Homophobia Creates Public Health Crisis in Jamaica


This stark report from the September issue of The Atlantic describes how rampant homophobia in Jamaica forces the gay community underground, inhibiting efforts at AIDS education and treatment. One has to wonder whether similar factors are contributing to the epidemic in some African countries, where anyone suspected of being gay runs the risk of criminal punishment and mob violence. Then, to top it off, anti-gay pundits feed these statistics back to impressionable young men who are struggling with their sexual orientation, warning them that “the lifestyle” inevitably leads to misery, disease and early death.

From The Atlantic article by Micah Fink:

We may be accustomed to thinking of AIDS as most rampant in distant parts of the world like Africa, India, and South Asia. But these days the epidemic is flaring up a bit closer to home, in the Caribbean. Indeed, AIDS is now the leading cause of death among adults there, and the Caribbean’s rate of new infections is the second highest in the world, following just behind Sub-Saharan Africa.

A major factor in the region’s susceptibility to the epidemic is its pervasive atmosphere of homophobia, which makes education and outreach efforts nearly impossible. Jamaica, which lies near the middle of the Caribbean and, as of last year, was found to have an astounding 32 percent HIV infection rate among gay men, offers a case study in how anti-gay attitudes have helped spread and intensify the epidemic’s impact.

In Jamaica, homophobic attitudes are reflected in everything from laws that criminalize anal sex, to the lyrics of popular dancehall music that celebrates the murder of gay men, to widespread acts of anti-gay violence, and a gay culture of sexual secrecy and high-risk behavior. Each of these factors is intensified by a religious context that defines homosexuality as a mortal sin and points to the Bible for moral justification in violently rejecting the concerns of the gay community.

According to Dr. Robert Carr, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading researchers on cultural forces and the unfolding of the AIDS pandemic, local awareness of the disease was initially shaped by the international media: “AIDS was seen as a disease of gay, White, North American men. And people were really afraid of it.”

“There were no treatments available in the Caribbean at the time,” he says, “so AIDS really was a death sentence. You had people with Kaposi’s sarcoma, people with violent diarrhea, who were just wasting away and then dying in really horrible and traumatic ways.” The terror induced by these deaths, combined with an already intense local culture of homophobia to produce a violent backlash. “To call what was going on here ‘stigma and discrimination’ was really an understatement,” he says. “In the ghettos they were putting tires around people who had AIDS and lighting the tires on fire. They were killing gay people because they thought AIDS was contagious. It was a very extreme environment, and really horrible things were happening.”…

Experts are increasingly convinced that getting AIDS under control here will require putting out not just general public health messages to the whole population, but targeted ones, directed at those most at risk. “A good starting point,” Maluwa suggests, “would be to openly design programs [for the gay population], just like we have programs to address the general population, to address children.” And these programs, she contends, should come complete with “adequate commodities, such as lubricants and condoms.”

But the social and political environment makes such targeted public health assistance nearly impossible—in part because the gay community is afraid to come forward to receive it, and in part because the (frequently violent) intolerance gays face makes AIDS a relatively less pressing concern….

Read the whole story here.

New Poems by Conway: “Leap Frog” and “Proof of Perfection”


My prison pen pal “Conway” has been experimenting with the prose-poem format while continuing to develop his gift for lyric poetry. I’ve been writing to him about my struggles with religious concepts of sacrifice and submission as I see them being misused in the church. I see those discussions reflected in his latest offerings, below.

Leap Frog

Imagine, what His hand and throat began
through all of the silences we chopped out
in front of our father’s shining eyes.

I’ve no need to sing it anymore
or finish the melted words melody.
We can all see & smell around the burning nights nettle,

as fluttering moths fill this scene’s backdoor screens
tendering an irresistible invitation to attack
in search of a crack in the curtains’ narrow track.

While chance packs another perishable skull
tight enough to subsist, in the spiritual
shimmering lushness, of dawn’s faithful light.
 
