Matt Powell, an angry 22-year-old minister, is the latest instigator of violence in a long line of clergy who loathe LGBTQ people and abuse the ministerial profession. His promotion of “humane execution” for our community (see his May 10 webcast interview with YouTuber Skylar Fiction) is hideous and moronic. But it is also nothing new in the Culture Wars raging in the U.S. since World War II.
Mention Powell or any other recent anti-homosexual preacher, and LGBTQ people spring to their own self-defense by accusing their attackers of being “closet cases”— self loathing, secret queers who lash out of their latency in an attempt to harm what they despise in themselves.
Indeed, we know of self-hating gay clergy, some of them powerful and famous, like big-steeple preacher Ted Haggard and Missionary Baptist Bishop Eddie Long. Their bad examples show that angry condemnation of LGBTQ people does sometimes point to psychological compulsions.
The cynical manipulation of contributors by unscrupulous preachers also accounts for the way same-sex marriage is targeted as the bogeyman of the cultural right. Distortion and lies about same-gender- and transgender-loving people have proven to be a surefire way to fill their political war chests.
As an overall explanation of the systematic scapegoating of the LGBTQ community by fundamentalist/evangelical clergy, however, homosexual latency and manipulative disinformation campaigns probably account for only a fraction of the problem we face from anti-gay/anti-trans Christians.
The kind of fear that motivates nearly universal disgust for the “homosexual agenda” across the conservative political spectrum is more complex and far more dangerous than we have imagined. Trump, Pence and their cadre of white evangelical advisors have harnessed this potent disgust with the goal of wrestling the hands of time backward to a white-male-controlled, misinterpreted Biblical utopia of their own making — a smokescreen Trump and his fat cat friends use to pillage America undisturbed, while the false prophets that deliver electoral majorities for them work to create a Christian-style “Taliban” to rule a restored “Christian nation.”
According to the Rev. Dr. Mel White, one of the keenest critics of the fundamentalist assault on American life, “Fundamentalism, like a mutating virus, infects and sickens Christianity — especially evangelical Christianity — on a regular basis, and the plague that follows infects and sickens the nation as well. Contaminated evangelical preachers and famous evangelical ‘personalities’ are particularly contagious, especially those with powerful media ministries. Professional clergy and committed lay leaders who have also been infected by fundamentalism seem helpless in recognizing the symptoms let alone in treating the disease.”
A toxic backlash of fear and loathing against a swiftly changing world, decades in the making, is behind today’s anti-LGBTQ campaign — but LGBTQ Americans are not targeted alone. Like their attacks against LGBTQ folk, conservative fundamentalists/evangelicals also aim their fury against feminists, racial/ethnic minorities, immigrants, Muslims, the urban poor, abortion activists, liberals, atheists and agnostics and anyone else who disagrees with them.
The issue that divides a fearful conservative America from newly energized progressive groups like the Reclaiming Jesus movement, the resurrected Poor Peoples Campaign and the #MeToo movement is how the world is understood to be, and how we are to live together in it.
Religious communities across the progressive spectrum, like Reform Judaism and the United Church of Christ (the successors to the New England pilgrims) have embraced the modern world, found scientific investigation to be compatible with religious faith, celebrated human diversity and cultures and opposed the plunder of our planet’s natural treasures.
Fundamentalist/evangelical traditionalists, on the other hand, have fought evolution, human racial and sexual diversity and reproductive rights, and have declared cultural warfare against any authority other than a painfully narrow, weaponized reading of the Bible — one that supports their supremacy. The hostility conservative religionists unleash on others is directly related to the fear that their traditionalist way of life is obsolete and passing away before their very eyes.
They cannot conceive of a world they do not control.
Young people are abandoning the fearful evangelical communities they grew up in for a sound faith that welcomes all people. As Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, a religion writer in Louisville, Ky., puts it, “I’m not giving up on my faith, my belief in God and the inherent dignity given by God to all people. It’s time for a new narrative about religion in America: Americans of good faith reject bad religion.”
The most powerful voices to create this new religious narrative belong to America’s progressive clergy, like the thousands of LGBTQ clergy among us who refuse to surrender to the merchants of bigotry.
Secular voices are good, but the LGBTQ community needs lesbian, gay, bi- and trans religious messengers to make the case for our lives. Bishop Yvette Flunder, the black lesbian pastor of City of Refuge UCC in Oakland, Calif., and presiding bishop of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, said to the Religious News Service, “I know something about freedom and positivity: It’s much more alluring than all this hate talk. There are same-gender-loving people all over the world and cultures that resist them all over the world — religion being the principal culture.”
The Poor Peoples Campaign’s Bishop William J. Barber II, an LGBTQ ally, says the hate preachers who oppress LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups are “servants of Caesar” who are guilty of ”theological malpractice.” He uses Biblical language to indict ministers that do not embrace the doctrines of social justice for being “calloused, insensitive, unloving, hateful, hypocritical, greedy and corrupt.”
Barber refuses the tired labels of “right” and “left.” “It’s not any longer about right or left, it’s about the moral center of our faith,” he says. “There is nothing ‘right’ about the servants of Caesar! Today it’s about right and wrong, and they are wrong!”
Purveyors of religious hatred against any marginalized person are “morally bankrupt,” and Barber urges progressives to recover the message of Jesus and the prophets to counter fundamentalists who have perverted its meaning.
We need to call them like we see them.
Here are ideas we can all use to reduce the religion-based harm caused by anti-LGBTQ ministers:
• The answer to bad religion and bad preachers is not no religion — an unfeasible solution in any case. The answer to bad religion is to encourage and support courageous LGBTQ ministers and their progressive allies every way we can.
• Support quality, rigorous theological education and the seminaries and divinity schools that provide it. Demand ministerial credentials from an ATS accredited school. Four years beyond college is a good rule of thumb. It matures ministers and weeds out those who don’t belong (like angry Matt).
• Educate yourself on how to counter the voices and deeds of bad religion. Reading the Gospels and the Hebrew prophets is a great way to start. Check out Mel White’s Religion Gone Bad from your public library and study it.
• Publicly enact your spirituality. Show the world what good faith looks like and what it does, whether you belong to a faith community or are faith-free.
• And please, for God’s sake, find ways to participate in progressive social action.
Stephen V. Sprinkle, Ph.D., is a professor of Practical Theology, and director of Field Education and Supervised Ministry and director of Baptist Programming for Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth.
Steve, thank you!! I have sent the article to my family and some friends all of whom will be glad to hear a word of love and justice to and from the progressive church!
Thanks Dr. Sprinkle for a very insightful writing. I have sent this to a number of people that I know – both clergy and lay.
Thank you, Steve. We have been far too timid in standing up to the hate-mongers and those who want to recreate a world that never was and never will be.