God’s Eye for the Queer Guy

With its release of guidelines on homosexuality in the priesthood last week, the Vatican reminded the world that queers are not welcome in many major Christian communities—as if the world needed the reassurance. At this point, even the Pope is barely audible over the anti-gay clamoring of conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and fundamentalist Christians in the United States.

Also nearly lost amid the noise, however, was another recent—and much more surprising—development. In October, the queer advocacy group Human Rights Campaign launched its “Religion and Faith Project,” aimed at bridging divides between the gay community and people of faith.

For both secular progressives and Christians who aren’t members of gay-friendly denominations like the United Church of Christ, HRC’s move may take a little explaining. Could the Holy Trinity really accept the Fab Five? Can queers find a friend in Jesus?

We’ve all heard the religious right’s reasons why not. Conservative believers cite a smattering of obscure biblical passages from Genesis, Leviticus, and the letters of Paul that convey either explicit or implicit disapproval of homosexuality.

But what does “homosexuality” mean in these contexts? Right-wing groups like the Family Research Council frequently perform the linguistic sleight of hand that makes being gay synonymous with embracing promiscuity, unsafe sex, predatory behavior and pedophilia. While open-hearted people know this is ridiculous, this obfuscation allows conservatives to both vilify all modern-day queers and find support for their spite in Biblical passages that really aren’t so much about healthy, egalitarian gay relationships as about behavior that would make even the most outré leather-clad gay pride paraders blush.

Take the most famous ostensibly anti-gay Bible story: Sodom and Gomorrah. As the tale goes, these two cities were destroyed by God for their sinfulness, but not before two angels disguised as men arrived to ferry Lot, the only righteous citizen, to safety. Lot’s fellow Sodomites didn’t take kindly to the rescuers: A crazed mob demanded to gang-rape them.

The story ends happily with the would-be rapists perishing in a hail of fire and brimstone (literally!). But the Sodomites’ attempted assault has long been interpreted by many Christians as the sin for which the city was destroyed, and thus a condemnation of all those who might want to engage in even completely consensual sexual acts along similar lines (hence the vernacular term that the Christian right uses for the gay community).

This interpretation is simply wrong. Not only does the story make clear that God had decided to destroy Sodom before the famous rape attempt (that’s why the angels were there to begin with), but the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrash (Rabbinical elaborations on Biblical stories) all explicitly describe the real sins of Sodom—sins which read much less like gay erotica than, say, a conservative party platform.

“This was the guilt of your sister Sodom,” explains the prophet Ezekiel: “she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Perhaps someone should tell President Bush to stop sodomizing America.

How to explain the whole gang-rape thing, then? For a hint, think less “Queer as Folk” and more “Oz.” In the time of ancient Israel, the Middle East was a volatile mix of regional rivalries and an ever-growing obsession with masculinity (especially once the Greeks and Romans rolled through). One of the most profound ways to humiliate a male enemy or outsider, then, was to treat him like a woman—and you can sadly imagine the most humiliating way to do that.

Later, as early Christians evangelized the Roman empire, they found another reason to oppose homosexual behavior: Ritualized homosexual acts were common in the spiritual cults that Christianity competed with for followers.

And then there’s the most provocative proof that the biblical authors focused on extremely dominating, exploitative, and particularly male expressions of homosexuality, rather than the general state of being gay: There is not one clear denunciation of lesbian acts in all of scripture.

Still, even antiquity’s more egalitarian homosexual relationships (which surely existed) were likely frowned upon by many Jews and early Christians. It remains important to distinguish between biblical stories about immorality that happen to involve homosexual acts and loving, healthy homosexual relationships when interpreting the scriptures or discussing modern gay life —particularly when the Dobsons, Robertsons and Bill Donahues of the world won’t.

But biblical revelations and revolutions rarely come solely from haggling over the ancient context of a handful of passages. Remember that the scriptural recipe for supporting slavery was strikingly similar to the case against homosexuality today: One painfully straightforward passage from Leviticus (“...it is from the nations around you that you may acquire male and female slaves”); one strained interpretation of a Genesis story (the so-called “curse of Ham”); and a dash of quotations from the more didactic writings of Jesus’ first followers ( Ephesians 6:5: “Slaves, obey your masters…as you obey Christ.”).

Those verses are still there today. So how did Christians—like those who led the abolition and civil rights movements—get past them?

The first clue is concisely expressed in a slogan from gay rights rallies: “What Jesus said about homosexuality: ____.” (That would be nothing.)

Anti-gay religious groups like Exodus International are quick to denounce this focus on Christ as downright un-Christian: “[T]he gospels—and the teachings they contain—are not more important than the rest of the Bible.”

Oh really? Well, gay-bashing is by no means the only conservative Christian cause that you’ll hear this argument trotted out to advance these days: The worship of wealth, casual creationism, and strong blends of faith and nationalism with a double shot of warmongering come to mind.

But it’s high time that all those who find Christ’s version of Christianity to be the truly inspiring one called out this “every-word-of-the-Bible-is-infallible” canard for what it is: a sloppy, self-serving distortion of scripture that probably crossed the line into idolatry a long time ago.

What’s the alternative—the religious vision that overcame slavery and segregation, and will soon embrace homosexuality as well? It starts when Christians stop worshipping a book as a God, and start reading it through the eyes of the Godly man about whom it was written. It starts when believers put The Christ back in Christianity.

Jesus (along with the greatest Jewish teachers of his day) had his scriptural priorities straight, and was very clear that not all biblical rules are created equal. On the contrary, he shook his religious, political and social world to the core when he spoke and acted out “the greatest commandment” for judging our fellow humans: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The folks at Exodus International are quick to qualify this as well. “[L]ove is not always such a good thing.” They have a point: Love can cause pain; love can go wrong. But the love Jesus practiced—“agape” or brotherly love—is also the essential first step in discovering that such failings are not inherent to any human being or any equal human relationship.

Anti-gay believers talk about “loving” homosexuals as a one way street: They do not wish to be influenced or changed by the “sinners” they approach. But the love Christ preached is a transformative experience—even for him. In one fascinating Gospel story, a non-Jewish woman comes to Jesus asking him to heal her daughter, but he refuses, arguing in strikingly blunt terms that his mission is limited to serving the Jews. The woman persists, countering with a witty reply—and Jesus is moved to compassion. “Woman, great is your faith!” he says in Matthew. “Let it be done for you as you wish.”

This revolutionary power of putting Christ’s teachings on love before all other biblical rules or limits echoes through the ages. When William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. called a nation to let agape love transform their vision of different-skinned neighbors, no petty Bible verses justifying self-interest and validating fear could withstand the torrent of transforming faith.

And today, when believers let the love for neighbors pull them toward the gay community, they are moved as Jesus was. These are the triumphant stories of the gay rights movement: Christians who could despise some abstract deviant, but not the beloved family member, friend, or fellow churchgoer whose homosexuality poses no threat and promises much joy.

These are the stories out of Massachusetts, where last year’s legislative efforts to break up newly legalized gay marriages have fatally faltered as lawmakers open their office doors to healthy homosexual couples and their hearts to the revelation that such spite will only destroy families, not protect them.

This is the Christian story in which queer believers, like so many others who have suffered for doing no wrong, can find hope, liberation, redemption: “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And this is the enduring revolutionary power of Jesus’ true message, fulfilled through the commandment of love: “Blessed are you who weep, for one day you will laugh.”

Illustration: Matt Bors

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