Presbyterians Desperately Need a Sexual Reformation : Religion: The Christian church, if it’s to retain any moral credibility, must move beyond heterosexism and accept all people’s sexuality.

As pastor of West Hollywood Presbyterian Church, which has an aggressive outreach program to the lesbian/gay community, I know the personal devastation and dehumanization that accompanies the reigning sexual ethic in the Christian church. It is a mean-spirited, unjust and just plain cruel ethic. I, for one, live for the day when the obnoxious, vulgar, patronizing voices of oppression will cease speaking from within the church; for the day when it will be as spiritually and socially unacceptable to speak against lesbians and gays as it now is to be fascist or racist.

How long must we hear cunning words of condemnation in professions of love? When will the church stand up and say the truth: To be gay or lesbian is one’s birthright; the right to be the person you really are.

“Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality and Social Justice,” which embodies this simple truth, has created one of the greatest controversies the church has witnessed in decades. “God’s frozen people”--an epithet often applied to our Calvinist disposition of doing everything “decently and in order”--have again confronted the issue that generates enough heat to melt the rigid demeanor of our due process. That issue, of course, is sex and sexuality.

Twenty years after the sexual revolution in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) realized that something radically new and different is happening in human relationships. During the last 15 years, “that darn issue” of human sexuality kept creeping onto the church’s theological agenda. The issue was mostly focused on the ordination of gays and lesbians who are “out of the closet” and unwilling to commit to the church’s unfair standard of life-long celibacy. Concerns associated with adolescent sexuality, single adults and older adults living together outside of marriage, due primarily to the economic penalties of remarriage, were also discussed.

In good Presbyterian fashion, a special committee was formed to “study the issues of sexuality.” Studying an issue is usually a good way to deflect the heat, defer decisions and produce yet another document that virtually no one will ever read. Not this time. More than 30,000 copies have sold. The Presbyterian Church is in an uproar: “Ban” the document.

As one of 17 members appointed to the committee, I knew from the beginning that, for the second time in history, we had discovered fire. No sooner were the appointments made than the debate began. The task force was “too liberal.” It had one gay-rights activist on it--me. It was also “too academic”--a strange criticism for a church that prides itself on scholarship. What was unsaid but deeply feared was that we might say something progressive about sexuality and, most important, that we might again conclude that homosexuality is an acceptable life style.

Wherever we went--and we traveled across the country--we heard members of the church denounce the evil of homosexuality. But when we asked the complaining Presbyterians if they personally knew a gay or lesbian member, their answer was invariably “no.” Then we listened to gay and lesbian Christians of the Presbyterian faith. They were rational, caring, kind, loving people, certainly far more Christian than their adversaries.

We also heard from women who had been sexually abused by clergy; we listened to women who had been physically abused by their husbands; we were told about children who were victims of incest or rape. We soon learned that the issue of homosexuality was a pretext to disguise the real issues involved in the struggle of understanding sexuality.

The church’s only sanctioned expression of sexuality--heterosexual marriage--was rife with violence, coercion, sexual abuse, rape, child molestation and battering. None of this was articulated as the problem facing the church. The only “problem” was homosexuality.

The hidden, and potentially explosive issue, in the debate about church attitudes toward sexuality is patriarchy--the cultural and religious moral code that gives heterosexual men the right to control women’s and gay men’s bodies and human dignity. The Christian church is one of the most patriarchal institutions in the history of the Western world. It has much at stake in keeping women and gay men powerless. Controlling sexuality through heterosexual marriage is one of the prime means by which the church promotes the patriarchal ordering of society. Consider: Knowing that violence--from physical abuse to psychological repression of women--occurs in marriage, the church still clings to the institution without offering any moral guidance for those who enter into this convenant.

What the church has done is to equate what is sexist and heterosexist with what is moral and just. Overturning this equation--indeed, the very thought of doing so--would be as radical as Martin Luther’s insistence that celibacy is not the highest spiritual gift and that priests should be allowed to marry. That idea, among others, led to the Reformation. It’s no exaggeration to argue that the issues of sexuality, including gender justice and the quality of loving relationships, could trigger a second reformation.

We desperately need a more demanding sexual ethic in the church, one that rewards the quality of a relationship and one that celebrates the spiritual values that guide the relationship, rather than dwelling on gender and marital status.

“Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality and Social Justice” doesn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell of being officially studied by the Presbyterian Church. It’s too radical, even for Protestants. But if the church doesn’t find a way to be more just and loving toward all peoples’ sexuality, and move beyond patriarchy and heterosexism as the ethical criteria for establishing moral substance in relationships, the church will continue to lose moral credibility among its members. The sacred cow of Presbyterianism--the two-parent nuclear family, with the woman relegated to a supporting role--is rapidly vanishing.

There must be change, and we’ll know it’s beginning when gay and lesbian people are accepted into the church, with the full rights and privileges due their personhood. As theologian Thomas Merton said, “A spirituality that preaches resignation under official brutalities, servile acquiescence in frustration and sterility and total submission to organized injustice is one which has lost interest in holiness and remains concerned only with a spurious notion of order.”