that you know our sins before we tell you. Resist the urge to say, “The gay lifestyle is repugnant to any right thinking Catholic. The gay ideology is anti-Catholic and the gay manifesto is manifestly un Christian.” As LGBT people, we’re really confused about what you mean by “the gay ideology” and “the gay manifesto.” And honestly, publicly describing the lifestyle of any and all gay people as repugnant isn’t exactly going to offer us any assurance that we will be greeted with a handshake if we have the guts to walk through the door of your parish. Please know that we’re not crying “Persecution!” We’re concerned that people in your parish will take it upon themselves to speculate and query about how we’re abominations before God.

If you want to welcome gays, affirm where you see goodness within us. So many LGBT people have been called “repugnant” by Christians that it can be hard for us to see ourselves as “first and foremost brothers and sisters, fellow human beings created in the image of God and therefore good and precious eternal souls.” Many Christians treat us like we’re part of “certain pressure groups” out to get the Church to “change her basic stance on homosexuality.” We’d love the opportunity to be people who are assumed to enter the door in good faith. It’s really fantastic when pastors take time to say something positive they see in our spiritual lives.

If you want to welcome gays, be willing to listen to our stories of how we have been hurt by pastors and other Christians. We honestly wish it were true that in most churches “the homosexual person is welcomed without prejudice if he or she truly wants to be part of the family of faith.” Surveys indicate that while over 70 percent of gay adults identify some connection to Christianity, 42 percent don’t attend church. We find this incredibly sad. Many LGBT people have grown up hearing that it’s impossible to be a gay Christian. Lindsey was 29 years old before a pastor had ever said to Lindsey, “You are welcome in this parish.” It remains a singular experience but Lindsey makes a habit of replaying that memory when feeling discouraged. It’s important for priests to know how to respond if one of their brother priests denies a celibate gay person absolution because of the gay person’s sexual orientation. Yes, this does happen even if it’s not supposed to happen. Too often, straight Christians behave like ostriches when LGBT people tell stories about experiencing discrimination in church. One can dismiss these stories easily by saying, “Well, that priest was wrong to deny you communion if you weren’t sinning. That’s not what the Church teaches. Surely the priest had other reasons to deny you communion.” This kind of response accuses LGBT Christians of lying and gives straight Christians an excuse to keep their heads in the sand.

To answer your question, Fr. Longenecker, “Do [gay people] want to be assured that simply because they experience same sex attraction they will not be vilified, ostracized and excluded?” The answer is Yes. We would also like it if straight Christians could stop ignoring how LGBT Christians have been mistreated by clergy and laity alike. It would be awesome if an LGBT person could tell a story of hurt and be greeted with empathy, reassurance, and perhaps an apology if one is warranted. Speaking for ourselves as a celibate LGBT couple, we’d love it if clergy in our Christian tradition could help us sort legal matters to ensure that we’re able to care for one another. There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the question of gay marriage where many Christian traditions have concluded that it’s inappropriate for a couple like us to enact a civil marriage. However, we’re still wondering about how best to sort issues of health care, financial interdependence, and other practical matters. Not always, but often in the past when we’ve raised these issues with priests and others we trust at church, we’ve been accused of being over-dramatic and looking for an excuse to call our relationship a “marriage.” We’re grateful to have a priest now who sees us as people rather than as problems. Nonetheless, it would be nice to have some assurance that we would be treated as people if we went to a different parish within our Christian tradition. It would also be fantastic if we had a sense that our fellow parishioners felt like they could give us an authentic welcome.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.