Over at Christianity Today, Allison Althoff has a story about the growing attention to LGBT issues on evangelical Christian college campuses:
Same-sex attracted students at several Christian institutions have attempted to start on-campus organizations with varying degrees of success. Seattle Pacific University’s Haven is an “unofficial club” organized by students. It hosts weekly meetings on campus to encourage honest conversations about sexuality while holding to the school’s “Lifestyle Expectations” regarding sex outside of heterosexual marriage.
“Haven is recognized by the university administration, but not as a recognized student club through the student government system,” vice president of student life Jeff Jordan said.
“Haven has applied a couple of times for official club status through student government, but they have not attained that status. So administration has said, if indeed what’s important is having a safe place on campus for conversation, and you’re willing to work with university administration, whether that be through me, which is how it was for many years, or through an umbrella organization, then we’ll work with you on this.”
According to faculty advisor Kevin Neuhouser, the meetings function as support for same-sex attracted students on campus as well as a forum that hosts speakers who address human sexuality. “There are gay students on every Christian campus,” Neuhouser said. “What’s fundamental to respecting and caring for them is providing them a place they can feel safe. The main concern is the student, not the orientation.”
One of the notes this article strikes is the sense of ambiguity surrounding many of these student groups. Are gay students “welcome” at Christian colleges? What does “welcome” amount to? Reading the piece, I found myself recalling Eve Tushnet’s reflections on gay-straight alliances at Catholic high schools:
How could an openly-acknowledged GSA [at a Catholic school] aid in [helping students discern their vocations]? Well, for one thing, its relationship to the adults around it would not need to be antagonistic. The school chaplain or a local priest could attend some of the meetings, and talk with the kids about any misconceptions they may have about the faith. Specifically, I often hear that it’s okay for the Church to require (most) priests to be celibate, since they chose that way of life, but it’s cruel to require celibacy of gay people since we didn’t choose to be gay. This isn’t a good way to think about vocation—you don’t always choose what God is asking of you, and it’s rare that the greatest sacrifices in your life are the ones you chose entirely freely. A priest talking honestly about his own discernment process, and whether or not he felt directly “called” to celibacy, might offer a better model of discernment—and a better understanding of the purposes and challenges of a celibate life.
The group could be encouraged to spend some time volunteering in places—the most obvious example for me would be folding clothes or babysitting at a crisis pregnancy center—where they’d see how tough chastity and fidelity can be for heterosexuals. Married teachers, or single ones, could speak with them about their vocations and discernment process. They could be encouraged to see that all forms of love come with characteristic sufferings and lonelinesses: Every form of love has its own kind of cross. These priests and teachers could seek to learn from the kids, from their fears and questions and experiences, and encourage the kids to learn from the adults. (I do think straight adults often underestimate the loneliness–and fear of even greater future loneliness–of gay Christian teens. But it’s also, of course, very easy for teenagers of any sexual orientation to have unrealistic romantic ideas in which marriage solves the problem of the self, grants us our “soulmate” and ends our loneliness forever.) The solidarity implied by the “alliance” name could become more vivid and realistic—and more Catholic. None of this is likely to happen in a hidden, covert group.
Taking a cue from this kind of reflection, evangelical Christian colleges might consider LGBT student groups not simply as a problem waiting to happen but as an opportunity. The codes of conduct at Christian colleges, which usually include prohibitions of “homosexual behavior,” don’t at all prohibit the exploration of how same-sex attraction may become a gateway to the discovery of a vocation—to chaste friendship and other forms of sacrificial love. Encouraging same-sex attracted students to meet together and discuss their common faith—and put that faith into action—is entirely in keeping with the mission of evangelical colleges, and that encouragement could go a long way toward answering the question about “welcome.”
Keeping the prohibitions of gay sex in place at Christian colleges won’t satisfy the groups like CedarvilleOut that Althoff mentions in her article. But nor need those prohibitions prevent college staff from helping same-sex attracted students explore robust, beautiful ways of channeling their passions and energies in deeply evangelical directions.
(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)
January 21st, 2013 | 10:58 am
I was hoping for an innovative insight, but I’m afraid that steering same sex attracted individuals toward vocations is not necessarily a very wise idea. Doesn’t it seem remotely possible that a high percentage of same sex attracted individuals in some of the seminaries recently may have had a connection to some of the recent scandals in the Church?
January 21st, 2013 | 11:48 am
From the piece in Christianity Today:
To whatever extent Evangelicals or any others who consider homosexual behavior sinful can help those who are “same-sex attracted,” it will be to the extent that they repudiate the notion that such people can “change.”
Has it ever happened that a blind person regains his or her sight? Of course. Has it ever happened that someone considered a paraplegic has defied medical opinion and regained the ability to walk? Certainly. But our approach to the blind as a group is not that they can really see if they have faith and try to “change,” and our approach to paraplegics in general is not that if they just pray enough, they can walk.
