Celibacy Pt 2 - An Outdated and Failed Experiment

Easily the most read post on the BGBC Blog has been that which I published on 12 March 2012: Celibacy For Gays – A Deconstruction. It has had, on average, sixty views every month since its publication just over two years ago. It has been read on every continent in the world and in so many different countries that it has surprised even me by the interest it has generated.

In that post, I attempted to spell out the catastrophic consequences of:

1.       Telling a person that despite being gay, they must never ever act on     their sexuality or express it;

2.       Mandating such a rule from authoritative people like clergy and church   leadership;

3.       Declaring that such a rule is what God wants;

4.       Policing that rule with church sanctions;

5.       Declaring that a person who breaks that rule is sinning and rebelling     against God;

6.       Declaring that a person who breaks that rule is contravening nature;

7.       Insisting that such a person repent and return to mandated lifelong       commitment to celibacy no matter the personal cost.

I attempted to spell out that cost, especially to a young gay person; to show what it actually means in the lived experience when a church leader tells a young person they must commit the rest of their lives to sensual and sexual isolation, not because they want to, but because they are told to.

So why the interest in of all things – celibacy? Why after fighting for so many years to declare that being gay is okay and being gay does not exclude a person from being Christian is the traditional church now so powerfully interested in the notion of ensuring that gay people not express their sexuality?

A New Fight

There is a good reason. It would appear to all intents and purposes that the war on gays is over; at least relatively speaking. There are still skirmishes here and there but the shift towards positive attitudes to gay people is unmistakable and unstoppable. It has been so significant and so rapid that it has left many stunned and shocked. There is now widespread acceptance that gay people have always been around, that we are around today and not ashamed anymore and so are out and very public. Gays are now part of the furniture in the developed world and are gradually becoming relatively unremarkable. When a well-known figure or celebrity comes out these days, it’s not such a big deal anymore. “Oh yeah, I always wondered” or “good for him” “good for her” are common responses nowadays. In fact, it goes even further than this. Gay people are now so out and public that we are now active in ensuring that our rights are not trampled upon by traditional bigotries. We have been and continue to be strong and voluble advocates for gay rights and the removal of discriminations. We even want our relationships recognised by our respective societies in the push for the acceptance of marriage for our community.

And as this monumental social change has taken place and taken root, the traditional evangelical church’s view on gay people, which has been the loudest and most strident, has lost purchase with general Western society. People in developed countries are well educated and know at least basically how this whole gay thing works. They know that people don’t just wake up one day and decide to be gay. They know that the gay youth suicide rate is way too high and is a powerfully distressing phenomenon for local communities and nations.

Some statistics from the United States:

      ·        Lesbians are two times more likely to attempt suicide than straight women;
·        Gay men are six times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers;
·        Attempts by gay and lesbian youth account for up to 30% of all completed suicides;
·        Gay teens are 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.

People know that these numbers are caused by rejection and self-disgust, the perception in young gay people that they are sick or sinful or unacceptable or filthy because they have been told explicitly by church or family that this is so and that they lack the emotional maturity to be able to handle such devastating declarations about their life. People have gotten the message that it has been society and church that has been sick, not the young gay person. The world is waking up to the reality of the harm of such prejudice. Society has heard the stories about people like Matthew Shepherd and Tyler Clementi losing their lives due to the tumultuous issues around gay sexuality for young people and when there is a real face with a real name on the news, there is empathy and attitudinal shift occurs.

They have either read or heard at least a modicum of science that a gay sexuality is significantly determined by genetic and biologic factors. They know gay people personally. They work with them. Gay people are part of their schools, universities, hospitals, retail centres, their families. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends. Society has moved on.

Yes, there are and always will be pockets of homophobia; always due to fear and ignorance. But on the whole, the churches know that they have lost this war. No longer can they get away telling the world that being gay is a sin, a punishment from God, a rejection of God, a deal-breaker with God, a ticket to burn in hell for eternity. No-body is buying it anymore. Not because society has become godless and profane but because those traditionally taught notions are nonsensical and juvenile and harmful and are seen to be in the public discourse. There is more education out there now. Those attitudes simply do not make sense in a twenty first century world.

So what is the response of the traditional churches?

“Let’s go to Plan B. Okay,” they say, “you can be gay. We can’t change you and we’ve learned that the hard way. We know that most people accept you as you are and we know how bad it makes us look that they do and we don’t. We know how bad it makes us look when they offer love and acceptance and we don’t. So, you can be gay. There’s probably nothing we can do to change that anyway. But while you can call yourselves gay and while you can think of yourselves as gay, we demand, because we speak for God and we know that we are about to command is exactly and precisely what God wants, that you NEVER EVER EVER enact any sexual behaviour with someone of your own gender, that you NEVER EVER EVER fall in love with someone of your own gender, that you NEVER EVER EVER touch anyone or be touched by anyone in a sensual and loving way with your own gender and that you obey our command for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. If you disagree and disobey with what we demand as being the judges of you being acceptable or not to God and his church (that’s us), you will be in sin and you will be rejecting God and you will wear in your self the punishment and pain of rejecting God. This is a deal-breaker between you and God and for those of us who are obsessed with this kind of thing, we do not hesitate to tell you that you will burn in hell for eternity for expressing your gay sexuality because that’s what we believe is in store for all unrepentant sinners”.

In other words, NOTHING has changed. All that has happened is that the focus has been shifted from the ontology of being a gay person to the expression of that ontology by living out authentically your true and natural self. The same fundamentalist forces that would have had you rejecting your natural gay self and returning to the closet and possible marrying an opposite sex partner are now clamouring to stop you from being a whole gay person by refusing you the ability to express your sexuality. “You can be gay, but don’t you dare do anything about it. You can be gay, but don’t have sex, don’t fall in love, don’t touch anyone. Just shut up and be gay quietly and some of us might let you stay”. Thus, the call for celibacy for gay people / gay Christians is a misplaced error of judgmental reasoning. In the collective mind of homophobic fundamentalists, the exclusion of sexual expression for gay people is the next best thing to the non-acceptance of gay people. “Plan A didn’t quite work out the way we expected so we will go to Plan B”.

