The Religious Right’s Suicidal Gay Obsession

Survey after survey has shown that Millennials are leaving religion in record numbers and by some accounts those who are religiously unaffiliated range between a third and 40% of that demographic. The same surveys also have revealed that the most significant factor in the decision to walk away from religion was fundamentalist and evangelical Christians' anti-gay hatred and bigotry - followed by their hypocrisy and nastiness in general.   Indeed, the latest PRRI survey  cited in a recent post shows that every Christian denomination is losing membership, including evangelical ones and the Southern Baptists.  Among evangelicals, only 1 in 10 is under 30 years of age. Driving away the young and the educated (who tend to be Episcopalians, Evangelical Lutherans and some Catholics, if they remain Christian at all) is a sure form of long term suicide.  Playing numbers games like the Catholic Church which keeps one on the membership roster until one affirmatively demands to be removed can mask the attrition from supposed membership strength, but the PRRI report shows the reality of what is happening.  The irony is that a sexually obsessed and repressed minority within Christianity are killing the entire brand.  The self-composed Christofascist myth that those who have walked away will return as the get older and/or have children simply is not happening.  My own grandchildren, for example, are growing up as thoughtful, moral, compassionate individuals with religion playing no role in the lives.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Christofascists road to suicide.  Here are highlights:

At the end of last month, a group of Evangelical theologians, pastors, and leaders put out what they called the Nashville Statement on sexual morality. The first thing to note is that 50 years ago, it would have been regarded as self-evident to most Christians. Money quote: “We affirm that God’s revealed will for all people is chastity outside of marriage and fidelity within marriage. We deny that any affections, desires, or commitments ever justify sexual intercourse before or outside marriage; nor do they justify any form of sexual immorality.” So far, so conventional, especially for Evangelicals.

But you immediately wonder if the statement is going to condemn divorce or contraception or multiple successive marriages or pornography or masturbation or countless other questions of sexual morality that heterosexuals grapple with. And you can search the document for any thoughts on these questions. In fact, it has almost nothing to say to 97 percent of humanity on sexual matters.

What it does instead is condemn the 3 percent. In fact, it does more than condemn the sexual behaviors of gay and transgender people. It erases our self-understanding entirely. Money quote: “We deny that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” It is not just what we do that these Evangelical leaders object to; it is who we are. Our very “self-conception” is a defiance of God’s will. We sure aren’t part of nature, even though scientists have observed variations on the sexual norm in countless other species. We are merely heterosexuals who have chosen to act out our desires in sexually immoral ways. The words gay and homosexual and transgender describe nothing but sin. . . . . At best, we are beset with “psychological conditions” that lead us into sin and Hell.

What Evangelicals cannot seem to accept is the possibility that for the vast majority of humankind, male and female self-conception does indeed come completely naturally, that it is clearly integral to humanity’s reproduction and rearing of the next generation, that the sexes are indeed complementary rather than interchangeable … but that this is not the entire story. A small minority does not quite fit this rubric. . . . . it does mean that God’s creation isn’t just Adam and Eve period.

The reason so many minds have changed on this question is because we know more about our nature than we ever have before. You don’t have to junk all of Christianity to acknowledge that. Gay people, for example, will be the first to insist that male and female exist: It’s just that we are attracted to our own sex and not the other.

For a few generations now, gays and lesbians and transgender people, by coming out, have been telling our stories, and those with open minds and big hearts have heard us. It is one of the great tragedies of many Evangelical and orthodox Christians that they are not interested in listening.

And so in the Nashville Statement, there is no advice to gay or transgender Christians, except to be heterosexual, dammit. They don’t even air the possibility of chaste spiritual friendship as a way for such people to lead lives not beset with loneliness, or sexual repression of a kind no human is truly capable of without profound psychological distortion. There is no mention of love at all . . . All this constant rhetoric of loving us is therefore phony. You can’t love people without respecting them. You can’t welcome people you are simultaneously dehumanizing and writing out of creation.

[T]heir intransigence on this question is killing them. It’s particularly damning when so many of these leaders just endorsed, voted for, and threw their weight behind a man who has married several times, claimed that avoiding STDs was his own version of Vietnam, has humiliated successive wives, has bragged about sexual assault, who talks of his own daughter as a sexual object, and touted the size of his dick in a presidential debate. On all of this, most of these same Evangelicals looked the other way. But gay and transgender Christians? We are living rebukes to God’s natural order.

I believe that for an entire generation, this question is a litmus test for whether Christianity really is about love, and whether the Gospels (which have nothing to say about homosexuality) should even get a hearing. I can date my own niece’s and nephew’s rejection of Christianity to the day the priest urged them to oppose equal rights for their uncle. That’s why Evangelicalism is dying so quickly among the young. The latest PRRI survey shows that only one in ten Evangelicals are now under 30. It is no accident . . . . This is what the signers of the Nashville Statement do not quite grasp. They just signed one of the longest suicide notes in history. Because what they’re saying is not merely callous. It is manifestly untrue.

Some readers - most comment anonymously, of course - take me to task for lumping all Christians together when I say that Christianity needs to be a dead religion.  Sadly, rather than continually, loudly and publicly condemn the hate merchants within Christianity and the toxicity of evangelical Christianity in particular, its easier for these individuals to attack those who point out what they prefer to close their eyes to and ignore.  When Christianity dies, it will be because of critics like me, but rather those who could have opposed the hate merchants chose not to do so. 

