[UPDATE: I'm aware this post has an obnoxious title.]
On this blog I (a straight Christian) have written and published about 250 pieces in favor of Christians fully accepting LGBTQ people. I did that because the idea of Christianity being synonymous with the condemnation of gay people is repulsive to me. So I wanted to do what I could to change that.
I thought I might take a moment to share with you some of the posts I’ve written on this matter. Most of them did well: they were championed by Dan Savage, picked up by the Advocate or LGBTQNation, went large off Huffington Post, or whatever. It was all good. They helped effect the change they were meant to. Yay!
This was the first such piece I published on Huffington Post. I figured I couldn’t go wrong just asking a simple, innocent, Bible-informed question. (*snerkf*)
What Would Jesus Do If Invited to a Gay Wedding?
In some of his parables, Jesus wasn’t exactly fortune-cookie clear, but he didn’t even almost waffle about his “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He very explicitly declared that the “first and greatest commandment.”
If there’s any wiggle room there, I just don’t see it.
When it became clear that simply condemning it wasn’t going to work anymore, conservative Christians developed a new response to the question of homosexuality. In response to that I wrote this:
Nowadays the Christian refrain isn’t, “Stop being gay.” Now it’s “Stop acting gay.” They’ve given up trying to argue that gays can change their sexual orientation: the complete failure of Christian Fix-a-Gay and Homo No’ Mo! programs — not to mention a universe of anecdotal and empirical evidence — have left them little choice in that.
So they’ve changed their approach. Now their argument is that a homosexual struggling against the temptation to act homosexual is no different from anyone else struggling to resist a “sinful” temptation. ….
The “sinful temptation” that Christians are forever urging LGBT people to resist is love.
Being, of course, the one thing Jesus was most clear about wanting his followers to extend to others.
I next really sunk my teeth into the role played in the suicide of any gay person by any Christian who holds homosexuality a moral affront to God. So the next four are pretty self-explanatory. The one about Jeremy Rodemeyer went massive: again, Dan Savage featured it on his blog, for which of course I was and remain grateful.
The Gay Teen Suicide Rate and the Christian Condemnation of Gays
We Christians can say that we’re only trying to follow God. We can say that we personally would never do anything to hurt a gay person. We can say that we love the sinner, but hate their sin. We can say anything.
But let’s not insult ourselves and anyone listening to us by saying that we don’t understand the relationship between the gay teen suicide rate, and the common, absolute Christian condemnation of gays. We deserve better than that.
God knows LGBT folk do.
Christians and the Blood of Jeremy Rodemeyer
If you’re a Christian who believes that being gay is a morally reprehensible offense against God, then you share a mindset, worldview, and moral structure with the kids who hounded Jamey Rodemeyer, literally, to death. It is your ethos, your convictions, and your theology that informed, supported, and encouraged their cruelty.
Another Teen Bullied To Death; Another Reason for a New Christianity
If Christians would actually read the Bible, instead of daring to insist that three or four isolated phrases within it justifies a theology that has no more to do with Christ than the KKK has to do with equality, we would arrive at a popular Christianity that is not, as so much of our Christianity is today, a pure affront to anyone with half a conscience.
Tell Me, Christian, That You Hear This Boy
Tell me that your belief system didn’t help put the hot tears on this kid’s cheeks. Tell me that the bullies who torment this kid aren’t in any way encouraged or empowered by your tacit approval of their actions. Tell me that the shame this kid feels about himself has nothing to do with the shame that you believe all gay people should feel for themselves.
Those quotes, I know, make these pieces sound primarily angry. But if you read them you’ll see they’re grounded in sorrow—which is necessarily grounded in love. Simply hating is too easy, and of course accomplishes nothing.
This next one and its follow-up were also championed by Dan Savage. They quickly became central to the wide-spread controversy that resulted in the general consensus that no Christian leader who waffled on the gay issue could any longer be said to speak for Christian progressives. To my mind this is where the whole national conversation about this issue changed and opened up.
An Open Letter to Famous Christian Progressive Jim Wallis
Can you imagine someone working for you declaring that video to be too radical or controversial for Sojourners to be associated with? It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it? Hasn’t that person even read the Sojourners Diversity Statement?