Image via Shutterstock

While it may look like Plan B, when you analyse this position, the belief that being gay is wrong is still there. It is not really an acceptance of our sexuality at all. It is a sleight of hand, a misdirection, a religious illusion that would have young gay people, and older too, deny their identity and once again go back into the religious closet and keep quiet about sexuality once and for all. Why is sexual expression for gay people wrong? Because being gay is wrong. Well, we’re here today to challenge that notion.

This Blog Post

In this blog, I thought it might be time to put down some thoughts why I oppose celibacy for gay Christians and offer the reader some rationale for my position. This blog will perforce be more philosophical in its nature than Part 1, but the interest is clearly there, so I feel the importance of really spelling this out. To do this, the reader will need to understand from where I am launching, both theologically and philosophically, otherwise this whole discussion will not make sense or unnecessary arguments will be made that can easily be clarified if you know how I think first. So to that brief discussion, we go. To make things crystal clear, I have decided to enumerate my position in point form. There is a basic logic and sequence to the points. I will not discuss each point as to how I arrived at that conclusion for space forbids and it is not important in this particular discussion. It is sufficient to read the position statement below to gain an adequate understanding of what I say about celibacy after it.

My Basic Position (relevant to this issue)

1.  God is love;
2.  God is passionate about the earth and all of its people;
3.  It is possible (and wonderful), though not essential, to make relationship with God conscious and intentional;
4.  The first and greatest commandment, as focused on by Jesus is, not to obey God, not to submit to God, not to fear God, not to worship God, but to love God;
5. The second greatest commandment is to love our fellow human beings (whether we like them or not);
6.  The Christ came to show us that we are here to become – to become fully human, to become fully self, to become the individual we have the potential to be (he called it abundant living);
7. Part of the totality of human life is our sexual identity (that we are sexual creatures and find certain stimuli erotic) and within that identity we have a sexual orientation (the direction of ‘love object’ (gender) to which we are attracted physically and emotionally;
8.  Gay sexuality is a biopsychosocial orientation that is highly biologically and genetically determined (as is heterosexuality);
9. It is neither wilfully chosen nor wilfully changed;
10. It is not a sin, it is not a rejection of God;
11. It is not a sign of demonic oppression nor of psychopathology;
12. Gay people have been around since the beginning of recorded history and have been identified in every culture on earth;
13. If God is spoken of as the creator of human life then gay people are as much an outpouring of God’s creative act as are straight people;
14. God’s work of creation continues today and we are invited, gay and straight, to share in that creative act by bringing peace and justice to the world by compassion and care for our neighbour. As the saying goes, his hands are my hands (Jesus called this the Kingdom of God);
15. The Bible is not the inerrant word of God but the outcome of the endeavours of tribal people in the ancient world who had very specific and clear agendas in what they wrote. It is more properly thought of as a compilation or library of texts and while it does possess some internal consistency, the texts have been edited out of their original forms literally countless times and must be read with an acknowledgment that there is more than one voice. The books that make up the compilation were decided by a series of church councils of men only and concluded at the Council of Trent in the mid 1500s. To this day, Catholic and non-Catholic wings of the church differ in places as to what is canonical and what is not.
16. There is much that is inspirational in the texts especially in regard to dealing with God and in dealing with or fellow human beings. The long line of prophetic tradition, in which Jesus stands, ie., loving God and standing with the marginalised, is the closest thing we have to the teachings of Jesus about the nature of God and our place as relational creatures in the world. Thus for me now, the Bible should only be read with this guiding exegetical principle of charity. Where an interpretation shows no charity, it is to be discarded as unhelpful in today’s world;
17. I do not now regard the Bible as un unstintingly reliable text in all matters and can no longer countenance a ‘face-value’ reading of its many and varied texts. It is not a guideline about race, gender, ethnicity or sexuality. It is a historical fact that the Bible has been used to visit violence and oppression on a number of populations of people causing untold distress. While there is much good in its texts, most notably in the accounts of the life, example, teachings and dealings of Jesus, this good must be teased apart from the voices of oppression and tribalism, the voices of domination and coercion, the voices of false piety and ostentatious religion, the voices that lack charity to the human condition;
18. I see today that the Spirit also speaks to us in the lived experience of human life, in the lives of others, through the creation, through music, poetry, art and literature, through silence and contemplation;
19. I am not evangelical. I am not Catholic. Today, I class myself, as stated in the book, in the camp of Progressive Christianity;
20. I do not hold that believing certain tenets makes anyone a Christian or follower of Jesus. This focus on belief is an appeal to orthodoxy that I now reject. For me now, the Christian life is not about a list of precepts that I have to believe in order to be deemed orthodox. I do not demand anyone believe or think as I do.
21. It is apparent that Jesus’ greatest enemies were ‘from within,’ ie., the religious leaders of his faith. Though they talked the language of spirituality, their words and deeds were often condemned by Jesus. The same happens today with so many church leaders. St Paul himself says that you can talk up your spiritual credentials all you like, and in a dazzling display of rhetorical flourish ‘you can manifest the tongues of men and of angels and even prophesy’, but if you are not loving, then you are nothing but hot air – an abrasive noisy gong or clanging cymbal; worse than hot air. For me now, I am quite cynical of religion and the mess we have made of the Jesus story (the Gospel) in this world;
22. Part of the mess is the catastrophic teachings in the early church and in declamatory style from the third century on, that sex is evil, sinful, profane and ungodly, the opposite of spirituality; forever denoted as being associated with sin. The church got hung up about sex and remains hung up about sex;
23. I do not see the body, sex or desire as in anyway degraded or dirty or filthy or sinful. This does not make sense in a twenty-first century world where we have better understandings of human sexuality, nor is it congruent with incarnational theology that would have us see the God-man Jesus as truly and fully human with his own sexuality and life of erotica (anything less does not make him human);
24. I do not hold to a model of sin as the breaking of a rule which demands punishment by an authoritarian parent figure. I now hold a model of sin, a word I am happy to dispense with (as it is less than helpful in our telling of the Jesus message), as being an estrangement – from ourselves, from each other and from God. This tripartite model of sin has at its centre the concept of respect, or if you prefer more theological language, charity or love. Respecting oneself, respecting others, respecting God keeps us connected and estrangement disappears. This model is also more consistent with how the science of psychology views the human being and which aspects are, to use a psychological turn of phrase, adaptive and which are maladaptive. I do not see God as a punishing angry parent let alone an easily irritated judge figure and view that model as being juvenile and immature;
25. Though it can be many things, a sexual act is a connective act first – a sharing between two consenting adults;
26. Sexual connection for people, when all cultural, social and religious attributes are stripped away, is typically a reaching out for love and connection; a fundamental need in the human psyche;
27. I do not believe that God wakes up every morning and says, ‘now who is having sex who is not married? Let me at ‘em’!;
28. While harm can come to people via sexual means, it is always in the context of the estrangement of disrespect (Point 24) and should be avoided and shunned;
29. The focus on personal sexual morality by the twentieth century church has been a misalignment of what is really important in the Gospel – relationality;
30. This misalignment has become sadly part of the Judaeo-Christian culture throughout the world so that even ‘secular’ institutions, eg., the media, are ashamed and embarrassed by human sexuality;
31. I believe now that we need to change. We need to grow up. We need to have a more adult view of human sexuality and abandon altogether the guilt, the shame and the negativity around human sex, its expression, its depiction and the discourse through which we talk about it.

