Sunday, October 21st
Bible Thumping Against Gays Doesn't Work, Panelists Say
By Chuck Colbert
[For shorter version of this article, see IN NEWSWEEKLY, October 25, 2007 ]
How can people of faith who disagree on what sacred scripture says about homosexuality have a conversation?
About 50 people joined an interfaith panel of four during an open discussion about that question and much more on Sunday evening, Oct. 21, in Cambridge at the Episcopal Divinity School. The Religious Coaltion for the Freedom to Marry (RCFM) and the Human Rights Campaign co-sponsored the forum.
The release and recent screening in Boston of new documentary, "For the Bible Tells Me So," inspired and informed the nearly two-hour long dialogue. Dan Karslake's award-winning film attempts to reconcile homosexuality and Biblical scripture, finding, in the process, that Church-sanctioned anti-gay bias is based almost solely upon a significant (and often malicious) misinterpretation of the Bible. As the film shows, most Christians live their lives today without feeling obliged to kill anyone who works on the Sabbath or eats shrimp (as a literal reading of scripture dictates).
"For the Bible Tells Me So" is based on the experiences of five Christian American families - including those of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and New Hampshire's openly gay Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson, also featuring Bishop Desmond Tutu, Harvard's Peter Gomes, Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg and Reverend Jimmy Creech.
Moderated by the Rev. Gretchen Grimshaw, RCFM executive director, the panel consisted of board member Rabbi Daniel Judson; Rev. Kim Crawford Harvey; Charles Martel, Catholic layperson and board member; and Rev. Anne Fowler, RCFM's board president.
The panelists tackled the issues and questions of marriage equality, fundamentalist Christian worldviews and scriptural interpretations, as well as the generational gap in understanding, with a younger people more accepting of gay men and lesbians than their older counterparts.
"There are really two kinds of questions," Bill Barnert said, speaking from the audience, "among those who read the Bible and study it" and those "who believe from their five-year old core of their soul." He asked, "What advice do you have on how to talk to them?"
Reform Rabbi Dan Judson of Canton's Temple Beth David replied, "If you can't have a reasoned conversation, then out preach the ones preaching hate with love." The prophet's crying out for the poor, the widow, the orphan - the marginalized - and the mystery of life lay at the core of scripture, Rabbi Judson explained, adding, "A lot more in Reform Judaism gets our attention than one oddly phrased verse in Leviticus, which had done a lot of damage to so many lives."
Charles Martel, of the Jesuit-led St. Ignatius parish at Boston College, suggested, "Reminding them that scripture is a living word, about how God works in different times," he said, explaining, what the Bible talked about then is not the contemporary world view. "People's experience of gay people today is not adding up" with what recent Church documents say about them.
Martel acknowledged, to an audience chuckle, that his faith was on a "200-year plan," pointing to the long arc of church history in its eventual change, from papal condemnation of Galileo in the 16th century for his heliocentric view of the solar system to the Vatican's 19th century fear of electricity.
Pastor Kim Crawford Harvey of the Unitarian Universalist Arlington Street Church described the way in which Evangelical and Pentecostal people of faith view homosexuality in the Church, a comparison she likened being consumed in fire.
"They think, she said, "Our house is on fire. We're saying 'I just want to finish my book and kiss my girlfriend.' They're screaming at you - get out while you can. You can be saved from this burning house."
Nonetheless, Crawford Harvey said, "You have to promise never to stop talking to fundamentalists," adding, "They may be pretending not to listen to you, and they're busy proof-texting you. But their ears are working. They hear what you are saying."
Rev. Fowler, pastor of St. John's Episcopal Church in Jamaica Plain, suggested looking at the reasons behind specific beliefs. "It's helpful to find out why people believe what they do. Then you can forgive them because it is so weird," she said, adding, "You are not going to change them, but you at least you won't be hurt or bothered by what they believe, and you are not being wounded and victimized by someone's strange belief."
Speaking from the audience, Rabbi Devon Lerner said that sometimes personal hurt lies underneath religious objections to same-sex marriage. Lerner spoke about a gay marriage detractor on Beacon who said her husband left her for a man. "There was a lot of anger about that," Lerner said of the woman's anti gay-marriage view.
What about the use of the phrase "Jesus is Lord" used to suggestion conversion for gays and condemnation of homosexuality, a reporter asked, referring to the message of 12-foot high red-orange balloon often seen on Beacon Hill during years of constitutional conventions?
"Jesus says nothing about homosexuality," said Fowler. "He doesn't care about personal salvation, the Bible doesn't talk about personal salvation. God and Jesus are interested in community salvation of the chosen people. It doesn't bother him that Jesus is accused of hanging around sinners so much. It's about how the community treats the person who has sinned?"
"For a huge number of Christians," she went on to say, "Jesus the Lord is savior for their personal salvation. It's their personal purity that matters. That's not what I believe."
Has the conversation changed with legal same-sex civil marriage a reality in the state, a reporter asked?
"For most people in the discourse of inclusion, justice and equality, marriage is huge," said Fowler "The stakes have gone way up. Marriage has been a bastion of heterosexual privilege. That's over in Massachusetts."
And she said, "For some marriage had opened up a vision of equality that didn't get before. The magnitude of what has been withheld from people is apparent."
"It's generational," said Martel, referring to youths' comfort with gays and marriage, adding, "As more and more people die, it's a matter of waiting things out."
Overall, the four panelists agreed that arguing over Bible passages is not going to change people's hearts and minds. Experience, living in close proximity to gay and lesbian people combats prejudice and holds out the possibility of an epiphany, or transformational change.
The parents in the movie were not converted by scriptural arguments, Rev. Fowler said, "but by their children and the incarnational reality of loving someone who is gay. That's a conversion."