From the Church's Shadow

I blogged before about growing up in the Church and for the most part it was a pretty positive experience.  I was fortunate to have some open-minded, progressively theological adults in my life at the time.  Unfortunately, though, these few adults weren’t enough to counter the conservative culture that was pervasive in my area and the era in which I grew up.  One loving, accepting Sunday School teacher wasn’t enough to coax me out of the closet.  Since those teenage and young adult years I have been surprised and even shocked to learn who else around me had to keep their true identity hidden for the fear of what would happen if they were discovered. 

The problem with growing up in the Church is that the Church is always at least a generation behind the culture.  For example, the “women’s liberation movement” began in the 60’s and moved through the 70’s (and still has a long way to go on many fronts).  Most mainline protestant denominations slowly welcomed women into the ranks of ordained clergy (pastors, priests).  The Methodists, Presbyterians, some Lutherans, some Baptists all began ordaining women in the later 70’s and 80’s—pretty much a generation behind women taking their place in the secular workforce among male counterparts.  But not all denominations have moved to accepting women as church leaders.  Some Lutherans, the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and many, MANY fundamentalist denominations who adhere to a strict, contemporary interpretation of scripture divorced from original culture and context still insist women must remain silent (1 Corinthians 14.34) and that wives are inferior to their husbands (1 Corinthians 11.3) and should be obedient to their husbands (Titus 2.4-5).

The same holds true for topic of premarital sex.  It’s still scandalous in many church traditions for an engaged couple to “shack up together” before they get married and if they have a child before the priest or pastor declares them married the amount of judgment and scorn they have to endure typically drives many from the church.  I know many couples who have been told by their religious leaders that if they want to be married in this or that church they have to give up living together and remain celibate for a duration of X amount of days/months.  Why?  Because somewhere someone has found a passage or two that can be used to interpret these premarital relationships as adulterous.  Nevermind the fact that for most of history, particularly in Europe, many couples wouldn’t be married until well after the birth of grandkids, usually as they came into the last third of their lives and wanted to “make themselves right with God.”  Marriage, in their case, was something done in the senior years not when the couple began their lives together. 

And divorce, which is actually a topic Jesus of Nazareth speaks of with relatively great detail in Matthew 19, is something that the Church was fairly quick to be okay with.  Why?  Because so many high profile leaders and televangelists were getting divorces and so, to maintain their reputations (and income), they minimized Jesus teaching on divorce to suit their own needs.  And, let’s be honest, it’s easy to disregard your own sin when there’s so many other flashier sins that can attract the public’s attention and on which you can make a living. 

I pretty much grew up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).  I’m still a member of this denomination though over the years I will admit that I have been tempted to make a jump to other, more progressive traditions.  The ELCA, for the most part, has been a fairly forward thinking institution within the greater Church.  Its predecessor bodies (because it was formed by a merger of existing denominations in the later 80’s) began ordaining women in the early 70’s.  In 2009 the ELCA churchwide body approved the rostering of openly LGBT clergy in “committed lifelong monogamous relationships.” 

This kind of progressive mentality still hasn’t manifested itself in the region in which I grew up or currently live.  In 2009, when the churchwide body made its decision, many local congregations in my area left the ELCA because they insisted that homosexuality was a sin and they would not remain a part of a church body that would allow flagrant (and flamboyant?) sinners to be leaders in their church.  While large, progressive metro areas like San Francisco and Portland and even pockets of Kentucky and Indiana benefited from the decision, congregations fell away from the ELCA in droves in my region. 

The reason I’m giving you this history lesson and introducing you to the realities of church politics is because I’m trying to paint a picture for you.  This is the reality in which I grew up.  This is the reality in which many of us grew up.  Many of us still live in this reality.  The Church, which is so fond of making Sunday School children memorize “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son…” (John 3.16) and make kids sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world…,” was the same Church that looked at people who were LGBT and said, “Not you.  God says you’re an abomination.  Here’s a list of passages from the Bible to prove it.”