Fundamentalist Reaction

So I will not be arguing my position here based solely on scriptures or on church teaching or tradition. I will be arguing my position based on an overarching understanding that God wants our good and that abundant living is his desire for us. I will be arguing that denial of identity is not a good thing and is in fact life-negating not life-affirming. I will also argue my position based on the science of psychology in which I have some expertise. And I will be arguing my position based on the truth of my own and others’ lived experience and how that plays out across the lifespan of a human being. I am not interested in having scripture wars. I am not interested in fundamentalists telling me that “the Bible says - - - - -.” I am not interested in evaluating my life or my faith up against their criteria. I do not hold their paradigms about life or about God, so there is little value in entering that fray.

But fundamentalist Christians who read this need to know that I listened to your view for almost all of my young adult life. I was a Christian gay man in psychological turmoil because of the church’s teachings about sexuality. I was also a celibate man due to traditional Christian teachings about sexuality and maintained that state for the best part of twenty two years. At the end of that time, I was a significantly diminished person and felt I could no longer go on as things were. It is one thing for you to stand on high and judge and proclaim God’s voice as if you speak for him. It is another to navigate our real life in this world and do so with all the messiness and suffering that is part of human life, whether of faith or no. So do not come to me and tell me that gay Christians should be celibate without trying it yourself. Try one year of enforced involuntary celibacy. Try two years, or five years. How about ten years? Try twenty years of sensual and sexual isolation when you yearn for love. When you’ve lived twenty years of ecclesiastically enforced involuntary celibacy, then come and talk to me about your religious worldview about sexual ethics for my life and gay people in general.  

Celibacy

Celibacy is a pretty counter-intuitive and self-defeating phenomenon if you really think about it. It is the willing denial and impedance of what is probably the most powerful drive within the human being after survival. The drive to be sexual becomes conscious in our early teens. Puberty is a biologically driven milestone where we gain secondary sexual characteristics, in essence, we become physical adults and can reproduce, and where, psychologically, the erotic becomes the focus of much of our internal life and the awareness of sexuality takes centre stage. That milestone, once begun never really goes away in most human beings although it is tempered when older with other matters from the adult world. At puberty we become conscious sexual creatures and that sexual identity begins to assert itself powerfully. It is one of the strongest and most well-understood psycho-biologic changes in the human being.

Adolescence follows where we are in a transition psychologically between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence, which lasts into the early twenties, is typically a time where the erotic life is one of the most salient features of our internal world, whether we are sexually active or not. The age of first sexual activity does seem to have crept down over the last thirty years so that it is not uncommon for teens to have had their first sexual encounter; something I am not a great fan of when they are particularly young. But older adolescents typically begin their life of sexual activity. There are often quite a few partners over the course of a decade and more and more, young people use sex as a means to friendship and intimacy. It is a powerful drive within.

But then celibacy. The willing denial of that drive. For some it is self-imposed. But even there, it is only to conform to a set of usually religious principles that are held strongly by the individual. For others, it is imposed from without; a Catholic religious order, an evangelical edict that gay people are not ever to express their sexuality, a church that frowns publicly on sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage, and even sometimes in cultic situations where a guru imposes celibacy on cult members. It is a frustration or impedance to what the body and mind are powerfully and naturally inclining towards. The river is damned.

Now of course, when one does this, such action is not without consequences. In thinking of the involuntary celibate as I am in this post, there follows an experience of forever wanting but never having, a yearning for touch but never experiencing, a powerful drive to sexual expression but never permitted, a deep need to be loved by another human being but forever unmet.

Make no mistake. There is a price to pay for celibacy no matter that it is self-imposed or imposed by the necessity of conforming to an external rule. Loneliness, isolation, despair. Depression, anxiety, obsession. Instability, skewed relationships, eccentricity that excludes.

I can think of no more exquisite torture for a young person in the glowing candescence of their sexual flourishing than to impose upon them, against their will, against their desire, against every fibre of their being, a life-long obligation to sexual and sensual isolation; in reality, an involuntary, externally prescribed, mandated and enforced domination over their lives of celibacy spoken over them with the voice of God by respected authority figures and the disobedience over which bringing sin and rejection by the church.

Religious Origins

So why? Why do this to oneself? Why place one’s life into a tumult willingly? First, most young people who do this do not understand what they are getting themselves into when they make such a decision. They do not understand the power of loneliness as it has not yet taken root at the depths of their soul. They only need to hear the voices of some of our elderly who talk about the depths of their loneliness to take another look at their decision and maybe run in the opposite direction. Life is too short for celibacy and the loneliness that it brings, the oldies will tell them unhesitatingly.

Sex and The Sacred

Secondly, there is a reason why young people would choose this. They have been told that should they wish to serve God, they must remain celibate until they marry on pain of sin. They are told that if they are gay, they must NEVER EVER express their sexuality and deny it for the rest of their lives on pain of sin. Young Catholic people who feel they have a vocation to the priesthood or religious life must effectively renounce their sexuality and all expression of it and become mandated ‘eunuchs’ for life if they want to ‘join up.’