The tears diminish in the theft of a wilting heart
bent willows seeking flesh, have wrought
every salt-sprinkled drop on our pillows;

To slit the silent throat of sacrifice,
tossed the herded cross, lost in prayers petition.
But it was broken breath,

following the trail to the bitter end
of this deep ravine, winding its way
south of Heaven…

****

Proof of Perfection

Do you ever stare at your finger
wonder,
if it could pull the trigger
or write the warrant
for the Judge’s execution

Imagine
when a melting word
had burnished the herded cross

His head, was wrapped in nettle
from ear to ear
But,
who really smeared the bloody spear
all over the doormat of our existence?

whispered questions
what is this shimmering silence,
this twisted blow, we’ll never know

the pagan eclipse, locked us all
out of an over-exercised church door
falling through the floor
unsure of our homeland,
of a hollow reed
still singing a satisfactory song

long after its death
dancing among the barbed smiles
that stole our breath…

I’m in an Open Relationship with Jesus


Someone close to me was telling me this morning about her struggle to accept her rabbi’s teaching that she should love God more than anything or anyone. “I can’t help it,” she said, “I love my daughter more!”

In the past I might have given a neat response, paraphrasing Tim Keller, to the effect that idolizing any created thing puts unbearable pressure on yourself (because you can lose it through failure or mischance) and on the one idolized (who feels compelled to be impossibly perfect). C.S. Lewis illustrates this distortion in The Great Divorce, his fantasy of damned souls on a field trip to heaven, through the character of an old woman who mourned her dead son so obsessively that she neglected the surviving members of her family. Lewis suggests that over time, the object of her passion became her own identity as a mourner, rather than the real person she had lost.

To love someone properly, on the other hand, is to recognize that you are not the author of the universe, which sooner or later means that you must surrender to God’s will for the other person. After all, didn’t Jesus say, “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me” (Matt 10:37)?

And yet, my past year of queer activism makes me think that something is indeed amiss with the rabbi’s formulation of the question about how love of God relates to love of neighbor. This opposition between them is a common one in Christian apologetics, as the examples above show.

How many times have gay people been told that their loving partnerships are a form of idolatry, a choice to value their own desires more than God? Conservative Christian friends have warned me that I was imperfectly surrendered to God because I refused to leave my GLBT brothers and sisters outside the fellowship of believers. My friends hardened their hearts toward these people and called it “putting God first”. In a book I recently read about the ex-gay movement, the gay men in the “reparative therapy” program were encouraged to project all their longing for intimate companionship onto Jesus, the one relationship that would never let them down. I believe in Jesus, but this still sounds to me like a dangerous retreat into fantasy.

The mistake behind the question “Do you love God more than your husband, wife, child…?” is that it prescribes the via negativa as the norm when it’s probably not the healthiest spiritual path for most people. Some do find God through the path of asceticism, quieting down all human distractions in order to rest in the stillness of the Wholly Other, the “deep and dazzling darkness” of Henry Vaughan’s wonderful poem “The Night“.

But for most of us who don’t live in monasteries, God is mainly known through our interactions with His creatures. “For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20) The formulation that puts God in competition with our human beloveds subtly encourages us to hold back a portion of our heart from them, to dampen down our feelings for them, in the name of religion. This is a “jealous God” in the crudest sense, a God whose evil eye we attract if we praise our child too much. To prefer this God is really to prefer ourselves, because we are putting a mental construct ahead of a living person who can challenge our preconceptions and agendas.

I would contend that the problem with idolatrous love, such as the old woman’s feelings about her dead son in The Great Divorce, is not too much love but too little. It does not see the other person for who he really is, and therefore cannot seek the highest good for him. It turns the lover away from caring for others, rather than producing an overflow of creative energy that seeks new outlets for service. (For a beautiful discussion of how marriage can generate neighbor-love, I recommend Sacred Unions by Thomas Breidenthal.)

To love anyone rightly–that is, skillfully, compassionately and unselfishly–is to love God. If you want to show that you love me, Jesus says to Peter, you will “feed my sheep” (John 21:17). Conversely, if our love for God isn’t increasing our love for other people, then it probably isn’t the real God that we’re worshipping.

So what was Jesus saying, in Matthew 10, if he wasn’t telling us to worry about loving our family and friends too deeply?

