The Search for Community

LGBTQ individuals, like all people, are members of a number of different communities including family, church, ethnic or racial group, and the LGBTQ community. Conservative religious communities  frequently exile or marginalize queer persons of faith. Social scientists have used a variety of research strategies, including interviews and auto-ethnographies, to document the struggle of LGBTQ people as they search for community and most particularly religious community. These qualitative studies allow us to explore the intimate personal and emotional side of the negative ways that religiously-based prejudice has had on queer individuals historically and the harm that religion has too often inflicted upon queer persons of faith.

 Queer folks often look to the religious community in which they were raised when first searching for a spiritual home. If these communities are conservative or fundamentalist, queer folks generally find themselves marginalized and rejected. Their core sexual identity and their most intimate relationships are characterized as sinful and worthy of eternal punishment. Queer folks who are seeking a spiritual home can either ‘stay and fight’ in their original religious communities, or look elsewhere. Many religions offer more accepting and justice seeking environments where queer individuals can find religion, acceptance of who they are as individuals, and respect and support for their non-hetero-normative relationships. Healthy lives require both a healthy spiritual dimension and a healthy sexual dimension.

Religion that is nurturing and supportive is an important aspect of an individual's life. But religion can also be a source of alienation that is destructive to human growth and at times lead to aggression and violence against queer individuals or to self-destructive behavior. Progressive religious communities around the world have an opportunity to become welcoming and nurturing communities for everyone, regardless of race, ethnic background, socio-economic class, sexual orientation, or gender expression. This type of community is a healthy religious community that highlights the best that religion can offer the human body and spirit. This is the type of community that will grow and flourish during the twenty-first century, as we become an ever more diverse global community, one that demands respect and equality for all individuals.

LGBTQ folks, like everyone else, live in community.  Our communities---ethnic, queer, religious, socioeconomic, religious—are where we play out our self-identity, where we find comfort and relaxation from the stresses and strains of everyday life, and where we make meaning and understand our place in all of creation.  Our values, our concerns, what we embrace and what we reject, all are the products of our life in community.  When queer individuals are exiled from religious communities, when we are stigmatized as sinful or depraved, we not only lose community but we lose an important environment for understanding ourselves and the meanings of our lives. 

For some Unitarian Universalist resources that can  assist queer folks in finding a welcoming and nurturing religious home, I suggest looking at the website of Interweave, the national UU LGBTQ organization.  Many congregations sponsor local chapters. The Welcoming Church Program which works to help UU congregations become supportive and safe religious homes is useful both the LGBTQ individuals as well as allies looking to open their church community to everyone. The UUA website also offers an “LGBTQ  Welcome and Equality” resource page. There is also the “LGBTQ Ministries” page which readers may find of use.

 

Religious Responses to the Bullying of Queer Youth

LGBTQ youth are very often the target of attack by bullies. Many times, bullying behavior is influenced by conservative religious invective against LGBTQ individuals which uses religion and  scripture to justify castigating queer youth. At times this leads to violence. Religious condemnation of LGBT folks as sinful, as ‘abominations,’ as enemies of Christianity reinforces bullying behavior. In addition to the use of legal and social remedies to stop bullying, particularly the bullying of queer youth, individuals who profess a progressive religious attitude need to forcefully  argue on religious grounds against those who justify bullying on the basis of religious and ideological animus. For several decades religious scholars and activists have worked to open up the sacred scriptures, to demonstrate the inaccurate scriptural condemnation of homosexuality, and to look to the scriptures for a more positive message for queer people of faith

Another way in which individuals who are religiously conservative assist bullies is by arguing for broad ‘religious exemptions’ that would protect individuals who bully from legislation that is meant to curtail this violent behavior. Under such laws, bullies who root their behavior in religious condemnation of homosexuals could ultimately be protected from prosecution. In the US there has been a broad legislative strategy by conservative religious groups including some Roman Catholics and Evangelical Christians, to broadly expand legal religious exemptions that normally only protect churches and clearly religious institutions to a wide array of institutions, private individuals, and even for-profit corporations whose owners claim a special religious exemption. Here also, progressive religious individuals need to stress the appropriate level of separation of church and state and resist the expansion of these exemptions, particularly in the case of the bullying of LGBTQ youth. In addition, they need to criticize religious behavior and teachings that lead to devaluing the worth of individuals and at times physical violence.

Waldman underscores the epidemic of anti-gay bullying.  He writes that a particular focus on anti-LGBT bullying is warranted because gays and lesbians are particularly susceptible to being bullied and the subject of violent attack merely because they are gay or lesbian. Ari Ezra Waldman, Tormented: Anti-Gay Bullying in Schools, 84 Temple Law Review 385 (2012). Weddle and New look at resistance to anti-bullying laws by conservative Christians who oppose such legislation that explicitly mentions queer individuals because they fear that  LGBTQ groups “are attempting to indoctrinate our children to embrace homosexual lifestyles; tolerate homosexual behavior; and celebrate homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity. Those Christians who, in a rational defense of traditional morals, oppose such efforts by gay zealots are unfairly painted as bigots” Daniel B. Weddle and Kathryn E. New, What Would Jesus Do: Answering Religious Conservatives Who Oppose Bullying Prevention Legislation, 37 New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 325 (2011).