My close friend who was a Franciscan monk, not yet taken final vows, finally abandoned his ‘call’ due to the relentless and unflinching set of desires within him to express himself sexually; in his case as a gay man. Another friend, a former Jesuit novice, also abandoned his vocation to the priesthood after the Jesuits told him that his burgeoning gay sexuality was unacceptable. In the order in which I was involved in the 1970s, the Redemptorists, many of the priests left the order in the late 70s and 80s either to marry or go off and be gay. Their life of imposed celibacy and the attendant psychological distress was no longer to be borne. Almost all of the Catholic religious orders have experienced the same thing; members of the various congregations abandoning their vows to go off and marry or be gay, leaving behind an aging remnant who live in vast houses and who must wonder what on earth has happened. Diocesan Catholic priests who live alone in their presbyteries in the local parishes report that the loneliness of their life and ministry can be utterly crippling and not a few of them end in skewed clandestine relationships and depressed or leave altogether. In the developed world, most young Catholics who would otherwise contemplate a life of ministry will not do so due to the mandated vow of celibacy; hence the shortage of priests across the Western world.

But of course, the celibate priesthood was not there in the beginning. It was imposed by Rome in the twelfth century and has been a curse ever since. While it is true that some men have been able to navigate its murky waters, most male clergy have struggled endlessly with celibacy because of natural and ineradicable human desire, the yearning for someone close or special, skin hunger – the desire for human touch, and the power of libido, the drive to be sexual. Women religious too have had their struggles and this is now becoming more and more talked about. Today, there is a world-wide conversation in the Catholic Church as to the possibilities of relaxing or abandoning mandate celibacy.

Clerical Child Abuse

In the present day, the Catholic Church, like a few others, is engulfed in a firestorm of its own making: the clerical sexual abuse of children and the cover-up of that abuse by bishops and church leadership. No continent or country has been exempted from this disaster. And it IS a disaster of unprecedented proportions in so many ways. While there is widespread denial from church authorities that celibacy has anything to do with it, I cannot accept that conclusion.

Mandated involuntary celibacy, especially over the course of an adult lifetime, has severe negative consequences as I outlined above. Some of these can be a skewed sense of sexuality and substantially impaired relational dynamics. Opportunistic abuse by men who are severely sexually wounded or immature or dysfunctional has occurred probably more frequently than outright diagnosable paedophilic abuse. I see this as being systemic and not just a few bad apples in that the formation to the Catholic priesthood especially in years gone by has seen immature pre-pubescent or pubescent youth plucked out of their homes and lives and catapulted into the myopic life of the church and away from normal growth, maturation and relational processes, starting in the seminary and followed by enforced celibate life in ministry, being told what to do by bishops or religious superiors; in many ways, a wholly de-sexualised and de-individuated life. Saturated in the existence of the church from a tender age, it is no wonder we have had generations of priests who were juvenile in their approach to sexuality, the body and desire, frightened by it yet drawn toward it, some of whom acted out their dysfunctionality on defenceless kids. 

An indictment on the church, its protocols, its history and its recent behaviour in its attempt to minimise its responsibility and its clear failure. Celibacy, while not the sole cause of the clerical sexual abuse scandal, must share some responsibility for causing the greatest and most damaging scandal to hit the Christian church in the modern era: the repugnant sexual abuse by trusted ‘men of God’ to little kids who are less powerful than they.

Church Attitudes to the Body

But why has the church been such an advocate of a de-sexualised clergy and an opponent of any sexual behaviour for anyone outside of heterosexual marriage? I think there are three reasons:

• History;
• Control;
• Fear.

History

From the earliest times, the Christian church has frowned on the body and associated it with the sins of the flesh. It has taught and reiterated that human sexuality as evoked through desire, arousal and touch is to be manipulated or corralled into one and only one specific form: heterosexual marriage. It has eschewed the body, it has denigrated sex as being the opposite of the sacred, that it is earthy and dirty while God is heavenly and transcendent and beatific. The contradistinction has been pounded into the ears of believers for centuries. I took some time in Being Gay Being Christian to talk about two of the early church saints, Augustine and Jerome, both of whom had gargantuan sexual hang-ups, but of whom both had principle parts to play in shaping and guiding the early church in its attitudes to sex and the body. Augustine negativised sex and the body and women to almost incomprehensible lengths [Google some of his sayings], while Jerome was so uncomfortable with sex, and probably his own gay sexuality, that he couldn’t even countenance the apostles having sex with their own wives.

St Paul himself also seems to have had hang-ups if the accounts are to be believed. He felt the body, specifically here the genitals, were “unseemly” or “parts that are unpresentable” (1 Cor 12: 23), something we do not hold to today. In my teaching at the University, I regularly teach 3^rd year medical students to avoid all such embarrassment and shame language whether articulated or on facial expression or body language with their patients who might have sexual issues. The last thing we want is to treat the body, something that every human being possesses, with Pauline unseemlyness.

It seems that, if he could have his way, his basic position was no sex at all, but that concessions would be allowed due to, what he calls, sexual immorality, or what I might call, desire. “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (1 Cor 7: 1). That’s his foundation statement. It’s good for a guy not to have sex. That’s where he starts. In verse 5, he sets sexual activity up against prayer; the old sex is earthy and a bit nasty but prayer is transcendent and beautiful. “Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer.” It’s as if he feels we can’t have sex with our spouses AND be prayerful. Finally in verse 7, Paul announces his greatest wish, a return to his fundamental position in verse 1. “I wish that all of you were as I am.” Paul really wanted them all to be celibate - like him. Given that he more than likely expected Christ’s return within his own lifetime, he was probably not too concerned by the notion of the human race dying out should every adult become celibate.

