Category Archives: GLBT

Sponsor Soulforce’s American Family Outing


Soulforce, the nonviolent activist group that advocates for gay and lesbian equality in religious communities, is sending out 21 GLBT families to tell their stories to religious leaders at six leading mega-churches:

Rev. Joel Osteen and the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas
Bishop T.D. Jakes and The Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas
Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr. and Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland
Bishop Eddie Long and New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia
Rev. Bill Hybels and Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois
Dr. Rick Warren and Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California

Each family has pledged to raise $2,000 to visit these churches between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Most still have only a few hundred dollars, so your contribution will make a difference. Soulforce families include a mother and her FTM transgender son, a straight couple who have joined the movement to support their GLBT friends, and several gay and lesbian couples with adopted children. Their profiles contain inspiring stories of how they reconcile faith and sexuality. Steve Parelli and Jose Ortiz, for example, were evangelical ministers who met during unsuccessful “ex-gay” therapy. They write:


We believe that evangelical gay Christians have a real message to the church at large: whatever Paul is talking about in Romans 1, it isn’t us. John Wesley of the 18th century taught that the Christian’s authority is based on the (1) scriptures, (2) tradition, (3) reason and (4) experience, and that whenever accepted reason and general experience show one’s interpretation of a passage of scripture to be very unlikely, that one’s interpretation is to be called into question rather than the collective experience of the human race. Unfortunately, evangelicalism of the 20th century has put such a premium on scripture it has perhaps failed to see the significance of reason and experience.

We purpose to lovingly and patiently ask the church to recover Wesley’s principles of reason and experience, and in doing so, to give us audience enough to hear our sacred journey and process by which we dared to question centuries-old accepted norms through reasoning and experience.

While you have your checkbooks out, consider these facts from a recent Human Rights Campaign mailing:

Florida is considering a ballot measure to enact a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality, civil unions and domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.

Arkansas is considering a ballot measure to ban adoption and foster parenting for unmarried, cohabiting couples, both gay and straight.

Tennessee’s legislature is debating a bill similar to the Arkansas initiative, as well as a bill that would prohibit discussion of homosexuality in public schools until ninth grade.

Find out more about current and pending laws in your state here.

“Julian’s Yearbook” Wins Chapter One Promotions Short Story Competition


Marianne Moore may have wanted imaginary gardens with real toads in them, but what’s even better is imaginary friends who earn you real money. “Julian’s Yearbook”, a chapter from one of my two novels-in-progress, has won first prize of 2,500 pounds in the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. In this episode, Julian grapples with first love and homophobia at his Southern high school, while taking steps to launch his career as a fashion photographer. Here’s the beginning:


Desire smells like acid in the dark. Its face is a hundred faces, rising out of the stop bath, materializing on grey paper like ghosts. Your ghosts and mine; you knew them too. The football heroes joshing in a group shot, a chorus line of manly awkwardness. There’s the clown, the golden boy, the dull and violent sidekick. You’ve got to remember that snub-nosed blonde with too much school spirit, whose mascara you almost forgot to clean off the backseat of your daddy’s car. Memory kisses her lips back to pink, repaints these black-and-white yearbook photos in the streaked denim and poison green we wore when Reagan had his finger on the big red button.

Everything’s digital now. Hollywood no longer needs a thousand sweating extras to watch a gladiator die. It’s amazing that clients still fly me to Milan or Los Angeles to photograph an actual shoe on someone’s foot. I’m a Southern boy so perhaps I romanticize inefficiency. But I miss the days when you put something more than your eyesight at risk for a picture. I wonder how many of us went mad as hatters from the darkness, the fumes, acid seeping under our rubber gloves, the tension of this hurried intimacy with a masterpiece we had only one chance to perfect or spoil.
…

The story will be published in Chapter One Promotions’ 2008 anthology, which you can order here.

Northampton Pride 2008


Yesterday Northampton held its 27th annual Gay Pride March, attended by 7,500 people. My husband and I and one of my moms marched with the good folks from MassEquality, the group that successfully lobbied to preserve equal marriage rights in Massachusetts, and their Connecticut counterpart, Love Makes a Family.

