Newsletter of EVANGELICALS CONCERNED, INC
Fall 2000
Romans 8
Evangelicals Concerned founder Ralph Blair, a longtime member of the Evangelical Theological Society, suggested to Pinnock that he add homosexuality to his examples of issues calling for reappraisal along the lines of biblical "trajectories." Blair wrote: "It seems to me that everything you so well point out about ‘trajectories’ is applicable to the church’s taking a fresh look at what we know about homosexual orientation, committed gay relationships, etc. that was not known in the ancient world." Pinnock responded: "I see your point. … We do need to rethink this."
Approaching Reformation Day, Christian Reformed Church editor John Suk notes "My, How We’ve Changed!" He says that Reformation Day reminds us that "change can be a good thing." In looking back at the conservative CRC’s magazine, The Banner, for the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Suk finds that it was "a flagrantly racist publication." It also regularly attacked the alleged corrosive effects of baseball, novel reading, stereopticons, unions, drinking, fancy dress and the theology of ‘modernists’ like evangelist D. L. Moody. (These days, the CRC is preaching the alleged corrosive effects of same-gender relationships.) Suk concludes: "This Reformation Day, don’t thank God just for that momentous day Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a door. As the scenery and culture and opportunities and trials on the trail behind Jesus have changed, so have we. Be sure to thank God for that too."
An openly-lesbian minister was one of several speakers at a special chapel service at evangelical Gordon College in April. The service was part of a weeklong symposium on "Who Is My Neighbor?" — an allusion to Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. While some in the Gordon family welcomed her inclusion, others were outraged. The college’s director of communications, Rick Sweeney, responded to the aftermath in AlmaMatters, the Gordon and [merged] Barrington College alumni newsletter: "The College does not support homosexual practice. … The purpose [of the chapel service] was to encourage the Gordon community to consider how we, as Christians, should be neighbors in a diverse and changing world. … Whatever the original intent of the program, this episode clearly should not have occurred, especially within the context of a chapel service. This woman’s message caused much pain and confusion for students, guests and others. …The administration has apologized to those who attended and to others who have voiced their concern. … The president and provost met personally with the planners who deeply regret their error in judgment." [In the past, EC founder Ralph Blair was an invited speaker to the Barrington College student body and Gordon College psychology classes.]
The Religious Right says "the gay agenda" has changed everything. But the facts do not bear out this claim. In a letter to The New York Times, Matt Foreman, executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, writes: "Thirty-nine states, including New York, permit employment, housing and credit discrimination against gay people. Only Vermont grants gay couples something similar to marriage, yet in the last five years, the federal government and 32 states have passed laws banning the recognition of same-sex marriages. We cannot serve openly in the military or get estate tax benefits no matter how long we live together. Eighteen states still criminalize consensual gay sex. Anti-gay initiatives will be on the November ballot in four states and at least five municipalities I could go on and on."
Tim LaHaye has shifted focus from antigay religious rants to multimillion dollar sales in end-time novels. This summer, LaHaye’s and professional writer Jerry Jenkins’ latest novel in their extremely popular "Left Behind" horror-thriller series opened at number one on The New York Times Bestseller list — even without the Times’ surveying Christian bookstores. The singular event made the Times’ front page, headlined: "Apocalyptic Potboiler is Pulbisher’s Dream." LaHaye and Jenkins have each made $10 million from the series which has sold over 17 million copies in the United States. Right-wing World culture columnist Gene Edward Veith notes: "All of the sentimental plaques, the cutesy figurines, and the plethora of books on ‘relationships’ [in Christian bookstores] apparently give the majority of Christian men the creeps. The Left Behind books, though, with their apocalyptic violence and techno-thriller prose style, have a true macho appeal. Now that secular bookstores are stealing their customers and their market share, Christian booksellers — which still play an essential role — might do well to confront the feminization of their industry and learn from the big players how to offer more books to more Christians."
Though LaHaye calls himself "a prophecy scholar," his eschatological contribution to the action-adventure whipped up by Jenkins is considered to be bizarre by secularists and "tragically unbiblical" by serious Bible scholars. According to a review in The Washington Post, "The books read like artifacts of a time machine sent to retrieve pulp science fiction — and our morality — from the 50’s." [Douglas E. Winter] An Evangelical Theological Society member and Christianity Today Millennial Book Award-winner, John Noe, has written a book called Shattering the "Left Behind" Delusion, arguing that "Left Behind should be ‘left behind.’" If LaHaye is no more biblically or theologically on target in his pronouncements on eschatology than he is on homosexuality, eschatological fantasies nonetheless pay better.