When I read Paul in relation to the body, to sex, to marriage, to desire, I always get the impression I am reading someone who is immature and naïve, someone uncomfortable with sex, someone probably uncomfortable with his own sexuality and body. He would rather people didn’t marry but says that “it’s better to marry than burn with passion” (v9), whereas in today’s world, we would be more comfortable with the idea of burning with passion, with the notion of being horny or being aroused or really wanting to have sex. For us, there is not the association with it of being a rejection of God; a sin. Paul’s own neuroses about sex undoubtedly influenced the church fathers and subsequent leaders as they fashioned the early church and that, refined in the middle ages by celibate monk-scholars so that we have become the beneficiaries of a skewed and harmful view of human sexuality that urgently needs correction.

Control

When you control someone’s sexuality, in effect, you control their life. When you have the power to say who can have sex with whom, what kind of sex is acceptable, when it is acceptable to have sex, who can marry whom, who can have children, who cannot, or whether using contraception is acceptable, you are wielding immense social power. The Christian Church has been able to associate all these factors with the notion of orthodox belief which shamefully has had the otherworldly focus of who gets to go to heaven and who doesn’t. Even worse, who has to go to the other place. Sex has been historically conjoined with who is a good person, a Christian, and who is a bad person, an unbeliever. Now that is power. They can control what people will be permitted to do, on pain of losing their eternal salvation, by declaring the tenets of the faith and the religious and even eternal sanctions against those who disobey. This keeps people coming to church, giving the church their loyalty, their time, their energy, their strength, their tithes and offerings and keeping the whole show running.

Cyncial? You betcha. This control over the human body has been wielded by good men and bad over the centuries over that most basic of our needs: our need to sexually connect. We still see the Catholic Church today forbidding the use of contraception and declaring the use of it to be a sin. And of course, we have seen the hypocrites too. Think of former televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker ostentatiously prancing around a stage declaring what God wants for all of us, while surreptitiously both were betraying their wives’ trust and having extra-marital sexual encounters and affairs. Celibacy can control people. It is linked especially today to the unmarried and to the whole gay population. It is still linked with spirituality and is a controlling mechanism to get people to conform to a particular point of view.

Fear

From what I have said of the church above and elsewhere, it is apparent that the church has had a long entrenched history of the fear of sex and the body and desire: erophobia. It has never been comfortable with sex. It does not know how to deal with it. Celibate priests have often never really been wholly trusted by sexually active men and seen to be somehow lesser or inadequate or effeminate. Priests themselves have had a dreadful history up to the mid twentieth century of talking about sex in such a derogatory and denigrating way. Some of the ‘marriage counselling’ that celibate priests have given out to sexually active married people would be laughable if it were not so tragic. Historically, with an all-male celibate priesthood, there has been a long mistrust and lack of comprehension of women and their sexuality. The church has never understood women and still does not today. Misogyny has always been a part of the Christian church. A gay man was always thought to be effeminate and thus more womanly and to be repudiated. The fear and distrust of the body and its church enforced association with sin has done a great disservice to humanity in general; a position that sorely needs correction.

Celibacy and the Gay Person

I take as my premise that the Bible does not speak about gay sexuality as we know and understand it today. I have spelled this out in the book and elsewhere on this blog and in interviews in no uncertain terms. The Bible does talk about homogenital activity and does so in only a few places but its various texts do not address the modern concept of sexual orientation. The Bible has nothing to say about how I should live my gay life. It does have plenty to say about how I should relate to God and how I should treat other people, but it comes up short as guide book on how to live a healthy and authentic gay life. Given that I now believe that our purpose in this life, at least at one level, is to become, then I see that my becoming the best I can be, the most I can be with my particular temperament, my particular personality, my particular intelligence, my particular giftings and aptitudes, my particular interests, is in a sense, my mission in life. It is to enter into the ‘mostness’ of my own humanity. But as a Christian person, I also want to assist the ‘realm of God’ as Jesus spoke of it, in spreading peace and justice to my part of the world with especial care taken for the marginalised, for ‘the least of these.’ Now part of my ‘becoming’ in my own humanity is my personal journey in sexuality. It is not the same journey that straight people go through; it is quite different.

On pages 68 and 69 of Being Gay Being Christian, I discuss the formation of gay identity and use the Cass model to discuss the various stages that most gay people typically traverse more or less. This is a great example of becoming if ever there were one. A vast change where I learn to accept myself, like myself, and begin to slough off the shame of being gay personally and publicly. It is a process. My deepest emotions are accessed over that time. I get in touch with the need to love and be loved. I engage the need to touch and be touched. And of course this is in a same gender context, the normalcy and goodness of fit in such experiences expressing themselves strongly as I begin to feel at home. Enforced involuntary celibacy, after such a journey to self, would be a massive insult to sexual and emotional health; a boulder blocking the highway of a healthy sexual self. We are left to wend our way through this for ourselves and within the confines of our own consciences. Estrangement by disrespect, either to self, to another or to God, is to be avoided.

A behaviour that on one side of a religious divide is considered acceptable and healthy and on the other side of that divide is considered sinful and rejecting of God obviously has a sense of neutrality about it. It is obviously not the behaviour in and of itself that is the most important thing here ethically. A little like eating meat if you were Catholic pre-Vatican II (1960s). You could eat meat any day, but on Friday you were expected not to eat meat. A religious meaning was imposed on it. Eating meat itself was neutral. The religious imposition made it sinful on Fridays. Sex is similar. It is an intimate act of connection. Without the religious imposition, which is how most of society now views it, it can be an act of intimacy, exploration or friendly connection. It is not viewed in terms of sin and rejection of God. With the religious imposition, outside of heterosexual marriage it is a sin and a rejection of God’s way. Same act. Different meanings. I would argue in today’s world where churches just accept that there are few virgins walking down aisles and even fewer virginal grooms waiting for them at the front of the church, that the rule or the religious imposition should also not be the most important thing. Far more, it should be the respect for the self within personal conscience. Denying the identity is not respecting and looking after yourself. Acting like a eunuch when you are not one is not respecting yourself. Torturing yourself is not respecting yourself. Loving someone is a precious gift. It is a fundamental need to love and to be loved. Most human beings desire someone special in their lives. We often try various relationships before we settle on someone. Most people do, and many of them are Christians who go to church. During that time, we learn so much about ourselves, about the other person, about how relationships do and don’t work. It is good material. It is participating in the adult world.

