Death, Dogma and The Nazis

On Christmas Day 2011 at about six o’clock in the evening, my mother and I held my unconscious father as he took his last breaths. He passed away after a week of lying unfed and unconscious. He was 84. I had never seen anyone die in front of me before, let alone someone in my arms, let alone my own father. It was a life-changing moment and in that moment, I had an epiphany.

Death

For the entirety of his life, my father remained a committed Catholic. When people in their droves abandoned the church in the 1970s and 80s, my father hung in there and persisted in his attendance at Mass and his observance of the various Catholic rituals that pepper the liturgical year. Against the current of the time, he continued in his faith according to its Catholic traditions despite his four sons and many of his friends abandoning church allegiance and a Catholic worldview. Yet he continued to assist his local parish in their accounting procedures and to be a regular reader of the lesson at Mass. He prayed, he participated in the Eucharist, he worshipped weekly, he enacted his faith to the best of his ability over the course of his life.

I held my father's hand

Yet at his death, there was no observable sign of the church nor any observable symbols of religion. There was no priest, there were no nuns, no religious, no praying, no singing, no hymns, no rosaries, no incense, no Bible, no ostensible sign of the church at all. There was just my mother and me. His wife and companion of 63 years, and his third son, a gay man and his partner, another gay man who held his feet at the foot of the bed. To any objective observer or passer-by, there was no sign of religion in that room. No-one could have looked in and mistaken what was happening for any kind of religious ritual or ceremony. Further, all the beliefs about religious or faith issues were not present, neither in my father nor in me. Not a single church rule or rubric, not a single Biblical debate entered my mind. 

But there was love in that room. Love held him tight. Love caressed him. Love’s tears fell upon him. Love was spoken. Love let him go to end his suffering. If love was light, then the room would have been suffused in a beautiful gentle sunset light. Powerful, deep, profound love that enveloped him and us.

During my over 30 years as a Christian, I have heard every conceivable debate over what’s right and what’s wrong, what is correct thinking and what is not, what is truth and what is heresy, what is acceptable behaviour and what is unacceptable so that now, in my 54^th year, and with the memory of that room and that moment seared into my mind forever, I have come to a very different conclusion about so-called orthodoxy and doctrine, what the Christian life is, and more generally, what life is all about. For, when it comes down to it, we all leave this world inevitably, sometimes peacefully and beautifully, but as often as not, painfully, messily and in an undignified manner. What matters at that moment is all important.

What matters at that moment is not what your beliefs are but your life. What matters is whether you’ve lived and loved and grown. And it’s the same for everybody, Christian and non-Christian alike. Have you lived, loved and grown?

Dogma

In the Christian world, we have centralised beliefs to the place of apex. And we have done so to the detriment of understanding our humanity. If incarnational Christianity means anything at all, then it focuses on our humanity, what it means to be human, and how this messy and often difficult life all hangs together. What doesn’t matter is a set of precepts that I might have adhered to, some set of beliefs about God, the cosmos, humanity and the church, or God forbid, church governance. Let me spell this out because it links directly to the nub of why I am writing this post.

At my father’s passing, it didn’t matter which side he came down on in his attitudes to:

•         Infant baptism vs believer’s baptism
•         Reformation models of Scripture Alone vs Catholic models of Church Tradition as handed down by the teaching Magisterium
•          Biblical inerrancy vs the presence of Biblical inconsistency
•          Whether he had had the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession)
•          Whether he had had the sacrament of Confirmation
•          Whether the Gifts of the Holy Spirit ended in New Testament times vs they are available today
•          Whether miracles happen today
•          Whether sex before marriage is a sinful act vs it can be explained in today’s world via modern mechanisms of thought
•          Whether the Eucharist is best modelled by transubstantiation vs consubstantiation vs it is symbolic/emblematic
•          Whether the Bible is the Word of God vs it is the Word about God
•          Whether women should be allowed to be priests vs they should not be allowed to speak in church at all
•          Whether Jesus is God vs whether he was a God-filled man
•          Whether God intervenes in this world supernaturally vs we are alone to make of this world what we can with God's grace
•          Whether suffering is a result of ‘the fall’ vs it is part of the human condition and always would have been
•          Whether God’s salvific creative act is for everyone and all creation vs it is only for those who say a special prayer to activate it in their lives otherwise they’re not in
•          Whether Jesus died on the cross for our sins vs he died because of our sins
•          Whether Jesus physically rose from the grave as a re-animated formerly dead human being vs he was some kind of spirit vs the whole thing was a story to assist in understanding the nature of Jesus as Christ
•          Whether in a proposed afterlife, we keep our consciousness vs we lose it
•          Whether heaven or hell exists
•          Whether Christians can be oppressed by a demon
•          Whether demons or devils exist

AND I COULD GO ON AND ON AND ON AND ON

For over thirty years, I have heard various groups within the church all argue these and a hundred other issues out as though they are the crux of what it means to be human and Christian. And each is convinced that they have the truth of it and that others are in error. The truth or error of a particular belief has become the most import thing. It is as though humanity has been high-jacked by the orthodoxy police so that you have to believe certain ‘facts’ before you can be counted as a true Christian. And of course the ones who do the counting are the same ones who set the rules as to which precepts you have to believe.

As I looked at my father’s closed eyes and watched him draw his last four breaths, I had an epiphany. 

None of this stuff matters. 

We waste our lives and our energies and our thoughts and our behaviour on all this. We squander our precious time on all this religious fluff as though this is what God wakes up and thinks about every morning. Yes, it might be interesting academically. But even there, I think there are far more important things we Christians need to be concerning ourselves with regarding the centrality of our faith. But our transposal of the important stuff that Jesus was actually into over to the side, to the periphery, and putting in its place all this doctrine and dogma as though these are the central questions is I think to miss the point entirely.

Look at Jesus. He lived his entire public life breaking social and religious rules and conventions. He actually taught against having this kind of spirituality. He couldn’t be bothered with it at all. His words, recounted in the Gospel of Matthew where he is taking apart the Pharisees, echo down through the ages to today. “Blind guides! You strain your water so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel! (23: 24).” These words are powerful, pointed, unswerving and non-negotiable. He isn’t remotely interested in religious fastidiousness as a way of life and repudiates such religion as being blind and selfish and part of a spirituality that he deems bankrupt and illegitimate. He rejects any idea that the Realm of God is made up of one set of orthodox precepts that you have to believe or you’re not in. When the Pharisees, the religious show-ponies and pedants of his social sphere, asked him a trick question to see if he had ‘the right answer’ about the greatest commandment, he answered with love at the centre of the response, not some belief or religious precept or ritual. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Matt. 22: 37-38).

What my father’s death gave me was a profound moment in time where I could put just a few pieces of life’s puzzle together to make some sense of it all. It is that our lives are what counts – whether we have lived, loved and grown, not whether we have recited a sinners’ prayer or gone to Mass or attended synagogue or mosque or believed certain principles. It is our lives. God loves us whether we make his presence conscious in our lives or not. There is nothing that can change that. For those of us who do choose to make God’s presence conscious in our lives, then the whole thing can be summarised as our relationship with God and our relationship with each other. The prophet Micah put it this way, very much on the Jesus side of things. In answering the question: ‘what DOES the Lord require of us as human beings?’ His answer is as simple as it is timeless and beautiful. ‘To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God’ (6: 8). That’s it. 

Be just and honest in your dealings with your fellow human beings, love mercy and compassion and look after your neighbour, and love God and be conscious of his Spirit in your life and in the lives of all those around you. How stunningly beautiful. Gamaliel, the famous rabbi who was Jesus’ contemporary answered the same question that Jesus was asked and he gave the same answer, after which he said, “and the rest is commentary”. If you read the Gospels, you will see for yourself that Jesus spells this out time and time again in virtually every teaching and example of his life.