The Kentucky Baptist Home for Children, after flip-flopping votes for and against continuing to contract with the state despite provisions relating to the employment of gay men and lesbian women, has unanimously agreed to sign a $12-million pact with the state. The decision was reached after Gov. Paul Patton, a fellow Southern Baptist, gave the Baptist Home assurances that he will write to state case workers instructing them to consider only the best interests of the children, and not the Baptist Home’s antigay hiring policy, when determining placements.
Suspended for one year for performing a union ceremony for two gay men, a United Methodist minister went back to his pulpit this summer. Rev. Gregory Dell of Chicago’s Broadway United Methodist Church says he’s performed some 30 same-gender union ceremonies in the past and is up for doing it again. About a third of his present congregation of 250 people is gay.
Also this summer, Chicago Bishop Joseph Sprague, Dell’s pro-gay bishop who — in obedience to church order — was a party to Dell’s having been brought up on charges in the first place, found himself the target of antigay assault. A lawyer has filed complaints with the UMC protesting Sprague’s use of church funds "to promote homosexuality" during this summer’s General Assembly.
Meanwhile, in Maine, UMC Bishop Susan Wolfe Hassinger announced that Rev. Susan Davenpot had admitted to blessing a same-sex couple, but had asked forgiveness and promised not to do it again. And the UMC bishop of Omaha, Joel Martinez, confirmed that a complaint had been filed against Rev. Mark Kemling for blessing a gay couple in June. Said Kemling: "I don’t believe I’ve done anything wrong. The church’s position regarding homosexuality is unjust and needs to be challenged."
The crime-ridden and economically-blighted old Methodist shore community of Asbury Park, New Jersey is receiving what the local county newspaper calls "a big plus" in its "sudden popularity" as a vacation home for New York City gay men and lesbians. Named for the first Methodist bishop in America and adjacent to the still vibrant Victorian-era Methodist camp meeting community of Ocean Grove, the town is having mixed reactions to the gay gentrification. But as a gay magazine article puts it: "Like Miami Beach before it, this once grand resort town is being resurrected by a pioneering band of gay men and lesbians. Once again, a group of industrious homosexuals is inhabiting the uninhabitable, bringing beauty to the harshly unattractive and turning a town long given up for dead into a bustling hamlet."
A documentary film on gay and lesbian Lutherans who are struggling for permission to become Lutheran ministers has been shown at several gay film festivals and on some PBS stations this summer. Call to Witness is the work of Pam Walton, whose earlier film, Family Values: An American Tragedy, documented her late father’s Religious Right advocacy for the execution of homosexuals.
Henri J. M. Nouwen’s insightful wisdom is frequently quoted in the evangelical press these days, even though this Roman Catholic priest and psychologist had been supportive of gay people and their relationships for many years. He died in 1996. Michael Ford, a religious affairs journalist with the BBC and Nouwen’s biographer [Henri Nouwen: Wounded Prophet (Doubleday, 1999)] observes that Nouwen "experienced the depths of his own loneliness as a celibate who longed for intimate friendships but was also frightened of them. …[He was] a multi-gifted man of boundless generosity, charm, and pastoral vision, but also a deeply insecure person of anguish, pain, and craving." Ford says: "I came to realize just how central Nouwen’s long-repressed homosexuality had been to his struggles and how it had probably been the underlying stimulus for his powerful writings on loneliness, intimacy, marginality, love, and belonging." The book is based on interviews with 100 of Nouwen’s friends and associates and is recommended in a recent issue of the evangelical Christian Counseling Today.
Father Donald Cozzens, rector of St. Mary [Roman Catholic] Seminary in Cleveland, has written a new book entitled The Changing Face of the Priesthood: A Reflection on the Priest’s Crisis of Soul (Liturgical Press). With 35 years of experience, Cozzens concludes that there are too many gay men in seminaries and the priesthood. He says this situation is "destabilizing." But he says he understands why gay Catholics would be drawn to the priesthood, where their genuine Christian commitment and a wish to avoid prying questions about their disinterest in the opposite sex can come together.
"Vermont Becoming Homosexual Mecca." That’s the breathless front-page headline in the Right-wing National Catholic Register (July 9-15). After eight paragraphs of background on the Vermont Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of civil-unions for same-sex couples, the article states: "Most of the evidence that homosexuals are taking an interest in Vermont is anecdotal." It is reported that a country inn has set up a Web site that includes a "gay wedding guide" and the gay monthly, Out in the Mountains, added a dozen extra pages to its June issue. That’s the evidence presented. The scare tactics continue with warnings that there will be "Business Losses," as another headline puts it. The evidence? The head of the antigay lobby claims he knows of five fishermen who have decided to boycott Vermont. The president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce is quoted at the very end of the article: "I think all the attention we’ve been getting is going to fade away in the next six months or so."
