Scout’s honor

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A while back, a student in my philosophy of religion class turned in a paper which stated that, “in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris argued that morality was based on scientific discoveries about the order God had put into the world at the Creation.” I was, I confess, a bit at a loss about what sort of helpful comments I could make on the paper. There’s only so much I could do to soften the blow of, “Actually, Sam Harris is one of the leading advocates of atheism, and his book argued that we can base morality on science, not God.”

I was reminded of that student’s paper the other day, when a friend pointed me to an article by Ken Klukowski, the Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council, titled “Boy Scout Leaders Propose Incoherent Policy on Gay Scouts.”

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On Reading Richard Giannone

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In his memoir Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire, Richard Giannone, emeritus professor at Fordham, writes about his mother’s slow decline and his care for her in her final days. Central to the story is Giannone’s long-time partner Frank. After Giannone’s mother’s death, as Giannone begins immediately to care for his aging sister, he becomes more keenly aware of all the way his life is intertwined with his partner’s. For instance:

When Frank and I returned early evening that Saturday to our apartment in the Village, I was still shaken. By 2003 Frank had been with me for twenty-two years. Our partnership was repeatedly tested in the fire of social defiance and in the emergency room with family members and each other. Characteristically, Frank spoke not a word. He put down the bags with clean laundry, pulled me against him, and held me tight. Frank’s grip was so firm that his Parkinson’s got his arms wedged hugging me. We were caught, locked, immovable. We laughed. The sinews of our attached muscles held the love that bound us through the tight spot with Marie [Giannone’s sister].

I was home. I was in my faithful friend and partner’s shelter.

I chose this except almost at random. Virtually every chapter is filled with similarly tender moments of quiet intimacy.

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Day of Silence 2013

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When discussing anti-bullying initiatives, many Christians are quite concerned about parents who have to deal with school curricula discussing LGBT issues by talking to their kids about these issues earlier than they’d like. Why are they so often not as concerned about parents who have to bury their middle and high school kids knowing that they killed themselves because they couldn’t handle the pain of what they were going through? Although it’s hard to collect accurate statistics, the best research we have pretty consistently shows that around one in three LGBT teenagers goes so far as to attempt suicide. We have a very real problem on our hands, one that is killing people. While no doubt bullying is not the only cause of suicide attempts by LGBT people, it is often a huge contributing factor. As Christians, we have a responsibility to consider more than just sexual ethics, and to have compassion for “the least of these” who face mistreatment and whose lives are at risk.

Of course, nearly all Christians believe that bullying is wrong, whether related to sexuality or not. However, I think we often fail to understand some important realities regarding anti-gay bullying in particular. For example, it is important to consider the broader social and cultural environments that bullying takes place within. Far too often Christians provide condemnation without grace when it comes to LGBT issues. Even in broader environments, LGBT teenagers are frequently told that they’re disgusting perverts. They may not be told so to their face, but the message is pervasive enough that it can lead to a lot of internalized shame. I definitely faced this to some degree growing up in a conservative Christian environment and finding myself attracted to both sexes, even though I wasn’t sexually active and held to a traditional sexual ethic. Many LGBT teens are hit much harder than I was. LGBT teens often feel that they are so worthless that bullying towards them doesn’t matter, and generic opposition to bullying rings hollow. I strongly encourage people to read a powerful memoir expressing this, written by a woman who is now a Christian with a conservative understanding of sexual ethics, at My Day of Silence 2009 Post, A Year and A Month Late. She describes how it seemed that everyone hated gay people, and as a result she was “drowning in a sea of hate.” She then goes on to say that it would have been helpful to know that someone thought what was happening was wrong. Let the weight of that sink in.

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Why don’t we talk about friendship more?

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I realize that, at this blog, that’s a somewhat silly question. But over at Fare Forward, Jordan Monge raises the question with regard to the broader Christian culture:

Friendship often is given short shrift in our culture. As every child knows, the Disney movie ends with the princess marrying her prince charming and not by her forming a lifelong platonic friendship. Where marriage is so significant it demands a wedding ceremony more expensive than a car, friendship is mundane, meriting less deliberate investment and certainly no formal declarations of mutual love and admiration. You could buy a library’s worth of self-help books about cultivating a better marriage, but there is little formal thought devoted to becoming a better friend or what friendship ought to look like.

