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Catholic Teaching, Homosexuality, and Terminology

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Many Catholic writers insist that the simple identification of one’s sexual orientation is contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church. Catholic writer Marc Barnes has stated this view with particular force and consistency, rejecting not only the use of “homosexual” but also of “heterosexual”: “It is by the urging of the Catholic Church that I refuse, reject, and trample on the label heterosexual.”

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Pope Benedict: Not Pope John Paul II

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 05:39:00 -0500

Writing for Fox News, John Moody observes that Pope Benedict XVI was not Pope John Paul II. This seems, for Moody, to be the hermeneutical key in which the entirety of Benedict’s papacy should be assessed. Only at the end of his op-ed does Moody note a distinctive contribution of Pope Benedict to the life of the Church, and it is precisely in his resignation.

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False Hope and Gay Conversion Therapy

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:01:00 -0500

In any discussion of homosexuality from an orthodox perspective, the question of reparative therapy is in the background. It seems to me that our response to this question cannot be a straightforward “yes” or “no,” but must be carefully nuanced. Such treatment can have positive effects, but at the same time, many Christians have promoted these therapies (and allied themselves with their practitioners) with an alarming degree of enthusiasm and lack of subtlety, overlooking the dangers in this response to the pastoral questions of homosexuality.

A number of people I’ve known have spoken of the positive effects it has on their lives. Reparative therapy can help people who have difficulty relating to those of the same sex by providing more confidence and social ease. It can help render more robust the masculine or feminine identity of those who feel their gender identity is in some way deficient. Moving to a heterosexual identity (even in the face of continuing same-sex attractions) can also provide greater self-esteem and a more coherent sense of self to those struggling very deeply with their sexuality. Sometimes, even, people seem to achieve a real change in orientation.

The most prominent recent study, Ex-Gays? by Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse, offers promising figures for success, and is often cited by people and groups interested in promoting orientation change. But close examination of the study reveals a more problematic picture.

Out of ninety-eight original subjects, sixty-one were able to be categorized at the end of the study. The other thirty-seven either explicitly refused or were regarded by Jones and Yarhouse as passively refusing through non-communication to continue. Of the final sixty-one, just eleven subjects (18 percent of completing subjects, 11 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Conversion,” while seventeen (28 percent of completing subjects, 17 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Chastity.” (As a chaste man who is also gay, I am inclined to dispute categorizing chastity as a success for orientation change.)

When we look more closely at the success stories, the picture becomes even more complicated. Out of the five examples of conversion given, two describe themselves as either “heterosexual” or “primarily heterosexual by definition of who I have sexual activity with,” while at the same time frankly admitting to ongoing homosexual attractions.

Even more striking is the complete about-face by one man who ranked as a conversion success, but retracted his responses, and embraced a full gay identity and lifestyle after the book had been essentially completed, as the authors themselves note. That he was registered as a conversion success but quickly went to the opposite extreme deeply compromises the meaning of “success” in these efforts and sheds doubt on the reality of the other successes. (Similar “success stories” are not difficult to find, Gabriel Arana being a recent example). Moreover, when several of the respondents who reported as conversion successes readily admit to ongoing same-sex attractions, the definition of “heterosexual” is rendered highly ambiguous.

So, what are we to make of this study’s results? We need not absolutely reject orientation change. But it is frequently presented as a strong hope, an ideal to be striven towards, with good chances of success. For a person who is deeply struggling with her sexuality, who desperately wants, as many people do, and as I once did, not to be gay, the ready offer of orientation change can become an object of fixation, even an idol in which all of one’s hope is placed.

There are distinct power dynamics at play in orientation change that demand reflection. Because a homosexual person generally discovers his sexual orientation in puberty, the offer of the hope of change either comes during adolescence (if he grows up Christian), or in the early stages of religious faith (if he comes or returns to Christianity later in life). In both cases, the person is generally looking to religious leaders as a neophyte looks to the trusted guardian of the faith. What he receives from them is received as the authentic expression of the faith”which makes the possibility of its failure all the more damaging.

