Keep. Fighting. Christian. Institutions. On. LGBTQ. Rights.
Lee University, the Roman Catholic Church, and other places SHOULD change their policies, and telling people to suck it up or go somewhere else won't solve the institutional problems.
I make no secret of the fact that I have chosen to escape my hometown, Cleveland, Tennessee, the Pentecostal Church of God denomination I was raised with, and the majority of my conservative relatives along with former friends and acquaintances. I live in a liberal city in a blue southern state. I attend a local church of the most progressive Christian denomination in the world, the United Church of Christ, and I surround myself with entirely affirming people of both the religious and non-religious variety in every aspect of my life, both online and in person.
Hypocritically or not, I have very little tolerance for the same fundamentalist views I once held myself, or the people who cling to those views and the dehumanizing narratives they haven’t managed to escape the way I have: in fact, I find it destructive to my fragile mental health to be subjected to those sorts of views in the first place. For me, it feels personal and I don’t appreciate personal attacks, or devil’s advocate arguments, or being put in a defensive position when I’m not doing anything wrong.
But last week, my alma mater Lee University, who still has yet to address why they allowed a sexual predator to have access to students for seven years after one of their students was assaulted by their professor, made a formal statement with harmful comments about “homosexual behavior” being “against scripture.” This came after one of the most oppressive and largest churches in Cleveland, Tennessee — North Cleveland Church of God, located right next to the school — openly rebuked Lee University because one of their chapel speakers, Preston Sprinkle, stated that we should love LGBT people. That’s the bare fucking minimum. Preston Sprinkle isn’t even an affirming pastor — he’s just a lot nicer than most other fundie bigots.
Since then, the discussions at Lee, and about Lee, have been on fire. Professors I thought were progressive have been seen defending President Mark Walker, who came onboard last year and has been guiding the school as it slipped into regressive policies ever since. Not that the school has ever been progressive, but it was sort of accepting: it has long held a quiet stance, allowing underground LGBTQ clubs to form and such, and while each student must sign a “Community Covenant” mandating no sex outside of heterosexual marriage and no drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes etc. (most students break this at one level or another) it had been several years since the school itself took such a hateful public stance against many of its own students. And yes, Lee had become a bit of a haven for Christian LGBTQ people — particularly and ironically in their famed music and drama programs, which they endlessly brag about while calling many of the same people bringing fame to their school “sinners” for merely existing and having sexual attraction.
As all this drama was happening in my life on a smaller and more personal scale, the world’s largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church that I was so horny for many months ago, walked back its affirming stance toward LGBTQ people as well, stating that priests could not bless same-sex marriages. This is the same church paying out billions for the victims of its sexual abuse scandals? Yes, yes it is. All while I see the same exact “nice Christians” defend a man who murdered eight people, targeting Asian women in particular, as “having a bad day” because he struggled with “sexual addiction.”
For so many LGBTQ Christians, it feels like it’s one step forward, two steps back.
And often, the response from both the conservative Christians AND the secular community is this: “Why go to this school? Why go to that church? They don’t believe what you believe! They’re clear about their beliefs! Go somewhere that validates you instead!” I gotta say, I absolutely HATE that response, and here’s why.
Not everybody gets a choice where they go to college, school, or church. Some of the people from the most fundamentalist homes are told that their parents will only pay for them to attend Christian colleges, so that they keep them away from secular “liberal” institutions, and that’s when they’re over 18. Naïve church kids are extremely susceptible to these financially abusive control tactics. In this capitalistic hellscape, there are almost no other options for people to truly escape an ultraconservative familial environment without some sort of college or job opportunity. And if you’re under 18, well, it’s your parents’ legal right to drag you to any church or school they want, or teach any curriculum whatsoever in homeschool settings, and in America that’s exactly what they do. Even if someone voluntarily chooses to attend a conservative Christian college or church, young people’s minds are still evolving and changing. I was a registered Republican when I started at Lee University, I married at 20, and had two children affirmed with the Church of God before I turned 25. Now I’m a polyamorous bisexual leftist espousing liberation theology.
Nearly half of LGBTQ people are religious. Yes, as I scream with my whole body and soul, many of us believe in God and are queer. Why would I stop believing in God because of my bisexuality? My spiritual beliefs are totally unrelated to my sexuality or gender. That’s like me saying I don’t believe in aliens because I was born with green eyes. Being religious isn’t what makes life harder for LGBTQ people — it’s the religious RESPONSE to the existence of LGBTQ people. So why should LGBTQ people be the ones to change?
