On Being Gay and Christian

by Rev. Michael S. Piazza
Oct 13, 2006

In 1981 I wrote my first published piece. It was a small brochure entitled "Homosexuality and Christianity." More than one million copies have been printed in English, Spanish and French, and it is still one of the most often-visited pages on the Cathedral of Hope website.

Twenty-five years later, I am surprised to meet so many people who are still struggling with their sexuality and spirituality. So often, people I counsel, emails I receive, and conversations I have at the grocery store or restaurants come back to this issue in one way or another. Why? Why is it that this one issue seems to be so divisive for the church and such a point of struggle with so many people? Even lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who are not struggling with their sexuality and spirituality are actually living lives in reaction to the issue. They are angry at organized religion, and the majority of LGBT people will have no part of church anymore. They have allowed their pain or fear to rob them of a community of faith and of a spiritual home. This is not a healthy resolution.

Human sexuality and spirituality are two very powerful forces in our lives. We keep them compartmentalized lest the two come together and create an explosion. Perhaps that is just what we need. Too often we hold out-of-date and dysfunctional beliefs about both sex and God. We act as if God doesn't know we are sexual beings, didn't make it so, and didn't design us to enjoy it.

In what has been one of the Religious Right's greatest deceptions, they have made the words "values" and "morality" synonymous in political terms with homophobia and anti-abortion. They have been much more effective than we give them credit for. To understand, try this test: If you heard the phrase "S/he is a sinner!" would you be more likely to think the person had been caught in some sexual act or not helping the poor? We have made virtue of unprovoked war and vice of unrestrained love. Even in the gay community, we are much more judgmental of someone who hasn't lived up to our standards for sexual behavior than we are of someone who makes business decisions that are exploitive. Why is it that we pass judgment on a person who is "sexually promiscuous" (whatever that means), but joke about our community's conspicuous consumption? What I am saying is that the fundamentalists - both Christian and Muslim - have succeeded in connecting sex and sin, even in the minds of progressives.

We must challenge our own judgments and assumptions if we are going to be free enough to help others examine theirs. Yes, what they say about homosexuality is irrational, but we can hardly argue with them if we continue to hold irrational beliefs of our own. We must renounce magical thinking and superstition. If we believe something is wrong we need to know why it is wrong, not just accept what we have always been told. We need to stop labeling something as sinful simply because it violates our own bias, and look again at the words of Jesus that are in red in the gospels. We are destroying our planet, killing one another, perpetrating injustices by race, class, gender and national origin. We are discarding the elderly and allowing children to die of starvation while we have an epidemic of obesity. If we are looking for things to label as evil or sinful, let's not waste our energy worrying about what adults do with their genitals.

In the end, Jesus said little about sex, but a lot about how we treat the poor. These are the moral values I want our politicians to uphold. Maybe they are waiting for people of faith to go first.



Rev. Michael Piazza is President of Hope for Peace & Justice and Dean of the Cathedral of Hope.

Used With Permission

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