Not long ago I was sitting in a local Providence coffee shop with a ministerial colleague discussing strategy in support of marriage equality. Rhode Island is the last New England state to not allow same gender marriage and I am part of a group of progressive clergy committed to changing that.
My colleague, a liberal Protestant minister, alluded to how as late as the early nineteen seventies in American law a man and a woman who married were a “single person:” the husband. The simple truth is that “traditional marriage,” at least what marriage was understood to be here in North America for most of our history was for the most part no bed of roses for women. Beating a wife was sometimes just necessary. Marital rape was assumed as a husband’s prerogative. And property rights? Well, it all depended…
It took the rise of an aggressive feminism and a decade and more of activism, all in the mid twentieth century, before our culture shifted and accepted the legal equality of women and men in marriage.
His point, in that conversation, was that this recent shift of attitude that has radically redefined the rights of women and with it marriage in our culture; will lead to the rights of BLGT people, as well. And perhaps the most significant symbol of that will include the enshrining of same gender marriage in law.
Of course what drives these reflections is religion, spirituality. And with that in mind there’s another point to recall. This “recent” is merely a contemporary expression of a very old insight about who and what we are as human beings. There are currents running through pretty much all traditions that always at the very least have whispered deep truths about human dignity and human equality. But, for most of human history these have been whispers.
Today this truth must be shouted from rooftops.
And here I find myself thinking about the place of religion in this conversation, the whispering and the shouting.
Religions have multiple purposes, although they primarily turn on the deep currents of the human heart. Each religion speaks to the mysteries of life and death. Some seeing, I believe, a bit more clearly. But all, without exception, looking through the glass darkly, sometimes emphasizing irrelevant matters, or ignoring critical issues. It’s always a mixed bag when human beings get into the deal. No religion has a monopoly on the truths of the human heart, and all are confused on one matter or another.
So, of course, of course the messages religions preach are always somewhat compromised.
This is doubly complicated by the natural conservatism of religion and its place as a preserver of culture.
Now my natal religion is Christianity. No doubt this insight of basic human equality exists in Christianity. The scriptures and traditions provide clear and unambiguous assertions of human dignity and worth. And, to be brutally honest, this assertion of human worth exists in an uncomfortable tension with contradictory assertions in scripture and tradition.
The resulting tension has generated much pain for individuals within cultures dominated by variations on the Christian faith. My friend simply owned this reality. Sadly, in that conversation with my Protestant minister friend I knew how as a Buddhist (of a Unitarian Universalist turn) I had no stones to throw.
Buddhism also has a deep teaching of the equality of people, which exists in tension with all sorts of other views that deny one category or another their full possibility. This ranges from his Holiness the Dalai Lama’s statements about gay and lesbian Buddhists pushing for acceptance, to the (at best) second-class status of nuns within the Vinaya. Buddhist tradition has a serious misogynist side. And its treatment of homosexuality is contaminated by a perennial ambivalence about sexuality in general.
But we’re in a new age.
We’re at a time in history where old ideas about men and women as sexual beings are being challenged by an older and persistent perspective.
The challenge for people of faith is that we have been the holders of the traditions that have oppressed.
We need to see that.
And, there is good news.
We are also the holders of traditions that proclaim human dignity and human possibility.
And herein lies the redemption of the sins of religion.
We need to proclaim those truths of human dignity, worth and possibility, from our pulpits and in our larger communities.
And this is the joy.
We do this, and one corner of human suffering can be healed…
Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
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