Stanford Prison Experiment

Unswerving commitment to dogma, doctrine and ‘our view of orthodoxy’ has gotten the church and the world into all sorts of difficulties and has impoverished it to its roots. The church has so often completely missed the boat by making central the things that Jesus considered the most unimportant. Where humanity is forgotten, the value and dignity of every person, individuals and groups are depersonalised and violence ensues. Stanley Milgram’s electrification experiment and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment both stand testament to the atrocities that good human beings can commit when following orthodox belief blindly and unquestioningly. It explains the My Lai massacre. It explains the Abu Ghraib torture. It explains religious terrorism across the centuries and in our own day.

Unswerving commitment to dogma in the hands of the Christian church saw the Catholic Church in 1415 burn John Hus at the stake over his dissent from understanding the church itself and the Eucharist. Countless thousands died at the hands of the Church which believed it was doing God’s will according to its understanding.

And the Reformers were not blameless either. In 1541, perhaps the most famous reformer of them all next to Luther, John Calvin, returned to Geneva and set up a harsh and austere theocracy that brooked no dissent. He co-opted the secular authorities and interfered in the private lives of Geneva’s citizens according to his own understanding of things. And Calvin was no merry-man life of the party kind of guy. He ruthlessly quashed anything remotely joyous and any semblance of gaiety as being hindrances to the work of God. His inability to discuss issues in what we would term a collegial and civil manner saw him in 1553 acquiesce to having Michael Servetus burned at the stake over what looks like a theological rivalry turned murderous. 

 Abu Ghraib Prison Iraq

Make no mistake, blind, unquestioning, unswerving commitment to dogma, whether religious or political, typically becomes aggressive and violent. And it does not have to be physical violence alone that counts as violence. Examples of psychological and emotional violence perpetrated upon people by Christian dogmatic loyalists are numberless. People have been screwed over by dogmatists for centuries with immeasurable turmoil created in lives. Churches still hurt people today; regularly.

Gay people have particularly been at the receiving end of ‘orthodox’ belief about human sexuality and certain Bible verses and Biblical interpretation. As a result, we have been pilloried and persecuted by the church and by societies for centuries. 

Doctrine and dogma will have us as:

•         Intrinsically disordered
•         Inclined to moral evil
•         An abomination
•         Sinners
•         Perverts
•         Degraded
•         Shameful
•         Weak-minded
•         Sick
•         Deviant
•         Psycho-pathological

Nigerian president President Goodluck Jonathon
Photograph Matt Dunham/AP The Guardian

I write this blog-post because I see dogma again today turning aggressive and violent. India has recriminalised homosexuality. Russia goes on an aggressive and often vigilante-driven hate of gay people under the embarrassing ignorance of not propagandising children. And Africa has gone further. There are deaths. Nigeria passes a law that sees gay relationships and memberships of clubs or organisations punishable by ten years imprisonment and fourteen years for a marriage. The President, Goodluck Jonathon’s spokesperson, said, “This is a law that is in line with the people's cultural and religious inclination. So it is a law that is a reflection of the beliefs and orientation of Nigerian people … Nigerians are pleased with it." 

Roger Jean-Claude Mbede from Cameroon was arrested and imprisoned for three years for sending the text message: "I am very much in love with you" to another man. He was permitted to go to hospital for treatment on a hernia recently but his family removed him from the hospital one month ago saying that he was "a curse for them" and that authorities should let him die. Roger died on or around 10th January 2014.

Political masters using Christianity to deny human rights is an abomination and is an indictment on the church itself for being so ambiguous as to let these men say what they say and behave as they do in Christ's name. Their forebears in South Africa used dogma and doctrine and the Bible to pronounce that apartheid was good and fitting and God’s natural way. The American slavers and those who benefited from their actions likewise used dogma and doctrine and the Bible to enslave tens of thousands of people and to pronounce that it too was good and right and fitting and God’s natural way.

