BJUnity

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”— Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2; William Shakespeare

Whenever I hear a fundamentalist preacher hint affirmation of the preposterous falsehood that homosexuality is a “life-dominating sin” that everyone in the world is susceptible to “falling into,” whenever I hear a pseudo-therapist suggest that to be homosexual is to be “barbarian” and requires “education and training,” whenever I read a conflicted young person’s claim that God “called me out of homosexuality,” whenever another conservative politician gets caught with his pants down in an airport men’s room, and whenever I hear an “ex-gay evangelist” making beaucoups bucks telling gullible crowds how to “pray the gay away,” I am reminded of the now clichéd quote from Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece referenced above. The homophobe doth protest too much.

This month, the findings of a recent international research project confirm what many gay people have long suspected and known — many of us have gone through a homophobic phase prior to coming out of the closet — about many homophobic people: their hatred is an externalized reaction to the internal panic at the twinges of self-awareness they experience as they recognize same-sex attractions within.

I have previously mentioned the lisping, swishing, mocking rants of Bob Jones III that I and many others were subjected to from the chapel platform at Bob Jones University, in my case as an impressionable teenager, in the early and middle 1980s. I vividly recall one evening demonstrating these antics for my father, who was not amused but alarmed. He said “if you keep that up, you will end up talking like that all the time.” At this point, I was dimly aware of my same-sex attraction, so both “Dr. Bob” and my father were reinforcing the negativity of the stereotype, causing me to loathe that part of myself and to fear discovery by others. With my younger brothers, I mocked the kindly “lady man” who worked at the public library’s checkout desk, in an effort to distance myself from his perceived effeminacy. And yet, deep down, I was aware of my own hypocrisy in so doing. My conscience was troubled by my prejudice against this man, who was always kind and courteous to us. I remember a sense of being ashamed of myself for my uncharitable thoughts toward him… and toward the black people we encountered in the grocery store and other public places. (Contrary to present-day claims, there was always an atmosphere of racial prejudice and “white superiority” in the BJU-and-satellites subculture in which I lived my entire childhood and adolescence).

A friend recently gave me a copy of the late historian John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which sets forth widely-acknowledged scholarship on the topic. The following remark in Boswell’s introduction captured my attention because it so lucidly explains the fundamental problem with social prejudices:

“Of the various groups which became the objects of intolerance in Europe during the Middle Ages, gay people are the most useful for this study for a number of reasons. Some of these are relatively obvious. Unlike Jews and Muslims, they were dispersed throughout the general population everywhere in Europe; they constituted a substantial minority in every age — rather than in a few periods, like heretics and witches — but they were never (unlike the poor, for instance) more than a minority of the population. Intolerance of gay people cannot for the most part be confused with medical treatment, as in the case of lepers or the insane, or with protective surveillance, as in the case of the deaf, or in some societies, women. Moreover, hostility to gay people provides singularly revealing examples of the confusion of religious beliefs with popular prejudice. [emphasis added] Apprehension of this confusion is fundamental to understanding many kinds of intolerance, but it is not usually possible until either the prejudice or the religious beliefs have become so attenuated that it is difficult to imagine that there was ever any integral connection between them. As long as the religious beliefs which support a particular prejudice are generally held by a population, it is virtually impossible to separate the two; once the beliefs are abandoned, the separation may be so complete that the original connection becomes all but incomprehensible. For example, it is now as much an article of faith in most European countries that Jews should not be oppressed because of their religious beliefs as it was in the fourteenth century that they should be; what seemed to many Christians of premodern Europe a cardinal religious duty — conversion of the Jews — would seem to most adherents of the same religious tradition today an unconscionable invasion of the privacy of their countrymen. The intermingling of religious principles and prejudice against the Jews in the fourteenth century was so thorough that very few Christians could distinguish them at all; in the twentieth century, the separation effected on the issue has become so pronounced that most modern Christians question the sincerity of medieval oppression based on religious conviction. Only during a period in which the confusion of religion and bigotry persisted but was not ubiquitous or unchallenged would it be easy to analyze the organic relation of the two in a convincing and accessible way.”

Someone asked me this week why I thought it is that fundamentalists are so obsessed with defining homosexuality as a sin, why there is an abject refusal to accept homosexual orientation as being innate — in the face of overwhelming scientific supporting evidence — and why it is that opposition to marriage equality is such a hallmark of conservative American Christianity today. My answer is that I believe it is a cultural prejudice coupled with a deep-seated fear-based stereotype of gender and sexual roles; that most homophobic men are panic-stricken if the thought of being a sexually passive or receptive partner crosses their minds.

And so we find six verses out of thirty-one thousand that seem to justify and to support our prejudices, and we construct an entire theology and politics around them. We preach intolerance from our pulpits and damnation upon the different. We cannot see, so close are we to the intertwined prejudice and religious view, that our religious views are mostly just covering up a whole lot of fear and confusion.

The result is that young people across the country are so beaten down by this oppression that they resort to taking their own lives. Did Jesus really mean for this to happen? Did the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the whole world really want us to have no hope, those of us who know ourselves to be gay and who also earnestly desire to follow him?

A friend shared with me Mark Morford’s article from this past Wednesday in which he said “To lock the human heart into a cage of timid ideology or rigid sexual conduct, to forcibly limit its capacity for love is one of the most oppressive things you can ever do.”

I want to be very clear here. Our message to homophobic fundamentalists is the same as our message to everyone else:

We love you. We are here for you. You are not alone.

In John’s Gospel, chapter 16 we read

“12 I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. 13 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. 14 He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you. 15 All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you.”

My friends, the Holy Spirit is speaking in our hearts with that still, small voice that convicts us. Our prejudices and hatred are not of God. Please let Him lead us into His truth. Please let us walk in the light of His love together in fellowship and peace. Please let us make the world safer for everyone.

“And of some have compassion, making a difference.” — Jude 1: 22

Jeffrey Hoffman
Executive Director
BJUnity.org

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