A Universal Alternative

The sanctuary was packed, the simple pine casket sat at the front just before the altar. I was glad that the lid was closed now. The hairpiece the mortician had given him replaced the missing swatch of his natural strawberry blond hair—where the bandage had been. If only someone would have told her that he had a cowlick there, then maybe it would have looked more natural. His hair would have never laid that perfect.

The eulogy had already been given, and the pastor asked for friends and family to come forward if they wished and share something they remembered about the boy in the casket. Life should never be cut short in such a horrific way. This was the thought that no one mentioned that day, and especially not in large sanctuary brimming with people who loved him—or at least the idea of him. They couldn’t dwell on this sorrow; they had to find a way to lift their spirits, to elevate the boy to inspire their hope. So the people came forward: his two best friends, a childhood friend, a family friend, and then, someone who didn’t really know him at all. She rattled on and on (and on and on) about his personhood, his kindness, his compassion. His deity. The girl must have needed the boy. She needed the boy to be something that he rationally wasn’t in order to deal with her own mortality, or perhaps to deal with her discomfort that mortality exists at all.

People deify the dead. “He always told the truth,” said his father. “He was incapable of lying.” Others named their children after him and taught them of the dead boy's legacy. People deified him in other ways too. A cousin of the boy (a fundamentalist Christian) deified him because he was a virgin. "He will be a perfect organ donor," she said. "Doctors don't have to worry about any infectious diseases with him." She somehow linked the purity of his metaphysical soul with the purity of his physical body. No negative thing about him was ever spoken. Not then, not ever.

In the Book of the Dead, there is a prayer to the Egyptian God, Osiris. The prayer outlines Osiris’ role within Egyptian spirituality. Osiris was the martyred savior to the Egyptians and, in fact, paralleled the story of Jesus, born of a virgin, death and resurrection, etc. And then there’s Dionysus and Mithras, who were also redeemers to the people who worshiped them, not to mention countless other gods that parallel Christianity. The gods were the givers of immortality. Like the girl who deified the boy, the people needed the gods. They needed the gods to be something that the gods rationally weren’t in order to deal with their own mortality, or perhaps to deal with their own discomfort that mortality exists at all.

That is the accusation, isn’t it? That modern civilizations, like past civilizations, use religion as a crutch, because it is uncomfortable with its own mortality? It is somehow assumed that religious people are weaker than non-religious people because religious people need to come up with myth in order to cope with existence, or rather, non-existence. Religious people just can’t seem to accept that there is nothing.

But it isn’t nothing, otherwise society wouldn’t have dreamed up something. That is a curious question, isn’t it? And really, according to the philosophical applications of quantum mechanics, one can’t simply say there is nothing without accepting an implied boundary by which he can measure nothingness and that is, well, something.

I wonder if those who argue religions, be it for or against, aren’t taking their thoughts far enough. To the Christian, he accepts framework for his beliefs within the boundaries he’s created. He’s accepted Jesus, not Osiris, not Dionysus, not Mithras, as his redeemer. Why Jesus? Why when there are more gods to fit the mold of the prophesied savior? Why can this be the only way? And for the atheist, he accepts the framework of his beliefs within the boundaries he’s created to measure the nothingness. Why can this be the only way?

There might be a deeper question, a question that seems to blow apart our constructs, and this question makes us uncomfortable enough to develop the boundaries around the framework of our beliefs: why?

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Someone told me recently that she used to think she was agnostic, but more and more, she has come to identify more with atheism. She cannot believe in a supreme being, much less the Abrahamic God; however, she admits, there is a flaw in her reasoning. No matter how she chooses to draw distinctions between what she believes and doesn’t believe, she can’t bring herself to assert that human beings aren’t spiritual. Spirituality, it would seem, is an experience independent of belief. I would assert that one could even experience what some would call divine in the absence of it.

I wonder if our society, in spite of all the ways we draw hard and fast distinctions between ourselves, can remember that we are perhaps more alike than we care to admit. Perhaps we can all agree that there is something that drives every one of our beliefs. Some of us would say it’s nothing. Some of us would flip a card. Some of us would seat ourselves in lotus. Some of us would give it a name. And some of us, sadly, will ignore this idea altogether. 

