Coming to Grips with the Beast – I
The
culmination of a 50 year struggle
News from the recent General Convention of the Episcopal
Church indicates that the church has edged ever closer to coming to grips with
the beast of homophobia. In lopsided votes, the Convention approved a trial use
of a rite to bless same sex unions and also voted to lift barriers to
transgendered persons seeking ordination. While the beast of homophobia is
hardly dead, particularly not in most of the dioceses of Florida whose
representatives not surprisingly led the resistance to these measures, it has
sustained some major, perhaps mortal, wounds within the Episcopal Church.
It has been a long road for the church from its initial
study of homosexuality and alcoholism by the House of Bishops in 1962 from
which came the magnanimous pronouncement that homosexuality was a mere “standard
weakness” and not a mortal sin. In 1976, the General Convention took a giant
step in resolving to offer "pastoral care" to those in same sex relationships
and to oppose discrimination against the legal rights of gays and lesbians.
But the church itself continued to discriminate when it
came to ordination until 1997 when the Convention would agree to ordain openly
gay and lesbian priests. It would take another vote at Convention in 2009 to
remove the last barrier to ordination of gay bishops to the episcopacy. And the
recent convention voted to open the ordination process to transgendered
persons.
The approval of a trial use of a same sex blessing rite thus comes at the end of a 50 year bitter struggle within the Episcopal Church over
the question of whether its gay and lesbian members would be treated as first
class citizens. Throughout its seemingly endless debate during which gay and
lesbian Episcopalians have served as the subjects under the microscope of study
after study, justice delayed has surely been justice denied for many loyal
Episcopalians. And no small number of them could not endure the long wait and
departed the ranks of its members.
For the injustice within its own ranks and the harm it
has inflicted on its own members, the church must ultimately apologize to its
victims to regain any semblance of integrity. But for its willingness to engage
and persevere through such an extended struggle and ultimately to choose to do
the right thing in the face of centuries of attitudes and practice to the
contrary, the church deserves no small amount of credit.
It
came by the beast honestly
In all fairness, the church came by the beast of
homophobia honestly. Misanthropy has
long marked the Christian tradition from its very beginnings. Read the commentaries about women and slavery in the letters attributed (probably erroneously) to
Paul. Read the Hebrew Scripture’s rationalization of genocide committed against
human beings in places with names like Jericho and Ai supposedly at the command
of a deity called YHWH. The Christian tradition is definitely no stranger to misanthropy.
Of course, it’s hardly surprising that tribal, sectarian
thinking would mark a tradition which would purport to hold the exclusive path
to heaven, that path extended only to those within the circled wagons of the
tribe. A generous supply of the damned has always been necessary to
those who would construct themselves as the elect if nothing else than for marking
tribal boundaries.
Where Christianity
has always erred is in the attribution of its socially constructed distinctions
to the mind of G-d, a move by which eternal, existential ramifications come to
apply to temporally and culturally conditioned distinctions. As Annie Lamott
observes, “You
can safely assume you've created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
The Original Sin of Christianity
Homophobia is but one of many heads of the hydra of
Christianity’s Original Sin, its
dysfunction regarding anything remotely related to the human body, particularly
its sexual expressions. Rooted in part in Greek dualism, the subordination of
the body to the spirit has, over time developed into a decided antipathy toward
the body. From this body-negative starting place, it’s not difficult to see how
the experience of the majority - heterosexual feelings and behaviors - came to
be seen as normative for everyone resulting in a comparatively benign heterosexism. But it is out of this
matrix that a more malignant and virulent homophobia
would ultimately arise.
As a common social prejudice, homophobia has tainted the
thinking of many, perhaps most, cultures historically including those which
produced the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Thus it should not be surprising to see that prejudice reflected in the scriptures those cultures produced. To make the prejudice even more
difficult to confront, homophobia has long been the common sense default in
western thought, seen as “normal” in both the statistically prevalent sense as
well as in the self-serving moralism which arises from majorities who come to
see their understandings as normative – and thus imperative - for everyone else.
The uphill struggle within Christianity to finally come
to grips with this beast has in large part turned on the willingness of
Christians to call this particular form of misanthropy, the primordial sin of
failing to love our brothers and sisters as ourselves, what it really is - homophobia. And this has proven the major
stumbling block for many Christians, Episcopalians included.
No
darkness at all….
The reality is that no one wants to see themselves in
less than socially acceptable terms. This becomes particularly pointed when one
adds the values of purity and perfection to the self-constructions of most
Christians.
The Episcopal hymn “Child of the Light” illustrates this
well: “I want to walk like a child of the
light, I want to follow Jesus…In him there is no darkness at all…” The goal
of imitating one in whom “there is no darkness of all” is particularly trying
for imperfect human beings. It almost inevitably means that the contents of one’s
shadow must be repressed into the unconscious. From there the shadow is readily
projected onto socially powerless targets who become the designated scapegoats.
Personas constructed on the terms of this faith tradition
demand that the good Christian be seen as unconditionally loving, respecting of
the image of G-d on every human face. But such demands are ultimately irreconcilable
with the base, common social prejudices of the surrounding culture and therefore
cannot be allowed to come to consciousness.
Thus it becomes very difficult to even recognize the
operation of such prejudices in one’s worldview, much less to confront them and
confess them as sins. Little wonder many good Christian voters in California
gave survey takers the expected halo effect response of opposing the deeply
homophobic Proposition 8 – no one wants to out themselves as homophobes - only
to go into the inner sanctum of the voting booth to cast ballots arising from their
darkest prejudices.
[Continued]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott
Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member,
Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest,
Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor:
Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University
of Central Florida, Orlando
If the
unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it
religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do
not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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