Evangelicals are Killing LGBT Youth from the Inside Out — Soul First

I am very hard on evangelical Christians who I view as a toxic element in American society.  They blather endlessly about personal responsibility yet they close their eyes to the deliberate harm they cause to others by clinging to what one blogger friend describes as relying on Bronze Age anonymities versus knowledge and scientific data.  Why?  First because they have been brainwashed since childhood. Second, because it is easier for them to cling to lies fed to them as children than it is to think for themselves.  Thinking for these folks is a terrifying prospect. With the Internet, knowledge is at one's finger tips unlike during the years I grew up closeted and thinking I was some lone, sinful freak.  The worst among the evangelicals are their often self-anointed leaders who not only cling to ignorance, but do so to retain power over their though free followers but also to line their pockets with money. These "leaders" - who I refer to scamvangelists - care nothing about the harm their cult of ignorance and Bronze Age beliefs  wreak on the country.  Among the favorite victims of the posion they disseminate are LGBT individuals. Surprisingly, a piece at Baptist News makes the argument of why science and data should have greater influence over society's thinking.  Here are excerpts:

This week, a group of the country’s most prominent evangelical figures released a document condemning lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and those who affirm them in what they called the Nashville Statement. Read the list of signatories and you’ll recognize the names — presidents of some of the country’s largest seminaries and pastors of burgeoning evangelical churches.

I spent three years writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the religious and spiritual dimensions of suicide among LGBTQ people, and aside from the interesting nuances of the research and the elegance of the theory that developed from that work, there’s one cruel fact that became clear: this type of theology is brutalizing the bodies and berating the souls of LGBTQ youth. In fact, it is literally killing many of us.

Take a look at a few recent statistics:

• In 2015, GLSEN surveyed 10,528 students and found that 57.6 percent of LGBT students studied felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, 43.3 percent felt unsafe because of their gender expression (an increase from 2013).

• 82.5 percent experienced verbal harassment at school because of their sexual orientation or gender expression (another increase from 2013).

• 57.6 percent of LGBTQ students who were harassed or physically assaulted at school didn’t tell a staff member because they thought it would not help or would even make the situation worse.

• LGBT youth represent about 5 percent to 7 percent of the total youth population, but comprise up to 45 percent of homeless youth in the U.S. (Seeking Shelter report)

• The Surgeon General reports that around 30 percent of LGBT adolescents report attempts at suicide compared with 8 percent to 10 percent of all adolescents. And the National Transgender Discrimination Survey shows a 41 percent suicide attempt rate for trans people.

But those are cold statistics, facts on a page, representable in a flat pie chart or bar graph. I spent hours upon hours sitting face-to-face with LGBTQ people who have attempted suicide in their past and survived — people for whom suicide became a thinkable option largely because of theologies that suggested that living as LGBTQ people in their churches and families and communities was impossible.

The signatories of the Nashville Statement see this as a fight for the soul of evangelicalism. But in reality, this is a struggle for the souls of our LGBTQ family and friends and neighbors. The souls of LGBTQ people have been assailed for far too long by the largest and loudest Christian leaders in the U.S. while so many progressive churches with scads of LGBTQ people in the pews have contented themselves to affirm LGBTQ people but “not make a big deal about it” — debating whether to display a rainbow flag on their sign or state their affirmation on their website or consigning their celebration of LGBTQ lives to one week in June.

The statistics and the voices of LGBTQ people are enough to convince me that the Evangelicals are still succeeding in killing LGBTQ from the inside out — soul first. If those of us who stand in contradiction to the theology represented in the Nashville Statement are going to make any lasting different, we must stop being content to affirm in subtlety and silence or with once-a-year celebrations.

It is not enough to denounce the theology represented in this heinous statement on social media, convincing ourselves that “most people know this doesn’t represented mainline Christianity,” or contenting ourselves with the small, affirming bubble we’ve created. Churches that seek to cultivate the abundance of life for LGBTQ people have work to do, and that work will be lifesaving.

The reluctance of non-hate-filled Christians to challenge the hatred of others disseminated daily is why I fault "good Christians."   Their silence and/or deference to the Tony Perkins, James Dobsons, and Franklin Graham - not to mention the entire Southern Baptist Convention leadership - allows the denigration and assaults on LGBT lives to continue.  I grew up Roman Catholic rather than Southern Baptist, but the damage done to me was very similar.  No child or teen should grow up hating themselves and believing that suicide is the only option to them.  As a teen and young adult, I thought of suicide almost daily as I tried desperately to "pray away the gay."  When I came out, it literally took years of therapy to undo the psychological and emotional damage my religious upbringing had done to me. Indeed, there were two serious suicide attempts along the way during my coming out journey.  Lives continue to be ruined and/or loss because of evangelical's fear of thinking for themselves and letting go of writings of ignorant Bronze Age anonymities that fly in the face of modern knowledge and science.   Being LGBT is not sinful and there is no more choice in the matter than being born black, Hispanic or Middle Eastern.  Decent people need to condemn both the "Nashville Statement" and each and every one of its signatories.  Indeed, go a step further and stop giving them money and stop attending their denominations.