Out-of-the-Closet Support

I have a confession to make. I have been living in fear for the past year thinking about what people of this church would think if I came out about it. And before that, I lived in fear for the year I attended a more conservative evangelical church. And before then, well, I didn’t really go to church.

I have struggled with myself about this issue. I have wrestled with science about this issue. I have wrestled with the Bible about this issue. I have wrestled with God about this issue. Some of my Christian counterparts have made me feel dirty for thinking about what I sometimes think about, because I know that the tendencies that I have within myself to support, and even be attracted to, people of this lifestyle are incompatible with Christianity—or at least, so they say.

Many of you may know me by now. My name is Michaelia Kendall, and I am a gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender rights supporter, both politically and in our churches.

It was something of a transformative process that landed me in this position. I didn’t start out this way. From my early understandings of homosexuality, much like my family of origin, I remember denying that it existed. “God doesn’t really create people that way. People who say that they are gay are lying just to attract attention, I would have said. I thought that much like my younger cousin would blow things out of proportion just to create drama, so too did people who claimed homosexuality as their sexual orientation.

In my teenage years, I’d come to accept that gay people do, in fact, exist, but that didn’t mean they could experience the kind of marital love that straight people do. In other words, I thought that if if God wanted me to support homosexuality, God would have said so.  

By the time I was a young adult, I had experienced so much destruction in the church of my youth, my faith, and its people, I had come to throw out those components of scripture that I didn’t like. I could see how the scriptures speaking against homosexuality could be just as painful for gay people as other scriptures had been for me. I didn’t care to justify homosexuality by scripture, and to be honest, I’m not sure that I cared about a scriptural basis for anything.

But life went on, and healing began to take place. I decided to revisit this hot-button issue that some Christians claim is life-giving if scripture is followed, even while massive amounts of people lay slain in its wake. I’ve come to realize that I cannot expect Christians to try to see through my lens if I am not willing to see through theirs. Fast forward to today, and I am trying to reconcile my faith to an understanding of scripture where gay people may eventually be wholly accepted in their churches. I think the church is doing a tremendous disservice to Christian gay people out there, and even to the Christians (like me) who support them. Many people in churches have given gay Christians no real home. They’ve tried to convince gay people and their supporters, that real Christians believe that homosexuality is wrong.

Fifteen years ago, a young man was kicked out of my church youth group just for admitting his bi-sexuality; however, I don’t think, had the same thing happened today, that kicking the boy out of the church would have been the first response of the church leaders. And while I do think the people of this church would do everything in their power to change that boy’s sexual orientation, I don’t think it would have been because they hated him, or because they didn’t desire him to succeed in life, or that they wanted to oppress him. I believe they would sincerely think that they are reconciling the young man to God. Could there be a more noble cause?

According to a young man named Matthew Vines, in his speech, “Don’t Blame the Bible for You’re Bad Views on Homosexuality,” Christians who believe that homosexuality is wrong do so by using primarily 6 verses of the Bible to validate their stance—3 in the Old Testament, 3 in the New. They say that if something was an abomination in Leviticus, then surely it still is today. They say that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality. They say that the New Testament’s mentions of homosexuality are proof that God still wants us to follow the old letter of the Law. Matthew makes a compelling argument for these passages, one by one. And while I have only enough time for a soapbox sermon, I’d like to examine the basic gist of his arguments against the common theology.

First, some Christians might say that homosexuality is wrong because it deviates from God’s original plan in Genesis: one man, one woman. He says that when scripture says that God made man a suitable partner, and that when this is interpreted to ‘woman is the only suitable partner for man’, it’s a straw-man fallacy at best. For some men, suitable partners are not women but other gay men. And for some women, suitable partners are not men, but other lesbian women.

