We Occupy Jesus on Why Jesus Wouldn't Call Anti-Gay, Anti-Women Pastor Mark Driscoll for a Second Date

The Place of Gay Persons in God's Plan: The Biblical Question (2)

The following is from a journal entry dated August 1990:

I want to do this thinking through of the biblical evidence about “homosexuality” as a personal thinking through in which I try really to encounter the negative objections and let them persuade me as they may. So I’m stretching for a cool, reasoned, academic voice. Futile, of course, as futile as Thomas’s entertainment of objections to his theses, because I know ahead of time what I think.

Or do I? I want to write as if I’m responding to a reasonable and thoughtful gay-basher. I don’t recall having ever met any such person.

Re: the bible. A reasoned analysis would cite the specific texts. I’m working from memory and not troubling to do so. Not sure I will. If I do look at each text eventually, I’ll have to pay more attention to the exegetical details.

But I'm looking at the texts as a group deliberately, to point out that, even before we approach the texts individually, we have a serious problem of interpretation to face. This is why anyone, or any church, would ever grab a handful of disparate texts from a huge grab like the bible (which is a compilation of many texts written at many different times for many reasons) and then claim that that handful of mysterious texts written over many centuries in many contexts is a consistent statement about a psychological phenomenon that was not even understood until the late 19th century.

This is where I was headed with my concluding remarks last time re: texture: what seems never to receive sufficient attention as any question of interpreting the biblical evidence about “homosexuality” arises is what to do with any specific text. We have such a strange book with which to work—many books.

As my remarks about the fundamentalist canon within a canon (and the fundamentalist tendency to mirror cultural norms in selecting this canon within a canon) suggest, one of the primary problems confronting the biblical theologian is that of deciding what to take seriously. I don’t mean simply what to take seriously when there are notorious difficulties with what the scriptures appear to teach—and here I’m narrowing the focus to the problem of deciding what to take seriously ethically. The imprecatory psalms pray that God’s people may dash the heads of their enemies’ children against the rocks; the chosen people are divinely ordained to exterminate their conquered peoples; the bible accepts slavery as a permissible social arrangement and tells slaves to obey their masters; Leviticus commands God's people to execute witches.

No. I’m talking more about focus and perspective, that which enables us to see anything at all in the text. To be more precise: I’m talking about hermeneutical starting point. What makes us even see, let along highlight, the “anti-homosexual” texts? And why do we miss so much that appears even more significant from another ethical vantage point, say that of feminism? (Feminism is about ethics—it's a movement centered on ethical questions—that seems self-evident to me, because it envisages the liberation of women to full personhood. God who makes persons wishes them to be fully liberated . . . .)

Part of the answer to what makes us see these texts in the first place, I think, is that we’ve taken 17th-century confessional statements as the benchmark for orthodoxy. As Shailer Mathews observes, when most American biblical literalists tout orthodoxy, what they actually mean is not the long, vexed, rich historic traditions of the church. What they mean is something like the Westminster Confession or a variant thereof. We’ve been fixated for some time at this stage of development, and stuck with the exegesis it entails.

The connection between 17th-century orthodoxy and an anti-homosexual exegesis may not be readily apparent. Homosexuality—the concept as we know it, of an irreformable predisposition to erotic attraction towards one’s own sex—did not exist in the thought of the Reformers (or of their Catholic patristic and medieval predecessors). I’m not even sure, in fact, if they addressed the question of homosexuality.

What I’m getting at, rather, is a suspicion that the way we read the bible now has been framed for us for some time, for several centuries, in fact. E.g., our tendency to ignore the numerous and weighty texts that call into question the very possibility of a capitalist economy seems clearly rooted in how the Reformers, or at least their first followers, who formulated the classic Reformation credal statements, read the bible. This is not a novel insight. Max Weber showed us this years ago. And liberation theologians are hammering the point home today.

Liberation theology seems very pertinent to this discussion, it seems to me. If we grant a fundamental premise of liberation theology—that the bible can and must be read in new ways in response to new historical developments—then it seems to me we’re always beginning anew, we’re always in a position of having to ask why this text and not that one, why have we privileged this and ignored that? This means, of course, taking the bible seriously, far more seriously than fundamentalists do or many Catholics, with their doctrine of ecclesia docens.