Mr. Wallis and His Big Gay Waffle
Mr. Wallis, I implore you to consider that saying that it is your long standing, deeply rooted conviction that marriage should only be between a man and a woman is tantamount to saying that gays and lesbians are (pick your word/phrase) unnatural, inferior, morally corrupt, shameful, disgraceful, freakish, an abomination before God. That is necessarily the correlative truth to “the only legitimate, God-pleasing marriage is between a man and a woman.” That’s what those words of yours mean, friend.
You are saying that gays and lesbians are, in every way that really matters in life, inferior. You are saying that the Bible says that. You are saying that is what God believes. You are making that statement as large and true as anyone possibly could.
So. You know. Stop doing that.
This next one had a simple premise, captured in its pull-quote:
Making a Brokeback Mountain Out of a Molehill
How in the world would anyone judge when acceptable brotherly affection between two men living together crosses the line into unacceptable sexual relations between them? The only way to do that would be to set up some kind of actual, clearly defined, behaviorally specific no-no criteria.
Forget it. It’s a fail. There’s just no applicable system of assessment, no way of clearly determining when acceptable, wholesome platonic love becomes unacceptable man-on-man action.
Another self-explanatory one that I thought would be basically impossible to argue was:
Gays and Hell: How Can God Break the Great Commandment?
The idea of a God who would condemn all non-Christians and/or homosexuals to hell forever is logically, diametrically opposed to the idea of a God who loves mankind. It would mean that God himself is not obeying the very law about which God himself, as Jesus, said there is none greater.
Simplest point ever (you’d think, anyway: but dang do people not like you screwing with their money) is:
Christians: No Fair Heeding Paul on Gays But Not Jesus on Wealth
I don’t see how it’s possible to avoid the conclusion that there is something very definitely wrong with any Christian who is not himself as poor as the proverbial church mouse pointing to the Bible as grounds for his condemnation of gays and lesbians. How can any self-respecting Christian take literally what Paul said about homosexuality, and at the same time ignore or seriously waffle on what Jesus Christ himself said about money?
This next one was in response to (yet another) resurgence of the fallacy amongst some Christian leaders that when it comes to committing to the idea that it’s okay to be gay, a waffle is as good as a meal:
Christians and LGBT Equality: There Is No Middle Ground
No matter how strenuously he or she might deny it, the fact is that any Christian who does not forthrightly and unambiguously assert that there is nothing whatsoever inherently immoral about same-sex relationships has chosen a side in this conflict. To a starving man, the person who can’t decide if they want to share their food is no better than the person who refuses to.
Thought I’d write this one by way of cutting to the heart of the matter:
The REAL Reason Christians (and Other People) Get So Crazy About Gays
Gay men threaten the traditional power base of straight men. Men are going to kiss men. And that will always seem intensely weird to straight people—just like men and women kissing will always seem intensely weird to gay people.
It’s a new world. And it’s time to be brave about it.
And mostly, of course, it’s time to realize that when it comes to men loving men and women loving women, straight people have nothing—nothing—to fear but fear itself.
I think this is one of the strongest points about this issue that can be made:
The deciding LGBT issue that Christians cannot ignore
“Gosh,” said Arthur. He thought for a moment. “Nothing. The Bible doesn’t say anything about any contexts or situations in which it is or might be okay for gay people to actually be gay. Same as it doesn’t with lying, stealing, killing, and all the other sins it mentions. It doesn’t talk about contexts at all.”
I’ll let the rest of these speak for themselves.
To Christians Who Still Believe That Homosexuality is a Sin
Christians today who take seriously the search for truth must admit that the old axiom that homosexuality is a sin has been forever reduced in status from objective truth to subjective opinion. From fact to belief. From beyond question to unquestionably dubious.
Believing that homosexual love is a condemnable sin, in other words, is now a choice one must make.
And what Christian—what person at all?—would choose ignorant condemnation over enlightened love?
It’s not about the gay issue; it’s about restoring our devastated mountaintop
I don’t write about gay people because I love them so much. I don’t love gay people any more than I do anyone else. They’re just people. But they’re an entire class of people who are every day being cruelly maligned, denigrated, bullied to death, and in every way dehumanized—by Christians. People representing the faith to which I ascribe are, in the name of that faith, purposefully, consciously, and even gleefully tending to the destruction of people whose only “crime” is that they love in a way that’s barely different from the way the majority of people love.