As a Christian, I am no saint. I have all sorts of questions that do not have ready answers. There are things about the Christian life that do not make sense to me. There are elements of orthodoxy from both my Catholic and evangelical roots that I no longer believe. I do have a faith albeit a very human faith. It is honest and enquiring. Doubt is part of it. I do not understand God. I don't think anyone does or can. There are those out there who value orthodoxy above all else who would deem me a heretic. It wouldn’t be the first time I have been called one, as some very loving Christians ascribed that epithet to me when I came out as a gay man. But, it doesn't matter. I am not using the same model as they use. We look though different prisms now. From our records of him, I know what Jesus was like and that he rejected the domination systems of this world where the more powerful lord it over the weaker, that he loved compassion and that he gave what is probably the greatest teaching on treating our fellow human beings that has ever existed. I also know what kind of spirituality he didn’t like. He made it quite plain. And I know that he spoke of God as a relational God whose nature is love. That is enough for me. The rest, to channel Gamaliel, is commentary, and I don’t think it matters.

When my father died in that moment, it was his life that counted, not his set of religious or political beliefs. At that moment, all that fell away. I believe that it will be the same for me and for you too.

The Nazis

There is a light-hearted meme that says the first person to mention the Nazis in a disagreement or argument loses the battle. It is based on the notion that since the Nazis were so extreme, so cruel and calculated as to be inhuman, no modern day comparison can be legitimate. The problem with that scenario is that it exculpates us from similar monstrous behaviour were we to be put into similar conditions as those of the German soldiers of the Third Reich. If you don’t believe me, Google the two experiments I touched on above. We like to think of the Nazis as being beneath human. Not us. But the Nazis were very human. They were not only not beyond what humans are capable of when belief goes awry and dogma is made king, but they enacted their barbarism through very human thinking, logic, emotion and behaviour. Yes, there was tribalism of the worst kind, a nationalistic fervour that saw the Aryan race as superior to all others but it was this unshakeable belief in this precept that was the driving force behind the Final Solution with all of its violence, dehumanisation and cruelty. 

I end this blog-post which is essentially a warning against a top-down spiritual orthodoxy based on unalterable doctrine and dogma with a clip from Professor Jacob Bronowski. This scientist and polymath intellectual of the twentieth century made a thirteen-part documentary that was first aired in 1973. It was called ‘The Ascent of Man’ and with long unscripted ‘talking head’ sequences but wonderful location shots, it was not expected to do all that well. However, it was ranked 63^rd in the top 100 television shows ever made.

In one of the final parts of The Ascent of Man, Professor Bronowski visits Auschwitz where he had lost members of his family. He agreed to go there provided that there would be one camera, one take and one scene with him. He ended up by a pond where the remains of people’s ashes had been pumped; and very likely, those of some of his family members. As he stood there, his daughter tells, his prized crocodile shoes began to sink into the mud surrounding the pond and get covered in water, so Bronowski simply walked out into the pond and standing in the water, gave what is one of the great speeches, and all the more for its unscripted nature, against the violence that is always inherent in dogma and orthodoxy and the need for humanity to continue to keep questioning, to keep searching through science and an enquiring mind. It is very powerful. The words spoken as they are in that particular pond by this particular man should have us wary and skeptical about dogma forever.

So, if you’re going to be a person of faith, any faith, then please, act justly, love mercy and compassion and above all, walk HUMBLY with your God.

 Professor Jacob Bronowski in Auschwitz 

 The Ascent of Man

Pax et Amor - Stuart   

A Call to Clergy - Church Homophobia

Calling all Clergymen and Clergywomen the World Over

In 1967, English band The Tremeloes covered the song Silence is Golden. It became a huge hit for them and stayed at the top of the charts for three weeks; the incredible falsetto voices and close harmonies soaring the words of the chorus into history. "Silence is golden, but my eyes still see. Silence is golden, golden, but my eyes still see".

