Debating Faith and Sexuality

At San Jacinto United Methodist Church, lay leader Jackie Harry rises one recent Sunday morning to report on a Methodist district meeting she attended a day earlier.

“It turned out to be an opportunity for the gay rights movement to get a foothold,” she tells her fellow congregants, who quickly fall silent. “They want to incorporate the gay people into our church and let them be ministers,” she says. “God expects us to give up the sin in our lives--and we believe that homosexuality is a sin.”

Sixty miles away on the same day, Claremont United Methodist Church is observing “Reconciling Sunday,” a celebration of its ministries to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

“No one is going to tell them or imply their sexual orientation is wrong, or that it is a sin,” says the Rev. Rosemary Davis, program minister. “It means we celebrate anniversaries of same-sex life partners with flowers on the altar and with prayers of thanksgiving. It means it’s OK for a gay couple to come to the altar for Communion holding hands. . . . They know that they are in a safe place.”

No contemporary issue cuts so completely to the core of the nation’s religious groups as homosexuality. Viewed by one side as a challenge to God’s law and by the other as a sign of God’s love, debates over whether to bless same-sex unions or ordain gay men and lesbians have divided families, friends, congregations and denominations.

In the next few months alone, four of the nation’s largest denominations, with a combined 20 million members--Episcopalians, Presbyterians, United Methodists and Reform Jews--will confront these issues at national meetings. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, meanwhile, may undertake a study that could lead to rethinking its ban on ordaining non-celibate gays and lesbians.

In California, the battles are magnified by the way churches have lined up on opposing sides of the fight over Proposition 22 on the March 7 ballot--a measure that would bar California from recognizing gay marriages performed in other states.

Beneath the political and electoral battles lie fundamental assumptions about gender roles, the veracity of the Bible, even the nature of God.

For theological liberals, strict adherence to the letter of biblical injunctions against homosexuality amounts to idolatry--worshiping the text rather than God.

“Not everything biblical is godly,” said the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr. of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, where same-sex blessings have taken place for nine years.

For conservatives, such statements deny fundamental principles.

“The truth of the created order is at stake. The notion of God as an unchanging God who reveals an unchanging order that we can rely upon is at stake,” said the Rev. Jeffrey S. Siker, a Presbyterian and author of “The Church and Homosexuality,” a book widely regarded as an evenhanded treatment of the issue.

Teachings Have Been Rejected Before

But theology and sociology would not be nearly so engaged--or so explosive--were it not for the fact that what is being talked about is sex. After all, many of the same Christian denominations that now preach perdition for unrepentant homosexuals have long since jettisoned biblical pronouncements condoning slavery and male dominance and virtually forbidding divorce.

“For many people sexuality is an irrational force and therefore threatening. It doesn’t submit to logic the way other dimensions of our personality do, and therefore has to be strictly bound,” said the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The great debate within churches and synagogues hinges on how the Scriptures are read. For those on both sides of this theological divide, world views can hang in the balance.

The biblical passages include sections of the Hebrew Bible as well as the Christian New Testament. For example, the Hebrew book of Leviticus declares: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

In the New Testament book of Romans, the Apostle Paul describes people who are subject to “degrading passions,” saying that “their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

From the traditionalist Christian perspective, if Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday, today and forever,” how can moral teachings change? If biblical teachings are subject to change, what would that say about the reliability of Holy Scripture? And where does that leave God?

“Once the church would acknowledge that there’s validity in the homosexual lifestyle . . . where would you stop?” said James V. Heidinger II, president and publisher of Good News, a periodical aimed at United Methodist evangelicals and traditionalists.

Biblical literalists say they are not selectively reading the Bible when they accept divorce but reject homosexuality.

“The Bible allows for divorce under two conditions: abandonment and adultery,” said Scott Rae, professor of ethics at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, a fundamentalist institution. “You can be faithful to Scripture and still have some latitude on divorce. It’s different for homosexuality. As I read the Bible teachings this is pretty clear: The Bible condemns as immoral all homosexual relations.”

Liberals insist that biblical values of love and justice, not to mention God-given reason and experience, must be taken into account in reading the text.

“If you take it literally, if a person is a homosexual we’re to put that person to death! Who are we kidding?” said Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, a Reform rabbi and immediate past president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis.

In any case, liberal scholars argue that Paul was not referring to homosexuality as it is understood today--a sexual orientation as capable of authentic love as heterosexuality--but of willful and idolatrous passions in which self-absorption and self-deception replace the truth of God.

For nontraditionalists, nothing argues more persuasively against literalism than stories like Frank Wulf’s. Wulf, 44, is a Methodist chaplain at UCLA, a graduate of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena--and gay. For years he tried to suppress his homosexuality. He went to prayer meetings. He hired a therapist. He even submitted to an exorcism “to drive demons from my soul.”