It hasn’t always been this way. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero authored works on friendship. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, there is a ceremony called adelphopoiesis, which is literally translated as “brother-making.” Norwegian, Chinese, and Native American cultures were known to have had ceremonies to honor blood brothers. It’s ironic that, among Christians, we’ve privileged marriage so much highly over friendship despite the fact that our founder Jesus Christ was a man who never married but did invest quite deliberately in 12 friends.

Check out the whole thing.

A Note on Karl Barth, Celibacy, and the ‘Image of God’

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In his Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships, James Brownson critiques the idea that the “image of God” in humanity includes sexual difference:

Throughout much of Christian history, the notion that gender differentiation is part of the image of God (“male and female as the image of God in stereo”) has occasionally surfaced as a marginal voice, but it has never occupied a significant place in the Christian understanding of the imago Dei. The reason is a simple one. If both male and female must be present together in order to fully constitute the image of God, then those who are single do not fully reflect the image of God. This runs deeply against the grain of many passages in the Bible. But even more important, the New Testament clearly proclaims that Jesus is, par excellence, the image of God (e.g., 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 3:10; 1 Cor. 15:45). Unless we are to postulate an androgynous savior, something the New Testament never even contemplates, we cannot say that the image of God requires the presence of both male and female. It is far better to interpret Genesis 1:27, which insists that both male and female are created in the divine image, to mean that all the dignity, honor, and significance of bearing the divine image belong equally to men and women. We need not delve into the entire debate about what exactly the image of God signifies. For our purposes it is enough to say what is not signified by the divine image: gender complementarity.

One theologian Brownson singles out for criticism is Karl Barth, for whom, Brownson says, “a complementary understanding of gender is essential to the image of God.” Brownson thinks this understanding of the imago Dei would require each person to be married to a member of the opposite sex in order to fully become a divine image-bearer.

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Friendship and the Scandal of Particularity

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In a recent post, Wesley Hill discusses the apparent tension between the Christian ideal of universal, unconditional love and the particularity of friendship, and cites Samuel Johnson’s worry that “All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend, to the neglect, or, perhaps, against the interest of others… Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren; which is contrary to the virtue of friendship, as described by the ancient philosophers.”

I want to draw attention to a serious problem with Johnson’s understanding of Christian love.

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Is Friendship an Unconditional Love?

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Last weekend I had the privilege of speaking to the Harvard College Faith and Action student ministry (which, incidentally, makes the Boston Marathon bombings feel so much closer—I sat next to two runners on my flight there). Rarely have I encountered such a vibrant, passionate group of Christians, and I was honored by their sharp, creative responses and questions.

(One of the most moving parts of my visit was hearing a student give a testimony about being gay and Christian and wrestling with what that means for his future—celibacy? marriage? community? Afterward, it was hard to avoid tears as student after student came up and embraced him. I thought of Brandon Ambrosino’s story and how these kind of loving expressions often fly under the radar in our public debates about sex and marriage but are no less sustaining for going unremarked.)

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On ‘Bilingual’ Pastoral Theology

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Recently I went on a walk with a friend, both of us sipping takeaway cups of Starbucks and she pushing her youngest child, chicken pox-afflicted, in the stroller. My friend teaches theology and ethics, and we’d agreed to meet up and talk about matters LGBTQ.

It was an especially rich conversation, but for now I just wanted to mention one thing my friend said that struck me as profound and helpful. My friend began by admitting that she really struggles with what’s become a standard gay Christian testimony: “God made me this way and wants me to flourish, so God must want me to be true to myself here.”

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Welcoming and shaming

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A friend of mine recently brought my attention to a video called “Homosexuality and Hope: My Journey to Truth in the Catholic Church.” In the video, the speaker says:

We can let go of any shame or guilt internalized on account of the existence of those attractions. Ok? This whole myth that we’re supposed to feel shameful? Forget it. It’s not part of Catholic Church teaching, and if you do have shame or guilt because of the fact that you might have same sex attractions, you can let that go. We’ve all been able to let that go. It’s absolutely liberating.

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Thoughts on ‘Does Jesus Really Love Me?’

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I’ve just finished reading Jeff Chu’s new book Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America, and I highly recommend it. Besides being well-written and engaging (I could hardly put it down), it’s also very illuminating. The book is a balanced, fair-minded collection of snapshots of virtually every corner of the (Protestant) Christian discussion of LGBTQ matters. If someone wanted to get a sense for how American Protestants treat their gay and lesbian neighbors, this is the book I would give them first. It covers Westboro Baptist, The Episcopal Church, and everything in between.

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