I don’t think he was prompting us to seek out conflict between our loyalty to God and our loyalty to our loved ones. Rather, he was warning us to make the right choice in the conflicts that would inevitably come as a by-product of kingdom living. Quoting the prophet Micah, Jesus says, “For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.'” (Matt 10:35-36)

Sometimes our loved ones don’t understand the way we feel called to serve God. A career military man may feel rejected and dumbfounded when his son reads the Gospels and decides to be a pacifist. An evangelical mother may feel afraid when her daughter studies Buddhist meditation as a way to enrich her prayer life. A feminist mother might be angry that her daughter votes pro-life for religious reasons.

In such cases, to put God first means letting the other person work out his or her own salvation. When we can’t come to agreement on what the Bible says, we have to trust that somehow it’s God’s will that each of us sees the world from a particular angle. We’re part of a larger pattern where these differences will ultimately be transcended or reconciled without shame to those on the “wrong” side.

Every morning, in our separate homes, my conservative Christian friend and I pray the Daily Office. We read the same psalms and speak the same prayers. I am praying that she and others like her will open their hearts to the full equality of gay people and the salvation of non-Christians, and she is probably praying that I will return to an orthodoxy that anathematizes these views. This scares me, sometimes so much that I become angry and frightened by Christian talk in general. The word of God is indeed a double-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). But if I’m so afraid to live without that friendship that I can’t follow my own sense of God’s will for me, then I am not obeying the command of Matthew 10.

Friday Random Song: Jason Bravo, “You Raise Me Up”


Buffalo, NY-based singer/songwriter Jason Bravo’s performances of original pop songs and classic covers can be enjoyed on his YouTube channel, BraveHealerMusic. His debut album “Between Head and Heart” is available from CDBaby.

In this concert clip from summer 2009, he’s performing Josh Groban’s hit song “You Raise Me Up”, with my best buddy Greg Bravo on the awesome guitar solos.

When I am down, and oh my soul, so weary.
When troubles come, and my heart burdened be.
Then I am still and wait here in the silence.
Until You come and sit awhile with me.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains.
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders.
You raise me up to more than I can be.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains.
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders.
You raise me up to more than I can be.

There is no life — no life without its hunger.
Each restless heart beats so imperfectly.
But when you come and I am filled with wonder.
Sometimes I think I glimpse eternity.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains.
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders.
You raise me up to more than I can be.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains.
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders.
You raise me up — to more than I can be.

Lyrics courtesy of AnyChristianLyrics.com

Wednesday Random Song: “Brighten the Corner Where You Are”


Ina Duley Ogdon was a Midwestern wife and mother and Sunday School teacher during the early 20th century.
Ogdon had ambitions of becoming a preacher but family responsibilities intervened. Her poem “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” was written in 1912 while she was caring for her sick father. Set to music by Charles H. Gabriel, the tune became a nationwide hit after evangelist Billy Sunday made it a staple of his revival meetings.

I first heard it this week on Enlighten 34, the Southern gospel station on XM Radio, in a lively rendition by The Statesmen which I wasn’t able to find on YouTube. (It’s featured on this album.) Instead, enjoy this old-school version by the Criterion Quartet:

This interesting 10-minute video tells the story of Ina’s life and the inspiration for the song, as well as its subsequent cultural reception.

1. Do not wait until some deed of greatness you may do,
Do not wait to shed your light afar;
To the many duties ever near you now be true,
Brighten the corner where you are.

* Refrain:
Brighten the corner where you are!
Brighten the corner where you are!
Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar;
Brighten the corner where you are!

2. Just above are clouded skies that you may help to clear,
Let not narrow self your way debar;
Though into one heart alone may fall your song of cheer,
Brighten the corner where you are.

3. Here for all your talent you may surely find a need,
Here reflect the bright and Morning Star;
Even from your humble hand the Bread of Life may feed,
Brighten the corner where you are.

Lyrics courtesy of the Timeless Truths free online library. (Click the “midi” music note icon on their website to hear the tune.)