“At a pastoral level,” telling the “same-sex attracted” they can “change” seems to me as wrongheaded and even cruel as telling the blind they can see or telling paraplegics they can walk. You can’t help a person if you are profoundly mistaken about his or her condition.
January 21st, 2013 | 1:56 pm
I guess it is nice to hear some familiar themes – celibacy, self-giving love, and service as faith and prayer in action – mentioned positively in connection with being gay (which in this essay seems to coincide with what religious folks so often like to call, same sex attracted). However what is missing is a deeper grasp on the daily nuts and bolts of living any, several, or all of these familiar themes out, daily. After five decades of my daily life touching upon one or more or all three of these themes, what I consistently find missing is an honest talk in both church and/or society about what being embodied without physically intimate bonding means. My personal lesson is simply that no matter how busy you get yourself, sooner or later you will have to stop or pause for sleep, for rest, and you will end up with alone time. Then the deep, painful odd isolation seeps up, seeps through, and I have never found a sufficient means of not having to feel and admit and bear it. You see, without physical bonding, you are cut loose from the very moorings through which you are born into the world. Need I remind us all how newborns in old-style orphanages who were feed well and protected from obvious harms or injuries, nevertheless fell ill, pining away for the complex human embodied bonding in care that calls us into being and realization as personalities? Expecting adults to do without any/all of that sounds awfully idealistic and high-minded. For 50 years I’ve not been able to get there, but given how often we talk and act in church/society as if it is oh so easy to grow, work, pray, or be plopped by God right into? I may be the flawed exception to the high-minded rule. These ideals leave at least some of us developmentally denied and disconnected – in soft, sensitive, intense, complicated realms of body, emotion, spirit, faith, and even cognition. One simply…
January 21st, 2013 | 2:08 pm
I’m afraid that steering same sex attracted individuals toward vocations is not necessarily a very wise idea.
Bill Huber,
A vocation is what one feels called to do, or chooses to do, with one’s life. Steering people toward vocations does not mean urging them to be priests, ministers, nuns, or whatever. It means helping them to discover what they are meant to do or are well suited to do or want to do with their lives.
Doesn’t it seem remotely possible that a high percentage of same sex attracted individuals in some of the seminaries recently may have had a connection to some of the recent scandals in the Church?
That is a very complicated (and controversial) question based largely on unwarranted assumptions. But if we are talking about the Catholic Church it is a moot point, since men with a homosexual orientation are now excluded.
January 21st, 2013 | 3:43 pm
It’s also worth noting that men with “deep-seated” homosexual inclinations are barred from ordination under current Vatican rules (probably related to what Mr. Huber mentions). I think Ms. Tushnet was using “vocation” in a broader sense, though, but I would really question the prudence in dividing the student population in this way. We’re too ready to help young people imprint the idea of homosexuality on their identity. I think once that happens, it’s going to be difficult for a self-labeled gay young person to see the Church as an instrument of love and mercy.
January 21st, 2013 | 5:55 pm
“Has it ever happened that a blind person regains his or her sight? Of course. Has it ever happened that someone considered a paraplegic has defied medical opinion and regained the ability to walk? Certainly. ”
1. It has happened more than most are likely to admit – and
2. This contains the assumption that sexual orientation is, for like of a better term, a physical attribute – or something hard-wired or a result of a genetic defect or horrible injury. Is that so? Has that been demonstrated convincingly anywhere? Is it not more likely that sexual orientation is a combination of all kinds of factors (which might very well have a genetic component) including – but not necessarily all of these elements and others not mentioned – home environment, social experiences, traumas, psychological makeup, cultural influences – etc…
This just strikes me as an incredibly ham-handed and simplistic way to view sexual orientation. It also strikes me as a low view of the potential of the gospel to transform persons at the very core of their identity (and no – I don’t locate sexual orientation as the core of someone’s identity). The ancient world, particularly the Greco-Roman world, treated sexual orientation is something much less fixed and as susceptible to change over the period of one’s life. I think that view is a much more realistic view of human nature than the either/or way that is tends to be categorized in our society.
January 22nd, 2013 | 1:34 am
This contains the assumption that sexual orientation is, for like of a better term, a physical attribute – or something hard-wired or a result of a genetic defect or horrible injury.
Steve Billingsley,
Remember that heterosexuality is a sexual orientation—by far the most common one, although the least discussed here. :P
The ancient world, particularly the Greco-Roman world, treated sexual orientation is something much less fixed and as susceptible to change over the period of one’s life.