To point the discussion back towards the “anti-homosexual” texts: have we “heard” these texts primarily because we’ve always read the bible patriarchally? (Note that hardly anyone immediately imagines, when the texts are cited, that they refer to women. Our concern is with forbidding male homosexuality—our concern, and so the bible’s, we imagine?) How would our hearing differ if we heard the biblical texts with feminist-liberationist ears? Perhaps we would not even notice these texts!

Perhaps we would notice instead the very attractive, alluring softness of Jesus—what Leonard Swidler calls his androgyny. Generations of muscular Christians have attacked the anemic, neurasthenic sissy iconography of Christ in parts of our tradition. And I don’t mean to imply that he was the pale and wilting flower of 19th-century sentimental iconography.

But what alternative do we envisage? I fear muscular Christianity has thought of Jesus as a kind of divine Rambo, someone who, if he appeared today, would come among us chewing a cigar stub, swaggering, kicking ass, and bellowing in a loud deep voice about all the problems of the world, all the problems the world presents the men who want to control it. Or church bureaucrats no doubt would refine the image, but it would be equally macho: the 3-piece suited, slim, svelte, bronze poster boy who would toss out his cool aphorisms with supreme sangfroid in boardrooms.

Camauros and Crotch-Enhanced Flight Uniforms: The Spectacle of World Youth Day and Manly Christianity

People have been seeing red lately—well, it seems the Vatican has—over media reports of Pope Benedict XVI’s fascination with the latest-old fashions in papal attire. As an article on today’s Clerical Whispers blog entitled “‘Vintage’ Pope Benedict XVI: Media Victim" notes, Benedict has made a name for himself by re-introducing such arcane articles of papal attire as a red woolen cap with ermine trim (the camauro) that dates to the 12th century; the ombrellino, a small parasol used to symbolise the pope's temporal powers; a higher-than-high miter; and lacier and more richly embroidered surplices than the Catholic world has seen in lo these many years (see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/07/vintage-pope-benedict-xvi-media-victim.html).

Benedict’s fixation on these latest-old papal and liturgical accessories seems to go hand in hand with his fashion sense regarding plain old clothes like shoes and sunglasses. European media have deemed his smart red leather shoes a Prada product, though the Vatican hotly denies this—and has, indeed, issued an explanation for them in an issue of Osservatore Romano last week.

The scarlet pumps and sporty Gucci and Serengeti sunglasses in which Benedict has been seen as he scoots around Rome in his spiffy little sportscar outfitted with white-leather furnishings by Natuzzi earned the pope a place in Esquire magazine’s list of the world’s best-dressed men last year. His title? Accessorizer of the Year.

As I have noted above, media interest in Benedict’s sartorial nattiness has evoked some, well, downright cattiness on the part of the official Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano recently. In a 26 June article in that paper, Spanish novelist Juan Manuel de Prada reproaches the media for "trivializing" Benedict’s sartorial styles (see “Vatican: Pope’s Designer ‘Not Prada, but Christ,’” 28 June Whispers in the Loggia blog at http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com).

Prada offers an . . . interesting . . . theological defense of Benedict’s concern with style. The revolving door of newly retrieved old liturgical fashions is apparently all about putting on Christ, "dressing oneself anew in Christ," becoming one with Christ through a transcending of one’s regular identity. In a word, Benedict is accessorizing for Christ. Prada concludes, "The pope, in short, does not wear Prada, but Christ."

Well. This is a theological tactic already floated in the media by the pope’s liturgical advisor Msgr. Guido Marini (no, I am not making this up; and no, I am not hallucinating “Saturday Night Live” episodes). According to Clerical Whispers, Msgr. Marini has informed the press that that “the use of age-old liturgical accessories was aimed at reinforcing a ‘sense of mystery’ and ‘the sacred’.”

Oh, my goodness gracious, yes! Anytime I see a man in a red-wool, ermine-trimmed cap carrying around a tiny parasol I certainly do tend to think: “Why, there goes sacred mystery walking down my street.” Who would be blind or heartless enough not to see the nimbus of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans in such splendid sartorial-liturgical displays?

Somehow, in my own perverted little mind, all this talk of the pope’s latest finery blends together with a picture I am sorry I had to see again yesterday, in Brad Reed’s Alternet article “The Ten Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency” (see www.alternet.org/election08/89686). This is a picture of our current president stepping out of a fighter jet onto an aircraft carrier in 2004 to announce that we had “accomplished” our “mission” in Iraq—in short, that we had won the war there.

