Celibacy Pt 2 - An Outdated and Failed Experiment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

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