Facebook Reopens Religious Wounds

In the barrage of random request for friendship, groups, and causes that regularly pop up in the special corner of my Facebook homepage, one rainbow color icon caught my attention and challenged me to revisit the religious turmoil of my youth, quite a feat for such a small graphic. The actual group description wasn't the catalyst for my week-long distress; I was familiar with the ideas it explained and had no doubts about joining. The seemingly benign step of selecting other friends from my eclectic list to join the group provoked a shocking self-discovery. I had checked only the people who would be sympathetic to the cause. I skipped over most of the people living in my current community or from my high school days. In doing so, I was editing my own personality, choosing to appear a certain way to those friends who are best described as fundamentalist Christians, and destroying the whole purpose of the group. I was supposed to be challenging my cyber social circle with the knowledge that I know and love gay people and believe that they deserve nothing short of equal rights. Instead, I was hiding, afraid of the epic flood of Bible verses and your-so-misguided-and-going-secular head shakes that were sure to find their way back into my life via my seemingly harmless social networking site.

It reminded me of the day I found out Paul, my then high school boyfriend and now husband, believed gay men were spiritually diseased. We were sprawled, stomachs-down on the trampoline in my backyard reading our summer AP assignments and baking in the sun when he revealed this belief. It was a complicated issue for a teenage, fledgling relationship to handle, but I couldn't let it pass. My uncle is gay and I grew up knowing that the mythically tall, African American man who had a fondness for belting out songs, especially the disco ballad Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain, was his long-time partner. While my church hardly ever spoke about sex (in fact, make that never, except in the cases of Old Testament readings where it was briefly acknowledge with nervous smiles then left alone) and I had heard the word “gay” used regularly as a derogatory term, especially from middle school boys who seem to posses a heightened sensitivity to all things sexual, I was relatively naïve when it came to the strong religious views against homosexuality. Paul, on the other hand, had always been told homosexuality was a sin, a perversion which needs to be exorcised out of the sinner before they are able to accept Jesus as their lord and savior. He had never had the opportunity to meet an openly gay person. In our suburbia, they are treated more like hypothetical others living and doing evil deeds in some film-noir-like, modern day Gomorrah. Like lepers, they are cast out of the normal realms of society. They are not brothers, friends, uncles, or fathers. And they are certainly not mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers.

Needless to say, for those who know him, Paul has had many experiences and paradigm shifts since that summer day. Depending on the camp you belong to, he has either grown to open his mind or fallen woefully far from grace. The part that troubles me is that I thought I was beyond the time when I had to hide my beliefs and seethe silently at the bigotry clothed in religious righteousness being preached around me. I thought I was beyond the time when I would simply sit, burning with shame, as a youth pastor announce that girls had to wear one pieces to the pool party so as not to tempt the boys into sinful thoughts. I only owned a bikini. Yet, I am back in my hometown where almost every lawn sported a yellow sign with a smiling family saying yes to Prop 8 and where a church actually sponsored a speaker to come lecture on the premises that the Nazis were all homosexual. A place where people regularly ask how your walk with Christ is going.

My second thought, after realizing that I am still afraid of these conservative Christian's opinions of me, was that if it is this hard for me to let everyone in my life know I support gay rights, how much harder is it for my uncle and my gay friends to live in this world? How would it feel to be told by strangers that you are perverted, depraved, spiritually diseased, next to rapists and child molesters? To hide your identity from parents, friends, colleagues until you can't stand it any longer? If I was so easily and regularly shamed about my “normal” sexuality in youth group, than how much more so those afflicted by “the spiritual disease”? I have seen the depression that results from this shame and hate. I have also seen the damage done from being tolerated but not accepted or celebrated. It is not harmless to disagree with homosexuality on religious principle. Nor is it necessary.

In the same week, I read a post about how the number of proclaimed Christians is decreasing, while the number of those who identify themselves as being secular is increasing. It really comes as no surprised to me. I don't want to be identified with this new gospel of hate that is more obsessed with what people are doing in their bedrooms than with global injustice and prejudice. I am more concerned with how we own the mass amounts of goods in the world while millions suffer and with the sanctioned violence perpetrated by the world's armies, than I am with how people chose to express their sexuality. This may be presumptuous of me, but I think Jesus, a peace-preaching nomad with a heart for healing the poor and overturning the rules and roles of society, is, too. Since when did middle class American values become synonymous with Christian values? When was Jesus reduced to being the poster boy for the religious right, endorsing the institutions of the nuclear family, capitalism, and nationalism?

My favorite part of my religious upbringing is communion. Even as a child, I was moved by the way everyone came forward, young women holding babies, old men wheeled up in their chairs, teenagers in saggy jeans, and newly-communed elementary school children both nervous and proud; everyone received a piece of God on the tongues. That is what the church should be in this world, an open table serving otherworldly love. We are not called to judge, to hate, to uplift one country's interest over all the rest or to use the Bible to marginalize others. All we are called to do is love and give. It is a testament to how hard those two things are that we are continually searching for easier roles.

In the end, I messaged every “friend” I had and wrote this blog, despite worries that some readers will never click on my link again. I know it is an infinitesimal act compared to what some do and live with everyday. Yet, it is important that people know I love my zany uncle, who dresses in mock drag to earn money for charities, who quit his successful sales job to pursue his dream of becoming an art photographer, who dares to make conventionally ugly spaces hauntingly beautiful, and who still lives his life with the same overflowing presence that made me run from his overly exuberant embraces as a child. He deserves his rights in every element of society. This may mean nothing to many people, but it changed Paul's mind all those years ago and freed him to live a life he may never have known before. It wasn't necessarily anything I had to say that changed him, but his own willingness to get to know the people he had been taught to insulate himself against that opened new friendships. Through love and understanding, he grew, and continues to grow, beyond the confines of his upbringing.

So, feel free to send me those obscure Old Testament verses about sexuality, but before you do, take a moment to remember the verses used to support slavery, segregation, and innumerable incidences of violence throughout history. Ask yourself if you want to be a force of love or a force of hate in this world, someone who heals or someone who wounds.