Gay people need to be able to do this too like our straight brothers and sisters already do. And we need to be able to do this in a way that is healthy and respectful and that does not have Bible verse hand grenades thrown at us from the sidelines as though any straight fundamentalist could possibly understand our journey or where we are coming from. For most human beings, perhaps a time of exploration in the early twenties, most human beings associate sex with love. Loving relationships that are fulfilling and meet so many needs are integral to the stability of a healthy adult life. It is frankly nonsensical in today’s world to state that because I am gay AND happen to be a follower of Jesus that I have to deny part of my identity for the rest of my life; and to do so when I don’t actually believe God is demanding that of me at all.

I am created a gay person. A healthy and respectful expression of my sexuality is not only to be permitted but encouraged. No analogy suffices but it’s like saying you can be a singer but you cannot sing. Then in what way am I a singer? You can be a psychologist, but you can never act as one. Then in what way am I a psychologist? You can be a dancer, but you must never dance. Then in what way am I a dancer? How can I be something when I cannot express its beingness? And please don’t come back at me and say, ‘you can be a murderer, but you will never murder anyone again,’ or some such. That analogy falls down in that a murderer is obviously an ethically abhorrent referent where as a gay sexuality like a straight sexuality or a singer, psychologist or dancer are all ethically neutral referents.

I can only see involuntary enforced celibacy on gay Christian people as being immoral and unjust. Such an enforcement or teaching is harmful to people and loads the vulnerable with an unparalleled psychological burden. It destines loving people to loneliness, sexual and sensual isolation and is unnecessary when weighed up against competing notions of stable psychology, the avoidance of psychopathology like depression, a fair go at achieving happiness in life, the necessity of Biblical context, historical church erophobia, the illogic of ontology not being able to express itself and the lack of humanity and compassion inherent in imposed celibacy.

If you are gay or LGBT and a follower of Jesus, then you have a right, some might even say a duty, to become, although the Spirit of God will never coerce, only ever invite. You have been created a gay person and you have as much of the favour and love of God as any straight person. You are meant to grow, to develop into the you you can be. Abundant life, Jesus called it. Your faith does not exclude you from being gay nor does it exclude you from expressing your sexuality, part of your identity. Your faith does not exclude you from loving. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that God would create you as being a gay person and then torture you by forbidding you to act on it. Unlike strict evangelicals, I hold exactly the same view for straight people. Our human life is both wonderful and challenging. As mammals, we are designed to be social animals. We are gregarious to greater and lesser degrees. We need other human beings around us to function well. Most of us need a special someone eventually to hold that place of greatest intimacy and companionship. Gay people need that special someone too. 

Celibacy is an outdated idea and a failed experiment set up by ancient men who had very skewed ideas about human sexuality. It is time we discarded it and stopped altogether associating sex, the body and desire with sin and rejection of God. It is not. It is part of who we are. It is part of what makes us human. 

Don’t let yourself be coerced into committing your life this way. I cannot for the life of me understand how such isolation and denial of identity would be pleasing to a loving God, unless he's a sadist. And if you have already committed your life to celibacy, I challenge you to re-think. Your life of sexual and sensual isolation does not make you any more holy, any more acceptable to God, any more open to God. Time for a re-think.

This is my position. I offer it not to tell you how to live, what to do or what not to do, but for your consideration and prayerful contemplation.

Pax et Amor - Stuart

A Portrait of Hate: Fred Phelps 1929-2014

Well Fred Phelps is dead. 

He was born in 1929, so he made 84. 

It is almost impossible to describe this man, such was his life, such is his legacy. Probably the closest single word as epithet would be 'tyrant' or perhaps ‘hatemonger’. A man so full of bitterness and bile that he twisted and contorted his entire extended family into a parody and turned them into willing acolytes in the cult that is the Westboro Baptist Church, obeying the old patriarch to the letter. Until very recently, he ruled the cult as impassioned religious demagogue but also as tyrant. The Louis Theroux 2007 BBC documentary ‘The Most Hated Family in America’ showed all too well the fear of Phelps that was held by the family members. His tyranny was rampant and so, not much questioning, not much dissent occurred in Westboro Baptist.

Their ‘church’ has been rejected by the Baptists and other Protestant denominations as has Phelps himself for his extremist views. On only a few occasions, one or two family members have left the cult and have been rejected by them ever since. The evil perpetrated in this man’s name at so many levels is astounding and is a monument to the obsession, opprobrium and resolve of Phelps to do all in his power to militate against gay people and more latterly, the whole of America, including its dead soldiers and the military in general, for accepting gay people.

So why? How did it come to this?

Phelps was not a stupid man. He had graduated from law school. He was also given to obsessiveness and retribution for perceived hurt. He had worked as a lawyer in his earlier career, but presaging the turmoil that would surround his adult life, he was disbarred in 1977 in telling circumstances.

The Wikipedia entry for his disbarment states:

“A formal complaint was filed against Phelps on November 8, 1977, by the Kansas State Board of Law Examiners for his conduct during a lawsuit against a court reporter named Carolene Brady. Brady had failed to have a court transcript ready for Phelps on the day he asked for it; though it did not affect the outcome of the case for which Phelps had requested the transcript, Phelps still requested $22,000 in damages from her. In the ensuing trial, Phelps called Brady to the stand, declared her a hostile witness, and then cross-examined her for nearly a week, during which he accused her of being a "slut", tried to introduce testimony from former boyfriends whom Phelps wanted to subpoena, and accused her of a variety of perverse sexual acts, ultimately reducing her to tears on the stand. The trial became an exhibition of a personal vendetta by Phelps against Carolene Brady. His examination was replete with repetition, badgering, innuendo, belligerence, irrelevant and immaterial matter, evidencing only a desire to hurt and destroy the defendant. The jury verdict didn't stop the onslaught of Phelps. He was not satisfied with the hurt, pain, and damage he had visited on Carolene Brady” (Wikipedia).

While being trained in the profession of the law, Phelps was not of the calibre to be able to examine intensively and extensively. In other words, he was smart enough, but he was no genius. And his personality traits coalesced with some little intelligence as to make him an impossible and unreasonable opponent.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;   drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring”

(Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1709).