Too often, I have seen people who placed their hope in orientation change in this way come crashing down when they realized it wasn’t working. On a psychological level, it can lead to depression, to self-loathing, to suicidal tendencies. The message that the absence of successful change makes one a lesser Christian or some kind of failure is always present, either explicitly or implicitly. There is an undertone of condescension in the way some religious leaders promote orientation change, while magnanimously allowing that not every Christian is required to pursue it.

On a spiritual level, this failure to change sexual orientations can easily shatter someone who placed her hope in heterosexuality, leaving her extremely vulnerable to throwing off the faith entirely. Those who offered a hope that proved false render themselves complicit in the damage it can do to a soul.

Given orientation change’s low rate of success, and the apparently precarious status of that success (on exhibition in the about-face from “Success: Conversion” to “Failure: Gay Identity” in the study), the odds of eventual failure are far, far too strong. Our response to homosexuality is playing with souls: surely, we should play the game that has most hope, rather than the one that seems more neat and tidy?

Of course, there are dangers in celibacy, as well. People do take up the “celibacy/singleness” approach, only to discard it later when the burden becomes too heavy, and we must not examine celibacy through rose-tinted glasses, either. But we should be much more hesitant to propose orientation change.

By promoting celibacy, we are simply promoting what the sexual ethic of the churches demands. But by promoting orientation change, we are promoting a shift far deeper, far more rooted in someone’s particular personhood. In pressing for this “extra mile,” we incur a certain moral connection to the result. If it succeeds, well and good. But if it does not, great damage can be done, and we can end up implicated.

It seems to me to be far more fruitful to simply promote chastity. Like any risky therapy, orientation change should be recommended only in strictly defined circumstances where success seems more likely or where a risky treatment is the only chance for hope. The path of celibacy, in the end, is really dependent on our struggles for Christian virtue, rather than struggles for a heterosexual functioning. As a goal, heterosexual functioning may remain elusive despite our best efforts, and is too often ephemeral even when it does seem to have been achieved for a season.

Joshua Gonnerman lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a doctoral student in historical theology at the Catholic University of America. This piece is adapted from a post at spiritualfriendship.org .

RESOURCES

Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation , Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse

“ My So-Called Ex-Gay Life ,” Gabriel Arana

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Born That Way?

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:01:00 -0500

The causes of homosexuality are infamously difficult to pin down. Science (in the American Psychological Association) and religion (in the Catechism of the Catholic Church ) have agreed that, in the current state of things, there is no single cause to which we can definitively point and say, “Here, we have found it!” Indeed, in some circles, the discussion is about homosexualities , to remain open to the possibility that one person’s homosexuality might not have the same origin as another person’s homosexuality. These questions never cease to intrigue, and once again, they have hit the news with a new study suggesting that epigenetics may lie at the root of the development of homosexual orientation.

Investigations of the etiology of homosexuality may be interesting, especially insofar as they shed light on the origins of human sexuality in general. However, these investigations have tended to be ideologically driven on all sides. This has particularly tended to manifest around the idea that one is “born gay,” with many gay activists flatly refusing to consider the possibility that a gay person is not “born gay,” while many religious conservatives have responded with a mirror refusal to consider the possibility that one is. What exactly is meant by “born gay” often seems to have little significance; the phrase itself becomes the shibboleth which one camp must blindly accept and the other must utterly anathematize.

This ideological commitment to a particular answer to these questions suggests underlying premises. It seems that all are agreed that, if one is born gay, it would necessitate revising traditional morality in ways which one side wants, and the other does not. There seems to be an echo of the old zoological argument, where one points to homosexuality among bonobos and dolphins to prove that it should not be opposed among human beings. There, the traditional moralist was usually quick to see through the facade, and see that “nature” was being used equivocally.