Institutional change is more impactful than individual change. Even some of the most affirming people I know believe that churches and religious schools should be allowed to show bigotry to people based on their beliefs about homosexuality, and other attributes that people can’t help. Why the fuck would you give them that kind of power? Nobody should be able to legally show bigotry to another human being based on gender, sexuality, race, disability, ethnicity, or religion — period. Is it really that hard to be ideologically consistent about it? Not much changes in society when someone gets mad and leaves a church. I left the Church of God; I promise you they don’t even notice. The #EmptyThePews movement may contribute to declining church attendance in general, but religious institutions are still extremely powerful in the USA. So when those same religious institutions enact massive policies, there IS a more meaningful impact. It’s the difference between one person recycling versus the entire oil industry being forced to reduce carbon emissions and fund renewable energy instead. Which one do you think would make more of an impact? There is zero reason for you to defend anyone’s right to practice bigotry, and no, you’re not gonna use the First Amendment to do so either. Everyone deserves full civil rights across the board in every institution, public and private. Telling an LGBTQ person to “go somewhere else” is the same as telling someone who complains about America to “move somewhere else.” It’s not always possible, and it doesn’t address the underlying impact for the institutions actually at blame.
There will always be LGBTQ people in conservative spaces, in every area of society. That’s just math, and science. A certain percentage of the population is born LGBTQ regardless of the beliefs of their parents or the culture they are born into. And as long as they exist in those spaces, we have a duty to defend them against institutionalized bigotry. LGBTQ youth who are in environments in which harmful things are said about their gender and sexuality are far more likely to attempt suicide or die by suicide. That especially includes religious spaces. The more institutional impact we can make, the less likely it will be that teens and young adults will take their own lives because of the way they are treated in fundamentalist religious communities.
I believe we are obligated to keep fighting back against religious institutions as long as they continue to cause harm to vulnerable people. We cannot excuse their behavior. It’s easy for those of us who exist solely in progressive spaces in blue cities in blue states to tell other people how much easier their lives could be if they shed the skins of the religious institutions that are causing them harm, and maybe that’s true at the end of the day. Maybe people will get there eventually. But if there is even a single LGBTQ person being harmed by a religious institution, whether they are there by force or by choice, we should stand up beside them and fight until they are no longer being harmed. Bob Jones University used scripture to ban interracial dating on their campus. It wasn’t overturned until 2000. That’s THIS MILLENNIUM. Thank God someone challenged them on this issue, right?
To that end, I would like to introduce you to the new Lee University Affirming Alum Collective, led by many good LGBTQ alumni and allies. They have a great place for resources for current and former Lee students — as well as a petition demanding that President Mark Walker and Lee University affirm their LGTBQ students. I am also encouraging people to flood their mailboxes by printing out the letters and mailing them (or writing your own) — since so many emails and phone calls and social media posts are simply ignored or deleted.
As a queer Lee alum, with so many Lee graduates in my family, and the granddaughter of longtime Lee University science professor Dr. Robert O’Bannon (after whom a dormitory is named at Lee) with two of his grandchildren falling under the LGBTQ category — this is extremely important to me.
Keep fighting the religious institutions. Don’t give up.
As someone who was kicked out of his lifelong religious institution after challenging its orthodoxy at age 23, I sympathize with your frustrations and sadness around what feels like retrograde stances in our modern era. But I'm surprised that you are going with a "reform the institutions" approach rather than a "leave them behind and start your life in this big, diverse world" one. Even Don Quixote would have seen the folly of tilting at windmills like those.
Although now banned from burning dissenters at the stake, the reason we even have that option to go our own way and live by our own standards is that modern Western Enlightentment championed it several hundred years, under the a priori that "forcing other people to change their ways and do what you want to fit your idealogy" will always endanger a civil society. This is why we now condemn totalitarianism and fascism as totally unacceptable political systems.
But it goes both ways. We can't in turn demand that those religious institutions change to fit our ideologies because we would be destroying the intellectual premise of our own escapes. The price of keeping your integrity is loss, sometimes terrible loss. All my friends and family shunned me when I left the church so I paid a high price, but at least I had that option. Western Enlightenment's win also meant they couldn't stone me to death or burn me at the stake for my choice to leave. Even Christ said that his followers would pay a high price to follow him, including losing parents and children and status. But the compensation is struggling and winning the right to be who you are and a place to become who you are going to become, outside the old world.
We can lament the harm that those institutions may do, but they are not ours to reform We *left*. Our best efforts should be help those who want out to transition to their new lives, as you and I both did.