How can I live with that? It’s so wrong. It’s so hideous. It’s so inexcusable. It’s the crudest, most damaging kind of transgression.
The Inevitability of the Rise of Progressive Christianity
The world is rapidly changing. And as surely as one day follows the next, Christian theology, as it always has (slavery, anyone?) will change right along with it. As our world grows smaller, our Christianity will grow larger, broader, more inclusive.
Come Out of the Woods, Christian Soldiers: World War Gay Has Ended
It’s as obvious as a stunning rainbow in the sky that within, say, ten years, any church or denomination still fighting against the marriage of gay couples and the ordination of gay clergy will be like those recalcitrant Japanese soldiers living amongst the mangrove trees of Lubang Island long after everyone else has accepted peace as a fact and adjusted to the new world order.
And that’s ten years tops. At the rate things are changing now, I wouldn’t be surprised if by Thursday the Pope was a drag queen. … The bottom line on the whole gay/Christianity issue is that, in an astonishingly short period of time (yay Internet!), we have reached Ye Oldyee Tipping Poiynte. And that seesaw will only continue to further tip in the direction it is now. Which (let’s face it) is to the left.
An Open Apology From Christians to Gay People
For a grievously long time we have treated gay people in a way that we now understand brings nothing but shame upon the God we purport to emulate. With bilious fury have we systematically maligned, denigrated, condemned, cursed, shamed, and bullied you literally to death.
For no reason beyond animal ignorance we have tried to obliterate you: to rob you of your identity, crush your self-worth, destroy your hopes, turn you against yourself. We have harnessed our almost unimaginable power to bring to you the singular, unceasing message that God finds you reprehensible.
Shamefully, we have turned the way you love into the way we hate.
And finally, ultimately, I wrapped it all up with this next biggie, which my genius of a wife Catherine helped me write:
The Best Case for the Bible NOT Condemning Homosexuality
So that’s a bit of what over the last five years I/we contributed to the Gay War. That war hasn’t yet been won, by a long, long shot. But it’s now clear that on that issue history has decided.
So. Onward Christian soldiers and all that—or at least, you know: onward Christians with keyboards and mousepads.
P.S. I’ve no plans to stop writing on the gay issue. I mostly write about it in the context of answering letters written to me about it, and of course I’ll continue responding to such letters for as long as I receive them.
![John Shore on The Huffington Post](http://johnshore.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/huffpost.jpg?w=120 "John Shore on The Huffington Post\")
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Excellent post! Thank you for pioneering! I recently “came out” as a Christian gay rights pacifist. I blog openly about it now:
http://www.justbeingthere.org
http://www.priestlynation.com/archives/1169
Just got your book in the mail for my student/friend, thanks for writing a perfect dedication in it!!
probably meant “inscription”.
John, blessings to you for all that you have done for the gay community and Christianity! After the elections last week, I was so disappointed I won’t make it back for Thanksgiving with my family this year. It would be awesome to walk into that room of homophobic Catholics and just beam from ear to ear all evening. I told my parents ten years ago that I was leaving the Catholic Church because I couldn’t abide by their marginalizing of gay people. I finally feel justified for leaving the Catholic Church, for taking a stand even though it pitted me against my family. Now they are learning that their beliefs are on the way out and maybe we, the ones who spoke up against religious persecution of gay people, were on to something all those years ago. I’m just so darn happy for everybody who wanted this to happen! So darn happy I don’t have better words for it than “darn happy.”
Melody, I understand so much your frustration.
But then I too was a literalist until I repented.
Oh, I was, too! I was a staunch conservative and Baptist until I was about 24 or 25, when I actually became good friends with people on the other end of the spectrum. That made me really step back and question my obstinacy on a lot of issues and my narrow interpretation of the Bible. I’ve done a 180 in the last five years. And I’m glad to be around people, even if only virtually, who can relate.
Thank you so much for the work you do, John.
