My Miracle

I find that I am more than a little shy in writing this piece; it is, at once, apparently unlikely, and open to skepticisms of all sorts. For all that it is a true story and one which I want to have out in the world—I think it matters. I have held off on writing it out properly so far mostly because I have had intentions to include it in a much more comprehensive account of how I went from being a politically and theologically conservative evangelical Bible college student to where I am today ("LGBTQ+ affirming Anabaptist post-evangelical anarcho-pacifist" only scratches the surface). I still hope to write that story out properly at some point and, since this story plays a pivotal role in that one, I will have to recount this one. But since I have not gotten around to properly writing it up yet, I want to get this one out in the meantime. Anyway, this is a story of my miracle*.

In the fall of 2011 I had just managed to work my way back into teaching and was, at the same time, beginning to really question my theology around sexuality (for reasons that I will get into some other time, I was already fully affirming of transgender identities). The coincidence of these two developments in my life came together in the form of two brilliant students. One a young lady who was, at the time, dating another young woman at the school, and the other a brilliant young trans man, James, who was at that time still identifying as a lesbian. These two were both the sort of students that you just like having in class and getting to know. Both are brilliant, engaging, and friendly—the one hardworking, passionate; an inspired poet with an ever-present gleam of laughter in her eye; the other energetic, mischievous, and compassionate with a sense of justice which drives him to speak out at all the right times. Without knowing a thing about it it the time, these two students made it impossible for me to think of "questions around the theology of LGBTQ+ identies" in the abstract. I had to deal with the question in the concrete: were the the things my conservative Christian upbringing told me to believe about these two young people true or were they not? As anyone who has followed this blog at all surely knows by now, I came to the conclusion that God fully celebrates the identities, relationships, and marriages of LGBTQ+ folks.

Any analysis of one's own deliberation and discernment processes are prone to error, but so far as I can tell my theological shift began with accepting the plausibility, even the compelling logic, of LGB affirming interpretations of certain key passages from the Bible (I have written about those arguments in this series) but in the early fall of 2011 I was still afraid to accept those conclusions. I was still fighting against the weight of a homophobic Christian culture, of a church and a peer group which I knew held contrary beliefs, and of the fear of being wrong. It was those two students who gave me the perspective and--frankly--the courage to break through those barriers in my own soul. By November I had begun to publicly (I think online and certainly to my friends and family) acknowledge that my "views had changed".

But this is supposed to be a story about a miracle so I need to jump forward a bit. Several months later (late winter or early spring) found me having a conversation with James. He was telling me about instances of bullying that he and his friends endured at our high school. I didn't know much at the time but I knew enough to ask him whether the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at the

school wasn't helping enough with the problem. He ruefully told me that we didn't really have a functional GSA. I was a little surprised to hear it and told him that he ought to start one. That is as much of the conversation as I remember but he has since assured me that I followed up with a promise to be the faculty adviser if he couldn't find someone better. The first day of school for the 2012/13 school year, he popped up in my classroom grinning from ear to ear and waving the forms that I needed to sign in order to make the GSA and official club. Clearly running the Gay Straight Alliance at a public high school is not what I would have seen myself doing as recently as one year earlier, but I was not about to say "no" at this point so I signed the form, and declared him president of the club. Seven years later he has graduated from both high school and college and the GSA is still going strong.

It didn't take long for our weekly club meetings to become a highlight of my week. If you haven't ever had the chance to create and hang out in a safe space for marginalized and bullied high school students then you haven't fully lived. LGBTQ+ and ally high school students are some of the most resilient, quirky, fun teenagers in the world. I really have had the time of my life being their faculty adviser.

