Gay group reaches out to Lakewood

From the Houston Chronicle:

The son of evangelical Tammy Faye Bakker Messner will spend his first Mother's Day weekend since her death in Houston, waiting to hear from Lakewood Church Pastor Joel Osteen.

Jay Bakker, a high-profile supporter of Soulforce — a group that fights religious and political oppression of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders — wants Osteen to join the nontraditional families at a picnic Saturday and welcome them to church on Sunday.

As the tattooed and pierced Bakker spoke at a Soulforce news conference Wednesday, it was clear his mother was in his thoughts. Though she died of cancer last July, she remains a near-legend in the LGBT community.

And

Donald Iloff, Lakewood's chief of communications, later told the Houston Chronicle that Osteen wasn't able to meet with Bakker or attend the picnic because he is busy writing his Sunday sermon. It's a four-day process, he said.

Iloff went on to say, "If we met to talk, would this group be satisfied if we agreed to disagree? ... Soulforce wants to use Lakewood to further their agenda."

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Yeah, Iloff is right, ain't gonna happen, and Soulforce is, indeed, trying to use Lakewood to further their agenda. Not that there's anything wrong with that. If religious gays are trying to change American Christianity for the better, mega-churches aren't a bad place to start. I just wonder if they're wasting their time.

Long ago, back when I was a Southern Baptist, the first few chinks in my fundamentalist world view happened over the course of a few years when a couple of my close friends from high school came out of the closet while we were attending the University of Texas together in the mid and late 80s. One of them, also raised as a Southern Baptist, told me that he had always been gay. After a while, I believed him. The chain of logic isn't hard to follow: if my pal had always been gay, then he was born that way, which means that's how God made him. Why would God make somebody gay and then insist that his very nature, his identity itself, was abhorrent? It made no sense to me. God, if he is truly just and good, would never do such a thing. Ergo, the Bible must be wrong.

That was a big step, philosophically speaking, because once a fundamentalist decides that the Bible has mistakes, he's no longer a fundamentalist. Over the next few years, I kept finding new and confounding contradictions in the Bible, and in Christianity in general. I discarded chunk after chunk of my Christian beliefs. By the mid 90s, I was a Christian in name only. Another friend pointed this out to me, and I finally said "enough." I was no longer a Christian.

So, while I think what Soulforce is trying to do here is a pretty good thing, relatively speaking, I also think that they're trying to tinker with some very essential elements of Christianity's very nature. That is, the Bible seems, to me, to be extraordinarily clear in its stance on homosexuality, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament: gay sex is a major sin against God. Of course, that's not true, whether God exists or not, but most Christians think it is, and they base that view on their most central and absolute document, the Bible.

Now, I've read a bit about some gay-friendly interpretations of the Bible, that the passages widely understood to be anti-homosexual are actually anti-pagan, which means being gay is a-okay in the eyes of God, as long as you're not worshiping Baal, but this is a wildly weak argument, especially when seen in the light of how a pro-heterosexual mandate makes a great deal of historical sense for an ethnicity, the Jews, constantly on the verge of extinction--not that it makes any real sense, of course, but you see what I'm saying; if your people are in fear of being wiped out, making babies becomes really, really, really fucking important, and gay sex doesn't do much as far as that goes.

But hey, who am I to tell people how to interpret the Scriptures? I'm just saying that these Soulforce people would spend their efforts much better by trying to make Christianity more tolerant rather than accepting.

On the other hand, I've known a few gay Christians, and I used to teach a gay Mormon. Like I've said here before, religion is far less about rational consideration of the nature of the universe, and far more about identity: being a Christian is incredibly important to believers, and gay people are no different from straight people in this respect. It may not be logical to try to make churches accept what is clearly unacceptable to them, but the gay faithful must necessarily stake their lives on it. Otherwise, they lose an elemental part of themselves.

Who knows? Maybe this is how religions change over the years. But I wouldn't bet on it.

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