The homophile church
Protestants were deeply involved in the gay rights movement—even before the Stonewall Riots.
homosexuality
Historically, black people and those deemed “homosexual” have been marginalized and silenced on many faith-based campuses. My Then & Now post from 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 closing of the doors of Exodus International earlier this summer doesn’t just signal a sea change in evangelical thinking about homosexuality. It also highlights some evangelicals’ dubious claims of adherence to immutable convictions.
Nowhere has our callow politics asserted itself more thoughtlessly and noisily than in the politicization of personal or private life.
Evangelical and gay
Justin Lee's book is more than charitable to his Southern Baptist origins. But his heart-wrenching stories speak for themselves.
The Chick-fil-A hullaballoo is a sad commentary on our society. It is a proxy war for the civil discourse we’re unable or unwilling to have over the issues that deeply divide us. I'm not opposed to peaceful demonstrations; I've participated in some myself over the years. But remember Newton's third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s what we've seen here.
About 15 years ago I was a guest at the annual meeting of the Association of Christians Teaching Sociology. In one session a professor reported on a student's project. Taking the Century as a barometer of mainline Protestantism and Christianity Today as a barometer of evangelicalism, his student compared the respective responses to the civil rights movement. The student found that the Century was very hospitable toward the movement and that CT was critical of it. (Full disclosure: At the time of this ACTS meeting, I was working for CT.) Since ACTS is comprised largely of evangelical scholars, there was some hanging of heads in the room. Evangelicals, they agreed, had been on the wrong side of history, not to speak of the wrong side of justice.
From Disgust to Humanity, by Martha C. Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum's perspective cuts to the heart of our tendency to exclude others when they fail to live up to expectations about how "good people" should be.