MassEquality is currently advocating for the Equality Agenda, a variety of state legislative and funding initiatives including transgender civil rights, “safe schools” programs, and HIV/AIDS prevention.



Behind that sign, I’m wearing my rainbow “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” tank top, available here from Cafe Press. The leopard-print sequined lid is from Mrs. Dewson’s Hats in San Francisco. (I received objective proof of my fabulosity when a young gay man asked to buy it from me. I let him try it on.)


That’s MassEquality organizer Ryan Brown on the left, with other supporters whose names I didn’t catch, as we march down Main Street past the courthouse.



An appreciative crowd on Main Street.



 


Some of our more colorful characters.

Book Notes: Liberating Tradition


Kristina LaCelle-Peterson’s Liberating Tradition: Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective offers a solid introduction to Christian feminism, and a wake-up call to the churches not to mistake culturally conditioned gender roles for gospel truth. Topics surveyed include the strong women of the Bible and their often-overlooked successors, from the female monastics to the 19th-century social reformers; feminine metaphors for God in Scripture; sex discrimination and body image; the diverse forms that marriage has taken in the Judeo-Christian tradition; and the egalitarian message of Jesus.

While at times I feel that Liberating Tradition goes in too many directions at once, this smorgasbord may be useful to conservative Christians who have not previously been exposed to basic feminist critiques of consumerism, for example. The book’s main strength is that LaCelle-Peterson backs up mainstream feminist-egalitarian arguments with detailed Biblical citations and historical evidence of women’s leadership roles in the church.

I was encouraged to see this book being sold at the recent Wheaton College theology conference, on the table of Baker Books, a leading evangelical publisher. As egalitarian perspectives become more reputable in evangelical circles, space also opens up for a more dynamic, historically aware method of reading Scripture, which hopefully can benefit other marginalized groups. It’s no longer plausible to say that we must replicate the family structures of first-century Palestine or else we’re undermining the authority of the Bible. Educated, active, Spirit-filled women, in numbers too great to ignore, are forcing the church to recognize that history and personal experience must inform our interpretive process, which means that our understanding of what the Bible says about women will change over time.

LaCelle-Peterson distinguishes herself from secular feminists and Christian complementarians, both of whom see the Bible and feminism as inherently incompatible. Instead, she argues that the Bible as a whole affirms women’s full humanity and equal participation in God’s kingdom. She does not take the liberal approach of throwing out texts that offend her politics, but rather contextualizes them and asks whether the “obvious” interpretation merely seems so because of the sexist cultural lenses through which we read.

God’s maleness, for instance, is not evident from Scripture. Compared to the other gods of the ancient Near East, who all had consorts and fertility rituals, the God of the Old Testament is strikingly non-gendered. Why do we assume that God is a literal “father” when this metaphor appears, but have no trouble perceiving the figurative language when God is compared to a stream of water, a rock, a nursing mother or a brooding hen? Since the God of the creation story transcends gender, “made in God’s image” applies equally to men and women.

After the Fall, hierarchy is introduced into the male-female relationship, with elements of oppression and unhealthy craving. Again, Christians have easily recognized that the other aspects of Adam and Eve’s new situation are a curse to be alleviated: “Are the items in Genesis 3 describing the state in which God wants us to live? For example, since God said farming would be difficult, does that mean using tractors is contradicting God?…Is it wrong for a woman to have epidural anesthesia in childbirth, since God said that women will have increased pain as they bear children?” (p.40) By contrast, we take Adam’s rule over Eve to be a moral norm, not a warning that their sin now taints all intimate relationships with the possibility of abuse of power.

In Jesus’ earthly ministry, we see God’s original plan for an egalitarian kingdom. Jesus validated Mary the sister of Martha when she assumed the posture of a male disciple, and provocatively ignored the purity taboos that would have kept him from healing, touching and speaking with women.