Later, he secretly maintained a relationship with Tom, a man he had met in graduate school in New York. When Tom was stricken with AIDS a short time later, “I was able to do everything needed, give him injections, change his diapers,” Wulf said. When Tom died on a Friday, July 24, 1992, Wulf had to preach on Sunday as if nothing had happened.

Later, Wulf’s name appeared in a Methodist resolution for gay rights without his permission. Another minister demanded an explanation. The minister challenged Wulf to defend his position, not based on his own experience, but on the basis of Scripture.

Instead, Wulf came out of the closet.

“I had to tell him I could no longer acquiesce to the assumption that what Tom and I had was sick, sinful or dirty, because it wasn’t. That relationship I had with Tom was a life-giving relationship . . . ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health till death do us part.’ We didn’t get to say those vows to each other but in fact we lived them out in our day to day lives.”

But, in an illustration of the complexity of the emotions that surround sexual issues, one of Wulf’s best friends, the Rev. Robert Shuler of First United Methodist Church in Riverside, says he still cannot approve of Wulf’s homosexuality, although he loves and respects him and admires his ministry.

“The question of human sin is a reality and it cannot be curbed by our denial and our wishful thinking,” Shuler said.

With the emotional stakes so high, it’s no wonder that churches and, to a lesser extent, synagogues continue to wrestle with homosexuality or that the feuds have become increasingly public.

Conservative Anglican archbishops in Singapore late last month ordained as bishops two American Episcopal priests who oppose their church’s liberal views on homosexuality. Those on both sides say the ordinations are evidence of deep divisions within the Episcopal church. In June, traditionalist Presbyterians will propose at the denomination’s annual meeting, in Long Beach, that liberal congregations in the 2.58-million-member denomination pack up and leave. It is unlikely that such resolutions will be approved, but the tensions are palpable.

Evangelicals in the United Methodist Church are talking about creating a separate jurisdiction in the Western states because Methodist officials in the West have taken a liberal stance on gay-related issues. Earlier this month, charges were dropped by the church’s California-Nevada Conference against 68 Methodist clergy who defied church law by officiating at a lesbian couple’s “holy union.” Both Southern and American Baptists have expelled congregations from their conventions because they blessed same-sex unions.

The Rabbinic organization of Reform Judaism is struggling with whether to issue a statement endorsing the blessing of same-sex unions. Opponents of the move say it would jeopardize liberal Judaism’s grudging acceptance in Israel and worsen relations with Orthodox Jews in the United States.

The Vatican, meanwhile, has forbidden a priest and nun in the United States from ever again taking up their ministries to homosexuals because, officials say, the two soft-pedaled church teachings. The Catholic church considers homosexual acts to be “disordered” and “intrinsically evil,” but does not consider homosexuality itself to be sinful.

Seeing It From the Other Point of View

Amid the battles, there has been some progress in opening communication between the antagonists. Many liberals, including the founder of the predominantly gay and lesbian Metropolitan Community Churches, say that they believe many traditionalists are sincere in their views on the Bible and sexual morality.

“I really do believe there are [traditionalists] who are not [simply] homophobic . . .”said the Rev. Elder Troy Perry.

And some traditionalist Christians, such as the Rev. Bob Ferguson at Jackie Harry’s church in San Jacinto, say the sin of homosexuality may be no greater than any other sin. Everyone, the Bible says, falls short of God’s glory.

But Ferguson and others insist that although a loving God will forgive wrongdoing, homosexuals, like everyone else, must repent of their sin and change their ways through prayer and repentance.

Some steps toward dialogue have taken place. Last October, for example, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, met in Lynchburg, Va., with 200 gay and lesbian leaders. Falwell said he still follows the precept of hating the sin and loving the sinner, but would begin stressing compassion over condemnation.

The Rev. Jimmy Allen, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, made headlines last July when he accepted an invitation to speak at the international convention in Los Angeles of the gay and lesbian Metropolitan Community Churches.

“We’ve been talking past each other and it’s time for us to talk to each other,” he said. Like Falwell, Allen continues to hold that homosexual acts are contrary to biblical morality. But, he said, “there’s something about what God does in the human heart that reaches beyond those differences.”

Dialogue on such issues is a hard sell.

But, then, religious leaders and theologians say Christianity, in particular, has been uncomfortable with sex since its beginning. St. Augustine spoke of his “unruly member.” The Apostle Paul, some speculate, may have been referring to his own sexual urges when he wrote in Romans 7:15, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

Even as many on both sides say the church must often confront popular culture, it more often mirrors the civilization in which it exists. As long as America remains divided over homosexuality, so, too, will its churches, they say.

“Historically, the church has always followed the culture, not the other way around,” said the Rev. Linda Culbertson of the Presbytery of the Pacific in Los Angeles. “That’s how major issues like slavery have resolved themselves. I’m not sure you’re going to find the church being a leader in this either.”