Faith and Homosexuality
By Susan Ryan-Vollmar [email protected]
It’s not often that one attends an event geared toward discussion of LGBT issues at which the acronym is spelled out for attendees. Yet that’s how the forum “God, Gays, and Faith: Journeys Through Challenging Terrain” began when moderator Maggie Herzip of the Public Conversations Project clarified for the mostly older and, presumably, mostly straight event-goers that “GLBT [means] gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender.”
About 150 people turned out on a rainy Thursday night April 12 at the Hancock United Church of Christ in Lexington to listen to the Rev. Walter Cuenin, Rabbi Steven Greenberg and the Rev. Dr. Zina Jacque talk about their views of homosexuality through the lenses of their different faith traditions. Sponsored by Respecting Differences, a Lexington-based coalition dedicating to raising community awareness about LGBT people, the forum lasted about two hours and saw standing ovations for each clergymember as they related their own struggles of either coming out or ministering to LGBT people within their Catholic, Orthodox Jewish and Baptist religions.
Greenberg, who was introduced by Herzip as the only gay Orthodox Jewish rabbi — Greenberg quickly clarified that he was the only “openly gay” rabbi within Orthodox Judaism — told of his 10-year struggle to come to terms with the passages in Leviticus decrying homosexual acts as an “abomination.” The text is read during Yom Kippur, and for 10 years, Greenberg said, he wept beneath his prayer shawl as the passages were recited. On the 11th year, Greenberg said, he made peace with the text. If the rabbis reading the text didn’t actually write it, then they surely didn’t “know what that verse means … I don’t know what it means, but neither do they,” he recalled thinking.
During the audience question-and-answer portion of the event, a man asked Greenberg, who is also the author of Wrestling With God and Men: Homosexuality In the Jewish Tradition, if he had come to any further understanding of Leviticus. Greenberg answered that in his view, the passages of Leviticus dealing with homosexuality, which are frequently trotted out by ministers, rabbis, priests and laypeople as proof that homosexuality is an unnatural condition, cannot be read as the final word on homosexuality because they don’t deal with lesbians. Condemnation of other homosexual acts, meanwhile, cannot be found in the Torah. Given that the hierarchy in Jewish law descends from God to man to woman, and that the “way to humiliate a man is to treat him like a woman,” Greenberg said, “the best way to read that text is how men use sex to humiliate, debase and demean” others. Leviticus, Greenberg added, is a warning to men — all men — against doing so.
Jacque, a Baptist minister at the Community Church of Barrington outside of Chicago and the former executive director of Boston’s 10-Point Coalition, warned of liberal faith-goers’ increasing illiteracy with Biblical text. Religious conservatives can recite the seven passages from the Bible about homosexuality “chapter and verse” but liberal people of faith are unable to respond in kind. “I can engage anyone based on the word [of the Bible],” Jacque said. But those who are truly evangelical — “I want that word back, by the way,” she said to applause — about welcoming more people, including lesbian and gay people, into their faith traditions, are “on the losing end about engaging in a dialogue” about faith and homosexuality.
“When we try to stand on Biblical ground, we … move very quickly to secular [arguments],” Jacque said, warning that those who believe that LGBT people should be fully included in religious communities must become “Biblically astute.”
In answer to the question of why he regularly speaks out on LGBT faith issues, given that it can be risky for Catholic priests to do so, Cuenin, who is the chaplain at Brandeis University, talked about how it’s impossible to take any message about homosexuality from the Bible. “There really is nothing in the scripture that deals with homosexuality,” he said, adding that the idea of love between two men or two women is a relatively “modern construct.”
Meanwhile, added Cuenin, who was removed from the pastorship of Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Newton in 2005 in a move widely seen as punishment from the Boston Archdiocese for his open ministering to LGBT people, moral law is constantly evolving. “All you have to do is look at something like slavery,” which was morally justified by clergypeople from the pulpit, to see how mores shift over time.
One audience member asked all three clergymembers to comment on whether they believed LGBT people should stay and worship in places “where we’re not wanted” or should they find like-minded communities and gay congregations? “I go all over the Archdiocese and people ask me, ‘Why don’t you leave the Catholic Church,’” Cuenin replied. “I stay because it’s my faith and my family. It’s not perfect but neither is my biological family.”
Greenberg said that there was a time “when it was absolute survival” to leave a hostile faith community. “But we’ve come to a new age,” he said. “If we want to continue to make a difference for the next generation, there need to be some of us” who stay and change things for the better.
Jacque agreed, adding that if previous trail-blazers “had not been courageous” people like herself, an “ordained woman” could not do what they do. “If it’s your [calling to be courageous] and you don’t use it, the world loses deeply.”
Cuenin added that he tells people all the time that “if you have to check your brain at the door, don’t go in.” Take the time to find a welcoming priest and generous community, he said. Who cares if it meant attending Mass two or three towns over. “I mean, we drive half an hour for a good restaurant,” he said.
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