And that is how I find myself sitting in my car in the parking lot of a local grocery store praying that I wasn't sending kids to hell. This might not make a lot of sense to anyone who wasn't raised in the toxic soup of white American Evangelicalism. By the fall of 2012 I barely believed in an eternal hell anyway and I definitely didn't believe that being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender would send you there. But fear is only rarely about what we give our conscious mental assent to. Very few of the children who are afraid of monsters in the dark still actually believe on a conscious rational level that those monsters exist. You really don't have to believe in something to be afraid of it. So despite my own convinced beliefs, I was afraid that by organizing a safe and supportive space for LGBTQ+ teens I was facilitating their damnation to a fate I didn't believe in.***

Beyond the lingering fears rooted in my white American evangelical upbringing, I was struggling with something else in the fall of 2012: homophobia. Miriam Webster defines homophobia as "irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals***". The term overlaps with, but is distinct from, heterosexism, "discrimination or prejudice by heterosexuals against homosexuals***" Given those definitions, over the course of 2011 I had moved away from conscious and intentional heterosexism but was still very much struggling with unconscious and visceral homophobia. The way I would have probably put it at the time is that I was find when interacting with LGBTQ+ folks in general and I supported their social and legal liberation but when I thought about what "being gay" entailed, it skeeved me out and I would experience what psychologists and sociologists refer to as a disgust reaction.

Let me take a moment here to emphasize something: if this disgust reaction is something you experience as well please know that this is something which was done to you by an overtly heterosexist and homophobic society, and that, if you were raised in white American evangelicalism**** then this malformation of your emotional self was perpetrated against you by evil, sinful forces which have long operated within the church and are only slowly being exorcised.

Some beliefs can sicken the soul

Disgust reactions are really hard to revise but they are not impossible to get rid of. They are also extremely destructive. When disgust is activated against people or groups it results in marginalization, persecution, scapegoating and, in extreme cases, genocide. It is by activating a disgust reaction against minority communities that evil men have been most effective in attacking and damaging those communities. Based on what I have read***** (here is a decent place to start) I tend to think about changing a learned and ingrained disgust reaction about the same way I think about overcoming a phobia: possible but difficult and ordinarily requiring a lot of work. In that context, changing my beliefs was the way to start, and ongoing positive interactions with people who were likely to elicit that reaction was a solid way to move forward. But despite being on (probably) the right track psychologically, this remained a problem for me. I had enough of a handle on it that, so far as I can tell, my students were entirely unaware; it almost never occurred to me when I was around actual LGBTQ+ people in any case but I knew that it was having some effect on my overall relationship with my duties as facilitator of the GSA. If you have never experienced this imagine having in involuntary queasy reaction 10% or so of the time you think about your best friend. It wouldn't end your friendship but it would definitely be something you would want to overcome if at all possible.

So there I am, sitting in my car, suddenly flooded by irrational fears and doubts and struggling to overcome an ingrained reaction which I hated an which was getting in the way of relating to and helping the very students I most wanted to help. I started praying.

This wasn't the first time I had prayed about this topic or asked God for some sort of guidance. As I said, I had been working through bible study and theology on the topic for more than a year at that point and that process had involved a whole lot of prayer. To put it in distinctly white American evangelical language, my exegetical and discernment process had been bathed in prayer from the start.

Not much of a stretch

In 2007 my wife and I joined the Vineyard Community Church of Central Maryland, a charismatic and (at the time) relatively progressive—context matters folks—evangelical church. I found a whole lot of healing and growth in that church and was profoundly mentored and encouraged by the pastor at that time, John Odean. His support and teaching are substantially responsible for my even being willing to begin questioning the perverse doctrines I had been taught about LGBTQ+ people. But by 2012 John O had moved on and the new pastor, whom I got along with fairly well at the time, brought a different focus to the church. This new pastor was passionately motivated to see miraculous events (healings, speaking in tongues, prophecy etc...) at the church and in that vein he like to bring in various teachers and pastors who were known to practice and elicit that sort of experience. One of those pastors he brought in, offered to pray and prophesy over each member of our leadership team—including me. So I had walked up to the front of the church with my long hair, beard, beat up jeans and over-sized sweatshirt to get a prophecy. The teacher (a pastor at another church in our denomination) put his hands on my head and prayed quietly for a while and then told me "I think God is calling you work with marginalized and outcast people in this community". I had thanked him and gone back to my seat more than a little skeptical. The idea that a statement like that might apply well to someone who looked like I did in that mostly white middle class suburban church was hardly any sort of stretch. I had mentally filed the prayer away as sort of interesting but unlikely to mean much and gone on with life.

A year or so later and I am sitting in a car, pleading with God for direction, trying to figure out whether all of these negative feelings were damage I needed to heal from and overcome, or that last warnings of the Holy Spirit to a confused soul about to cause horrible damage to the spirits of teenagers by encouraging them in identities and behaviors which God objected to. "Jesus," I prayed, "am I doing the right thing?"