Organizers of July’s international World Pride celebration admit that they selected Rome as their venue in order to inflame the Vatican in this Holy Year of Christian Jubilee. "Of course [World Pride] is provocative and the choice of Rome was deliberate," said event organizer Imma Battaglia, in an interview in NOW, the Toronto-based lesbigayt paper. World Pride was a 9-day festival of parties, drag shows, fashion shows, concerts, dances, lesbigayt seminars, and nude beach events. Some 70,000 demonstrators marched in the big Sunday parade that climaxed World Pride with what The New York Times called "the sights and sounds that the Vatican dreaded — drag queens, scantily clad male gladiators, topless women and outrageous floats."
Speaking to Christian pilgrims from a balcony over St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II expressed "bitterness" at what he said was "the offense to the Christian values of a city that is so dear to the hearts of Catholics across the world." Contending that "homosexual acts go against natural law" he added: "This inclination, objectively disordered, is for most [homosexuals], a trial." Quoting from the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, the pope pleaded for "respect, compassion, and sensitivity" for homosexuals: "Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided."
A French Roman Catholic bishop skipped his scheduled appearance at a seminar on homosexuality and religion at the World Pride celebrations in Rome. He did so after receiving an ecclesiastical order not to speak. Bishop Jacques Gaillot, who was removed from the Diocese of Evreux, France, in 1995, said he was being "loyal and obedient to the Pope" by not speaking at the seminar. But, he added, the church "should behave like parents who discover their son is gay and, after being upset at first, learn to accept it and love him for what he is, without asking him to deny his nature and his sexuality." Bishop Gaillot has taken unpopular positions before — on matters such as the role of women in the church and the rights of Palestinians.
Folk singer Judy Collins cancelled a charity concert scheduled as a highlight of the triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church in July. She said she was "shocked to learn that the Episcopal Church, of which I’m a member and in which I was married, does not have an official national church policy allowing ministers to officiate at same-sex unions or ordain openly gay people. Allowing each diocese to determine whether or not to ordain gays and lesbians or bless same-gender couples on a local level, rather than making a church wide decision, I feel is tantamount to accepting and supporting discrimination."
The national president of Integrity, the gay/lesbian caucus in the Episcopal Church, responded by saying that while Collins had a "right to make this decision," he regretted her shunning "one of the church’s finest organizations, which helps countless thousands of people throughout the world, including gay and lesbian persons." Addressing an Integrity worship service during the General Convention, the dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts noted that while the denomination "has a long way to go," he thought that Collins had "been talking to the wrong people."
Late in the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, both the House of Deputies (clergy and laity) and the House of Bishops passed a resolution affirming pastoral care for unmarried couples. The denomination makes no distinction between unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples and expects all such couples to be monogamous and demonstrate "mutual affection and respect." Promiscuity is condemned. In supporting the pastoral recognition of same-gender couples, Los Angeles Bishop Chester Talton said: "I can’t imagine how much pain it would cause me if I could not acknowledge in the community that is the most important part of my life, the partnership that is the most important in my life." But Tennessee Bishop Bertram Herlong countered: "You’ve heard of the pain of gays and lesbians, let me tell you about the pain of the traditionalists who feel the church has betrayed them."
The Reformed Church in America has drawn limits on future involvement with the United Church of Christ because of the latter’s open and affirming stance on ordaining practicing homosexuals. Meeting in national synod on Long Island in June, the RCA decided not to pursue a closer ecumenical relationship with the UCC. The issue of homosexuality was behind proposals from several sectors of the RCA, calling for admonishment, rebuke, and/or separation from a full communion agreement with the UCC.
The Russian Orthodox Church has now officially condemned homosexuality as well as genetic engineering, abortion and euthanasia and has approved the concept of private property and the church’s close relationship with the Russian military. The church has also elevated the last czar, Nicholas II, and his family — all assassinated when the Communists came to power -- to sainthood.
Australia’s Uniting Church voted in its triennial meeting in July "not to consider any proposals relating to sexuality at this Assembly." The delegates were so deeply divided over homosexuality that it was thought that debate on the issue would be destructive to church unity. The Uniting Church is Australia’s third-largest denomination with 1.3-million members — formerly Presbyterians and Methodists.