Mary Ruefle: “A Minor Personal Matter”


Halfway between prose-poems and essays, the offbeat musings in Mary Ruefle’s The Most of It (Wave Books, 2008) take some mundane incident–picking out a garden bench, for instance, or drinking a glass of water–as the starting point for an increasingly strange chain of associations. The original question becomes lost in the narrator’s argument with herself about action versus inaction. As in a Platonic dialogue, the only enlightenment we take away is an awareness of how muddled our concepts are. Or, to use a more modern example, Ruefle is like the toddler in the “Buttons and Mindy” cartoons who perpetually reduces adults to sputtering frustration by responding “Why?” to everything they say. Just when this aimless demolition seems to have gone on too long, Ruefle ends the book with the astonishing piece “A Half-Sketched Head”, in which we see that the preceding diversions served the same purpose as Zen koans, to humble the chattering mind and make room for spiritual clarity.

Rather than spoil the journey by giving away the ending, I’ve chosen to reprint a different selection from The Most of It. (Thanks to Wave Books for permission to quote this here.) Last year I was going through a serious “Why write?” crisis when I happened to read Ruefle’s book. “A Minor Personal Matter” oddly comforted me like nothing else. Perhaps there is no good reason to write, i.e. to exist: okay then, how do you face that and keep going?

A Minor Personal Matter

For a long time I was a poet. That is, I used to be a poet, for quite a long time in fact, and made my life making poems and teaching persons younger than myself just what this entailed, although I myself had no idea what it entailed, beyond a certain amount of courage and a certain amount of fear, but these amounts were variable and it was not always possible to say in which order they appeared and at any rate it was hard to convey. It was harder and harder to convey, but conveying it became easier and easier and that, too, lent an air of confusion to my days. For instance, many days I did not care about saying any of this, I only cared to say certain things that might cause someone to like me, but of course I never said that. I said only that I cared to say certain things that might cause someone to like the language. This seemed foolish because whether or not someone liked the language they had no choice but to use it. Whether or not the language was beautiful or gruff or strange they had no choice but to use it. So I said I only cared to say certain things that might cause someone to like the world, and being alive in it. Whether the world was beautiful or gruff or strange they had no choice but to live. Yes, I said, you may kill yourself, but that would not be living, you would not be living then. A great many poets killed themselves. This was a problem too insurmountable to even understand, although at times I felt I understood it very closely and this also was part of the problem. The only thing that seemed certain to me was that people who had no choice but to use the language while they were alive had a choice in whether or not they liked me. This was a real choice, one I might be able to persuade them in. And so it seemed to me this reason, the one which sounded most foolish of all (and therefore I never spoke it) was actually the most reasonable of all. Still, occasionally I met people who did not seem to like me no matter what I said or did. And it was not easy to turn away from them because they were the challenge. They were the challenge because they challenged me to like myself even if they did not. That was the challenge–to like myself in spite of all that happened or did not happen to me. It was to face this challenge that I ceased to write poems. Could I like myself if I no longer engaged in an activity I openly declared was the reason I was put on the planet in the first place? Would I find another reason to be on the planet, or could I remain on the planet, with nothing to do and no one to like me, liking myself? I decided to try. I was on the planet with nothing to do and no one to like me. And as soon as I found myself there, I realized I had created the circumstances in which I had begun to write poems in the first place, to the extent I now wander the earth, a ghost, with no intent to write, but carrying a spark in my fingertips, which keeps me in a state of constant fibrillation, a will-o’-the-wisp of stress, art, and the hours.
 

Constantine P. Cavafy: “In Despair”


Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) is acclaimed for his poems of love and longing. The website Billie Dee’s Electronic Poetry Anthology includes several of his poems translated by Rae Dalven. I particularly appreciated this one, depicting the familiar tragedy of religious guilt coming between two lovers. Which of them is pursuing an illusion? Perhaps both; or perhaps the idealized lover of our imagination, whether human or divine, is a more rewarding prize than the love of an ordinary mortal.

In Despair

He has lost him completely.   And now he is
    seeking
on the lips of    every new lover
the lips of his beloved   in the embrace
of every new lover    he seeks to be deluded
that he is the same lad,   that it it to him he is
    yielding.

He has lost him completely,    as if he had never
    been at all.
For he wanted — so he said —    he wanted to be
    saved
from the stigmatized,   the sick sensual delight;
from the stigmatized,   sensual delight of shame.
There was still time —    as he said — to be saved.

He has lost him completely,   as if he had never
    been at all.
In his imagination,    in his delusions,
on the lips of others   it is his lips he is seeking;
he is longing to feel again   the love he has
    known. 