In this post, I want to challenge the church and especially its leaders that silence regarding the vilification and denigration of gay people by the Christian clergy, is not only NOT golden, it is also an act of collusion in oppression. The silence over this issue by clergy leaders is one of the great sins of the Christian church (see BGBC Blog post J'accuse).

 

A New Presence

Over the last two years or so the world has been discovering the presence of gay people in a new and, for us us gay people, exciting way. It has taken almost everyone, gay people included, by surprise. There is the very obvious gay marriage debate which is found in every quarter of the Western world and in some developing countries too. Gay marriage is everywhere - on our screens, in the papers, on the Net, on Facebook and Tumblr and internet mags and journals. I have written a post on gay marriage on the BGBC BLog myself.

But the gay marriage thing is not the only LGBT issue presently around. Other gay issues are being discussed now, regularly, openly, daily: adoption, aged-care facilities, political equality, discrimination, church teachings on the nature of gay sexuality, gay ordination and gays in the military. All these issues are upon us and around us everywhere and the conversatons about gay people are now being had in the wider community. But it is not always with grace that people are entering into these conversations.

 

The Kickback

Because there is still a vast amount of cultural homophobia and heterosexism inherent in our society, there is the inevitable kickback. And we are feeling it now. It is coming from a number of quarters, but probably most vociferously from certain elements in the Christian church.

Many times, I have read the commnents section to a gay-focused article like:
"these bloody gays are everywhere. We're getting swamped with gays". Or, "these gays have no right to foist their lifestyles on us - if they choose to be gay, then that's their choice, just let them stay out of our lives". Or "God will not bless these unions because He condemns homosexuality outright in His word and God never changes". Such sentiments are not uncommon at the end of opinion pieces.

Of course, there is no 'swamping' and there are no more gays now than before; it's just that we're a lot more open and less shamed about who we are these days. However, as an example of the kickback, allow me to share my own experience.

On 11 May, I wrote an article for the online political paper The Punch who were interested in the author of Being Gay Being Christian doing an opinion piece on gay sexuality and the church. I was happy to oblige and duly wrote the piece and sent it in to them. No doubt with a gleam in their eye for sensationalism, The Punch provocatively entitled the piece: Modern Christians Can Trump Bible Thumping Fundies. 

If anything was going to bring the haters and the homophones, the aggressive atheists and, excuse the plain speaking, the nutters out of the woodwork (and no I'm not talking abut the mentally ill), that title was going to do it. And it did. The majority of them were Christians or purportedly Christian by their rhetoric.

Of 273 comments posted on the page at the completion of my text, only one was unequivocally positive about the piece itself or the issues I raised. 1 out of 273. All the rest were highly critical of me, telling me in no uncertain terms that among other things:

•  I will burn in hell
•  I am not a Christian
•  I am a fool
•  I am rewriting everything to suit myself
•  I need to repent
•  I should do some research on the Bible
•  I am a nasty and vicious person
•  I am confused
•  I am a poor scholar
•  I am a fundamentalist
•  I am deluded

And one I do love in particular was being described as "an avowed homosexual"; presumably by someone who is an 'avowed' heterosexual. Come to think of it, I don't recall making a vow when I accepted my sexuality.

Anyway, one of my Facebook friends suggested that given the number and negative nature of the comments, it "suggests an organized alert went out to a certain cohort of people". Wow! They really do get themselves organised! It felt like a shark-feeding frenzy as the comments came up relentlessly, one after another, all two hundred and seventy three of them.

 

Difficult for Gay People of Faith  

Now we gay people have been forced to live with this stuff; not easily or comfortably mind you, but nonetheless, we've managed. It's nasty. It's frustrating too, because almost all of this kickback is premised on erroneous thinking, ignorance of science and anthropology, and a blind obedience to a 'conscious literalist' approach to the Bible where solid and sound scholarship about these matters can easily be found. But it can be hurtful too. Although I am a big boy now and can look after myself, having the emotional maturity to be able to manage such emotional  abuse, I do fear for younger more tender-yeared gay people who do not have the emotional maturity or the life experience to be able to healthily bat this stuff away for the embarrassing ignorance that it is.