As commentators (including Irish Catholic Chris Matthews, ever sensitive to sartorial displays of manly power) noted with blowsy rhetoric on the occasion, Bush issued from the fighter plane as the veritable man’s man, swaggering and strutting to the cheers of the (staged and under-orders) military personnel aboard the carrier.

It may not have hurt that the president was wearing a specially designed crotch-enhanced uniform that, well, um, enhanced. It made visible. It made the president’s manly equipment appear large and strong, in need of specialized v-shaped padding that draws the eye right to said equipment.

The connection between Bush’s crotch and the pope’s red shoes and ombrellino? Am I the only one who sees more than a tiny bit of defensive image-manipulation in all this shifting of guises, enhancing of uniforms? And where all is about image, can it simultaneously be about substance?

I will say frankly that I credit John Paul II with the start of this image-management trend in the Vatican. John Paul was an actor, an adroit one. He knew just when to turn to the cameras and kiss the baby. From the time he was made pope, he was exceptionally clever about exploiting his athletic accomplishments in the media—who were only too willing to play along with the myth the church sought to develop through all this: a return to a man’s man’s church, one in which nelly priests would no longer hold sway over lavender rectories.

A return to the church as Jesus intended it to be when he chose that stalwart crew of burly workmen headed by Peter the fisherman. A return to the kind of manliness dominating the political life of the world at the same time via Ronald Reagan.

Since that period, some sectors of the Christian world—including large sectors of the Catholic church—have bought with a vengeance into the myth of the recrudescence of manly Christianity. Whole mystical superstructures of nonsense about the complementarity of males and females in their “natural” roles (which include, coincidentally and naturally, the subordination of women to men) have been erected on this myth.

The purported “natural” complementarity of males and females (with female subordination as a corollary) has translated itself into noxious political agendas in which the churches have heavily invested. These agendas include resistance to gay rights, to gay marriage, to the passage of laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, to the ordination of (openly) gay clergy, etc.

This past weekend’s defiant Jerusalem Statement ending the GAFCON conference and paving the way for the erection of ombrellino structures to shelter homophobic and misogynistic Anglicans within the worldwide Anglican communion relies heavily on the male-female mysticism. As do many Christians today, it seeks (without any theological justification) to read that mysticism and all the discriminations it is currently being used to promote into scripture and tradition.

How have we gotten to this point? In large point, by allowing our minds to be manipulated by easy images, rather than by thinking, reading, praying, and talking together. We have made it very easy for the media and church leaders to manipulate our consciousness. If we do not see the ridiculousness in the attempt to revive ombrellinos and higher miters, of the glozening argument that the pope puts on Christ rather than Prada, then God help us, because we are beyond human help—the help of reason.

If we let such nonsense go on and on, while resources sorely needed for substantial work and not for insubstantial image-management are diverted into the manipulation of our consciousness by crotch-enhanced uniforms and ermine-trimmed camauros, then I fear we are getting what we deserve (and paying for), and have no right to complain.

Sydney is gearing up for the big Vatican splash that will be World Youth Day—an event that was, not coincidentally, instituted by John Paul II to bring the Catholic youth of the world back to Christ and the church. Millions of dollars are being spent on this lavish media circus. The Vatican is flying—again, I am not making this up—the body of a young Italian sainthood candidate, Pier Giorgio Frassati, to Sydney for the event.

John Paul II beatified Pier Giorgio. Pier Giorgio was, like John Paul, an avid skier, an athlete. Like many of the Catholic groups and Catholic youth John Paul most avidly pursued, he was also (not coincidentally) from a wealthy family. And he was, as was John Paul in his youth, movie-star handsome.

Enough. Enough with the image-mongering. Who does the church—really—think will attend World Youth Day? Who goes to such events other than well-heeled true believers who do not need to be rescued for Christ and the church?

Would not the millions being spent on this big media splash, on flying saints to Sydney, be far better spent on, say, religious education for the vast majority of Catholics everywhere in the world whose level of religious education remains stuck somewhere around first grade? Why do youth (the ones who won’t be in Sydney, the millions who have just walked away in frustration) leave the church today?

I propose it’s because of the level of inanity permitted and supported in many parishes and many dioceses, due to a plain lack of religious education. Sermons are abysmal. Liturgical life is arid. Catholic newspapers are all too often laughable propaganda rags.

Youth are not blind to all of this. Media shows aren’t going to pull the wool over their eyes, either—even if that wool is bright red and edged with soft white ermine.