Pope’s famous couplet is apposite to Fred Phelps most surely. His wit took him to Bible College where he was eventually ordained into a Southern Baptist church and his personality took him to extreme Calvinism where he thought of himself as a Primitive Baptist (not that they accepted him either). I have always found Calvin pretty hard to swallow and have rejected his most famous of theological positions: unconditional election and limited atonement; the first holding that God has chosen a certain elect to be saved, their own lives being irrelevant to God’s decision, while others are not to be saved; while the second holds that Christ died for these elect only and not for anyone else. The God portrayed by these theologies comes off as a pretty unsavoury character, hugely partial, biased and indifferent to the lost eternity of those not in the elect which is most of humanity if you think about what Jesus said, ‘narrow is the gate and few there be that find it’. The pure Calvinist God is monstrous and couldn’t match it with the weakest of human fathers. Phelps was utterly and completely attracted to this portrayal of a ruthless God like a moth to a flame. This imago dei matched his own skewed retributive and belligerent personality. In the Westboro Baptist cult otherwise known as the ‘God hates fags church’, Phelps fashioned God after his own image.

Fred Phelps’ behaviour is legendary or more accurately infamous. I do not need to go into the picketing of funerals of gay people and of fatally wounded American soldiers. I do not have to go into the hate speech and vile invective of their website. If you believed that, then God hates everything and everyone, every nation, every person not of the Phelps persuasion. It is a theology of grotesquery, a twisted parody of the Judaeo-Christian God-figure where God is portrayed as a furious, rage-filled, retributive, violent, castigating, aggressive, vengeful deity. “Can you preach the Bible without preaching the hatred of God?” Phelps asked in a 2006 interview with The Associated Press. “The answer is absolutely not". The Theroux documentary was challenging to watch as the members of the cult when speaking of God came across as being absolutely terrified of him. And their fear of God was what they preached and protested.

“God hates fags.” “God is your enemy.” “God hates you.” “USA = fag nation.” “Fags die God laughs.” “Thank God for maimed soldiers.”  “Pray for more dead soldiers.” “Thank God for dead soldiers.” “Thank God for IEDs.” “God killed your sons.” “Thank God for 9/11.”

A man of impenetrable hatred preaching a god of fury, rage, retribution, judgement and tyranny and indoctrinating his family to do the same; adults and children alike. It is not conceptually possible to get further away from the relational God whose essence is love that Jesus told us of if you purposely tried.

What do we do with Phelps’ death? Well, whether we are Christian or not, I believe we should be better and bigger than Phelps and his family ever were. We should not picket his funeral if he has one. We should not dance on his grave. We should not delight in the demise of another human being. If we do call ourselves followers of Jesus, then we need to leave Phelps to God and not return hatred for hatred. 

It is hard to imagine anyone being so unempathic, so blind to the suffering he caused others. But psychologists do talk about a trait called psychopathy that is identified in people who do not have the ability to empathise. Most people usually think immediately of serial killers when we use this term, but serial killers are only the extreme version of psychopathy. Many people are known to exhibit strong traits of psychopathy, eg., some bosses and narcissists come to mind. It is often associated with either narcissistic or anti-social personality disorder. It would not surprise me to learn that Phelps might have been in one of these categories, such was his lack of empathy.

As such, I think he deserves our pity. Please do not misperceive my meaning here. I do not feel sorry for Fred Phelps. And I certainly do not endorse his life. But I do wonder whether this was a tormented soul. Was Phelps narcissistic? Did he have a personality disorder? Did he have homosexual inclinations himself and used Freudian reaction formation as a defence against it? We will never know. But we do know that Fred Phelps was not a happy man nor a man in peace. I am comfortable leaving him to whatever comes next for those of his ilk. He leaves a dreadful and terrible legacy of twisted religious bile behind him and a family probably forever destroyed.

There is one final point I wish to make. It has been a strong theme through the whole BGBC Blog. I want to point out that Fred Phelps was a fundamentalist extremist. But he used mainstream Christian doctrine and well-known Bible verses to spread his filth. Where we are convinced that we have the truth and everyone else is heretical; where we hold that our version of God is correct and all others are in error; where we say what is right and what is wrong; where we focus on one tenet of thought and neglect all others; where we ignore science and human reason; where we pronounce judgement on our fellow human beings guided by our own teachings; where we split God’s beautiful creation into the saved and unsaved, the elect and non-elect, the washed and the great unwashed; where we put dogma ahead of people; where we give blind allegiance to texts written in the ancient world; where we place the letter of the law before the spirit of the law; where we follow a primitive tribalism over an inclusivity of the family of humanity, then any of us potentially could become another Fred Phelps. 

Fundamentalism misses the point of spirituality entirely. It is a parody of authentic spiritual life. It is pharisaic and misguided. In its most tribal forms, it is cruel and even cultic. It is a diminution of the human spirit and an attempt to give borders to the divine, to put God in a box.

Fred Phelps might have been one of a kind and to be sure, he was. But there is a lesson here. The road away from Jesus - his life, his example, his teachings, his non-violence, his preparedness to forgive, his willingness to love, his desire to be with those most struggling, his willingness to die to show a better way - leads only to law, judgment, exclusion, arrogance and domination; the stuff of fundamentalist religion. People suffer under the yoke of fundamentalism because the focus of fundamentalism is not people; it is conformity. Jesus' focus was always the people. Fred Phelps was an exemplar of the most extreme forms of fundamentalism and should be discussed in the same arena as Jim Jones, Shoko Ashara, David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard and other cultists of their ilk. When you look at Fred Phelps, you see a neon-lit example of how fundamentalism can easily tip over into cultism. For those of us who call ourselves Christian, we need always to be vigilant that we follow in Jesus’ footsteps and to eschew once and for all religious arrogance.

Vale Fred Phelps. In truth, the world will not be poorer for your passing.

Pax et Amor - Stuart

Talk Show - Gay Talk Tonight 1 & 2

Recently I was in New Zealand to do some promotional work for Being Gay Being Christian. I did some interviews, some public speaking and had the wonderful opportunity to shoot a documentary on same-sex marriage - more about that in a future post. It was quite an exciting time I can tell you. 