Speaking Justice Versus Living It


One of my challenges as an activist, and as a Christian, is finding the proper balance between speaking about my values and living them out. Too much discussion keeps me unhealthily engaged with self-justification against opponents, while too little can be a form of selfish quietism in the face of widespread misinformation about what the Bible says.

The Epistle of James has a lot to say about closing the gap between hearing and doing God’s word. This recent installment of the Human Rights Campaign’s Out in Scripture lectionary e-newsletter includes some fruitful reflections on that text (boldface emphasis mine):

Our conversation about this week’s lectionary Bible passages began with James 1:17-27. What is the way of God’s wisdom? The book of James suggests that it is the “law of liberty” (James 2:12). And that law starts with doing. Doers of the law’s basic justice requirements place themselves in risky outreach settings in which we are inevitably challenged to know who we really are. Acts of justice hold up the mirror that enables our transformation of heart, while doctrinal obsessions and arguments merely keep us in bondage.

Deeds and words both matter in the book of James. And at the beginning of today’s reading, we are called to be quick to listen, not to speak (James 1:19). This is a kind of listening that calls for inward listening. Sarah, a transgender woman, reminds us: “Before my transition, I needed to step back and away from all the outside advice I was getting from people. I needed to really listen for God’s voice inside, in the midst of all the other voices.” Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people know that it is often a matter of life and death that we distinguish the voices and learn to trust inner listening. The author of James provokes us, however, to remember that such times of contemplation cannot be divorced from habits of service and justice.

Listening to others without a prayerful discerning heart can lead to powerlessness. Words can be hurtful, dangerous and affect others in ways that the speaker may not realize. Those in power in our denomination, local church or civic settings may have power to name the “tradition” or to label others: for example, when only men decide about women’s ordination or only heterosexuals decide about the ordination of LGBT people in the church. Fatigued by the struggle against endless pronouncements, LGBT people may come to this place: “I just don’t know if I can listen anymore.” We cannot ignore the reality of power by idealizing an uncritical, non-discerning listening posture. We can, instead, lift up a reminder that those in power may themselves be transformed when they have the courage to listen to LGBT people for God’s voice.

Visit the Out in Scripture archives and sign up here.

The Theology of Abuse (Part One)


Hugo, via Facebook, pointed me to today’s Washington Post story about a new study on clergy sexual abuse from Baylor University’s School of Social Work:

One in every 33 women who attend worship services regularly has been the target of sexual advances by a religious leader, a survey released Wednesday says.

The study, by Baylor University researchers, found that the problem is so pervasive that it almost certainly involves a wide range of denominations, religious traditions and leaders.

“It certainly is prevalent, and clearly the problem is more than simply a few charismatic leaders preying on vulnerable followers,” said Diana Garland, dean of Baylor’s School of Social Work, who co-authored the study.

It found that more than two-thirds of the offenders were married to someone else at the time of the advance….

For its study, Baylor used the 2008 General Social Survey, a nationally representative sample of 3,559 respondents, to estimate the prevalence of clergy sexual misconduct. Women older than 18 who attended worship services at least once a month were asked in the survey whether they had received “sexual advances or propositions” from a religious leader.

The study found that close to one in 10 respondents — male and female — reported having known about clergy sexual misconduct occurring in a congregation they had attended.

Researchers say they don’t know whether the incidence of clergy sexual misconduct had changed over the years. Nor do they know whether sexual wrongdoing by clergy is more, or less, frequent than in other well-respected professions.

But, Garland said, “when you put it with a spiritual leader or moral leader, you’ve really added a power that we typically don’t think about in secular society — which is that this person speaks for God and interprets God for people. And that really adds a power.”

All power can be misused, and greater intimacy risks greater pain. In one way or another, the world’s religions aim at making the hard and selfish ego more permeable, creating more opportunities for love but also greater exposure to others’ unsafe emotions.

In the past few years, as I’ve become more deeply involved in Christian fellowship, I’ve also experienced some serious violations of trust. It’s driven me to re-examine my core beliefs through this lens: do some doctrines make the believer more vulnerable to exploitation?

Certainly the reverse has been true for me, earlier in my faith journey. I wouldn’t have valued or trusted myself enough to break free of some abusive family patterns, had I not discovered the loving and forgiving God of the New Testament. (Read Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s Boundaries for details.)

