Snow in Berlin 26.12.14

It’s very nearly been a year
Since snow fell and I landed here
Citing at yours that night my lack
Of a coat for the journey back.
Next morning I face the outdoors
To lumber home in one of yours,
The mark left by its owner’s face
Proving a challenge to erase
Even as a fresh fall fills in
The trail where my feet’ve been.
Outside my window now the snow
Has come back for another go.
Almost a year on I can tell
This snow’ll bury you as well. 

Snow in Berlin 26.12.14
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‘We can’t stress enough how triggering overt religiosity can be’ (guest post by Paul)

More? More.

From Sunday:

Many in queer communities have histories of religious abuse, whether ordinary queerphobia or physical, sexual or emotional varieties: the mere presence of guests in holy orders, even entirely friendly ones, can make an event a no-go area. . . . Welding together religion and queer identity is a false economy. Communally, it makes us more exclusionary rather than less; politically, it writes off queer people and others who’ll never be godly enough, pushed to the margins by religious structures.

Paul of the Spark in Darkness blog responds:

I think we can’t stress enough how triggering overt religiosity can be and is to many LGBT people. If I knew an event was taking place in a church, I would avoid it – I don’t feel safe in churches, I don’t feel comfortable in churches. Churches scare me, they make me uncomfortable and they make me [feel] unsafe. In our desire to let organised religious groups play the ‘we’re not all like that’ game, we’re frequently required to pretend they’re mainstream, rather than exceptions, and that so many of us are somehow not legitimately and severely frightened by overt religiosity. That is not an unreasonable or unfair fear, nor one that isn’t based on experience – yet I am expected to treat it as such. No matter how neutral the event is intended [to be], if it is held in church property it is something that will push me out.

And that ‘we’re not all like that’ game is destructive. For me to even remotely consider that a religious ‘ally’ is an ally, I need to know they realise their faith has a bigotry problem – because at the moment our desire to make religious groups comfortable and play PR for them is giving them a pass for bigotry and denying the scale of it in organised religion. How do we counter that if we’re all pretending it doesn’t exist or is ‘fringe’?

‘We can’t stress enough how triggering overt religiosity can be’ (guest post by Paul)

On the difference between Christian queer allyship and exploitation (guest post by Xenologer)

From Sunday’s post:

I see why ‘doing God’ as a community might seem politically expedient. I understand the urge to demonstrate religion need not entail queerphobia. Despite this post, I value religious allies – and I recognise queer believers face all manner of challenges that mean they need inclusion and support. I’m not here to deny them that – queer spaces, most of the time, should welcome those of all beliefs and none – but I will argue the following: overt public religiosity stands in the way of this, and believers (queer or not) in LGBT space should be considerate.

Xenologer, who also has a blog, responds:

Personally, I have appreciated and seen the benefits of Christian orgs offering their basically unearned place of automatic credibility and moral high ground to queer people and queer causes. The phone banks against Indiana’s anti-gay proposed constitutional amendment took place in a church. I’d like to explain the difference – for me – between what this essay is talking about and what progressive people of faith did for us in Indy.

The insistence for many on cramming their gay-friendly Christian theology into LGBT events seems less like ‘we are here to support you’ and more [like] ‘if we are nice to you, will you please keep us from becoming obsolete?’ It’s a demand, not an offer. It’s always on Christian terms and we always have to include them and even center them so that they can reassure themselves they’re not like Those Other Christians.

For contrast, take LifeJourney Church, which let Freedom Indiana use their space to phone bank against HJR-3/6. I never felt like the fact that we were in a church was supposed to matter to us. There was no necessary deference to Christianity required as the price of their assistance. They offered help and then let LGBT people take the reins.

Basically, it’s the same choice available to all allies. Crappy faux-allies will say, ‘You have our support as long as you use it to improve our PR.’ Actual allyship means saying, ‘Here’s what we’ve got available. Is that useful? Cool. Use it. Let us know if you need more stuff to use,’ and not demanding that the help come with those ‘and be sure to tell everyone we did it’ strings.

Christian theology comes from a text full of such diverse and often contradictory content that people can come to the text with whatever they want and walk away from it completely unchanged (but with shiny new scriptural support for whatever they wanted to think). As a result, yes, Christianity can be spun to be queer-friendly. However: supporting LGBT people as a way to show off how modern and cosmopolitan the religion can be so that its frequent backward arsery doesn’t render it obsolete? That’s gross. That’s not allyship, but it is what I see a lot.