And of course, I'm not the only one. I have a pastor friend, straight and married, who stood up for the LGBT community and declared his support for marriage equality and duly lost his parish ministry. He has said that he has been called names and that he has been accused of being deceived "by those promoting the gay agenda". I have another young gay friend who came out of a pentecostal church, went through an 'ex-gay' ministry and was nearly driven to suicide by engrained church teaching that tortured him much the same way that it tortured me when I was his age. After finally finding freedom as a gay man of faith, he told me that he has been called "a demon, sexual deviant, stupid, deceived and numerous other insults more times than I care to remember".

Ramping Up the Rhetoric

Now of late, the trend of such kickback has become worrying. The rhetoric has been ramped up and has become much more aggressive and there have been instances of violence or abuse that have been incited. And this, by clergymen.

The trend toward hostility toward gay people is becoming very noticeable and is an entirely unwelcome phenomenon in the discourse of the Christian church, being so antithetical to the Gospel.

What is it about the opponents of gay people in the church that makes them so strident and so unloving? There's that incredible comment by a gay person who in answer to a Christian said, "if you people are supposed to love the sinner but hate the sin, then why am I feeling so unloved when you speak to me?" It's an important point.

Verbal Violence

I am profoundly worried that the rhetoric coming out of America, especially evengelical/pentecostal churches is becoming more and more violent. Over the last few weeks we have had various pastors lining up to offer their take on gay people.

Pator Sean Harris

We start with Pastor Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church North Carolina. He encourages his fathers to punch their sons if they exhibit any gender non-conforming play or to use his words are "a little girlish".

Here is an excerpt of his sermon.
“So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed. Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.’”

So, here you have a Christian minister, a so-called leader in the faith suggesting violence to kids.  This is the 'beat the gay out them' Gospel.

Then we move on to Rev Charles Worley. I have already written a post on this man after he told his congregation to many 'amens' and 'preach it brothers' that the solution - final solution? - to the "queer" problem is to build a giant enclosure surrounded by an electric fence where all the "queers and the lesbians" can be penned up for the rest of their lives until they die out. Charming huh. I'm not the first one to recall Nazi allusions. He told his people that "the Bible's agin it, God's agin it, I'm agin it and if you got any sense, you're agin it". That's what they call 'down-home preaching' - 'no fancy theology here brother'. Is this man actually suggesting the deprivation of liberty, summary imprisonment with no offence committed, and ultimately, mass man slaughter? Is this what passes for theology in the Baptist Church in the State of North Carolina?

Over this last week, we have had the unedifying video clip of a small toddler in Pastor Jeff Sangl's Apostolic Truth Tabernacle in Indiana singing to the church congregation, "I know the Bible’s right, somebody’s wrong...ain't no homos gonna make it to heaven."

Apparently in Indiana, it's okay to teach very small children to hate, to normalise discrimination and to be homophobic to the rapturous applause of the colluding adults. As a Psychologist, I consider this child abuse. As a human being, I find this heart-breaking. It is as aggressive and immoral as a parent teaching their small child to bully other kids when they're at school.

I don't know if this is only America. I have not heard yet of any other similar things happening in Europe or other Western countries to the same degree. But here's the thing and this is the crux of my post.

WHERE are the church authorities?

Where are the clergy councils, or the state or national assemblies that are running these denominations?

Why is there deafening silence over these travesties of 'men of God' who are out there week after week spouting this vile filth?

Why are they not defrocked?

Why are they not laicised?

Why are they not disendorsed?

Why are they not rebuked with the utmost vigour?

Why are the churches so silent?

What these men are doing is such a complete disgrace that the ramifications of their actions and words are barely describable. The harm to people is incalculable and the reputation of the Gospel is trashed.