In a section titled “Discipleship Trumps Gender Roles”, LaCelle-Peterson adds, “It is interesting that Jesus also refuses to affirm positive traditional roles for women, even when asked to. Most significantly, unlike the tradition of some sectors of the Christian church, he does not put his own mother on a pedestal and value her simply for having borne him.” (pp.58-59) In Mark 3:33-35 (“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”) he takes an exclusionary status marker, one’s membership in a family, and makes it open to all who follow God. Women who fulfill traditional expectations as wives and mothers are no more privileged than their widowed, poor, or unpartnered sisters, including those with a checkered sexual history. Similarly, in Luke 11:27, Jesus proclaims that anyone, through discipleship, can be on a par with the woman who gave birth to him. “He isn’t putting Mary down, but raising the status of all the women in the crowd.” (p.59)

LaCelle-Peterson takes on the verses in the Epistles that seem to limit women’s participation, such as 1 Cor 14:33-35 (“women should be silent in the churches”). She notes that these lines occur within a discussion of how both men and women should behave decorously when they pray and prophesy, so that non-Christians will not be scandalized. It is assumed that women will be preachers and teachers (e.g. Phoebe and others in Romans 16). As many scholars now believe, 1 Cor 14 probably refers to women in the congregation who talked during the service, perhaps asking their husbands to explain the Scriptures, since women were not generally literate.

LaCelle-Peterson suggests that 1 Tim 2:11-15 (“…I permit no woman to teach or hold authority over a man…yet she will be saved through childbearing”) addresses a specific problem: female followers of Diana or other mother-goddesses who were proclaiming their superiority to men within the church. Saved “through” childbearing does not mean “by” (as in, salvation comes through being a mother) but “during”; God will bring them safely through childbearing, so they no longer need to hedge their bets by praying to Diana.

Anyone who’s cringed at the selection of pastel-tinted “Christian womanhood” books in a Lifeway bookstore, or sat through one too many John Eldredge lectures on how men naturally long to be rescuers and women to be rescued, will appreciate LaCelle-Peterson’s deconstruction of gender stereotypes that have been picked up by the evangelical marketing machine and reinforced with so-called divine authority. Consumer culture teaches young girls that their self-worth depends on being pretty, delicate, and unthreatening. Gimmicks like Revolve, the Bible packaged as a teen fashion magazine, misdirect Christian girls’ energy toward externals rather than internal spiritual maturity. It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

One of the most helpful sections of this book is its tour through the many manifestations of marriage in Biblical times and beyond. What Christian conservatives call the “traditional” family, with the man working outside the home and his wife staying home to raise the children, is an artifact of 19th-century capitalism. Before industrialization, husbands, wives and children often worked side by side on the farm or in the artisan’s workshop. Both parents were involved in teaching the children the skills they would need to carry on the business.

However, when capitalism turned men into salaried employees of a large corporation, women’s non-cash-based labor became devalued and invisible. It was a sign of upward mobility if your wife could afford to stay home. This meant that the woman became an ornament to the male ego rather than a contributor to society. That pride-based arrangement doesn’t sound like the model of mutual submission we read about in the Epistles, still less the actual patterns of discipleship in the early church. Yet today’s conservative churches have uncritically
adopted a commercialized vision of gender roles as if it were based on natural law.


To me this suggests the dangers of an ahistorical reading of the Bible. Human beings are inescapably embedded in history, both enriched and constrained by the specifics of our time, place, and material interests. When we are afraid to contextualize and move on from the social arrangements that happened to prevail in New Testament times, because we are seduced by an impossible dream of an “objective” social order that stands outside historical contingency and fallibility, we also lose perspective on our present-day social arrangements and how they unconsciously shape our hermeneutics. 

Liberating Tradition contains many more useful arguments from history and Biblical criticism than can be summarized in this review. By necessity, LaCelle-Peterson limits her focus to women’s heterosexual relationships and church leadership roles, but the logical extension of her critique of gender is unavoidable. Having admitted, in any context, that the meanings of maleness and femaleness are historically variable — and having recognized that our fallen nature easily converts difference into inequality, contrary to the radically inclusive vision of Jesus — we cannot honestly say “marriage is between one man and one woman” without admitting that most of the important words in that sentence are ambiguous, including (pace Bill Clinton) “is”. Will the female pastors and theologians in today’s conservative churches, who owe their leadership roles to feminist readings of the Bible, speak out against heterosexist idolatry, or will they pull the ladder up after them?