Second, Sodom and Gomorrah was not destroyed for its homosexuality, that’s a gross oversimplification of this ancient story. In fact, this idea didn’t present itself in scriptural interpretation until the Middle Ages. This is not just a Matthew Vines assertion; this is a widely accepted Biblical scholar assertion, and is validated by Sodom and Gomorrah’s mention 20 more times in subsequent books, but only one of those instances relates Sodom’s sins to being sexual in general, but not to homosexuality specifically. The homosexual component of this story refers to gang rape of men by men. Rape has nothing to do with attraction, but has everything to do with wanting to dominate, humiliate, and inflict pain on another human being. Male rape, especially for that time in history, was used frequently for these purposes.

Ezekiel refers back to Sodom and Gomorrah, saying this: Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. To assume that Sodom’s sins were sexual in nature is a mistake, and according to Rabbi Gold of Jacksonville, FL, “In short, they were prideful, materialistic, protective of their individual material wealth, slovenly fat, and dismissive of the poor and needy.” The people of these cities were inhospitable to outsiders, cruel to the poor, and socially irresponsible. Using rape to humiliate their opponents is only a small piece of their sins, and it has nothing to do with a loving, committed, homosexual relationship.

Matthew Vines would say that the mentions of homosexuality in the New Testament were due to a mistranslation of the original text, and the King James Version of the Bible does not use the word homosexual, but rather, effeminate, which could refer to any number of things. It could even refer to men taking a passive role in sexual relations and women taking an active role. In other words, it was a cultural difference, just as it had been with the women who wore head coverings and males being the only gender allowed to pastor churches. Also, there might also be a misinterpretation of the texts in that we assume that they’re speaking specifically of general homosexual acts  and not to promiscuity in general, which may or may not be limited to premarital sex, extramarital sex, incest, prostitution, and homosexuality.

Concerning the Old Testament, as is true for Matthew Vines, some Christian gay rights supporters may look at the Old Testament texts and say that they are irrelevant to the Christian because Jesus fulfilled the Old Law. They say that love is the predominating teaching of Christ, so we should just stick to the idea of love.

The problem is that many Christians seem to observe both Old Testament and New Testament teachings, or at least in part. These types of Christians are highly offended at the notion that they hate gay men and women. I think most Christians really do want to welcome gay people in their churches, but they’re ill-equipped to do so—because their hands and their theologies are tied. Most Christians who make up churches today have not been to the point in their faiths where they are willing to throw out scripture as I have been willing to do, for the sake of reconciling my faith to some of my gay and lesbian family and friends. I am not trying to discount a Biblical understanding; I am merely trying to honestly convey the peculiar places my faith has taken me.

I do not think I’m alone. There is a growing population of people of my generation and some of the generations preceding mine who have experienced an immense amount of pain at the hands of the church and its theologies. There are Christians out there who will never be a part of a church again because of trauma that they’ve suffered. There are Christians out there who will never recommend that their friends and family attend church or befriend Christians. There are even Christians out there who will not claim Christianity 6 ½ days out of the week. That’s why I’d like to raise the challenge for Christians to at least try to reconsider their certainty in their interpretations of scripture.

To those Christians who need the scriptural validation in order to support homosexuality, I am speaking to you.

This whole soapbox got me thinking. Because some Christians still observe some of the Old Law, then what of the person of Jewish faith who is, theoretically, still bound by it? You see, in my limited experience of people in the Jewish tradition in America, many of them seem to be much more free in their thinking on homosexuality than Christians.  Even the Conservative Movement Jews recently voted “yes” on same-sex marriages. Why is this, especially if people who don’t have Christ are still bound to the Old Law? So I asked a Reformed Jewish man, “What is your take on Leviticus 18:22, Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination?” He responded by sending me a couple of links for my consideration, and though both of them are only blog entries, my friend made clear that, for one of the entries, the “linguistic analysis in the article is a classic example of rabbinic exegesis, namely, that a close reading of the Hebrew text is necessary.  Conservative and reformed commentators will use textual and modern context in addition; Orthodox rabbis reject of course modern science and psychology usually, as do conservative commentators of all faiths.”

