Walking the Straight and Narrow
12.08.2008
I wrote this as an assignment for one of my freshman English classes, which will explain the parenthetical references and use of quotations. The paper deals with the dichotomy of being both gay and a Christian and grew out of a) a frustration and obsession with the seeming conflict of my two identities and b) a need to finish the assignment before the deadline. But I was pleased with it AND I got an ‘A’, so all’s well that ends well.
“Turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter one…” Great, my favorite passage. Wonder if he’ll finally get it right today. Ha, yeah right!
On any other day I would have been pretty excited about studying through Romans, but not this passage, this day, with this man. Honestly, I’d been dreading getting to this section for weeks, and I was equally as eager to move past it. You see, Romans chapter 1 is one of those infamous “clobber” passages some religious zealots use to condemn homosexuality. The passage reads as follows:
21Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. (Rom. 1:21-32, KJV)
As I sat there half-heartedly listening to the all too familiar diatribe on the evils of homosexuality, I found myself torn. Behind that pulpit was a man that my family and I respected as a minister of the gospel, a proclaimer of God’s truth. But I felt that in this particular arena, he could not have been more errant in his position. Does he know what it is like to be gay? Does he realize how foreign his particular model of a homosexual is to the real thing? Does he realize the harm he’s doing in propagating such hurtful myths? How could I go to him and explain how wrong he is on this issue? Better yet, how could I explain getting kicked out of the church to my parents after going to him? So, I decided that the best course of action would be to sit there with the evidence of blatant disdain for his message on my face. After all, “silence and discretion veil the hurt, slow the body searches, soothe the sting of loss” (617).
While I sat there probably unfairly judging my pastor for his prejudiced view, I began to wonder why he and many other Christians believed the way they do. “The gay lifestyle is one of promiscuity”; “They’re the ones responsible for the advent and spread of AIDS”; “Same-sex marriage destroys the family unit and takes from the sanctity of the very institution of marriage.”
As a gay Christian, going to church takes on a whole other dimension of meaning. It is no longer simply the place we go to be with people of like faith and practice to glean encouragement to face the week. Sometimes those things are there, but, more often than not, it’s where two identities grapple and clash with each other. A contact zone, if you will. Because at church, your other identity is at best an oxymoron. And outside of church… well, come on. You can’t be gay and a Christian. Right?
So what do you do when you’re caught between two groups? I’ve always attended Christian schools up until this year, and have seen the conflict between Christianity and homosexuality. One guy at my high school was kicked out for struggling with homosexuality; and the college I attended regularly expelled students for homosexuality and we even had a GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) advocacy group protest at our campus last year. The dialogue at both venues was pretty much the same. “How can they really think that’s a legitimate lifestyle choice when it’s totally unnatural?”; “How could they call themselves Christians when they’ve chosen a life so obviously antithetical to Scripture.”
I guess I can’t fault the fundamentalists too much. In all reality, and in the deepest recesses of their hearts, they really and genuinely wish to help those “struggling” with homosexuality. They believe that such a lifestyle is lived in direct rebellion to God and thereby sentences one to Hell. So, in their zealous insistence on homosexuality as a sin to be turned from, they are wishing to save such people from an eternity in Hell. A noble, although misled, desire.
So what do those of us who “struggle” with being gay yet are Christians do? It seems that any “identity…is difficult to maintain [while] in exile” from the other group (615). I mean, as believers and adherents to the Christian faith, our desire is that “[none should] perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:15). On the other hand, as homosexuals, we deny the unnaturalness and sinfulness of homosexuality. We don’t believe you need to be “saved” from being gay. So how do we identify ourselves? We can’t be totally Christian because of our “wicked lifestyle” and at the same time I can’t be totally gay because I’m a Christian and Christians think homosexuality is wrong. Who am I more and why should I have to choose? Neither option in and of it self would adequately define who I am. Both are necessary to the formation of a complete picture of my self, and without them I can never be whole. Other Christians are merely required to “do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with [their] God” (Micah 6:8). Should gay Christians not be held to the same standard?
A greater loss of identity is present when around other Christians. Most of the time we can’t come right out and say that they’re wrong and severely misguided in their stance. To the other believers in our churches, since their sexuality is the most prevalent, it’s obviously the one that God intended and any deviation is a twisted form of what He had originally planned. As Said puts it, “all cultures spin out a dialectic of self and other, the subject ‘I’ who is native, authentic, at home, and the object ‘it’ or ‘you,’ who is foreign, perhaps threatening, different, out there”(637). As the “others,” the best that we can really do is to try to present ourselves in ways to which they can relate in hopes of quelling the idea that we’re really “threatening [and] different” (Said 637). We must worship our God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23) with “the beauty of holiness” (1 Chron. 16:29) and pray that other fundamentalists will acknowledge that fact instead of stealing our faith from us. The proof of my Christianity is this: “whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (1 John 5:1). My faith is established by its Object, and in that I will rest.