Speak Up for Gay Rights at the United Methodist General Conference


Soulforce, an interfaith organization that advocates for GLBT rights through nonviolent resistance, will be sending volunteers to witness at the United Methodist General Conference, which will be held in Fort Worth, TX on April 23-May 2. The United Methodists are the second-largest US Protestant denomination. According to Soulforce’s newsletter, under current UM policy:


Local UM pastors have the power to deny membership to gay and lesbian Christians.
UM pastors are barred from performing marriage or commitment ceremonies for same-gender couples.
Openly gay and lesbian people are banned from the ministry.
Transgender people face potential exclusion from the ministry.
Gay and lesbian youth are taught that being true to themselves is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

To sign up to join Soulforce’s nonviolent demonstration on April 25-27, click here. To read more about the debate within the Methodist church, visit the website of Affirmation: United Methodists for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Concerns.

Holy Week in the Blogosphere


Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and this weekend, unbelievable as it seems to us in the Northeast who still see snow instead of crocuses on our lawns, will be Easter. Lent is my favorite season of the Christian year, a time when I can get serious about some spiritual problem or slackness of will. Since it’s only forty days (and it seemed shorter this year, somehow), I’m not daunted by the prospect of an open-ended vow, the promise to “never do that again” which undermines itself from the start by its very implausibility. It’s like Anne Lamott’s cure for writer’s block: rather than sit down to the monumental task of “writing your novel”, she suggests that you resolve every day to write as much as will fit within a one-inch picture frame.

Well, I didn’t do that, but I did more or less keep my Lenten resolution to stop talking to my novel characters instead of Jesus. What I discovered, when I no longer had my imaginary friend telling me “Girl, you look fabulous, and I love your defense of the Trinity!”, was that I still use others’ approval as a substitute for faith that God will either (a) bring to completion the good work He has begun in me, or (b) use my failures and humiliations for my spiritual growth and that of others, if I let Him.

My faith this year has been largely about “Not-That”. God is not Eros, not morality, not intellect, not the church, not my opinions, not others’ opinions. God is only authentic in the absence of all concepts about God. This is, after awhile, a dark and confusing space to inhabit. My plot problems, it seems, were really life problems, as I had fallen into radical doubt about all methods of knowing the right path.


That feeling found a companionable echo in Hugo’s latest post about his hiatus from church. I too have returned to the words of that old Negro spiritual: You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley/You’ve got to walk it by yourself/Ain’t nobody here can walk it for you/You’ve got to walk it by yourself. I keep wanting others to walk it for me, or at least with me, so that I can feel more confident that I am “right”. But only Jesus can make me right, or rather, lead me beyond rightness to God’s love. Jesus walked that valley for me, so why do I need anyone else to do it?

Kim Fabricius has posted a bracing Palm Sunday sermon about how the death of Jesus invites us to step into that emptiness, the place of not knowing and not being comforted:


So: for one Holy Week forget about the suffering of Jesus, the courage of Jesus, the wickedness of it all. Forget even about the dying of Jesus: it is not to the crucifix, or even to the deposition, that I would direct you – no! Rather look at the man – dead – gaze upon the corpse of Christ, fix your eyes on his cold and rigid body, laid out on a slab, already showing signs of decomposition. I am thinking of Hans Holbein’s painting “Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”. The Russian author Dostoevsky saw the painting, in a museum in Basel, stopping on his way to Geneva, and forever after it haunted him like a nightmare. He describes it in his great novel The Idiot. The character Prince Myshkin says: “Why some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!”

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

No one puts it more starkly – or more honestly and truthfully – than Bonhoeffer. We must recognize, he wrote from prison, “that we have to learn to live in the world ‘as if God were not here’. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it… God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross” – and then down from the cross and into the grave. “He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.” God a Super-Power? That god is a demon, the Devil. If that god is your Lord, this week is a call for “regime change” (Walter Brueggemann).

So, yes, lose your faith! For as with life, so with faith: only those who lose it will find it. Or rather may find it. Faith is a risk, and discipleship demands that we learn to live with insecurity and uncertainty, setting out on a journey without a map, with companions who are as lost as we are, following a leader who is always way ahead of us, beckoning mysteriously, “Follow me!”, and then vanishing just as we arrive. God is mystery, ineffable mystery, naming a reality that we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to un-know and rethink everything we thought we knew.
In an older post, Christopher at Betwixt and Between reflects on how Lent’s call to humility is heard differently by members of the dominant group versus those who are out of power. Traditional Christian rhetoric about “dying to self” has been addressed to those who already had a fully-formed, privileged self to lose. Without a nuanced understanding of the audience being addressed, this theology may further oppress those (such as women, children and sexual minorities) who have been forced to submerge their selfhood to the powers of this world.