I talk to God a lot and God does talk back sometimes, but it is pretty rare for me for God's response to shake my soul. Usually, the stuff I hear from God I perceive as gentle encouragement, suggestion, or reminder: a stray thought or spontaneous emotion which has the smell of the Divine about it, the sort of whisper that doesn't seem to have come from my own thoughts, but hey, maybe they did. Very occasionally though, God speaks in a way that causes the bones of my soul to vibrate, communicating directly to me so clearly and overwhelmingly that I can't account for it as anything but connection with One who is greater, fuller, deeper, and higher than I am or could ever imagine. God's response this time was like that.

Those of you who have experienced the sort of thing I am describing will know that putting the response into words always diminishes it; the best I can get at is a "mostly this but that isn't quite right and it was also so much more" like if you were trying to describe sailing on the ocean and could only come up with "It's like stepping in a puddle but floating instead of touching the bottom". So God didn't respond to my prayer by saying "This is exactly what I have for you. That is what I was talking about when I told the preacher that you were being called to work with the marginalized and outcast in your community" but that is the closest I can come to describing what God actually did communicate to me.

But that isn't my miracle.

The miracle accompanied the response and was in addition to it. As soon as the prayer had ended I was enormously comforted. I felt like I had my answer and I felt something more. My disgust reaction had vanished entirely. I haven't felt it since. A process of pyschological healing from sinful malformation at the hands of a broken and homophobic heterosexist church and homophobic heterosexist society which ought to have required months if not years, happened in a moment. From that day until now the disgust reaction has been entirely absent from my mental landscape regarding LGBTQ+ people. God gave me both the confidence and the capacity to lean joyfully into holy work: advocacy for LGBTQ+ people and particularly teenagers.

That isn't to say that I am all the way where I need to be. I doubt that any of us are, and I know that I still have thought patterns and reactions (but not disgust reactions) which were formed by heterosexism, patriarchy, cissexism, homophobia, and transphobia (to name just a few) I have much to learn and many LGBTQ+ people and allies to learn it from. My claim is only that this one barrier, a socially formed disgust reaction rooted in homophobia was overcome for me by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is what I now understand when I hear people talking about being liberated from sin and death. This is what I now understand when I read about Christ overcoming the body of sin. It was for freedom that Christ set us free. Freedom to free others from the clutches of sin: homophobia, transphobia, heterosexim, cissexim, racism, patriarchy, greed, consumerism, nationalism... the list goes on and the journey is long. But it is joy and it is freedom.

In the aftermath of that experience I was kicked off of the leadership team of my church (which we subsequently left) but the new pastor because of my online advocacy for the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ folks in the life of the church. But that is another story (one I hope to write up properly at some point). I bring it up here only to say that it was the message of encouragement from God and the evidence of my miracle (as well as the support of a beautiful community) which gave me the strength to get through that with my faith intact.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 

James 1:2-4 NIV

Please support the work of GLSEN and of the Trevor Project, two remarkable organizations working to support and protect LGBTQ+ teenagers and high school students.

Footnotes:

* When I say "miracle" I am speaking of a supernatural event which is outside of ordinary experience and which seems to subvert the usual course of material causation. That is I mean by "miracle" exactly what folks generally take it to mean and not some sort of liberal theology appropriation of the term to describe the mere good and or psychologically profound.
**If you are interested in my views on hell, I found David Bentley Hart's recent That All Shall Be Saved rather convincing.
***I 100% recommend against calling anyone "a homosexual" outside of an academic or specialist context.
**** I am very much aware of the fact that this spiritual dynamic is at play in other Christian and religious traditions; white Evangelical Christianity merely happens to be the tradition with which I have personal experience.
***** I you are looking for spiritual (Christian) analyses of Disgust Reactions my brother and I wrote a paper on exactly that subject: Eucontamination: A Christian Study of the Logic of Disgust and Contamination

David Bentley Hart is Threatening Christian Imperialism (and that is a very good thing)