I would hate to be one of those smug secularists who accuse Christians of being immature people with Daddy issues. Nonetheless, lately I’ve dared to wonder whether the traditional emphasis on human insufficiency, dependence, and sinfulness has kept me from outgrowing the need for parental approval, instead merely projecting it onto God. That wouldn’t be so bad if it were just “me and Jesus”, but inevitably, my understanding of God is mediated and influenced by the spiritual leaders in whatever community I join–either clergy or lay people who seem to be more educated and advanced in the faith than I am.

Dr. Edward J. Cumella’s Barnabas Ministry website lists 12 signs of spiritual abuse in their article “The Yeast of the Pharisees”:

Authoritarianism. Rather than modeling and teaching obedience to God, abusive leaders expect believers to obey them. Councils of elders, deacons, etc., are expected to rubber stamp leaders’ intentions rather than provide accountability.

Coercion. Rather than respecting freedom and conscience, as God does, and offering messages that persuade based on scriptural integrity and reason, abusive leaders use strong-arm tactics to coerce believers into overruling better judgment and following their demands.

Intimidation. Rather than building up the Body in the bonds of love, abusive leaders use threats of punishment, excommunication, and condemnation to force people into submission and continued church membership.

Terrorism. Rather than inviting people to follow Christ with the Gospel of love and forgiveness, abusive leaders intensify believers’ fear, shame, and false guilt, teaching that problems in believers’ lives are due to the believers’ personal sins.

Condemnation. Rather than refraining from judgment lest they be judged, an abusive leader liberally condemns those who leave his church, outsiders, and those whom he defines as sinners. The message is that believers will join the ranks of the condemned should they deviate from the leader’s teachings or leave his church/denomination. Individual members become the scapegoat when something goes awry in the congregation.

Classism. Christ was no respecter of persons. Abusive leaders are preoccupied with power, promoting church hierarchy, referring to and treating people according to their titles and roles. Those lower on the hierarchy are taught that their needs don’t matter.

Conformity. Abusive leaders have the greatest hold over inexperienced, naïve, and dependent individuals who are seeking a strong leader. These individuals suppress their objections to the leaders’ teachings for fear of being shamed or ostracized. Hence, abusive churches often appear unified, but beneath the surface there is discontent, anguish, whispers, rumors, secrets, and a desire among many to leave.

Manipulation. Rather than taking scripture in context, interpreting the Bible with the Bible and according to long-held Christian beliefs, abusive leaders twist scripture to convey their personal opinion rather than God’s intent.

Irrationality. Because scripture is manipulated, one interpretation may contradict another. Interpretations may contradict reason and obvious reality. This requires suspension of critical thinking. Some abusive leaders claim to receive direct messages from God about their church or individual members, but these messages typically deviate from Scripture and reality.

Legalism. Rather than treating others with love, grace, and forgiveness, as Christ commanded, abusive leaders offer little grace. They communicate instead that one’s worth and the amount of love one deserves depend on performance and status in their church. Abusive leaders expect believers to make heroic financial, time, and emotional sacrifices for their church and its members.

Isolation. Rather than respecting family ties, community obligations, and friendships, abusive leaders are concerned that such influences will interfere with their control over believers, so they encourage isolation from family, friends, and the outside world, and wage war against the outside world as a sewer of sin devoid of anything redeeming.

Elitism. Rather than modeling and encouraging humility, abusive leaders beam with false pride and teach the same to believers. An attitude arises of, “We’re it! We’re special! Everyone else is condemned!,” partially compensating for the shame and worthlessness that believers feel because of other experiences in the abusive church. The leader instills that believers must protect the church’s image at any cost.

Ensnarement. Rather than promoting maturity among believers, abusive leaders inevitably promote self-dou
bt, guilt, and identity confusion, since believers struggle with the contradiction between what their conscience and reason tell them and what they are being taught. This ambivalence, coupled with fear of condemnation and loss of direction and fellowship, make it difficult and painful for believers to leave abusive churches.