Gay Talk Tonight Host - Andrew Whiteside

While there, I had the happy opportunity of appearing on Gay Talk Tonight, a net-based talk show hosted and produced by media whiz and film-maker Andrew Whiteside. Gay Talk Tonight is a forum where, in a small interview of about twelve minutes or so, guests are interviewed by Andrew on all manner of subjects related to living freely as as a gay person. And so I felt it a huge honour to be asked to appear and to have my story and the story of BGBC alongside such an illustrious lineup of people. Andrew asks all his guests at the end of their interview the same question: what makes a happy life? It was great to be able to offer a few thoughts of my own on this.

Andrew is a such a professional and his interviews are always interesting. You can click on the following title to go to his webpage where you will find many other interesting people in the same short format. I encourage you to have a listen.

Gay Talk Tonight  

Below you can find my own interview. Andrew has generously placed much of our hour together in two parts; something he normally doesn't do, so a real honour. Both are about twelve minutes each. They are here on the BGBC Blog, on the above link of course, and on YouTube as well (under the title of Being Gay Being Christian). If you watch them here, you can watch them as you see them on YouTube and best of all, you can also re-size them to fit the whole screen. I hope you enjoy these interviews, and please, if you know someone who might benefit from watching, do pass this blogpost around.

Part 1

Part 2

Pax et Amor - Stuart

Preaching Hate in God's Name - Electric Fences and Rev. Charles Worley

It's not often that I am left speechless. I have now been a Psychologist for about one and half decades, and I can tell you, I have pretty much heard it all. There is very little that surprises me anymore and the rare time that something does come though my door to surprise me only comes about once every year or two.


And then I get to hear the Reverend Charles Worley.

Please listen to the clip below before continuing

America - You Have A Problem

Charles Worley did not become the man he is in a cultural vacuum. And I am talking about Christian or church culture here. That culture prevalent in the United States in the non-Catholic wing of the church. Evangelicals, pentecostals of all varieties and denominations. You need to take a good hard look at yourselves.

• Why are you breeding these churches and pastors that are so full of hate and bile?
•  Why is there such an aversion to any sophisticated theological training?
•  Why is there such a willingness and proclivity to accept literal interpretations of the Bible where there is good scholarhsip to show otherwise in so many cases?
• Why the aversion to an intellectual component to faith?

There needs to be some hard thinking and hard conversations if you are ever to pull the American church out of the right-wing conservatism that seems to be gripping its very heart and eclipsing every intelligent form of Christianity that might try to take a breath. I know you are not all extreme, but you do have more than your fair share of extremists.

America, You Do Have A Problem.

Australia does not have the same down-home folksy style of preaching in our evangelical and spirit-filled churches, although unfortunately we are doing our best to import it. While it may work for the USA, it doesn't really work here with average non-churchy folk. Australians are not Americans. We have a very different sensibility.

  

And so to Rev. Worley.

Please allow me to explain to you Rev Worley and to all those of your ilk how Biblical hermeneutics works. If this sounds patronising, I don't mean it to be, but your performance in that service, now shared around the whole world, is so saturated in ignorance, so completely bereft of love or compassion, so pig-headedly brazen and arrogant, that I feel the need to spell it out lest you miss it. Here it is.

When the Parisees tried to trick Jesus, they asked him what he thought was the greatest commandment. He made his answer in no uncertain terms and you can read it in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 22.

"Jesus replied: 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."

There it is. The entire Jewish religion encapsulated in the commandment of love. And the first teaching by the Lord that it was to be the greatest commandment in the New Creation.

It's not rocket science. It is as plain as day. It's all about 'love', nothing else. It is the only commandment Jesus ever talked about. He reiterated it again on the night before he died.

'A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you'.

He talked about it in the Golden Rule: do to others as you would have them do to you.

He emphasised the spirit of the Law rather than the letter of the Law. The spirit that had God's dealings with humanity enveloped in love and our dealings with one another enveloped in love.

One of Jesus' most famous Jewish contemporaries, Rabbi Hillel did exactly the same. There is the famous story of the pagan approaching, telling him that he would convert to Judaism if Hillel could teach him the entire Torah while standing on one leg. Hillel said, 'What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. This is the whole of the Torah, and the remainder is but commentary. Go learn it.' Both Hillel and Jesus understood the law of love and compassion was the only way to God and to be in God.

 

So when we read the Bible, the written Torah and the early life of the Christian church, we need to read it and interpret it with the greatest commandment in the forefront of our minds. There is no other way to read it.

Love is the only way to read the Scriptures.

Any interpretation that does not lead to love is false. It is not of God. It flays in the face of the Spirit in the world today. Where there is more than one interpretation of Scripture, it is a fundamental exegetical rule that we choose the one that leads to love and compassion and discard the alternatives.

The whole of the God - humanity story is based on love. And so the Judaeo-Christian narrative of that story needs to be so as well.

So that's it. If you can't read the Bible that way, then don't read it at all.

We gay people have had two thousand years of the Christian church putting us down, telling us we are sinful, rejecting the direction of our human desire, fobidding our relationships and repudiating our very lives. We are now in a time when we know better and the Christian churches and denominations that are engaging with that knowledge and understanding are way out in front on the love and compassion scale.

I admit I get angry when I hear such ignorance as that 'preached' by Charles Worley. I am no floating saint. But I do not and cannot hate him the way he hates us because I actually do try to listen to the words of Jesus.

But I also know that all people, men, women and children, gay and straight, need to stand up and say a resounding NO to this stuff and call it out by the names it deserves: ignorance, prejudice, bigotry, barbarism, ugliness, hubris, arrogance, hatred. This stuff is the antithesis of the Jesus command.

In a word, it is death.

If you can't love the people the way Jesus wants us to, then don't call yourself by his name. It is a travesty.

And one final word to Rev. Worley because the end of this clip was one of the nastiest pieces of denigration by an authority figure of a group of people I have ever seen. This is a picture of me (left) kissing my partner Chris. I kiss him because I love him with all my heart and because that's what we gay men do when we love our lovers or partners; we kiss them.


Pax et Amor - Stuart