For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.        
- Romans 1: 26-27

Texts of Terror

This is the third in our 3-week series entitled “The Separation of Church and Hate.”  The focus has been to highlight three different Bible passages; Leviticus 18, the Sodom and Gomorrah story and Romans 1.  We have highlighted these passages for a reason, that is that a particular interpretation of these texts has been used to justify hatred and violence towards people who would dare to express their true sexual orientation.

So we have several options as people who inherit these texts.  We can either let the texts go, saying there’s nothing we can do about the way they are used, and just get on with being an open and affirming community.

Another option is to actually go deep into the texts, understand the context and the broader interpretations so that we might not let these texts be given up to those who would use them for violence and hatred. 

Because we affirm the separation of church and hate, we cannot give them up, because our silence would implicate us in the violence.

There are many ways of reading the Bible and understanding these texts, and those of us in the progressive community need to have progressive re-interpretations out there alongside the others.  Not that ours are right, but simply possible, or valid interpretations of the texts. The conservative, or more literal, interpretation of the texts is also valid (if dangerous when taken to extremes). It’s valid, but it doesn’t have certainty. The voracity of the conservative moral perspective on issues such as sexuality is not matched by the speculative nature of their bible interpretations.

My hope is that if all bible perspectives might loosen their grip on absolute truth, then just maybe we can lessen the violence.

I know that some of you may be impatient with this emphasis on Bible text, but I want to ask you to bear with me, because we are doing this for the sake of the separation of church and hate.  We cannot let the text be given up to only one conservative perspective.

I’d like to start by pointing out 10 arguments against same-sex marriage.  My experience is that some people who are otherwise intelligent, for some reason when it comes to sexuality, suddenly become quite irrational. So I will offer these tongue in cheek rebuttals of the arguments.

10 ways People Become Irrational when thinking about Gay Marriage

10) Being gay is not natural. Yes, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning are unnatural. You should take your glasses off immediately. They are a wicked violation of God’s law.

9) Gay marriage will encourage many more people to be gay.  Right, just like hanging around tall people will make you tall.

8) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. I mean, what next? People marrying their pets because after all dogs are people too.

7) Gay parents will raise huge numbers of gay children. I mean, straight parents have only ever raised straight children, right?

6) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; Think about it. The sanctity of marriages like Britney Spears’ 55-hour marriage would be utterly destroyed.

5) Straight marriages are more valid because they produce more children. After all, more children is just what the world needs right now, isn’t it?

4) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. Hmm! Come to think of it, lets forbid single parents from raising children also while we’re at it.

3) Gay marriage will change the very foundation of society; we could never adapt to it. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, longer life spans and computers.

2) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. And after all we do live in a theocracy, where one branch of the Christian church gets to impose their values on the entire country. That’s why we have the separation of church and state! Ohhhhhh!

1) St Paul was clearly against gay marriage. And this is the same Saint Paul who said it would be better for a man never to touch a woman, but if he must, then he should get married to avoid temptation. So St Paul clearly has a very positive view of straight marriage.

Most of the arguments against a free expression of sexuality that are based in the Bible lack rationality, and when these views are part of violence and hatred they lack all semblance of humanity and compassion.

Reading the Bible Rationally

So we have inherited a particular interpretation of Romans 1.  Let’s just assume that the way we have been taught to interpret these words is accurate.  Then, let’s assess this interpretation for how rational it is.  Generally speaking we’ve been taught to interpret these words with two main points.  The first is that homosexuality is immoral because it is unnatural.  The second point is that not only is it immoral but it will lead to physical punishment. 

Now you remember that in the early 1980’s certain members of the religious right began to say that AIDS was God’s judgment on the GLBT community.  Pat Buchanan, one of the leaders of the religious right, said that AIDS is “nature’s revenge on homosexuals”.

What a strange attitude! What an irrational attitude.  Nature can’t take revenge on anyone.  Nature doesn’t have the ability to care whether someone is gay or straight or anything else.  Nature is impersonal and impartial, and it is quite irrational to think that nature would carry out the moral biases of a particular religious group.

That irrational attitude grows directly from one particular understanding of Romans Chapter One.  It is easy to see how you could end up with this irrational view, but it is not the only way to understand the text.

As we quickly learnt that AIDS was not in fact a gay disease, the religious right had to change their perspective a little.  Their leaders came out and said that God would send natural disasters and terrorist strikes against those places that were more supportive of a LGBT lifestyle.  Once again, quite irrational.

Janis Walworth has come up with an analysis of how irrational that view is.  She studied different states to see if there is any correlation between GLBT populations and natural disasters.

What she discovered was quite interesting.  She in fact discovered the reverse.  States with the highest number of GLBT have fewer tornadoes.  So what Alabama might want to think about doing is importing members of the GLBT community to lessen the number of tornadoes in their state.

Janis took it a step further, and asked what is common to the states with the highest number of tornadoes.  She discovered there were more Protestants than Catholics, and more Baptists than Lutherans.  So Texas might think about sending a good number of Baptists out of state in order to decrease the number of tornadoes there.

One last point she makes is that there may be some correlation between IQ and natural disasters.  It’s possible that Baptists flock to places where there are larger numbers of tornadoes.

Of course this is a completely irrational and ludicrous ways of thinking, and yet that’s the way people have understood these words from Romans for so long.  It’s almost the accepted understanding of what the words are saying; that homosexuality is unnatural and will lead to some punishment from God or from nature on God’s behalf. We can’t let this insanity go unchallenged. We must present other ways to understand the text.  In fact there are.