Before you write this off as only applying to cults, consider how the above attitudes are encouraged by the doctrines of many mainstream churches:

Isolation: If you truly believe that God condemns all people to eternal conscious torment, except for the lucky few who have heard the gospel and been convinced by it, you either (1) are a compassionate person and go mad from the horror of all that suffering, or (2) teach yourself not to care about people outside your tribe. It has become impossible for me to trust Christians who can go through life smiling and making friends with unbelievers while inwardly holding, in fact cherishing, belief in a God who would torture these people forever.

Ensnarement: Isn’t this the experience of GLBT people in conservative churches–forced to choose between loss of fellowship and their own psychological self-understanding? Undermining people’s pleasure and pain signals is a classic technique to prime them for abuse. This happens, for instance, when leaders tell gays that their homosexuality is a delusion, or that their relationships aren’t genuine and loving.

Classism: Churches that exclude women from leadership, for example, send a broader message that inequality is acceptable in the body of Christ. We learn to justify our failures of moral imagination and our natural tendency to see others as less than fully human.

Conformity: Biblical inerrantists are among those who argue that any deviation from tradition will undermine our confidence in our entire relationship with God. In this model, the living always lose out to the dead; the flow of learning only goes in one direction. We are taught to venerate those who will not respond to us. Like the child of an abusive parent, we have only two alternatives: submission or loss of love. We have no way to make our suffering heard.

Terrorism: I am leaning toward the opinion that the Calvinist belief in total depravity is an abuse-enabling doctrine. It’s a “hazing” model of identity destruction and re-formation in which the lay person is convinced to radically mistrust and despise herself, making her so desperate for approval that she falls gratefully at the feet of the “God” who spares her the punishment she thinks she deserves (the “honeymoon phase” in this Cycle of Abuse diagram). Similarly, advocates of predestination speak as if God’s absolute and unquestioned sovereignty would be weakened by requiring His judgment to be leavened by compassion or fairness. This idolization of content-free obedience sets up psychological blocks against defending one’s self from an abusive leader.

The website Under Much Grace provides other resources for conceptualizing and healing from abuse-enabling doctrines. In a 2007 post on “Doctrine Over Person”, author Cindy Kunsman writes:

Members’ personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group. The end ideology of the group must be maintained by any means, even at the personal expense or the personal suffering of the group members. Love for the system or ideology supersedes that of the people, places or lesser causes. This promotes hatred and intolerance of all opposing critics or ideologies (sadly, often including those within the group).

This was my painful experience when I found myself in close fellowship with some Christians who were not affirming of gays and lesbians. At that time a novice in reading the Bible, I hoped that perhaps they had simply not heard a convincing case otherwise. After much study and soul-searching, I was able to make such a case, only to discover that they resisted hearing it. I don’t think my friends felt an animus toward gays so much as a general rigidity such as Cindy describes above. They thought personal emotions about fairness were less trustworthy than a System. These feelings were branded a sign of weakness and partiality, of incomplete submission to God. The irony is that their fear of being wrong is also an unacknowledged emotion, one which a relationship with Jesus is supposed to heal.

I’m struggling to hang onto that relationship myself, even as I see how a person’s love for God can be used as the ultimate weapon of emotional blackmail. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38, NIV)

Literary Journal Roundup: Gemini Magazine, DIAGRAM, and More


As my attention span fades along with the light of summer days, I’m appreciating the brevity and variety that a good literary journal can offer. Here are some of the publications I’ve been enjoying this season:

Naugatuck River Review‘s summer 2009 issue is stuffed with good narrative poetry on themes including fathers and sons, aging, class and race, romance, miscarriages, Mexico, horses, D-Day flashbacks, and what happens when you’re in a bar with a woman who sees God. Read the issue from beginning to end because editor Lori Desrosiers has structured it like a narrative, with one theme segueing into the next. If you’re in Western Massachusetts this Tuesday night, come to the NRR authors’ reading at Spoken Word in Greenfield.

Think you know all there is to know about Huck Finn? The Missouri Review‘s summer 2009 issue includes a provocative essay by Andrew Levy, arguing that Twain’s book is not primarily about race but about our culture’s myths and fears concerning adolescent boys.

Issue #9 of Chroma, the UK-based queer literary journal, features a sestina by Judith Barrington, a hilarious and sad essay by trans-man Simon Croft about passing at a family funeral, and cover art by photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin.

