I make no secret of my sexual orientation. I also share with people stories from my life and those of others that illustrate how people are using religion as a weapon to harm people like me.
When I do, I frequently hear two responses.
- "Those people aren't real christians."
(This is often combined with...)
- "Please don't lump me in with those people. I know that they call themselves christian, as I do, but I just don't share their beliefs."
From now on, I have a new response to this: "What are you doing to stop enabling your fellow christians in harming people?"
Honestly, that's really what I want to know when I get that response. I appreciate when people express their support for me and others in the fight for equality. That's nice. I take an expression of verbal and personal support as a kind act, and it's heartwarming.
At the same time, if they're not doing something to oppose their church's actions on the issues, what does it really mean? I've begun to wonder if this person still donates money to the church, or if they aren't talking to their clergy about issues they have with the institution's behavior. -If they aren't in some way fighting for the soul of their religion and pushing for it to treat people as kindly as the christ it worships, are they then tacitly enabling the continued damaging behavior of the church?
It lies in this strange no man's land between the personal and the public. I think of it as similar to the divide between spirituality and religion.
I am not a religious person. I have been too burned by organized religion to want anywhere near it. I do have a personal spirituality. In a nutshell, it is a belief that I am but a small portion of a greater universe, and, as such, I should consider what I do in my life in terms of what effect I have on other small parts of that universe. I should also consider that, in the grand scheme of the universe as a whole, I'm not a movie star. I'm a speck. I'm cool with being a speck. My sense of morality flows from thinking about how what I do affects all the other specks around me.
That's all very personal. I think every person has her or his own set of beliefs like that. Some are more complexly set out in thought than others. It's when people group together to agree on beliefs -- and then decide theirs are better than everyone else's, and everyone else should believe the same way -- that I develop a big problem. I think spirituality is awesome and very helpful for people. I have come to feel religion is a mass wielding of spirituality, and in the use of it as a weapon, it has become spirituality perverted.
Many churches have longstanding traditions, and complex rituals, rules, and customs. Some of the issue, I think, is when personal spirituality is abandoned in favor of religion. (I know that in quite a few people, they coexist well.) The thought that goes into personal spirituality -- the questioning, the discovery, the thoughtful synthesis of a belief system -- can be replaced with dogma, rules, and customs, and the thought of how the operationalization of that dogma affects people is lost. The compassion is steamrolled. The kindness that can be brought to bear when people of deep faith do good acts is slaughtered by dogma when it tells them only some people are deserving. The joy of sharing spirituality and the good acts brought of it is skewered by the interpretation of a religious text to encourage discrimination and hostility. Perhaps there is comfort in not needing to question the faith or the book or the rules, but that someone can find comfort in something they use to deny me the same...is shocking.
I frequently hear this argument that equality under the law for gay people impinges on religious freedom. If that's the case, it only does so insofar as equality for gay people means religious people can't legally use religion as a reason to deny us housing, services, jobs, or anything else available for any other person. I'm all for freedom to practice one's religion as one sees fit -- until it harms someone else. If a religious person wants the freedom to harm another person for G_d, well, I'm thrilled that my equality under the law makes that a lot harder to do.
Religion is a human instrument. Churches are human institutions. When people in communities speak up and work to change the behavior of those institutions, our world changes. This has begun in many churches (I know many churches welcome equality for all). If that were happening in greater measure, we gay folks might be a lot closer to equality than we are. I look forward to the day when no religious person thinks my marriage has a darn thing to do with theirs. I look forward to a time when freedom of religion needn't mean freedom of discrimination.
So my question remains: How are you fighting religious-based discrimination?
What are you doing so as not to enable your church?