Your blog is one of the very few places in my life where I can be who I am, be known by my proper name, speak my truths and talk to wonderful people. It’s the only place I know of where my extensive Christian background and my LGBTQ identity can be happily married (wordplay completely intended).
At first I was frustrated that same-sex marriage was made a “states’ issue.” I thought, There is no way all 50 states are ever going to actually pass same-sex marriage, real marriage and not “civil unions.” Now I see hope. It’s helped me realize that we are America, but are also 50 states. We’ve been trying to keep that balance for so long, and this is just one more manifestation of that. So, you know what? USA, you do it how you do it. I want it done the right way, or not at all.
And transgender people will fight, too. We’ll fight to allow our birth certificates to be changed (currently impossible in Texas and Tennessee). We’ll fight to educate. We’ll fight to combat cruel gatekeeping for hormones and surgery. We’ll fight for our places in the mainstream LGB community, to have our voices heard. It’ll all be worth it, in the end.
Just thank you again, John. I can’t say thank you enough.
Gene Robinson.
There are others, whole denominations even, who were on the side of gay folks full acceptance.
But still. You’ve made a huge contribution. Thank you. I’ve tried even playing 6 degrees of separation type game with your name and some of my straight, Christian, Pro-gay friends. It’s not really fun though because you come up pretty quickly…
Thank you Rev. Shore.
Yes–and, again, as I said, it’s that I was the only Christian blogging about it, or regularly writing online about it, that I knew of. So. But. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for kind words, Blake.
Hi John. Add my deep gratitude to you for all your good work. I write too and I understand how time and emotion consuming it can be. I have something to relate that might interest you.
Two days ago a man commented on an article in Huffpost: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/antony-merkel/an-open-letter-to-my-republican-voting-family_b_2096631.html in which he lamented his estrangement from his parents and siblings because he is gay. No age, but the way he wrote made me feel like he was middle aged. (I’m 68) I wrote back to him, commiserating and encouraging. He responded. He’s only 23!! And wise beyond his age. But what he told me nearly had me in tears. He had seen my other commenting on the gay issue over time and told me that it helped him grow and find some peace in himself. OMG!! I’ve been a gay advocate writer for more than a decade and I understand what you say about every little (or big) thing making a difference, but we seldom get responses so directly and with such gratification. It’s wonderful ! Anyway, I let him know that I wished we could communicate somehow more directly but, of course, could not put my email on HP. Too many hater trolls would get it there. Some here too but I’d reveal it here quite comfortably. So I directed him to your blog with hopes that he might see me and we can connect. (Here I am, young man. Let me hear from you.) And, of course, get soaked in your and your commenters’ wisdom in the bargain.
So you see, John. YOU and we all, CAN and DO “make it better”. Much love to you. Damn, I’m crying. How I wish all this change had been happening when I was his age and could have avoided all the mistakes and lost time and love. But each generation misses out on something good that comes with later change and each has to learn to be content with that reality. You have surely made it so much easier for THIS generation.
SM–
THIS: Damn, I’m crying. How I wish all this change had been happening when I was his age and could have avoided all the mistakes and lost time and love.
This is something that when I do get down that I think about. It’s the one thing that breaks my heart… the could-have-been. How have you learned to deal with that? I mean, I know that having a grateful heart and looking at your present blessings is a good thing. I try my best to focus on that. Because I cannot change the past or take back things. But regret is hard, isn’t it? You write as if you are much older than me, I’m 35. So it seems that maybe you’re far along than I am in dealing with these things. Even at 35 though, I have so many regrets and I’m not sure what to do with them all but to continue to move forward. But if I think about the love that I have missed out on or could have had, it makes my heart a bit weary. Am I assuming that there would have been love? Am I assuming that I’ve missed something I should have had? Am I assuming that the future doesn’t have that for me? Thanks for letting me ramble.
I’m glad you reached out to this young man. Young people, we need those older and wiser to help us along more often that we’d like to admit. The world can seem such a scary and uncertain place all too often.
Regardless, here’s to acknowledging the blessings we do have, I’ll start: I lay my head down in a climate controlled home every night where there is heat if I need it and cool air if I choose, with an abundance of food and refinements. THAT is beyond goodness.