So growing up in the 80’s, with the HIV/AIDS crisis taking hold of the media and the public imagination, homophobia was on the rise.  The one place LGBT people could have gone to be reassured of their value and their humanity systematically rejected them, declaring that there was no way God could love such wicked, unnatural people.  “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” is something many of us chuckle about today but back then it hurt.  A lot. 

LGBT people had no standing in the secular world and the Church tried very hard to take the love of God away.  Is it any wonder that mental health issues correlated with LGBT self-identification? Is it a surprise that antagonists of LGBT people would use that correlation for their own agenda, saying that LGBT orientations created mental illness rather than understanding that isolation and fear and anxiety over the reaction of friends and family and even God created mental health issues in LGBT people?

Self-denial and conformation were requirements for survival or so many of us felt.  What choice did we have?  If we came out as teenagers we would be ostracized or even physically threatened.  If we came out as teens or adults we risked losing the people who should love us unconditionally, our families.  And even God.  We were trapped.  We made choices.  We made commitments that would lock us into a trajectory that would deliver us into a future that, for the most part, would look dramatically different than the past.  For the most part.  Obviously there still remain too many exceptions to the rule and we, as a society, still have a long way to go.

For me, because of my personality and my interests and my education, as I grew older I began to understand things differently.  Within the context of the Church and the Church’s institutionalized homophobia, I eventually learned that the Church’s intolerance of LGBT people had nothing to do with God and had everything to do with narrow minded, superstitious, and even ignorant interpretations of passages from the Bible.  I’ve blogged before about a quote from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and the quote that has been a guide for me in my understanding of theology and Church:

“From these Christians who came to [Avalon] to escape the bigotry of their own kind I learned something, at last, of the Nazarene, the carpenter's son who had attained Godhead in his own life and preached a rule of tolerance; and so I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.”

For me and others like me, it’s an enormous gift to come to a place of understanding in which you know that God loves you for who you are, just as God made you to be.  To shake off the burden of ignorant theology and superstition is a liberating experience.  The God we sought to please by denying who we truly were is the God who lovingly welcomes us with open arms, declaring, “No matter who you are, what you’ve done, what’s been done to you—I love you.”  Seeking God’s forgiveness for something far outside of our control like our biological makeup and internal wiring is no longer a priority.

For me, however, forgiveness still needs to be sought.  And I know I’m not alone.

In an attempt to be what we were told we should be, many of us, as I said, locked ourselves into a trajectory that led us into an unimaginable future.  We boxed up our LGBT selves and put on our straight faces because we never thought in a million years that things would get better for us.  We had “traditional” marriages.  We had children.  We built a life….that didn’t belong to us.  Some of us can extract themselves from this artificial life easier than others of us.  People like me?  Our life…our lies…interconnect with the lives of others with such complexity that to extricate ourselves from these lives would be disastrous.  It’s no longer a case of hidden identity for the sake of our own protection but it has become a case of hidden identity for the sake of the protection of others.  To tug at the threads and unravel the lies would hurt too many people.  So, those of us who have been forced by the culture, by the Church, and those who love us to deny who we truly are….well, we end up continuing to deny ourselves for the sake of those whom we love. 

I celebrate the stories I hear in which LGBT people find ways to navigate out of the trap and can do so on relative good terms.  Some of us can’t do that.  Some of us are still silent.  We’re here, we’re surviving, but…not really thriving. 

So here’s the thought that keeps me up at night.  Because I’ve come to a place where I simply can’t keep silent anymore, I worry about when Troy Comets and not-Troy Comets are going to come together for the first time in front of the people I try to protect.  Because, as much as I was victimized by a culture of ignorance and a Church that should have known better, the people affected by my choice to “try to do the right thing” are real victims.  I can’t not tell my story anymore (which is why I’m blogging) and I can’t not help others tell their story. 

What happens when my ‘two selves” are forced to coexist in the lives of the people I love and who love me?

And I know I’m not alone in this. 

I have learned that forgiveness from God is easy; it flows from God’s loving nature.  I also know that forgiveness from human beings is complicated, particularly from those who feel betrayed by us even when our intentions were the best.  After all, how do you forgive someone for breaking your heart?  How do you forgive someone for threatening to not be there when you depend on them so much? 

I guess this is the shadowed reality of the LGBT community.