Revisiting old thoughts…

Just over a year ago, at the request of the editorial director, I wrote the following article for my school newspaper The Bagpipe. I have decided to revisit the subject a year later.

What do we do with them?

When I first came to Covenant, I was a suicidally-depressed transfer student looking to escape from a bad situation at a large state university. I arrived here looking for healing in the community that Covenant ostensibly provides. And I cannot say that I was disappointed. My first semester here I was immediately taken in by hall mates and made to feel at home. I credit my experiences that first semester with my overcoming depression and experiencing healing and spiritual growth. Yet, there was one crucial piece of me that I was very careful about sharing, infinitely more careful than I ever was at the university.
I struggle with homosexuality.
As I looked back at the past year and a half, I pondered over what makes me walk with more trepidation here than I did at the university. I realized this one crucial fact: most people here have no clue about homosexuality. They have no experience of it other than the condemnations of their pastors, teachers, parents and popular Christian media of all sorts. Homosexuals are part of the “them”, the other, the not-us of which we are all afraid, in one way or another, and to which we attribute much of the wrong in society. As a result, the jokes, derogatory comments and other hateful jargon flow freely, much more freely than I ever saw in my 13 ½ years of secular education. And like worst racists, we wish death upon them with compassionate faces, saying we do not really hate them, just their lifestyle. In the words of a fellow student, “I wish they would all just go away.”
That is why I was scared to be open about it with more than a few of the very closest people in my life. Homosexuality is said to be a sin like any other sin, yet it does not feel like that, it seems like the unforgivable sin. Guys can be open with other guys about their struggles with lust, pornography or other sexual sins, more or less, without risking ostracism. After all, most guys can empathize with such sins, having experienced or fought them at some point in their lives. But what about the guy who thinks about guys like most guys think about girls? Scary! Even some of my closest friends are uncomfortable with the idea. The most costly thing that I could lose here at Covenant is the community that I am a part of. Pariah-ship would have very real consequences in my life in a number of different areas. I trade off deeper relationship with the people around me for a superficial community, afraid of risking the whole kit and caboodle.
This is a problem.
Homosexual Christians in our culture face an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, they have a religious community which is afraid of them and which casts eyes of suspicion on them no matter what they do. On the other, they have a secular community that accepts them wholeheartedly, will bring them into a very real fellowship and affirms the strong romantic desires that they feel. Excepting the last of those, the Church’s job is being filled by an entirely secular and often strongly anti-Christian community. The Church, and by extension Covenant, must find a place for homosexuals in its ministries and its culture, not just as a group to be ministered to, but as human beings deserving of the same intimacy afforded others, regardless of their past or the sins they struggle with. This is what fellowship means, and it can be accomplished without compromising Scriptural integrity. There are many homosexual Christians out there who are looking for the intimacy of fellowship from a Church whose culture is mainly geared for marriage and family life. They look to the Church as the incarnation of Christ’s love, and often enough, their relationship with God is intimately connected with their relationship to the Church.
The Church must move into the 21st century and realize that there are brothers and sisters in it that suffer in silence for fear of rejection and ostracism. The community at Covenant must realize that there are those who suffer in silence for fear of rejection and ostracism. It must seek to minister to those people as individuals, or it will risk losing an entire group of people and dishonoring the name of Christ at the same time.

When I read this article, I realize that my language has two main flaws: one, it speaks for more people than it should and two, it comes at a Christian identity from a homosexual identity rather than the other way around.

To address the first problem, I must admit the number of Christians I have met who struggle with homosexuality amounts to one. That fact makes it difficult to support the generalizations that I have made about the desires and needs of the above. Instead, I have merely generalized my own desires, though I imagine that I am not totally unjustified in doing so.

To address the second is a little more difficult. I have always been clear in Christian contexts to make a difference between struggling with homosexuality and being gay. The difference is one of identity. Struggling with homosexuality merely means to experience temptation towards sexual activity with the same sex. Being gay has a set of worldview assumptions about the nature of human sexuality and even to a degree a set of political views and historical interpretations. The latter implies the former but the former does not necessitate the latter. This fact is increasingly ignored in our society. Whereas I have always strenuously said that I am the former and not the latter, that proclamation has not always reflected how I feel inside. This article betrays that fact, if you have eyes to see. The pull to become gay from the outside culture grows stronger every day, as does the push from inside myself. I have fought for a long time, and I continue to fight, but for how long? I almost always lose wars of attrition, especially against myself. And so far, in my new context, Alex is the only one who knows. Though I suppose since some of the church people have been reading my blog, more people will know. But what then? I will remain in the same situation I was at Covenant. And my ties to the church grow more and more tenuous all the time. How long until I give in?