Finally, Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love is running a Gay Holy Week series of readings and artwork that retell the Passion narrative with GLBT imagery.

Sara Miles on the Idolatry of the Family


Poet and journalist Sara Miles, whose conversion memoir Take This Bread has just been released in paperback, preached this sermon last summer at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church (San Francisco) about an all-too-common misunderstanding of Christian “family values”. Just as in Jesus’ day, “family” is not merely a sentimental tableau; it is a circle of power that defines who possesses status and purity, and who does not.


Jesus says, I’ve come to bring fire to the earth and destroy your family. Do you think I’ve come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. What’s burning up here isn’t just money, as it was in the Gospel last week. It isn’t just religion, as it was two weeks ago when poor Peter tried to make a shrine to the ancestors to protect him from the blazing fire of the transfiguration. What Jesus is burning up in this reading is the past, and the future of the world as we see it in human terms. He’s replacing it with the fire of the perpetual present: the fire of Christ, the fire of baptism through death. The fire of new creation. He is burning down the house….

In our cold postmodern capitalist world, family sometimes seems like the only place we’re safe. It’s home. It’s love. It’s a minivan full of blond children. But Jesus is not talking about a cozy, affective private household: he’s talking about a system of power.

In Jesus’ time, family ruled as much as the temple did….or the soldiers of the imperial army. Your very name, your identity, was determined by whose son or daughter you were. Your role in life was completely circumscribed by your position in the family. Your freedom as an individual was negligible in the family, and in the network of families that made up tribes and nations. The father ruled the mother, the mother-in-law ruled the daughter–in-law, the elder brother ruled the younger brother.

And central to the construction of family, of course, was who was outside it. Families existed—in fact, just as they do now—to define outsiders. Widows and orphans, illegitimate children—these people had no power, no authority, no place. They were not full humans, because they did not belong to a family.

Jesus is gonna burn that sucker down.

And, to the extent that we still think families are about private life, about controlling boundaries, about maintaining an inside and an outside, they are over. When we think they’re about knowing who isn’t family, who isn’t our brother or sister, they’re over. God wants to smash even our enlightened, modern families, and replace them with something new. Because family, to Jesus, is not just the family you’re born into. Not the family of history, but the whole human family Jesus is born into, the family he remakes in his own image. Family contains everyone who is a child of God. It is love without conditions. And that smashed-up family, the new creation, is what Jesus gives us to live in, once he’s burned down the house of exclusive, man-made families.

Visit Sara Miles’ website for more sermons, interviews, and an excerpt from her new book.

Support Soulforce “Right to Marry” Campaign in New York


Roses fade and chocolates disappear (especially around my house), but certain Valentine’s Day gifts can make a lasting impact. This month, young adult volunteers from the progressive interfaith organization Soulforce will return to New York State to ask business and community leaders to support full marriage equality for same-sex couples. Last year, Gov. Eliot Spitzer introduced a gay-marriage bill that was passed by the state Assembly in June, but the Republican-controlled Senate did not let it come to a vote. To donate to the Soulforce Right to Marry Campaign, click here.

Also, because we love Hugo and chinchillas are cute, click here.

Carl Phillips: “Parable”


There was a saint once,
he had but to ring across
water a small bell, all

manner of fish
rose, as answer, he was
that holy, persuasive,

both, or the fish
perhaps merely
hungry, their bodies

a-shimmer with
that hope especially that
hunger brings, whatever

the reason, the fish
coming unassigned, in
schools coming

into the saint’s hand and,
instead of getting,
becoming food.

I have thought, since, of
your body — as I first came
to know it, how it still

can be, with mine,
sometimes. I think on
that immediate and last gesture

of the fish leaving water
for flesh, for guarantee
they will die, and I cannot

rest on what to call it.
Not generosity, or
a blindness, trust, brute

stupidity. Not the soul
distracted from its natural
prayer, which is attention,

for in the story they are
paying attention. They
lose themselves eyes open.