But the fact that we are now talking about human beings does not mean that our understanding of nature is in any more danger than it was with the bonobo. From a theological perspective, “natural” does not mean “biological” or even, despite etymological origins, “inborn.” The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes tells us the kind of questions we really need to look for, if we are to understand nature theologically. “What is the ultimate significance of human activity throughout the world?” Indeed, “What is man?” The same document provides us with the answer we seek to these questions: “Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

The normative status of Christ’s humanity is not only expressed in the head, but in the body as well. It is expressed in Christ’s example and the teaching of the Church he established, with the firm assurance that “the gates of Hell will not prevail against it,” that we learn the answer to the questions at hand. What does it mean to be a human being? What is the end to which human beings are called? How are human beings to order their lives and affections?

Because our answers to these questions are not fundamentally biological, but teleological and mediated through the teaching of Christ’s Church, the questions that fall within the scope of science offer no threat to our perspectives on sexual ethics. This is not to say that there is no value to the investigation. Scientific inquiry is capable of functioning as an act of worship to the Creator of an intelligible world. What it does mean is that our theological anthropology is not changed by the outcome. Where the obscure origins of homosexuality can seem like a darkness, our guiding light is not biology, but Christ and his Church. This light is not swallowed up by the darkness, but shines through it, lighting our path so that we need fear nothing hidden by the shadows of uncertainty.

Joshua Gonnerman lives in Washington, D. C., where he is a doctoral student in historical theology at the Catholic University of America.

RESOURCES

Study Finds Epigenetics, Not Genetics, Underlies Homosexuality

Homosexuality as a Consequence of Epigenetically Canalized Sexual Development

Alan Yoshioka, The Latest Gay Genetics Claim”Chill, People

Joshua Gonnerman, False Hope

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Why Matthew Vines Is Wrong About the Bible and Homosexuality

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:50:00 -0400

Matthew Vines has made a name for himself. He took two years off from college to study the question of homosexuality and the church. At the end, he came out bearing what he takes to be good news: Same-sex sexual activity is not contrary to the teaching of the church, or so he tells us.

His arguments are nothing new. They are the same historical and exegetical claims that have driven revisionist readings on this question for decades. Paul did not know committed same-sex relationships between equal, adult persons, so he could not have been speaking to them. What is condemned in the Bible is temple prostitution, and abusive relationships between a grown man and an adolescent boy.

What he has done is to present these claims in the relatively approachable format of an hour-long video online, a video which to date has garnered an impressive 400,000 views. The momentum of his message has grown steadily, until last month, when he was featured in the New York Times . At this point, some response is necessary from those who uphold a traditional sexual ethic, especially those of us who are, in fact, gay. What, then, is the response?

His arguments vary in strength. His claim that the “natural/unnatural” in Romans 1 must refer to a person’s natural heterosexual or, by extension, homosexual inclination is incoherent with his claim that it has to be read in terms of a wider usage indicating social custom. It seems absurd to claim that we don’t know the meaning of arsenokoitai (which can be roughly broken down into “male-bedder”), when the word, coined by Paul, clearly hearkens to the Septuagint translation of Leviticus 18:22, arsenos ou koimethese koiten gunaikos , a text which Vines grants as a general prohibition on male-male intercourse.

The fact that malakoi is, in 1 Corinthians 9, paired with arsenokoitai makes the most plausible reading a reference to active and passive partners in same-sex intercourse, rather than a broader sense of immoral indulgence. On the other hand, the most likely point of reference is, as Vines suggests, a far cry from the committed, monogamous relationships that he and others in the church are calling for. (There is the question of how many gay male relationships are, in fact, monogamous or committed. However, if we believe that the traditional sexual ethic is true, it must hold true against the strongest example, not merely the most common). That said, the burden of proof remains on them to show that Paul would approve such relationships, had he known them.

But the cracks in Vines’ message run far deeper than his arguments; his hermeneutical approach to the whole question is deeply flawed . Vines is approaching Scripture as though it were a puzzle to be solved. His impassioned plea that we not declare good what Genesis declares evil, that man should be alone, raises serious questions about the role of gay people in the Church, but the answer he seeks has clearly determined his engagement with the text.