The most terrifying story ever written appears in Barrelhouse Issue #7. Critics may disagree about which one this is. Matt Williamson’s “Sacrament”, a war-on-terror dystopia that makes Guantanamo look tame, is vying for supremacy with Matt Bell’s “BeautyForever”, a George Saunders-esque tale of love in the time of pharmaceuticals.

Finally, two online prose offerings for your free instant gratification. Gemini Magazine is a newly launched e-zine that publishes flash fiction, short stories, poetry, and drama. So far, my favorite piece in the September issue is Mary J. Daley’s “Wayward Conception”, a lingering, beautifully textured story about a young mother overwhelmed by the choices she’s made:

Stacy forgot about the baby, concentrating solely on the sunlight thatreflected off the stainless steel pot between her feet. The contrast of itsshine against the dull and worn porch steps had lulled her into a void,where her baby, so new and minuscule within her, slipped from herthoughts entirely and blissfully.

A plastic bag of green beans almost a quarter full sat beside her cup of milkytea. The beginning of a burn crept across her bare shoulders as she tookher time, cutting delicately, pressing green skin between thumb and knifeblade. She found this unhurried quiet elegant and she willed herself tostretch it out, to forget the stuffy heat of the house, the needs of thechildren and for one blessed moment the coming baby.

The rattling motor of Tommy’s black Ford broke apart her short-lived escapeand she raised her head, shielding her eyes from the onslaught of sunshineas he pulled into the gravel driveway. As he slid his big frame from the cab,she lowered her sight to his work boots. They came towards her crunchingloudly on the small white rocks.

“You’re home early?” she asked, squinting her green eyes, trying to avoidthe sun’s spillage around him.

“I have a job at the church and I need my safety harness.”

He jogged up the steps two at a time, disappearing into the porch just toreappear a minute later with the harness in his huge hands. He smelled ofpaint and turpentine.

“Does it pay?” she asked.

He nodded, pausing beside her for a second to consider what else he mightrequire. She waited, looking at his hands that held the belt, his short nails,the yellow stains of nicotine between index and middle finger, the ampleblue veins running beneath the skin.

“Did you finish up at Emily’s?”

“Almost. She’s not happy with the color in the dining room, but she’s willingto live with it for a few days to see if it grows on her.” He gingerly steppedover the teacup, not looking at his wife.

“God Tommy, I need to get groceries. She didn’t pay you, did she?” Stacysighed knowing full well Emily wouldn’t part with a dime until she wascompletely and whole-heartedly satisfied with the job.

“I’ll have it finished by Monday.”

“What are you doing at the church?”

He stopped at the truck, one hand reaching for the handle. She could seethe self-importance subtly emerge. After seven years of marriage she knewthe signs: shoulders pulled back ever so slightly, the first traces of red alongthe indentations of his neck, the minute lowering of voice as he answered.“The lights in the cross need to be replaced but Joe hurt his back. I said Iwould do it. Shouldn’t be too long.”

She gaped at him, wide eyed, mouth opened as he climbed back up into thetruck. Raising her voice over the sound of the ignition trying to turn over,she called. “Tommy, you’re not telling me you’re going to climb to the verytop of that steeple?”

“What? Are you saying I can’t?” He leaned slightly out the side windowwhile he gave the truck a chance to rest before turning the ignition overagain.

She shook her head and said, “No, just that it’s dangerous! Isn’t?”

“Should be easy to figure it all out once I’m up there.” He flashed a smilewhen the motor started. Tommy had a prominent chin and tiny eyes and asthe years went by it was only his confident smile that kept him from crossingthe line into unappealing. He turned his head to check for non-existenttraffic, backed the truck from the yard and was gone.

Fool, she thought as she tossed a bean into the pot. Just like Tommy andhis constant display of bravado to take that job, leaving Emily to mull overher walls and her to worry about what to do for meals. God she hoped hefell.

Read the rest here.

For something completely different, check out the experimental poetry and prose journal DIAGRAM, Issue 9.4. Highlights include Rhoads Stevens’ “Who Does What to Whom”, a bizarre Punch-and-Judy show personifying various phrases in a quote from Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, “a book that’s never been read while a patient waits for a barium enema.”