Read more poems from Phillips’ collection Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2002) here.

Jesus Won’t Make Me a Supermodel


As research for my novel (what a good excuse that is), I’ve begun watching the fashion-industry reality shows on Bravo. I’m sporadically following “Project Runway”, since I haven’t warmed up to this year’s contestants, but my real addiction is the ultimate bitch-fest “Make Me a Supermodel“. I could do without the manufactured interpersonal drama, especially this week when they all ganged up on Katy because she was eating carbs. Honestly, I’m just interested in the clothes. (I was pulling for Holly a couple of weeks ago because her Christian principles made her uncomfortable doing a soft-core photo shoot, but since then, she’s been just as catty as everyone else.) 

For maximum cognitive dissonance, I’m currently reading Gregory Boyd’s Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God. Boyd argues that Christians should be characterized by nonjudgmental love, rather than by willingness to make moral pronouncements. Only an omniscient God can truly understand all the factors that go into another’s virtuous or sinful behavior, and only God can pass judgment unbiased by ego-defenses. Since the Fall, we compulsively divide people into “good” and “evil”, but these judgments are always in reference to our own psychological needs, not the truth. We set ourselves up at the center of creation, where only God belongs.

Boyd recognizes that there is a need to hold sinners accountable, for their own good and that of the community. However, he says that the church should not be in the business of listing categories of sinners who are excluded from fellowship (he singles out Christians’ mistreatment of homosexuals here). Instead, accountability should occur within loving personal relationships, such as a small group within a church, where the message and remedy can be tailored to the individual’s needs. 

So what does this have to do with Katy and Holly? “Supermodel” may be an extreme example, but the everyday business of life is all about judging. We choose one book over another, one type of car, one career, one job applicant, one church. And when we put our own creations out there, be they sermons or shoes, we know that someone else will be approving, rejecting, or misunderstanding the value of what we do. How do you function, how do you stay motivated to strive for excellence, unless you judge? But how do you love yourself and others unless you suspend judgment?

It’s awful that Katy’s housemates make fun of her for snacking. On the other hand, leaving aside the unrealistic weight standards of today’s fashion industry, if she wants to be beautiful, she needs to stay in shape. “Fine,” a serious spiritually minded person might say, “this just proves that the fashion industry is stupid and evil.” Well, let me tell you, the poetry world is no less competitive, it’s just that the stakes are so low that the whole thing seems kind of cute, unless you’re a poet. Should I stop writing poetry because in order to improve, I must evaluate my own work harshly and compare it to the greats?

I like Boyd’s preference for interpersonal, individualized accountability. As he observes, moral abstractions distance us from one another, subverting the primary command to love. However, the church also has a social role, which is complicated in a fallen world. Must accountability be confined to the private, individual level so that we can live wholly in grace? Where is the dimension of social justice? As an institution in the world, the church cannot be neutral between good and evil. That would be like hoarding grace for ourselves, preserving the nonjudgmental purity of our interactions within the church at the expense of speaking up for those outside.

Moreover, because sin still exists, we need to have some categories of “sin” and “not-sin” or else accountability has nowhere to begin. This is where Boyd’s approach to homosexuality, though an improvement over the evangelical mainstream, still falls short.

It’s magnanimous of him to say that we should extend fellowship without discrimination to gays and transvestites along with obese people, greedy people, racists, prostitutes and murderers. (Just as an aside, why are “prostitutes” always named as the sinners in that transaction rather than the pimps and johns who enslave them?) But if he’d added blacks to that list, we’d all be offended, even though it’s equally true that churches should avoid racial discrimination.

There’s a crucial difference between flaws that we graciously overlook and neutral characteristics. The former, we separate out from the person in order to maintain our relationship with him. The latter is part of who he is. In practice, a solitary gay person may not notice the difference, but it’ll soon become clear that his spouse and adopted children aren’t accepted on equal terms as the other men’s wives and families. Being gay is not something you only do in private. (Then again, in this great land of reality television, what is?)

That’s why I’m rooting for Ronnie.