I find it really alienating that in so many LGBT circles the drive to assimilate into a Christian-dominant notion of respectability is so important. Not everybody wants to be A Good Christian Just Like You Cis-Het Christians, and not everybody wants to be a prop in someone else’s quest to do that. Furthermore, we shouldn’t have to let Christians use us for their PR. LGBT people are the ones who need help, and treating us like a resource for churches that wanna bedazzle Christianity is hella exploitative.

I can’t wait until LGBT people don’t need help from churches, and honestly? The churches that are our actual allies can’t wait either. They’re the allies who are working to make themselves obsolete. Churches that use us for their PR as a symbol for how modern they are? To show that they are so good at Jesusing that they’ll even *gasp* be nice to TEH QWURZ? They like us right where we are, and never forget it.

On the difference between Christian queer allyship and exploitation (guest post by Xenologer)

Heina weighs in

It’s mildly awkward when you spend years trying to articulate something, then somebody else does it in a day.

Heina Dadabhoy at Heinous Dealings, responding to my last couple of posts:

The worst experience I had was at a local conference about mental health and LGBT issues. Fully half of the panels were about religion, and every panel had a representative of what was euphemistically referred to as ‘the faith community.’ To their credit, the conference organizers included me as the token atheist. I tried to represent those of us LGBT folks who have been harmed by religion and want no part in it. However, I found myself the subject of subtle and not-so-subtle digs by my fellow panelists that went unchallenged by the moderator. The expectation was that I would agree with others’ ‘live-and-let-live’-style statements and accept the ‘teasing’ I got for being an atheist lest I sound like an intolerant naysayer.

It is bizarre, to say the least, to sit in a room filled with LGBT folks and hear nothing but praise for religion and disdain for criticism of religion. Any mention of the homophobia in Christianity or any other religion was treated as if it were taboo, or at least unnecessarily hostile. I found myself feeling an odd sense of longing for the openly-homophobic Muslim I had encountered on an interfaith panel I had done at a local high school. He at least acknowledged the anti-queerness in his faith rather than pretended it didn’t exist and wasn’t relevant to the discussion.

Why should we atheist queers have to capitulate to religions, the very institutions that have vilified, demonized, abused, tortured, and murdered us in the name of their beliefs? Our views on the harms of religion have the realistic precedent. The (a)historical revisionism that casts Jesus as a queer ally and depicts religion as benign at worst and helpful to LGBT causes at best is factually dubious and actively exclusionary.

Well, damn. (Read the rest. It’s worth it.)

Heina weighs in

Jesus was not a queer ally: why I can’t take LGBT-affirming Christianity seriously (and why queer spaces must remain secular)

Introduction

I can’t tell you how long I’ve been trying to write this. Weeks in draft-and-delete mode spawned the post you’re reading, but drafting it at all was half the battle. Having first thought up this piece in February, I’ve spent 2014 with writer’s block – but a block is just the state of not knowing what to say or how, and I’ve felt that way about queer Christianity since leaving the church seven years ago. What I’m about to say’s a long time coming.

I was twelve the first time I came out, sixteen when I lost my faith. In the intervening years I never thought God was against me: mine was the God-loves-the-gays Christianity the gays have since fallen for, and I knew all the scriptural self-defence techniques I needed. No one was without sin; all were one in Christ; homophobic Bible verses had been badly translated; they had to be read in context; Jesus himself made Old Testament ideas redundant; he said nothing at all about gay sex; his was a gospel of love and acceptance.

I’m more embarrassed now of telling myself this than anything I thought about resurrections or virgin births. You’d think perhaps that as an atheist, I’d find all my former beliefs equally odd, but given my upbringing I understand why I thought Christ rose from the dead – within a certain belief set these things make sense. The claim that Jesus was a queer ally seems poor on its own terms, so clear a feat of wishful thinking I don’t know how I convinced myself of it, yet I hear it everywhere. Continue reading “Jesus was not a queer ally: why I can’t take LGBT-affirming Christianity seriously (and why queer spaces must remain secular)”

Jesus was not a queer ally: why I can’t take LGBT-affirming Christianity seriously (and why queer spaces must remain secular)