Screenwriter Mike White (son of former Fuller Seminary teacher, now gay activist, Mel White) has written a popular new film in which he also stars. Chuck & Buck is the story of Buck, a 27-year-old child obsessed with recapturing a childhood friendship (including sex play) with Chuck, now a music industry exec engaged to a woman. White (who plays Buck) says: "I think the sexual identity of both Chuck and Buck is grayer than what you’re used to seeing. … It’s a call to bisexuality. [It’s] subversive."
It’s called a "creepy, disquieting drama" [People], and a "creepy, often disturbing look at loneliness and need" [New York Times]. Godfrey Cheshire of the New York Press observes that "our entire, increasingly infantile culture is Buck." He notes: "Not that long ago homosexuality was widely pathologized as a form of ‘arrested development’ … and now here comes Chuck & Buck, exuberantly and unmistakably dredging up a very un-p.c. stereotype." Time film critic Richard Schickel says that "any movie that sentimentalizes stalking ought to be shunned." But Rolling Stone praises it as "one of the year’s best and most provocative films" and it’s called "a bright pinwheel of a film, …a subtle, nuanced fable that finds a bright side to romantic obsession" [the GLBT New York Blade News]. Entertainment Weekly raves it’s "the one movie at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival that I wouldn’t hesitate to call extraordinary." Playboy calls it "terrific!" Says Rex Reed in The New York Observer: Mike White is "a marvelous writer [and his acting] makes you forget you’re watching a movie." According to Allison Fashek in George: "It’s enough to make a papa proud."
In the 1980s, the now ex-"ex-gay"Jeff Ford was director of Outpost, the "ex-gay" ministry in the Twin Cities. The Bethel College graduate had struggled with his homosexuality for years and "believed that if I worked at it long enough, my feelings would pass." To that end, Ford prayed, submitted to "conversion therapy" and underwent electroshock treatments (during which his penis was wired, he was shown erotic photos of men, and when he became sexually aroused he would be zapped with electric punishment). He married a woman, fathered two children, and counseled hundreds of homosexuals to stop their homosexuality and get heterosexually married — all to no avail.
For 13 years now, he has been in a committed gay relationship with another man and he says he’s never been happier. The relationship began as a prescribed "covenant-brother" relationship that was supposed to help both men overcome their homosexuality. Instead, they fell in love. Ford and his former wife are best friends and share in their child-rearing responsibilities.
In August, Ford was interviewed by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. He was asked about a Focus on the Family "ex-gay" conference promising pastors and parents in the Twin Cities that homosexuality "is preventable and treatable." He said that the "ex-gay" leaders are "lost and confused" and, as such, are "hurting people, especially children."
Sex-change operations were performed on South African homosexuals in the 1970s and 1980s, according to South Africa’s Daily Mail and Guardian (July 28). Some patients died during the procedure. Says Aubrey Levine, the psychiatrist who was in charge of this program to "cure" homosexuals: "We had only patients who wanted to be cured and were there voluntarily." Levin now works in Canada.
Gay activist Jim Fouratt addresses "those gender-variant gay men and women who are under siege ... to mutilate their bodies to gain [heterosexual] acceptance" to think more deeply about their decisions to undergo sex-change operations. Advocate columnist Norah Vincent cautions that "mutilating their bodies" for societal acceptance is "reinforcing oppressive stereotypes" and suggests that those who are thinking of doing that, instead "live androgynously." But these views are intolerable to transgender GenderPAC head Riki Wilchins, who claims that such suggestions are "indistinguishable from the Right’s exhortations that gays live as straights."
The evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury has given his blessing for an Anglican priest to undergo a sex-change operation and then continue his serving the vicarage as a woman. According to London newspaper reports, the Archbishop said in a sermon at the priest’s country church: "We do not always feel our bodies fit us. Some of us feel too fat or too thin. How would you feel if your body felt totally wrong?" Following the sermon a member of the parish rose and affirmed: "We loved him as Peter [Stone], and as Carol we will give him our full support." The congregation broke into applause.
AND FINALLY:
The second Gay Men’s Health Summit convened in Boulder, Colorado in July. Nearly 500 conferees attended from throughout America and from several foreign countries. The organizers, the Boulder County AIDS Project, said that they were trying to represent the widest diversity of gay men and their subcultures. Here’s a report from a Christian who is a social worker and gay. "I attended several workshops on ‘spirituality’ and heard endlessly about everything under the sun. The only two words conspicuously absent in all the workshops were ‘sin’ and ‘Jesus.’ Inclusivity and non-judgmentalism were heard literally hundreds of times, however. One of the speakers, the founder of Body Electric (which he has since sold) who now heads EroSpirit, invited the attendees to go to their rooms and ‘wank’ (his term) together. He advised them that any apprehension to do so is caused by ‘shame issues’ they still had to work through."
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