What A Friend We Have In Jesus

I recently read Does Jesus Really Love Me? by Jeff Chu,  an American-Chinese descended from ministers of the Southern Baptist faith back in China, himself a home grown Southern Baptist, a reporter, and very importantly, gay.  Chu claims that he is a relatively conservative person, and of course his faith is vital, if problematic.  The book is the result of a tour of the entire country, interviewing as many persons as he could about either their gayness, or their attitudes toward gay people from a Christian perspective.  I have some understanding of this stuff, raised in the Episcopal Church, and seriously devout, although I left the faith when our minister and I collided over the revelation that I was gay. It’s all described in the portion excerpted in the October issue of Out, (pp 45ff.) taken from my memoir, My Husband and My Wives.  Still I retain an instinctive regard for Christianity, plus, as a classicist I have the professional knowledge I have acquired about the great Abrahamic religions which I have needed to set into the historical context of the religions and cults of the Greco-Roman culture, which forms a considerable basis for Christian thought. And, of course, I am gay.  So I have been reading the book with far more interest than I would have imagined. My immediate response is one of horror. Protestant Christians are all liable to their founder Luther’s belief that he was unworthy, which can only encourage a gay Christian’s belief that his sexual preference is corrupt.  I find it extraordinary that parents can shut gay children out of their lives, for instance, because they have a stronger belief in the validity of a few sentences in a traditional book, I refer to what is often called, Scripture, which seem to doom gay persons to eternal damnation.  Or that there are people who confronting the myriad miseries in the world will expend all their energies into trying to ostracize and degrade gay persons and the dignity of their lives.  I know this is probably naive, but I cannot understand anything other than if there is such a thing as a loving god, or there is a god who is omnipotent, then either way he made persons gay and it must be okay.  Of course, ever since my late teens I have considered that anyone who lived through the time of the Holocaust would be quite right to repudiate the idea of a caring god of any sort.  Later as a classicist I much preferred the notion of an indifferent universe in which human suffering is at best the result of divine inadvertence or malice.
Recently my husband and I watched a Canadian film Incendies about the misfortunes of a woman caught up in the nightmare of clashing faiths, civil war, and warring males in an unnamed country--a stand in for Lebanon, which was torn apart by the civil war between its Christian and Muslim populations a few decades ago. Designed to make the brutality of war fired by the ardor of religious faith come home to the viewer, no ghastly detail is omitted, and for a wuss like myself it was a very difficult evening (and for quite other reasons it grated on my highly impatient husband who cannot stand the predilection of European-style films for lingering over the visuals of every detail and mood as the plot very, very lazily advances, and sometimes just disappears).  The early scene of the brothers of the main character as they shoot point blank their sister’s Muslim lover, and hesitate over whether they should administer the same “justice” to her sets the tone for confronting the fundamental brutalities of the Christians in Lebanon.  Later we watch as Christian militants set fire to a bus filled with half dead Muslim passengers, many of them women and children, and shoot to death a child who had escaped the bus.  The film is a meditation on the hatreds of the middle east that are born in religious affiliation and ethnic identification, and one’s first reaction is to thank whoever that we live in the United States.  And then I turned to Chu’s book.  It seemed to me that all the potentials are there for something like this in the USA, the same inflexibilities, the irrational faith in the irrational, the same angers that inflexibility encourages in the human breast.