I came across a message in my email inbox about a recent poll taken of Americans about their houses of worship and homosexuality. The conclusion: many Americans give religious institutions low marks for their handling of LGBT issues, especially the recent well-reported spate of suicides. Roman Catholics, particularly, gave their churches "D's" or "F's" on the topic. And, not surprisingly, a plurality of those surveyed by the Public Religion Resource Institute and Religion News Service (PRRI/RNS) found that people gave higher marks to their own individual house of worship than to the broader spectrum of churches.
This is kind of like those polls done periodically about Congress. Everybody hates Congress, but "my representative is doing a great job." Perhaps, with the advent of the loonies in colonial hats waving tea bags, those polls might reflect a different outcome. But I digress...
One of the interesting notes in this survey is that people age 18-34, and women, are among the groups most critical of the messages that are coming from churches and the effect it is having on LGBT youth. This should give pause to anybody in a church leadership role, especially among those mainline denominations that spend so much energy wringing their hands about how to attract "young families" to come worship. If you want the young families, which often include that wife who usually makes the call that she wants her children to have a religious upbringing, perhaps you might consider that when you fail to be inclusive of the gay friend, or lesbian sister-in-law, in your messages, you will lose that family forever.
That's the head count game which seems to pre-occupy so many in church leadership. Then there's the practical, nuts-n-bolts of this issue: God is love and where true love is God himself is there. How can anyone sing the words of this hymn and then attempt to put a limit on that love? It's absurd! I realize that there are seven passages in the entire Bible that get pulled out regularly to condemn LGBT people. Some of those passages have been repeated in my face by people who believed that such brow-beating might "save" me and make me different. But those seven passages, chosen selectively and quoted out-of-context, are trumped by the entirety of the rest of the Scriptural canon which contain life-affirming messages that say, "I have known you were a queer from the beginning, and I am your God, too! And like so many before you, you will suffer at the hands of those who don't hear, don't see, and think they know more than they really do. Just stick with me, and you'll have eternal life. I promise!"
The other day I was at Tallahassee Community College for a Spirit Day vigil in remembrance of those six young people who have taken their lives due to anti-gay bullying. As I stared through my candle light at the pictures of the dead, I couldn't help but think about a culture that allows people to use their religion as a weapon against others. I thought about their parents now left grieving and what are their clergy or pastors doing to help them? Did they even trust a person of the cloth in the first place!
What this poll should say to all of us in the church is that it is time to repent the silence too many have taken on the complicity that church has had in empowering the bullies. Repent the official stances that treat the LGBT faithful as the half-assed baptized. Repent the use of Scripture as a weapon instead of the Word of the Lord. Repent and become the prophetic voice of God's love for all of creation.
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