Sanders views fighting against anti-gay bullying as a theological issue.  He finds that there is a close link between religious based anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and bullying and violence against LGBTQ individuals.  Bullying is a violent strategy to aggressively enforce social hetero-normativity.  Sanders writes that for conservative religious groups: “political rallying on issues like same-sex marriage and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell serve to maintain some ground on the preservation of anti-gay cultural ideology, the intermittent reinforcement of violent attack is an even better tool to ensure the silence (and suicide) of LGBT people and their subjugation to the closet.”  Cody J. Sanders, Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue, Religion Dispatches, October 2, 2010 at http://www.relgiondispatches.org. Strategies to combat the bullying of LGBTQ individuals is an issue that all progressive religious communities need to focus their social justice efforts upon.

Some useful resources on the issue of LGBTQ bullying from the Unitarian Universalist Association include Standing on the Side of Love, whose blog contains a number of anti-bullying posts.  The UUA Tapestry of Faith Lifespan Curriculum also contains a link to Anti-Bullying Resources.  An excellent popular resource on the phenomena of bullying can be found in the book “Sticks and Stones” by Emily Bazelon (2013).

Religion and Queer Theory

Queer folks and religion. Although they are frequently at odds with one another, they clearly go together. Many LGBTQ individuals are looking for spiritual homes. At times this is within the religious communities in which they were raised, while at other times, queer individuals look for a home in other religious communities, some that are millennia old, like Buddhism, others that are much more recent such as modern day paganism. And for many religious groups in the early twenty-first century, sexuality, and particular non-heterosexuality, is front and center in terms of religious ethical concerns. Many of the most conservative traditional religious groups reject LGBTQ folks out of hand or demand that they lead lives of celibacy. Fortunately, today there are many more progressive religious groups that are looking to incorporate queer individuals into their religious communities in ways that respect their religious beliefs while at the same time treat queer people of faith with dignity and respect.

The positive use of the term ‘queer’ is a recent trend. Folksin the 1940's, 50's, and 60's used it as a term of derision. Sexuality and gender is no longer tied to simplistic binary ways of thinking. Someone is either gay or straight. These categories, like the general category of ‘homosexual,’ did not exist until the nineteenth century. The French philosopher Michel Foucault describes the genealogy of the concept of homosexuality in his landmark first volume of his “History of Sexuality.” Sexuality today is not seen as completely or nearly completely biologically rooted. Rather, much of what we understand as sexual or gender oriented behavior is culturally constructed. While our notions about sexuality or gender may see these as natural phenomena that are ultimately  about biology, social scientists have shown that this is not the case. Social scientists have demonstrated that the way in which we perceive the world, as well as  behaviors or desires that we think of as natural, as biologically determined, are in actuality  the product of society and our social life. They are socially constructed.

Queer theory attempts to go beyond ‘liberation’ and ‘full rights’ and to decenter us and make us question the primacy of these concepts. Instead, queer, in the words of Ellis Hanson, marks off “a domain virtually synonymous with homosexuality and yet wonderfully suggestive of whole range of sexual possibilities…that challenge the familiar distinction between normal and pathological, straight and gay, masculine men and feminine women” (cited in A. Jagose: Queer Theory: An Introduction,  p. 99).

Looking at sexuality and gender as socially constructed helps us reject a rigid dichotomous thinking that divides everyone into male or female, gay or straight, and ultimately natural or unnatural and good or bad. Many young people today experience gender as much more fluid. They are almost intuitively aware of the constructed nature of gender and sex roles and they creatively play with these areas of life. They are not tied to the older conceptions. This in part helps us understand how young people in America are very open to same sex marriage and find discrimination against LGBTQ individuals as appalling and unacceptable. As these social changes touch our religious communities, they  need to rethink the ways in which they deal with queer individuals, a number of whom are members of their churches and congregations. The good news for LGBTQ folks is that the future looks full of potential. The potential for a normal life with a same sex partner without discrimination in either civil society or in the religious community is within reach. While there are still communities who use models that see queer folks as sinners and condemned by God, more and more faith communities are opening their eyes and their hearts and understanding that equality both in the secular world and in the religious community is a winning strategy for all of us as we move toward the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century.
 

For more on Michel Foucault’s biography, click here. One Unitarian Universalist resource that may prove useful in exploring queer theory in a religious context is the Welcoming Congregation program. This is a voluntary program that congregations take part in so that they can “become more welcoming and inclusive of people with marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities” (UUA, Welcoming Congregation Program website). The UUA offers Queer 101 as well as Resources for Queer Youth.  Patrick Cheng provides an accessible survey of what queer theory is and the way that it relates to relgious questions in Radical Love.  The first few chapters of Radical Love orient someone who is new to queer theory and the book references many of the 'classics'  for those who want to explore queer theory and religion in more detail.