A few years ago at the height of the fear over the so-called war on terror, the world asked the same question of the imams and leaders of the Islamic faith. Where is your voice? Why don't you denounce the violence and murder done in God's name? And the imams and Islamic leaders to their eternal credit did just that. There has been widespread condemnation of religious terrorism by Moslem leaders in mosques the world over. Public denunciations of the incitement of religious-based violence. We Christians can take a leaf out of their book.

Silence is not golden and unfortunately our eyes still see. We continue to see these ignorant men declaring in God's name that we gay people are less than people. They dehumanise us from their pulpits and call that Christianity. I want no part of that god or that faith. And neither should anyone else who understands even a mere scintilla of the Jesus message.

Christian brothers and sisters in the pews - when you hear this kind of thing, you need to denounce it as pernicious wickedness. Don't just sit there and take it. To speak such violence and using God's name no less to do it, is beyond the pale. This would be utterly rejected if secular leaders got up and said this stuff. Church hierarchs - you need to speak up. There should be no room in the brotherhood and sisterhood of the clergy for such men and women. If they want to remain in the denomination, then let them recant. Let them go back to school and do some theology, learn some modern Biblical studies, some hermeneutics and Biblical exegesis and some humility lessons wouldn't go astray either. Denominational hierarchies, you need to take this seriously. We should all have zero tolerance in the Christian church, no matter what denomination, for its pastors and priests to be speaking such calumny against any group of people, including gay people.

The Catholics are no better. There are so many bishops and priests across the globe who do not agree with official Roman teaching about gay people, that is, that we are 'objectively disordered' and 'inclined to moral evil'. It's time for bishops and priests to speak up. It's time that you spoke out. Be part of what the Spirit is doing in the world today regarding LGBT people. The Bishops' Conference is the place to do it. Stand up and speak out. Get your brother bishops to listen to what you have to say. Call for others to stand with you. You know that science and anthropology and sound Biblical studies and theology are all on your side.

Melbourne writer, Will Day's essay Don't Tell the Cathedral is powerful reading. Bishops and priests - read it. I include an excerpt here.

“. . . there is a long-standing Catholic tradition of exercising a grumbling patience in relation to injustices within the church itself. This stands in stark contrast to the vigorous response of Catholic workers and activists to injustices in the wider community. Within the church there is a tendency to trust that the Spirit will work at its own pace and in its own time – usually slowly. It is an unusual and courageous priest or nun who stands up to address church authorities, crying; ‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ in public. I imagine the reasons for this are complex: religious, ideological, political and probably often very personal.

“Certainly to speak out may draw onerous sanctions, may threaten one’s job security, housing security, financial security and social standing. One might be sacked and ousted, or shunted off to a disheartening gig in the middle of nowhere.

“Imagine if every priest and bishop in Australia who believed that official church teaching on homosexuality was wrong stood at the pulpit one Sunday and said as much. The landscape would powerfully change for the adolescent boys and girls in the congregation to whom the official church was teaching that their emerging sexual orientation was a ‘disorder’. The landscape would also change for the countless older queer folk in the congregation and within the priesthood.”

 

Conclusion

I am not the only commentator to have observed this development. Others have written about it too. For example, see Michelangelo Signorile's article in the HuffPost Gay Voices where he names names in the United States.

I say again to the ecclesiastical authorties in the Christian Church the world over - every denomination - from the mainstream well-known ones to the little ones that hardly anyone has heard of: 

SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN.

Silence is immoral.

Please speak up. Denounce hatred for hatred. Denounce violence for violence. Denounce bigotry for bigotry. Say what needs to be said. If you are true to your vocation, then you MUST speak up. Let there be a resounding chorus of church authorities and church figures throughout the world who will stand up for the oppressed. Don't let ignoramuses trash the Gospel, ruin the reputation of the Church, hurt gay people and push people away from Christian spirituality because they figure that if that's what it's like, then they want nothing of it. When you have the power and opportunity to speak up and you remain silent, you collude in their ignorant and evil behaviour.


Pax et Amor - Stuart