My wife and I divorced after 23 years with two sons, now both military officers, successful and mostly insulated from economic concerns, tho one has three daughters. Since than I’ve been thru 3 partners. The first for one year when he left me due primarily to his alcoholism and chain smoking. The second after 8 years when he got religion and reverted to his safe Catholic blanket where he didn’t have to think, just do what he was told. (That didn’t last. Now, 10+ years later, he’s all gay again but alone and still hung up in fetishes). The third was lost to a richer, younger man and at 32 he’s still a “kept boy” (but won’t admit it) . I loved them all deeply and the first two were agonizing, flat on my face losses. My very soul felt ripped out. I literally thot I was gonna have a heart attack more than once. The third was Marilyn Manson to my Andrea Bocelli, taken off the streets in ILL and tho I loved him to death, I realized there were too many differences…..and I couldn’t afford him in any case. So I encouraged that and we have remained best friends since. I gave him a new life and promised to love him always and I’ve kept that promise to this day. He feels like a real son to me now. I’ve been alone since(10 yrs). They were all 30 years younger.
In the process, I lost religion and gained spirituality from all the agonizing introspection. I read voraciously from the increasing myriad of books and writings on gay and other history, psychology with gay focus, personal stories, fictions, religious history and epistemology, personal development, other books that provided historical understandings of human development, and even related Biblical writings until I have a personal library longer than twice my arm span and could probably take on men like Huckabee. It’s really quite simple. If you know enuf about the Bible, you can throw it right back at them. They make witless targets of themselves. And for the decade of the 90′s, I was THE “out” gay writer/columnist in the local/regional newspaper. Thru all the years of such distraction, I never had a career tho I had a degree. I lost jobs, got jobs, was never financially successful.
So how did I get thru it all? Well, I faced many dark blanks at each loss. I would open a door in my mind and see a dark void where a future should be. It was indeed scary, but there’s only two choices at that point; suicide or keep on keeping on. One thing that I think helped a lot was the sloughing off of all the religious trappings until I came to the prayer point of “Just you and me now, Jesus. Just you and me.” I came to faith in that, NOT in religion and NOT in what others tell me to believe vis-s-vis the Bible. Each step made me stronger and more able to know that when I face another one of those blanks, I know I will go on…..somehow…..and I always have. “Faith” does work, but not in the “traditional” way we have thought of it for centuries. That always lets one down eventually and that’s the problem the “religious” anti-gay people are facing now. They do not have “faith”, they have “tradition” without realizing, indeed, refusing to accept that tradition has always changed, as it is changing now, and they have fear where they think they have faith.
You read, you write, you comment on blogs, you talk with others, you scream and cry, you find someone to hold on to and love if only for one night, you learn, and YOU FORGIVE YOURSELF for your mistakes. In all this you grow in knowledge and understanding and begin to accept the pain that wisdom brings with it.”For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Ecc 1:18 It does not come easy or overnite. It will take you a lifetime and if there’s one thing I have learned, it is that it really never ends.
But you NEVER, NEVER give up on Love. Not necessarily the love of another person, but the Love in your heart. While at my age (68) I am almost resigned to never love again I keep dreaming. You are young and you have time. Seek and ye shall find but you gotta put yourself out there.
Some Bible verses have sustained me. 2 Corinth4:8-9. “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but not crushed and broken. We are perplexed because we don’t know why things happen as they do, but we don’t give up and quit. We are hunted down, but God never abandons us. We get knocked down, but we get up again and keep going.”
And you decide for yourself your definition of God of which Jesus provided the best example. For me God has become this:
1John 4:16 – “God is Love and anyone who lives in love is living with God and God is living in them.” AND
Romans 13:10 – ” Love does no wrong to anyone. That’s why it fully satisfies all of God’s requirements. IT IS THE ONLY LAW YOU NEED.” (emphasis mine)
Keep always in mind that God is in you, not OUT THERE somewhere. Jesus admonishes us to be perfect as the Father is perfect which I concluded means that Jesus believed we have that potential; that each of us is not separate from, but A PART OF GOD.
That truth made me free.
Stay with this blog. You will learn much from John and there are good people here, all for each of us. I invite you to my facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bill.steffenhagen
I need others too. And so much I like to share.