Why I was particularly fascinated with the Jewish argument is because, if we are speaking of the pre-Judaism culture of the past, who better to ask about Leviticus than the people who have always been the trustees of these ancient texts? What I understand is that the Rabbis handle these texts with a care and a reverence that has been preceded by their ancestor’s back to their faith’s—and our faith’s—beginnings. The blog called, Libertarian Jew, in the post, “Parsha Acharei Mot--Does Leviticus 18:22 Condemn Homosexuality?” reads, “Translations are inherently limiting.  When going from a Semitic language to a Germanic language, much gets lost in translation […].  The second issue is that when you put a text in man's hand, even if the text is claimed to have divine status, interpretation is inevitable.  This is a scary notion for the other two Abrahamic faiths.  In Judaism, however, interpretations have existed for quite some time.”

The Libertarian Jew asserts that mentions of Old Testament homosexuality may have pertained to dominating homosexual acts because the text seems to imply that it is something done to somebody, rather than something being done with somebody—a point which I encourage you to read in the blog post itself. He also says that Christians are often caught up by the translation to the word, abomination. The original text’s translation to English indicated something that causes disgust, abhorrence, or hatred, but really, according to the Libertarian Jew, this word would be more accurately translated to ‘taboo,’ and perhaps simply social taboo more than anything, hence other Old Law verses: it is a ‘taboo’ for Egyptians to eat at the table with Israelites. It is ‘taboo’ to eat shrimp. It is ‘taboo’ to marry one’s sister or to two sisters, something that 2 out of 3 patriarchs did. It was also ‘taboo’ to use incorrect weights and measures. Some people of the Jewish tradition assert that it might have only been taboo to be a homosexual man or woman in an agrarian culture, simply because it frustrates the ability to procreate in a society where children were a necessary component for survival and wealth.

The fact that the Torah is silent about lesbian sexual relations should be noted. It isn’t, nor has it ever been, common for women to use rape or domination as a control or a shame tactic. This, for some people of the Jewish tradition, indicates even more strongly that the Torah does not restrict consensual, loving, non-violent, homosexual acts, but only those that are used for prostitution purposes or to dominate and humiliate another human being. This is why it is crucial to keep the ancient texts of Sodom and Gomorrah within context of the culture and the time.

I wonder if Christians who assert that they have more freedom from than bondage to the Old Testament texts and traditions, and even those Christians who see some of the Old Testament teachings as applicable to our modern society, might take a lesson from Reformed, Renewal, and Reconstructionist Jews, and even some Conservative Movement Jews. What’s fascinating to me is that of the 3 Abrahamic religions and all the subgroups within them, there is a myriad of interpretations of even one single text among them. I think that it’s fair to say that when a text leaves the hands of its author, when its original language has evolved over time into a modern version of that same language, then when it is translated to a number of different languages, and then therefore interpreted by an array of scholars and lay-readers, things can never be certain. I think Christians of our time need to understand this and take great care in assuming any measure of certainty with the ancient texts they consider sacred.

I would assert that one’s experience and role within society makes his or her interpretation of the Bible drastically different from another’s. During a time when slaveholders used the Bible to validate their keeping of slaves, slaves experienced Christianity and the Bible much differently. A person who is impoverished will most definitely experience Christianity and the Bible much differently than those who are wealthy, for the first shall be last and the last shall be first. I, as a woman, read the Bible much differently than my male counterparts, for there are neither Jew nor Greek, bondman nor freeman, male nor female for those who are in Christ.  Who’s to say that straight, male scholars and clergymen hold the keys to the correct interpretation of scripture concerning homosexuality?

  I conclude my soapbox today by leaving you with the words of the Libertarian Jew, because I couldn’t have said it better myself. “Whatever the case may be [in how one interprets ancient texts], the last thing that one can argue is that [any one] verse is a blanket prohibition against any form of homosexuality whatsoever. I find that the beauty of studying Torah is that even in a verse as controversial as [Leviticus 18:22], one can find multiple forms of interpretation, thereby bringing multiple ways to bring this verse alive. However you decide to read […], may it be done so in the goodness of Torah, as well as in the dignity of your fellow man.”