Like gay activist Dan Savage, I was raised as a Roman Catholic and church and religion dominated a great deal of my years through high school and even after. However, unlike Dan, it took me far longer to face my sexual orientation and to ultimately let go of much of the brainwashing I had under gone as a Catholic youth in the late 1950's and 1960's. In a column in the New York Times, Dan Savage reviews a new book, "Does Jesus Really Love Me?," by Jeff Chu. The book among other things profiles gays and lesbians who are struggling to reconcile their faiths with their sex orientation. Some, like some of my personal friends remain tortured by the indoctrination they received as children and find themselves unable to move on and see their faith traditions for what they are: made made constructs with money, power and control as their ultimate motivating forces. In this category I would definite include the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Russian Orthodox Church (while for centuries worked hand in glove witht he rulers of Imperial Russia), and many fundamentalist denominations. Yet others end up rejecting religion completely. Sadly, Chu is less kind to these individuals that the tortured gays who do not walk away from toxic denominations. In the Column, Savage also talks about his own evolution. Here are highlights:
A great many of the stories Chu relates are grim — I eventually lost count of the number of suicide attempts — but there are moments of humor. Andrew Freeman decides to move to Sweden at 26 in a last-ditch effort to turn himself straight. “I thought if there’s ever a place to find a beautiful woman, it’s Sweden,” he tells Chu. “Then I got there and I thought . . . this isn’t helping anything. Sweden has beautiful men!”
And there is hope in this book, too. . . . . A few months later she reversed herself, asked for her son’s forgiveness and gave him her blessing to come out. “I love this denomination,” Eva Sullivan-Knoff tells Chu, “but I love my son more.”A million moments like this are playing out all over the country. Taken together, they’re building toward a cultural tipping point, and as a result, the marriage of Christianity and homophobia is increasingly harming the churches that espouse it. The damage done by religious bigots used to go one way: churches preached homophobia, gays and lesbians suffered. Increasingly, religious bigots are hurting themselves.
But while Chu is gentle with gay people who are working to reconcile their sexualities and their faiths — straining in some cases to do so — he is far less generous to those of us who are no longer believers. For gay people who’ve left organized religion, the condescension that creeps in around the edges of his narrative begins to feel like contempt.
Mr. Byers, as we learned on the previous page, gave up his parental rights after his wife divorced him; his wife’s second husband adopted his children, whom he hasn’t seen in more than a decade; his brother refuses to speak to him; and his parents think his lifestyle is despicable. Maybe such acts of emotional and spiritual violence, committed in the name of Christian beliefs, account for the sadness Chu detected.
Chu worries that gay people like Mr. Byers have been “pushed out of the church.” That’s not true for all of us. My father was a Catholic deacon, my mother was a lay minister and I thought about becoming a priest. I was in church every Sunday for the first 15 years of my life. Now I spend my Sundays on my bike, on my snowboard or on my husband. I haven’t spent my post-Catholic decades in a sulk, wishing the church would come around on the issue of homosexuality so that I could start attending Mass again. I didn’t abandon my faith. I saw through it. The conflict between my faith and my sexuality set that process in motion, but the conclusions I reached at the end of that process — there are no gods, religion is man-made, faith can be a force for good or evil — improved my life. I’m grateful that my sexuality prompted me to think critically about faith. Pushed out? No. I walked out.
He captures the fractures and conflict at a moment when the issue of what to do with L.G.B.T. people is tearing Christian denominations apart.
Like Savage, I wasn't thrown out of the Catholic Church. I left and happily so - especially as the sex abuse coverage exploded in 2002. By leaving Catholicism, I felt clean as opposed to those who remain and continue to bankroll the criminal conspiracy orchestrated from the Vatican. If I do have any regrets, they focus on the lives of Catholic youths who continue to be warped and damaged by a church that is about everything but the true Gospel message of Christ. It distresses me at times when I wonder how many of these young Catholics will see suicide as the only escape. Unlike Dan Savage, I do not count myself an atheist. I do believe that there is a high power or creator. By I believe that this higher power bears little resemblance to the God fabricated by men seeking wealth, power and control of others. Religion can be a force for good. But if one tallies up the evil done over the centuries, I suspect the scales reveal that religion - especially fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam - are a net evil in the world.
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