And sometimes I ramble too. Forgive me everyone for taking up so much space. I should get my own blog but I haven’t learned how.
Hey, thanks for sharing. I know a lot more about where you’re coming from now.
“They do not have “faith”, they have “tradition” without realizing, indeed, refusing to accept that tradition has always changed, as it is changing now, and they have fear where they think they have faith.”
THIS is the really tragic part – I worry that it is these people, who are missing out on faith in God rather than tradition, who will face Jesus at the end and discover that He tells them ‘depart from me, I never knew you’
It is so easy to fall into rule-following instead of faith-living…
SM–
Wow! I can’t thank you enough for sharing. I have no words but to say thank you. I will look you up on FB.
Yes, you’ve missed some things you could have had in a different world, where these changes happened sooner. But there’s no guarantee it would have been better, just different.
Soulmentor gives some examples in his life. Everyone has them. You might have found the one true fairy-tale love of your life – and then lived happily ever after, or lost him six months later in a tragic accident. You could be dead because you were somewhere different than you were.
I’m 52, and remember reading the first newspaper articles about a new disease that was starting to kill gay men in New York and San Francisco. If I hadn’t been in the military and deeply in the closet, I have every reason to believe I would have been out having all sorts of (now known to be unsafe) experiences, and could easily be a statistic. Now, I’m married to a wonderful man, who himself only came out about 10 years ago. You never know.
I like to think that my regrets have an equal flipside of positive outcome that I just failed to notice. Of course just typing that comes off smug, but I just know personal tragedies have had both effects in my life. I don’t know the person I would’ve/could’ve been had things sorted out differently, but I guess this is the person I’m intended to be so it’s good that I’ve arrived.
Since we’re talking age, I’m 37 and hoping that I achieve the insight and wisdom of the people here like Lymis and Soulmentor and John, among others. You gentlemen make me believe in a better world in which you are impacting the positive change.
Lymis–
Thank you. Your story is comforting in many ways. I is so true that we just never know.
A year after high school I went into the Air Force for 4 years. I married immediately after that for 23 years and tho in the later years I “fooled around” I attribute all that to the fact that I too escaped the plague. I figure marriage saved my life.
John,
You certainly inspired me to comment here, blog about homosexuality and Christianity, like your page on Facebook and Like several blog posts of yours (much to the dismay of many of my more conservative friends). Thank you for your blog, your voice, your words, and your friendship over these years.
Thanks for all the great work, John!
Hey John, I’m baaaack! After a long hiatus due to the need to give my nerves a serious break and feel happier instead of being pissed off all the time at people’s inane comments. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to spend as much time here as I used to, due to the fact that I let it get too much under my skin and it ruins my whole day. (Especially during election season, when I’m already on edge due to ultra-con relatives and friends.) But I’ll certainly read your posts and occasionally the comments, long as there aren’t too many troll comments to raise my blood pressure. Anywayyyyy…
Unlike some here, I laughed when I read the title. I know perfectly well what you meant, and people need to stop being so touchy and literal and PC all the time. Having come back after a few months, I’m happy to see the tidal wave of positive comments regarding this issue, whereas before, my nerves would get on the ragged edge from Frankenstein and other numbskulls.
Oh, yeah. The article. I think the pieces you listed are incredible, and the process is super inspiring. God bless you for your part in promoting equality.
Hi Melody! I missed you, but not in the fundy where-have-you-been? kind of way. The genuine kind of way.
I missed you too, Melody. I’m sorry to hear that the trolls raised your blood pressure, but I have to say it was great fun to watch you take them on!
Oh yes! I’ve learned much about how to stomp down stupidity from you. A good education for all!
Welcome back, Melody! I think a combination of John’s judicious modding and trolls simply learning they won’t be listened to are why things are brighter around here. Glad to have you back.
Glad I found you guys. Feel like I was ready to give up on Christianity as I’m over debating literalists on hell, homosexuality, Obama…
G’day from Australia and keep up the good work, John.
Well done to the US for re-electing Obama and not falling for the religious Right.
Thank you guys! It’s good to be missed.
I’ve missed you guys, too. I hope to spend more time here again and laugh with your awesome, profound, and often hilarious comments. It feels familial.
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