Romans 1 in Historical Context

I want to outline another interpretation.  According to the interpretation I will offer, just like the Sodom and Gomorra story before it, these words have absolutely nothing at all to do with sexual orientation.  Further, a contextual reading of Romans 1 actually affirms the role of minorities, such as the LGBT community, in revealing divine consciousness.

My first point is that for 400 years after these words were written by Paul, in his letter to the Romans, no one believed they were speaking about homosexuality.  None of the scholars or fathers of the church believed these words had anything to do with homosexuality.  They all felt that these were words addressed men and women together who were engaged in acts that we might call “kinky sex”.  To be specific, early scholars believed that these words referred to heterosexual, anal intercourse.

So for 400 years these words were interpreted as being about sex between men and women that was in some way unnatural.  Even that argument is irrational, but it is helpful to understand that it was 400 years before anyone drew a connection between these words and homosexuality.

The second point is that there is a solid strand of scholarship that interprets this text as being quite specifically directed at the emperor Nero.  Nero came to power about the same time the text was written.  It is just possible that these words are actually being directed specifically to the lifestyle of the emperor Nero and his cohorts.  Nero’s lifestyle was based around perversion and abuse.

Nero came to power under suspicious circumstances.  He allegedly murdered his predecessor and stepfather, Claudius.  Nero’s first act as emperor was to deify his stepfather; that is, to call his stepfather a “Son of God.” This was transparently a political action, blatantly a hypocritical move, an act designed to protect his own backside.  It was a move that laid the platform for the way Nero would conduct his entire leadership.

So when Paul refers to Jesus as Son of God, it’s quite possible that what he was saying was not that Jesus had some divine nature, but rather that he possessed authentic power, based in service and integrity, as opposed to Nero whose power was based in selfishness and gain and oppression.

It’s possible that describing Jesus as a Son of God was Paul’s way of contrasting Jesus with the leadership of Nero.

Nero was someone who did whatever he wanted to do with whomever he wanted to do it with.  He had sex with men and women, boys and girls, apparently even his own mother, according to his own whim.  It was believed that Nero took a young boy, castrated him, and then married him and took him as his “wife”.

When you begin to understand some of the sexual perversion that Nero brought to the empire you see that Paul may have been addressing that abuse of power.

When you read Romans in this historical context you see that Paul’s intent may have been quite particular.  He may have been contrasting the corruption of power amongst Nero and his cohorts, and the life of the community of this young Jewish church, the Jewish church as a minority,  a minority that knew the violence of Nero.  Paul himself eventually knew the violence of Nero.  He was killed by the emperor.

A few verses later in Romans 1, Paul includes a list of dis- honorable behavior (or soul-less humanity). Included in this list is murder, deceit and ruthlessness. It could well be his litany of condemnation against Nero.

So my point is that this historical context might offer quite a new reinterpretation of the text. I’m not saying that this reinterpretation has certainty or absolute authority. It’s just possible, and if its possible, then the case for a literal condemnation of homosexual orientation is not as strong as the religious right would have us believe.

Let me continue with the historical context. This minority community, the Jewish church in Rome, knew what it was to suffer violence at the hands of a corrupt power. Paul seems to hold them up as some kind of example, in contrast to Nero. He goes so far as to say that out of this group, Israel, will come the Messiah, the one who knew divine consciousness, the one who lived divine consciousness.

It’s just possible that the point that Paul was making was not that homosexuality is immoral or unnatural but rather that minority groups that suffer violence gain special awareness of divine consciousness. Without the blessing of church or empire, they pioneered their own way of living honorably. They lived a soul-full humanity in the face of great suffering, in contrast to the soul-less humanity of Nero.

Well, enough history. Let me bring this closer to home.

Soul-full Sexuality

What does it mean for us to live a soul-full sexuality?  We might take our cues from those groups who know what it is to suffer because they dare to express themselves.

We might learn from the GBLT community not just to tolerate difference, but to celebrate diversity and self expression.  These groups can give insight into divine consciousness, because they know what it is to be pioneers. We might learn that soul-full living is to walk
“at life's edge as a pioneer; as an individual who must learn for himself the meaning of relationship, love of equals, sexuality, and morality. Without the blessing of the Church and society, my life is one outrageous experiment after another…… knowing that if I settle into a particular frame of thought, it is because I have found it appropriate and not because I was raised to believe that's the way things must be..” - Brian McNaught

Soulful sexuality is about self-expression. 
Soulful sexuality is self assured. It has nothing to hide and nothing to defend. 
Soulful sexuality is honorable.  It has the concern of the other always in mind. 
Soulful sexuality is connected. It knows that sexuality and spirituality are intimately related, that violence that is perpetrated against people due to their sexuality is violence perpetrated against all people, and it is unacceptable.
Soulful sexuality knows that all issues are related.  Social justice in one area is related to social justice in all other areas. 
Soulful sexuality knows that the right to free expression for the GLBT community is the right to free expression for all people, no matter what their sexual orientation.
Soulful sexuality is the end of hatred. 
Soulful sexuality is the end of violence.

This community stands for the separation of church and hate; we celebrate the beauty and diversity of humanity.  This community celebrates people who are pioneers, out at life’s edge,  breaking new ground in terms of acceptance and wholeness.

This community stands for those who are at the edge because we know what it is like; we’ve been there as well. We know what it’s like to break new ground in Bible understanding.  We know what it is to seek freedom, to use our minds to think clearly and rationally.  We know what it is to seek lives that are connected and whole, because we have been there too.

It’s at that place at the edge where we find insight into divine consciousness.

I stand for the separation of church and hate.  Don’t you?  We stand for the separation of church and hate, and refuse to let these texts go, given up to those who would use them to justify hatred and violence.  Above all else this community stands for people expressing their sexuality freely and truly.

What could be more natural than that?