The Christian campus and sexual identity
Historically, black people and those deemed “homosexual” have been marginalized and silenced on many faith-based campuses. My post here in December notes the increasing acceptance of black Christians at Christian schools. However, such acceptance has not been extended to LGBTQ Christians.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk intertwines “the problem of the twentieth century” color line with LGBTQ resistance in the 21st century. The structures of resistance toward racial equality are also paradigmatic of gender and sexual inequality. Both racial and LGBTQ liberation struggles began with Brown v. Board of Education.
However, there have long been mixed thoughts regarding racial equality and sexual equality. Even Du Bois was bothered by LGBTQ folk. As historian Michael Bronski noted in A Queer History of the United States, Du Bois, the champion of civil rights, was critical of the LGBTQ community, leading to his dismissal of Augustus Granville Dill from The Crisis magazine. Christians, on the other hand, have demonized LGBTQ people by referencing scripture as evidence of their sin. Black evangelicals have been just as critical, if not more critical, of the LGBTQ community. By the late 1970s, religious scholars described America’s Fourth Great Awakening as the coalescing of religious and political conservatives fearing LGBTQ activists’ demands.