If Scripture is merely a code to be broken, then we can enter into it by ourselves, armed with lexicons and concordances, to declare its true meaning. But a deeper reflection will reveal that this leaves us with no defense against our own prejudices and the ways in which we have been shaped by our culture. It would seem that Vines has absorbed the problematic attitudes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to St. Athanasius’ De Incarnatione , offers words Vines would do well to heed: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

No approach to Scripture can be unmediated. The only question is: Will my approach be mediated only by the prejudices, concerns, strengths, and weaknesses of my own day, or will they be balanced by the weight of Christian tradition? Mr. Vines is not unacquainted with the tradition; he cites St. John Chrysostom (anonymously, as “a fourth-century Christian writer”) on this question. Astoundingly, though, he seems to regard Chrysostom’s voice as having no value, except to demonstrate a late antique perspective on where homosexual desire comes from. There is no discernible sense that the earlier Christian voice might have a valuable contribution to make to this discussion.

What is the role of the Holy Spirit in all of this? For Matthew Vines, the Paraclete seems only to inspire Scripture and Matthew Vines’ own interpretation of Scripture, which we must assume is Spirit-led. But what of the ancient Christian tradition? Is it devoid of the presence of the Spirit? A robust pneumatology recognizes that the work of the Spirit is not limited to the inspiration of Scripture, but is seen in the living community of believers throughout the ages, and in the theological tradition which that community has handed down. This tradition is not infallible, but it does have a certain degree of normativity, which he ignores.

Matthew Vines would do well to recall the words of the true vine, who promised “I will not leave you as orphans.” While Scripture is foundational to the Christian life, it is not the only resource upon which we may draw; we are also incorporated into an ancient and continuous body of believers, a body whose very identity is found in the love of Christ, in conformity to him, and in the firm assurance of his continued presence in our midst, mediated by the Holy Spirit.

Matthew Vines has very real and pressing concerns about love, about loneliness, and about life. But in contradicting the consistent and unchanging witness of the community of faith throughout the ages, he must deny the real work of the Spirit in shaping that witness from the time of the Apostles to our own day. By rejecting this unbroken teaching, he may be making himself an orphan, a child who is all on his own, without caretaker, model, or point of entry into the society of Christ.

Joshua Gonnerman lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a doctoral student in historical theology at the Catholic University of America.

RESOURCES

Dan Savage Was Right

Why I Call Myself A Gay Christian

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Corralling the Cardinal

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:01:00 -0400

To many onlookers, particularly secular ones, the name “Timothy Cardinal Dolan” seems to evoke the attempt to make the Roman Catholic Church fill the role that once earned the Episcopal Church the nickname “the Republican Party at prayer.” The way conservatives have flocked to his rallying cry of religious liberty in the wake of the HHS mandate, and Dolan’s subsequent acceptance of an invitation to pray at the Republican National Convention, have greatly strengthened this impression.

But criticisms of Dolan have come from more than one side. By inviting President Obama to the Al Smith Dinner”an annual fundraising event for Catholic charitable activities”Dolan has disconcerted many conservative Catholics. Some critics, like First Things ’ David Mills, have offered tempered criticisms, while other have accused the Cardinal of betrayal and demanded that he retract the invitation.

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Why I Call Myself A Gay Christian

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Why would a Christian identify as gay?”

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Dan Savage Was Right

Thu, 17 May 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Dan Savage spoke, and the Internet exploded.

He rejected the Bible as “bullshit” in a keynote address to high-school journalists, and then described students who chose to walk away as “pansy-assed.” Since being uploaded to YouTube on April 27, the video of his speech has received over 600,000 views. In describing those who had the courage to take a stand as pansies, Savage flouted his prominent “It Gets Better” anti-bullying campaign (started in the wake of the suicides of Tyler Clementi and other gay or gay-seeming youth), as well as his less well-known stance against effeminophobia within the gay community. His hypocrisy is painfully evident.