I disagree, in that I don’t believe there was a concept of sexual orientation in the Greco-Roman world. Wikipedia says, “The ancient Greeks did not conceive of sexual orientation as a social identifier as Western societies have done for the past century. Greek society did not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants, but rather by the role that each participant played in the sex act . . . .” It was not a matter of changing orientations over one’s lifetime, but rather a matter of appropriate roles. Married men could have romantic, sexual relationships with adolescent boys, and adolescent boys could grow up to become married men who themselves had romantic, sexual relationships with adolescent boys. The behavior of both the adolescent boys and the older men was homosexual. We cannot know what their “orientation” was, and the question may even be meaningless.
January 22nd, 2013 | 7:07 am
This just strikes me as an incredibly ham-handed and simplistic way to view sexual orientation.
Steve Billingsley,
I think you are misconstruing my analogies, which are very limited. To have a sexual orientation one does not want is like being blind or being a paraplegic in that it is very unlikely to change that orientation, just as it is very unlikely the blind person will see again and very unlikely the paraplegic will walk again. That is where the analogy ends. I am not making any claims about the nature or genesis of sexual orientation. I am making what should be a very unremarkable observation that it is very unlikely to change.
Also, although it is doubtful that this would count as a change in sexual orientation (at least not in my book), I have no doubt that the number of people who lead a heterosexual “lifestyle,” get married, and later realize that they are gay is far greater than the number of people who lead a homosexual “lifestyle” and later in life realize that they are straight. I don’t think anything has really changed but awareness and perhaps an end to denial, but I suppose there are some who would call this a change in sexual orientation.
January 22nd, 2013 | 1:05 pm
” I have no doubt that the number of people who lead a heterosexual “lifestyle,” get married, and later realize that they are gay is far greater than the number of people who lead a homosexual “lifestyle” and later in life realize that they are straight.”
Pardon my french, but how in the hell would you or anyone else know that? I have never seen anyone even attempt to quantify or document that? Given just the raw numbers of people currently leading a heterosexual lifestyle vs those currently leading a homosexual lifestyle it would logically seem to be just the opposite.
The idea that someone that who changes sexual behavior in one direction or another represents some sort of discovery of their “identity” is a category error. It locates identity at the level of some sort of nebulously defined “orientation/attraction – maybe behavior”. People’s thoughts, feelings and behavior can and do change. How this affects or should affect legal framework, social policy, etc. is one question and can be approached in many different ways. But part of the confusion around this topic is that we don’t even know how to talk about sexuality and behavior without descending into the fuzzy world of “orientation” and “identity” which seems to me to be more about agendas and propaganda than about sane social policy.
January 23rd, 2013 | 10:49 am
without descending into the fuzzy world of “orientation” and “identity”
Steve Billingsley,
There seems to be no way of having a meaningful discussion, since I am talking about sexual orientation as something quite real (and even to a certain degree objective and measurable), and you seem to doubt it is a meaningful concept.
January 23rd, 2013 | 4:43 pm
I resonate with the implied difficulties of coming to grips with sexual orientation variance, since we are among the first human civilizations to have wide enough access to the empirical hypothesis testing methods, to dig as deeply as possible into the notion. The more one digs into orientation as a most often stable, enduring, and most often ‘deep’ phenomenon/reality of human nature/human personality, the less vague, fuzzy, foggy, and ineffable that reality seems. Indeed, for most LGBTQ folks who have dutifully hidden and bottled up any overt behavior expression of what not being straight means across the modern continuums of variation, the deepest realities are the inner ones, since one has never yet relied on outer social or observable behavior to test one’s persistent sense of not being opposite sex attracted. The very common sense fact that so many LGBT people still yet come to an altnerative, variant deep sense of themselves … as it were, in the typical cultural-church community vacuums which rigorously avoided all mention of anything even remotely related to LGBT life? Well that may indeed suggest to us that the inner life speaks as loud or more loudly than an single occasion of overt behavior, and even of overt behavior lauded by other people for sincere cultural or faith reasons. Trust me, then, LGBT people are no less embedded in their inner world embodied, knowing their own place on the Kinsey Scale adjusted for orientation, than any or most straight folks. drdanfee
January 31st, 2013 | 9:43 pm
I think this is a such a healthy step for Christian schools, and one that really demonstrates a commitment to the gospel. I attended a Christian university, and I so wish there had been more outreach and engagement for same-sex attracted students during my time there. My college ministry kept me grounded in the Word and in the gospel (I do believe that acting on my desires would go against God’s design and thus be sinful). But I dealt with a lot of shame, and I dealt with it alone.
We need to be able to trust Jesus to deal with people’s brokenness. Anything that encourages a student to bring his or her brokenness into the light of day, deal with it, confront it, etc. is a good thing. Is there a possibility that student may then venture down a dangerous path of finding identity in sexual orientation, perhaps even pursuing the lifestyle? Sure! Of course that’s a possibility! But trust Jesus! Believe the gospel! Do we not think God is sovereign over this? We must be willing to face this possibility and trust God to be at work. The alternative is keeping silence, continuing a culture of shame that drives same-sex attracted students further away from the gospel rather than drawing them in.
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