Affirming or Not Affirming: Is it Just a Racket?
by William Ashley
I have never been a deeply religious person. Growing up in a split household with a Christmas-Catholic mom and a Baptist-through-marriage dad turned me into your typical agnostic. That being said, I never had to bother with finding a church that welcomed my sexual orientation.
Yet, religious thoughts go through my head each and every time I come across the intersection of King and Neil Avenues. Every time I pass the King Avenue United Methodist Church, I can’t help but careen my head towards that giant banner that reads, “All are welcome. Experience inclusiveness as God intends.” I repeatedly find myself wanting to go into that church, if only to see how welcoming they truly are. Sometimes I even engage in a whole mess of internal dialogue: Maybe I am religious and I just haven’t given it a fair chance. Could being a member of LGBT-friendly church change my entire views on faith?
One day, it hit me: maybe that’s the whole point of the enormous sign. Perhaps this sign is there just to get people like me (people who know they are not religious, but are intrigued by LGBT-tolerant churches) to walk into their service.
True to my horribly inquisitive nature, this set off a whole new set of questions. Is this church really welcoming to all, or are they struggling to pay the bills and need the donations of economically successful LGBT citizens? The same questions go towards the über-conservative churches that are hell-bent on tradition in all its forms. Do they spread hate and pander to homophobia to get more conservative members?
Cynthia Burack, professor of women’s studies at The Ohio State University, denies the notion that political and membership strategy is the sole force behind a church’s position to either welcome LGBT believers or to shun them. Burack’s training is in political theory, and she focuses on exploring identity group politics. She has written several books and articles on the relationship between religion and homosexuality, most recently being Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right.
Burack continued to explain that many churches, mostly liberal, have seriously struggled in deciding whether or not to be welcoming to LGBT citizens. They want to follow what they read in the Bible, yet are conflicted with the notion of turning people away based on those views alone. And, while conservative congregations may look unified in their opposition from the outside, they face their own internal struggles in whether to be compassionate to their LGBT members or to punish them. Typically, conservative churches aim to keep struggling homosexuals close to the church to keep an eye on them. They don’t want to lose the poor souls to San Francisco or the circuit party scene.
The King Avenue United Methodist Church is one of the more extreme examples of showing support for the LGBT community. Rita Trimble, a Ph.D. student at Ohio State, extensively studied the visual images that churches use to show their pro- or anti-LGBT attitude. She calls this “identity branding” – churches brand themselves much in the same sense that a company must brand their product for a certain audience. Locally, churches will use visually affirming images (same-sex couples, racially diverse parents, single couples without children) of families to convey their welcoming stance. Smaller churches do this in a quiet way to avoid a complete split from their denomination. To break off from the denomination would deplete all of their resources, leaving them with an inability to preach religion to anyone, let alone their LGBT parishioners.
So how does all of this affect those who attend pro- or anti-LGBT churches? Burack believes that it depends on what you want to get from your church experience, and I heartily agree with her assessment. If you are attending a pro-LGBT church, then chances are that you accept your lifestyle and you are hoping to be surrounded with people who will accept you among their religious friends. On the other hand, if you are looking into a spiritually conservative church, then you are most likely looking for strict guidance. By hearing anti-LGBT sermons at church, you are affirming to yourself that your sexuality is wrong.
This makes deciding the most effective approach extremely difficult. If you are selecting or attending a church based on a desired outcome, then you can’t necessarily measure the end effect. But I believe that puts it in layman’s terms. It seems obvious to me that the pro-LGBT stance – whether it is as blunt as King Avenue United or as subtle as the churches in Trimble’s research – will win out between the two approaches among self-identifying LGBT parishioners. The notion that a lot of churches are struggling with this issue goes to show that they are attempting to ride the tide of social change. Even though their members are stuck in the middle of this argument, they will undoubtedly follow their church’s decision because they consider the church the end-all, be-all of morality. In her studies, Trimble recalled a certain older gentlemen who did a complete one-eighty on his views of homosexuality once his church decided to be supportive of LGBT members. I believe this change of heart will happen more and more as churches move from the subtle imagery approach to the banner-on-the-building approach.
In the end, I believe that religious acceptance often correlates with the political and social attitudes of our nation. Parishioners are happy just being along for the ride. Think about it: You would be dumbfounded to walk up to a church today and see a sign that reads, “All races are welcome.” Of course all races are welcome! Yet, before major civil rights movements, churches were segregated and African Americans had to find their own accepting places of worship because the Bible approved forms of slavery. I see this happening in a similar fashion to the issue of LGBT church-goers. Possibly excluding the hardcore Evangelist churches, I believe in a few decades there will be as little of a struggle with LGBT members as there is with racially diverse members. Then, with the full integration of sexual orientation, we can finally move on to conservative-favorite issues of polygamy and bestiality. Because, you know, that’s always the next stop on the morality train.
