In a heartfelt and important article for The Daily Beast, my good friend Russell Saunders relates what life was like for him as a gay youth in a fundamentalist evangelical church. While the people he worshiped with as a child and a young man were “generally kind-hearted, sincere people who wanted to make the world better,” his church was terribly homophobic:
It was in a Sunday school classroom that I was told that gays were out to deliberately spread AIDS, a calumny that still has traction in some quarters. It was at a conference I attended with the youth group where I heard a man who styled himself a Christian comedian crack a joke about “faggots,” to the riotous laughter and thundering applause of the audience. It was at a smaller youth gathering where I heard another speaker talk of shipping gays off to a desert island, once again to the acclaim of those assembled.
If hell was for your garden-variety sinner, the sub-basement was for the gays. It was a lesson I learned well.
Throughout an adolescence marked with anguish, Saunders sought faith-based conversion: “Every single prayer revolved around one unchanging, passionate plea to heaven: please let me not be gay any longer. I hadn’t chosen it, and God knew I’d have given anything to change it.” He finally found happiness, not through any ex-gay ministry, but by accepting that he already was who he was supposed to be. He came out and found a freedom he’d never thought possible.
A firm proponent of religious liberty, Saunders believes it is “perilous to intrude into the stuff of sermons and Sunday school lessons,” but he’s adamant that a line be drawn when it comes to claims made by mental health professionals. To that end, he supports a nationwide ban on youth being subjected to therapies purported to cure homosexuality.
Like Saunders, I oppose outside intervention into people’s personal and institutional religious beliefs. In general, people and communities should be free to espouse what beliefs they want without threat of government coercion or economic retaliation hanging over their heads. Also like Saunders, I believe that contemptible religious beliefs should be openly judged as such, especially when such beliefs, when put into practice, bring unwelcome suffering. Criticism isn’t persecution, and bad religion calls for fierce criticism.
“Pray away the gay” is bad theology whether or not you can provide a biblical basis for it or find justification for it within religious tradition. It’s spiritually and psychologically noxious, cruelly so. Within too many religious communities, my own Catholic Church included, religious doctrines, disciplines, and ministries are judged mostly in terms of their correspondence to the accepted interpretations of revelation–and too little with respect to the adverse consequences they have for people’s lives. When religion causes harm, the faithful most of all have a responsibility to acknowledge it and reform the religion.
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