Washington Blade - October 17, 2003
Chris Crain

ORGANIZED RELIGION HAS largely failed gay people, but we're not alone. The willful refusal of the world's major faiths to update their theology from religious texts from the Bronze Age (or older) has alienated more and more citizens of the 21st century, homo and hetero alike.

In Europe, the very peoples who brought Christianity to the rest of the world now largely ignore its teachings. According to recent surveys reported in the New York Times this week, more than half the citizens of France, Britain and Germany consider religion "not important" or "not important at all." And even in the cradle of Roman Catholicism, less than one in five Italians goes to church once a week and the majority does not attend any religious services at all.

Plenty of factors explain this decline, but one major one is the judgmental side of Christianity that seems to drown out all the others. We hear so rarely about the actual teachings of Jesus Christ and his message of love and supporting the less fortunate. Instead, the leading figures of the largest Christian denominations - especially the Catholics and Southern Baptists - aim their bully pulpit at cramped interpretations of ancient passages that bear almost no relevance to modern life.

There's a reason that the major Jewish faiths do not still adhere to the "purity laws" contained in the Book of Leviticus, which condemn for example the wearing of clothes made up of different types of fabrics. But that hasn't stopped conservative Christians from citing those same passages to support condemnation of gay relationships.

HETEROSEXUALS HAVE BEEN ignoring Christian teachings about sexuality for most of the last half-century. Most heterosexual Americans and Europeans have sex before marriage, practice birth control, and accept a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy, even though one or more of these basic personal freedoms is condemned by the major Catholic and Protestant faiths.

The teachings of Christianity about sexuality are at their most ludicrous when they are taken the most seriously. If the Vatican is to be satisfied, heterosexuals who are now waiting until their late 20s to get married should also be postponing sex until that time. Once married, they are to engage in sex only for the purpose of procreation: no condoms and no pill.

If you're homosexual, then the rules are even more ridiculous. Even though a "homosexual orientation" is not itself considered sinful, we are to have no sex at all, ever, for life. No romantic relationships. The life of a priest or a nun, but without "the Church" as our bride or groom. Celibacy rules hardly work for those Catholics who dedicate their lives to God; but it would be cruel, were it not so silly, for the Vatican to expect lay gays to accept such a solitary fate.

These rules don't just limit freedom and justify discrimination; they kill. The Catholic Church and its allies in the Protestant religious right preach "abstinence only until marriage" as the only way to avoid HIV and unwanted pregnancy, even spreading lies about the failure rate of condoms. The resulting body count - even more so than the dead from countless wars past and present fought in the name of someone's God - will be answerable on Judgment Day, if it should ever come.

SOME HETEROSEXUALS AND even some gays have happily found a way to reconcile the faith of their upbringing with their adult lives. But it doesn't take a public opinion survey to confirm that for most homosexuals, in America and across the Atlantic, we have responded to being rejected by the faith of our fathers by rejecting it right back. And who can blame us?

When a major Christian denomination finally takes an important first step toward inclusion of gays, as the Episcopal Church did this summer by confirming the election of its first openly gay bishop, conservatives at home and abroad threaten schism in response. Is the Christian faith really at its core about these few obscure passages that criticize same-sex acts, even when they really have nothing to do with committed gay relationships like the one Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire has with his partner?

Even if the Anglicans meeting this week in London answer that question in the negative, and manage to preserve their denomination without again condemning gay people, should they be rewarded with our affiliation and support? What kind of guidance can we realistically expect on problems with love, relationship and family from an organized religion that almost split apart because the majority is only now willing, in 2003, to no longer condemn us?

In fact, it will be a very long time before even "progressive" Christians like the Episcopalians have educated themselves enough about our lives and relationships so that they have any credibility when they offer guidance about our relationships and our families and our lives. Barring some series of miracles, that certainly won't happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this editorial.

In the meantime, it isn't just the body of Christ that is missing out on participation from gay men and lesbians, we are missing out as well. We have happily thrown off the yoke of ancient religious condemnation in favor of almost complete sexual liberation.

Like most of our 21st century heterosexual counterparts in Western cultures, most gay men and lesbians make decisions about when to have sex and with whom, when to enter into relationships, what rules to follow during relationships and when to leave, all without a real set of values to inform our decision-making.

Plenty of gay male couples, for example, want the right to get married, but they're quick to admit privately that they certainly don't expect to follow heterosexual rules about sexual exclusivity. That may well be the right choice for them, but how informed is that decision? The church has clearly abdicated its traditional role in helping answer that question, so who's left? Where do we turn?

For those of us fated to live through these last decades of Christian condemnation of homosexuality, it is a question worth pondering.

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