For the Bible Tells Me So

I went to a film & discussion event tonight based on the film, “For the Bible Tells Me So,” which is a film chronicling the experiences of 5 different Christian families who have had someone in their family come out as gay.  It was a really good movie, and the discussion afterward was heartfelt, expressing the worries, fears, hopes, and questions that so many people have regarding homosexuality and the response to it of the many different faith communities.

The film depicts several different families with several different responses, from all-out acceptance, rejection, and everything in between, and how those eventually impacted the families as a whole.  It also shared some history of the American church and American government’s actions as they relate to homosexuality, and talked about some of the ways that these have changed over the years.  There was apparently a real shift in the 1970’s in which homosexuality became the ‘other’/'outsider’ of the church, where before it had really been other groups (not to say that homosexuality was acceptable to the church before that, just that other things were of greater concern at the time).  I found that interesting, as it coincides with the resurgence of the evangelical movement in America, as well, and I wondered how those might be connected.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film was the discussion of James Dobson “Focus On the Family,” a program that aired on the Christian radio that I listened to when I was growing up, and is, I’m sure, a familiar name to many others who have any history in the conservative Christian church. One of the families went to the headquarters of Focus On the Family and read a public letter to James Dobson saying, “You told me to focus on my family, and I’m doing that.  I’m loving my son just as he is, because that’s what my family needs in order to be true to our belief in standing up for what’s right.”

I did not know that James Dobson is apparently one of the most vocal anti-gay spokespeople in the larger evangelical church community.  I also had no idea until the last year or so of reading into it, that James Dobson is considered by many to be in the same category as Pat Robertson and other fundamentalist preachers (you know, the ones who have been known to say such things as, “Pray that the supreme court justices will die before President Bush leaves office, so that he can put more conservative judges into the Supreme Court,” and worse things than that…).  I’ve heard his statements on Christian radio, like I said, and they have appealed to me less and less (in particular I have gotten frequently upset with his portrayal of women in his “family moments”), but I did not know about this side to his public image.

I’ve checked out the Focus On the Family website since watching the film above, to see for myself what kinds of things are written there.  What is written there is about Sexual Identity and Gender sounds very gentle and well-meaning.  Ironically, it in every way matches the ideal ‘tone’ of reconciliation and openness that I sought unsuccessfully in Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” (see my post below), but it uses that tone to mask a very harmful message. When you read what he’s saying, I hear two things that disturb me:

(1) He equates sexuality with alcoholism and other “diseases” and expects people to be “cured” of it.
Why I take issue: On a personal level, some of my near and dear friends are just as happy & healthy as they were before they came out and clearly are in no need of a cure of any kind–in fact, at least one of them has transformed to become more loving, happy, and warm toward others since coming out.  On a scientific level, multiple medical associations (of all sorts) have expressly stated that it does not help gay peoples to counsel them to change or deny who they are, and in fact doing so can have negative consequences, not the least of which is driving a person to commit suicide.

(2) He quotes passages from the Bible out of context and expects these stand-alone verses to be a solid foundation for an argument against homosexuality.
Why I take issue: It is one of my biggest pet peeves when people try to take a quote from any religious text on its own and use to to make an argument.  Stories, case studies, and other context-based examples are one thing, but you could take quotes from amazing people out of context and make them sound terrible, and quotes from people who have committed terrible crimes against humanity and make them sound like a saint.  Manipulation of a religious text is a dangerous thing–we need to be cautious that we aren’t just believing something because someone pronounces it with authority.

I think it’s easy to couch words in nice language and make something really hurtful seem hardly an issue at all.  It’s really easy for those of us who are not on the receiving end of that language to just ignore its impact, but when you have a personal connection to it, suddenly that exclusion is not so arbitrary or meaningless anymore.

The families in the film all grappled with this in different ways, and I empathize.  I think we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to really create an inclusive, loving community.

Maybe, after all, it’s not necessarily in always trying to be nice.

Maybe we need to talk more about how to create a context where we can listen even when someone is expressing a negative emotion or experience.  That takes a lot of practice, I think.

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