David Bentley Hart recently released his much anticipated That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation and, to put it frankly, the theology internet is freaking out. The book, Hart's argument for universal reconciliation—the idea that, in the end, everyone will be saved—has already been ably reviewed (I recommend Brad Jersak's review, this review by Dr, Akemi, and this interview with DBH over at Jonathan Martin's Zeitcast) such that I was not planning to post a review of my own. In fact, by way of review proper I will say only that I think Hart has successfully shifted me from the "hopeful inclusivist" camp into the "universal reconciliation" position and has almost certainly put forward an argument which any future conversations about hell will have to interact with. He makes four distinct and overlapping arguments, and the one I found most compelling is his third in which he points out that, because all persons are ultimately entangled in a web of relationship with all other persons*, it is impossible that any one person could ever fully experience heaven while any single person is still experiencing hell—the very nature of agape makes it impossible. Having said that much, what I really want is to move on to one particular dynamic which I think is present and active behind the scenes of this discussion.

It will come as not shock to any of my regular readers that I think white American Evangelicalism is deeply entangled with white supremacy to the point that its only hope for redemption lies in near-total deconstruction and careful reconstruction under the guidance and tutelage of extra-hegemonic Christians (if you aren't convinced then I would urge you to watch David Gushee's address to the American Academy of Religion In the Ruins of American Evangelicalism).  As is ever the case, conservative and Evangelical Christianity is freaking out over this latest broadside against the doctrine of an eternal hell. You will remember that the last time this happened was the infamous John Piper "Farewell Rob Bell" tweet in response to Rob Bell's Love Wins—a book which is far humbler and tentative in its challenge to infernalism (the belief in an eternal hell). While no less passionate this time around, the Gospel Coalition corner of Christian internet is somewhat more tentative as DBH is blistering compared to the irenic Bell, and is also an academic heavyweight who seems to delight in lambasting the perverse doctrines of Calvinism and whose scholarly credentials the Gospel Coalition folks are far more likely to find threatening. So the freak-out is a little quieter but no less real for that.

The question, though, is "why"? Hart (like Bell before him) is hardly threatening any doctrine of Christian orthodoxy. At no point do the creeds insist on an infernalist position, and Hart cheerfully and heartily affirms the incarnation, the deity, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Hart's universalism (much less Bell's tentative speculation in the universalist direction) is hardly a threat to orthodoxy in any meaningful way. I suspect that the freak-out is happening because on some level, white Christian conservative and Evangelical leaders realize that they need the doctrine of eternal hell not only (as even Hart, following Origen speculates) to scare lay Christians into being good, but more fundamentally, to justify centuries of white Christian genocide and imperialism.

I do not mean to suggest that this is the conscious motive for all, or even for very many, of the infernalists; insofar as it plays a role in their motivations I expect that it is subconscious—that is how white supremacy operates at present. At the very least I am convinced that the theory fits the data. Eternal hell is a perfect justification for all sorts of atrocities and has been used precisely in that way for centuries; the tortures of the inquisition and of many medieval executions were justified as extreme measures which were necessary to save the soul of the victim from the eternal torment of hell. But so too were the epochs of white colonialism justified in this way. The beautiful (terrible) thing about the infernalist doctrine is that since it represents an eternity of torment--the worst possible fate any person could ever possibly suffer--any actions taken in the interest of preventing it are automatically justified, if not perfectly, then at least as an understandable overreaction. You see the argument? "Yes," the infernalist says, "it is a real tragedy that our ancestors/forefathers in the faith destroyed that indiginous culture, stole those lands, oppressed, enslaved, or even murdered those people. But at the end of the day they were trying to save souls." The whole crime, the great sin of white Christian Imperialism is thereby demoted from "ghastly sin" to a mere "tragic overszealous mistake". The atrocities of manifest destiny and the whole Doctrine of Discovery—that infernal carte-blanche from the Church to Europe to enact its bloody megalomaniac will upon non-white peoples and lands—may be reduced by infernalism to a culturally misinformed attempt to spread the gospel. "Gold," as the saying about white imperialism goes "provided the motive; God the pretext". Absent infernalism and the chance to save souls from eternal conscious torment, the shabby pretext becomes infinitely less effective. In sum, Hart's attack on infernalism constitutes nothing less than an attack on one great foundation of colonial white supremacy and its unholy entaglement with white religion.

Dave Gushee In the Ruins of American Evangelicalism

Mark Charles on The Doctrine of Discovery