And yet, in the rush to (rightly) condemn, conservative responses have often overlooked the fact that Savage was on to something. In the past year, commentators including Elizabeth Scalia, Melinda Selmys, and Mark Shea have written articles to present the gay community as something other than simply an enemy. Each made clear their adherence to orthodox sexual ethics, but each nonetheless received a venomous response from many of their Christian readers.

Before we can say that Savage was right, we must point out that he also was grossly wrong. Savage is of course wrong to refer to the Bible as bullshit. It is the prime document of the Christian faith, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and treasured by the churches throughout the ages. Only in Scripture can we encounter Christ and through him reach towards divinization, and the Scripture in which I was raised continues to provide the backbone to my own life of faith.

He is no less wrong to dismiss traditional sexual morality. On this point, Scripture and tradition always have spoken with one voice, and the churches cannot, in good conscience, reject that voice. The traditional sexual ethic is the only possible antidote to the rampant commodification of human persons in contemporary culture. As a Christian who is committed to chastity and who is also gay, I acknowledge and I accept the high claims that ethic makes on my life.

But recall Savage’s original point. It was not “the Bible is wrong;” his incendiary remarks were meant to build up the over-arching concern of Christian non-response to the gay community. He recounts a hypothetical Christian who claims, “I’m sorry, we can’t do anything about bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, in Timothy, in Romans that being gay is wrong.” Christians have appealed far too quickly to their traditional moral views to avoid offering support to gay people. Here, if nowhere else, Dan Savage has a point.

In my own Roman Catholic Church, the teaching is clear that homosexual acts are immoral, but the presence of homosexual inclinations is not. Most (though not all) Christians of other traditions would agree. But if we make the distinction in theory, its practical application is far too rare. The all-encompassing rhetorical tool of the “lifestyle” is used to reduce the entire identity of gay people to sexual activity, and thus our response to all concerns of gay people becomes an automatic “no.”

Thus, the first line of response conservative Christians offer to the pastoral problem of homosexuality is to try to get rid of the problem through ex-gay ministries or reparative therapy; thus, Christian protest to the Uganda bill was half-hearted at best; thus, the concern for Christians over gay bullying has been minimal, and some Christians have even organized opposition to the opposition of gay bullying. The guiding principle is not the distinction between sexual activity and orientation, but their conflation into lifestyle or identity, and so those who are targeted for being or seeming to be gay are given only the most abstract support for their profoundly concrete humiliation.

“Being or seeming to be gay.” This phrase itself demonstrates that our approach to these questions cannot be conditioned by assumptions of sexual immorality, since some of the youth who are bullied are not even gay. Growing up, my brother experienced nearly as much “gay-bullying” as I did, even though he is straight. The fundamental category of this issue is not one of sexual ethics, but of encountering difference. Surely, the Christian (embraced by a God who is so radically different that he must become one of us to enable relationship) should approve? Surely, the Christian should view the encounter of the Other-as-Other to be deeply significant, and one of our basic ethical dilemmas? Why, then, do we fail to live out that call?

Last year, Biola professor Matt Jenson addressed students in chapel (like Savage’s address, also available on YouTube). After calling Christians to accountability for failing to make a real space for single people, he turns to the question of homosexuality. “The church is right to tell gay people the good news and call them to a life of discipleship, if and only if it is willing to live as their family.” If Christians have any interest in reaching out to the gay community, if we have any hope to speak a message which can touch their hearts as well, we absolutely must be willing to live as their family. Behind his blundering obscenity, behind his facile attempts to explain Scripture away, behind the blatant hypocrisy of his behavior toward those who disagree with him, what Dan Savage means to tell us is, “The church has far too often, and for the most wrong-headed reasons, failed to be family to gay people.”

And he’s right.

Joshua Gonnerman lives in Washington, D. C., where he is a doctoral student in historical theology at the Catholic University of America.

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